La Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. On a demoli pour la former un superb portail et des batîments conventuels du XVIIème siècle.
VIE ET HISTOIRE DU VIE ARRONDISSEMENT
Modern St.-Germain is lively and prosperous, yet it is the seventeenth century, still strangely present here, that establishes its character, and I find that to understand the way it is now, it’s necessary to try to see it as it was four hundred years ago. Since I have come to live on the Rue Bonaparte, the street that lies between Les Deux Magots—Hemingway’s hangout—and the church of St. Germain-des-Prés, I find that, beside the shades of Sartre and Piaf, there is another crowd of resident ghosts who urge themselves forward for recognition through four centuries. They include the Musketeers—d’Artagnan, Aramis, Athos, and Porthos; four queens—Catherine de Médicis, Marguerite de Valois (or “de Navarre” after her marriage to Henri de Navarre, later King Henri IV), Anne of Austria, and Marie de Médicis; the sinister Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu; Kings Louis XIII to XVI, many Henris; and numberless other misty figures in plumed hats whose fortunes and passions were enacted among the beautiful, imposing buildings of the seventeenth century still in this neighborhood. Theirs is the spirit that prevails today, and that moves me most.
In a way, I had been prepared for them. My particular connection to this Parisian neighborhood started in childhood, thousands of miles away; I was over thirty before I ever actually saw it, but when I did, I knew it well. Not that I was one of those good little French majors that had grown up dreaming of France, not at all. I am here by accident.
It was a Francophile librarian at the Carnegie Library in my hometown of Moline, Illinois, who placed in my hands, when I was nine or ten, the works of Alexandre Dumas. I read all the ones we had, in translation of course, and that is where Paris and I start, with my childhood reading of The Count of Monte Cristo, La Reine Margot, and, above all, The Three Musketeers. Was it this early passion for Dumas that preordained that I would someday live five minutes’ walk from where the real d’Artagnan lived, almost on the spot where the Musketeers fought their duels, and, above all, where the romantic queens of legend, Marguerite de Valois, then Navarre, and Anne of Austria actually trod, four centuries ago?
If only we could recapture how we read when we were children, burning with interest, with breathless excitement, unwilling to put down our book to eat or sleep. Often we can remember the actual circumstances of where we were sitting, the injunctions of our parents to come to the table, or go to bed. My memory of my childhood literary enthusiasms is still vivid. I read The Three Musketeers on a visit to my beloved maiden Aunt Henrietta, in Watseka, Illinois, the time I nearly died.
I had come down with polio, or at least that’s what doctors now say in retrospect it probably was. I don’t know where my parents had gone, or where my little brother was, and I can’t remember if the doctor was called. My childless aunt had not had much experience with childhood illness so was less, rather than more, concerned than she probably ought to have been; I had never been so sick and never have been since, with a raging fever, and a headache so horrible I can almost still feel it, an unusual thing, for pain is usually impossible to remember.
So my recollection of burning with reading fervor has a certain explicable component. Literally feverish, I lay on the sofa in the Victorian parlor or in bed for days with the enthralling story of d’Artagnan, Athos (my favorite), Porthos, and Aramis. They were alive for me—the Musketeers, their leader M. de Treville, the wicked Milady, the handsome Duke of Buckingham, and the beautiful Anne of Austria, she whose reputation was saved by the frantic voyage of d’Artagnan to England to replace her missing diamond studs before her husband Louis XIII could find out that she had given them to France’s enemy, Buckingham. Would she get them back in time to wear them to the ball where she had been commanded to appear in them?
Hindsight changes one’s reading of Dumas. I see now that I must have been given an expurgated children’s edition. In Dumas’s original versions, both Anne of Austria and La Reine Margot were free with their favors, but I got none of those innuendos as a child, and was surprised when rereading these books as a grown-up to find how rather explicit they are. I had never understood, for instance, that the villainess Milady de Winter seduces d’Artagnan and takes him to bed. Rereading The Three Musketeers, it is bound to seem today that the seventeenth-century ideas of masculine behavior—touchy honor, always being insulted, challenging each other and dueling mindlessly, rather like the young bulls in the children’s book Ferdinand the Bull, seem, in truth, rather silly, and we should hope that men have evolved, mostly, at least in some societies. In many other places, it seems, they are still going through their Musketeer phase. Still, who would change the swash-buckling movie versions? Even though I could not accept Gene Kelly in the role of d’Artagnan, (the earlier Douglas Fairbanks was better), Lana Turner entirely suited my view of Milady, and Van Heflin, Keenan Wynn, and Gig Young made a handsome trio of Musketeers. I would see all the films over and over. Meantime, I believe I was saved from serious complications of polio by my determination to remain conscious and finish Dumas’s wonderful novel.