At number 3 bis, Lacordaire, Montelembert and Coux, who founded there the first École Libre in 1831 (inscription); at number 4, Pradier; at number 5, Gérard de Nerval; at number 13, Oscar Wilde, who died there in 1900; at number 10, Corot, Merimee and J.-J. Ampère; finally, at number 8, Fantin-Latour had his atelier in 1868.
Hillairet, CONNAISSANCE DU VIEUX PARIS
A person raised and educated in America may have to start from scratch when it comes to French history, if I am any example. Who was Lacordaire? Who was Coux? The above passage describes a little section of the Rue des Beaux-Arts. Like Rue de l’Abbaye, Rue des Beaux-Arts leads between Rue Bonaparte and Rue de Seine, and had its share of celebrated and obscure inhabitants. Just walking on any street of St.-Germain with Hillairet’s guide in hand makes me conscious of my almost complete ignorance of the events of French history, things that were unfolding, evidently, at the same time as things in England and, eventually, America, that form the focus of our anglo-oriented studies.
Until now, when I thought of the nineteenth century, I would think of Queen Victoria, but never of Louis-Philippe or Napoleon III. We do recognize a furniture style called Directoire, but the English term “Regency” is more familiar. I could never have enumerated the French kings before Louis XIII (then it gets simple up through Napoleon), but, like many who went to elementary school in America, I can do all the English kings beginning with William and even a few of the Saxons, plus Boadicea.
Walk over to the Rue de Seine via the Rue Visconti, and stop before, say, number twenty-four, which belonged, in 1599:
to the poet Nicolas Vauquelin…. He became the teacher of César de Vendôme, then of the Dauphin in 1609; he left the court after the death of Henri IV, maybe disgraced by the boldness of his language. He then lived here a joyous epicurean, with a lady harp player, Jeanne Dupuy, picked up in the street.
At the same number lived in 1658, the historian Nicolas Fontaine, who shared the work and the hardships of the recluses of Port-Royal, and was, at the Bastille from 1664 to 1669, the companion in captivity of Lemaistre de Sacy. In 1692 Racine lived here, for seven years until he died…in 1699.
The indefatigable Hillairet knew his French history, but which Californian knows who Vauquelin was, or Lemaistre de Sacy, or why the latter was in the Bastille? Thus is the neighborhood saturated with more history than I can recount, each building a place where hundreds of people have lived. It would take a lifetime to understand the history of every building of this quarter, and even then, what would we know of all that really happened, was felt, was regretted and celebrated? How can one recapture a sense of the life unfolding here?
Perhaps I’m extra fascinated by history because I myself come from a place with not much history at all, or not much by comparison, that I know of. The sole resonances of the past in Moline were the graves of Confederate soldiers who had been imprisoned in the Rock Island Arsenal and died there of something like yellow fever or smallpox. And then, a grandson of Charles Dickens, so it said on his tombstone, had strayed into our town—we never heard why—and was buried in the cemetery where we used to ride our bikes. Also, Mr. John Deere had set up his plow factory in Moline, but that was it for history.
Paris has been here for two thousand years. In some ways it is always new; in others it has a patina and a collective sensibility that probably took two thousand years to develop, though it is hard to pinpoint all the ways this is manifested. One way is its self-regard. Knowing itself to be a precious example of civilization, it is constantly taking care of itself, polishing, repairing, gilding, refacing. Buildings are obliged to have their faces washed every ten years. Buildings of stone must be sandblasted; buildings like ours, stuccoed over the stones, must be repainted, and very expensive it was, too, more than ten thousand euros just for John’s and my share. The scaffolding eclipses the windows for weeks, and a scaffold is a signal to burglars that it is your turn for their attentions via the convenient means of entering you have provided.
The burglar who came to our building did reconnaissance first, disguised as a representative of the painting company. I thought it was odd that people doing the facade would want to look in our back bathrooms and kitchen, but I didn’t tumble to his real game until another person in the building got suspicious, and called the police. Our burglar was gone in seconds, but weeks later, some false painters turned up, went into the apartment one floor above us, and began to help themselves. The building had to change all its locks, a project of immense expense and nuisance for everyone.
There are not so many of us in 8 Rue Bonaparte. This is a small building, with us on the first floor; the colonel and his wife on the second, and their two daughters each with her apartment and family on the second and third; a small pied-à-terre on the third floor, also owned by that family; and the art galleries on the street level. These are Mssrs. Marcel and David Fleiss, father and son, dealers in twentieth-century art, that is, early modernist and contemporary art; M. Felix Marcillac, who sells important art deco furniture; and Monsieur Rossignol, the bookseller. There is also a room for Errida, the gardienne (it is now considered non-p.c. to say “concierge”), who I think has to go into the entry of the cellar to shower. I have never wanted to know too much about this arrangement, but when I went down there with our late cat Walter who loved to prowl there, looking for cobwebs, I would sometimes hear a shower running. Until recently, the sanitary arrangements in many Parisian buildings involved a shared toilet on the landing, and God knows where the bath was; so I suppose Errida’s situation is not entirely unusual. She is from Mexico, which is not common in Paris, and though, being Californian, I should speak a sort of Spanish, we speak to each other in our bad French.
It was the ancestor of the present family who bought our building after the Revolution, when all of Paris was for sale, and well-off middle-class people were able to buy real estate that had until then been the property of aristocrats and friends of the king—people who were beheaded. As I have mentioned, we are the sole outsiders in our building—otherwise all the apartments are lived in by three generations of the one family—grandparents, parents, and children, and there are even two great-grandchildren who are often brought to visit. Presumably some members of these three generations were themselves brought up in the building, just as their children are being brought up here now; there’s also a country house where they all go on the (numerous) French vacations. I often think how nice this arrangement is, not unlike the communes idealistic Americans tried to form in the sixties (no doubt fraught with the same potential for squabbles).
There are so many advantages to this way of life. When one of the sisters happens to be out, the other can take in her packages or groceries; all the cousins grow up knowing each other, with babysitting always on hand; models of extended family life—so much nicer than the bleak isolation of an American suburb with the mothers going crazy, and rivers of gin. Of course, the French family may all detest each other, but they don’t seem to, and if they do, they would never show it, with their good manners and unfailing charm.
We are not here in the summers, when, with the windows open, we could glean a better take on all the family relationships. In our last apartment, on Rue St.-Simon, it was a festival of Portuguese in the summers; all the gardiennes talking and gossiping and launching horrendous, audible quarrels.
To find the exact date of our building remains an unfulfilled quest.