THIS IS MY FAVORITE piece written about the lovely Île Saint-Louis.
HERBERT GOLD is the author of more than twenty books, including the memoir Still Alive: A Temporary Condition (Arcade, 2008), Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti (Prentice Hall, 1991), Fathers (Random House, 1967), Daughter Mine (St. Martin’s, 2000), and my favorite, Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love, and Strong Coffee Meet (Simon & Schuster, 1993). I share the following passage from Bohemia that I particularly love not because it is about the Île Saint-Louis but because of the singular Parisian spirit it portrays, which residents of the Île would appreciate:
A fellow Fulbright scholar, studying in Belgium, happened to arrive for his first visit to Paris on July 14, Bastille Day, when the entire city was strung with colored lights. Bands played on every corner, or at least flutes and musettes; people were dancing, singing, embracing, inviting us and anyone else nearby to join them for their wine and food. It recalled the soupers fraternels of revolutionary times, when the people of Paris set their tables outside, lay extra places for hungry or convivial passersby who wished to share bread, wine, and cheese. This Bastille Day mood, after war and Nazi occupation, was one of spiritual orgy, a festival nourished by deep griefs. My friend saw only the gaiety. He looked about at the hubbub, sighed, and said, “I always knew Paris would be like this.” Paris, of course, is not really like this. But we know it must be, therefore it is; the Paris of our dreams is a required course.
AN ISLAND PRIME, an island at the secret heart of Paris, floating in time and space across a footbridge on the shady side of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Île Saint- Louis may also be the most ambiguous orphan island there is—city and not a city, village and metropolis, provincial and centrally urban, serene and hyped by hundreds of years of noisy lovers of solitude.
Unique it is, possessed of itself, even self-congratulatory, yet available to all who choose to stroll from the population sink of contemporary Paris to a place that has no Métro stop or depressed highway. One could live there forever and do it in a short span of time, and I did.
Just after World War II, I came to study philosophy amid the existentialists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The first winter was bitter cold, with food rationing and no heat, and we philosophers—that is, admirers of Juliette Greco with her long nose, hoarse voice, black jeans, and sweaters—had to find cafés to do our deep thinking in.
In existential pursuit of the largest café au lait and most tooth-rotting but warming chocolate, I bought a bicycle to widen my field of operations, showing a certain Cleveland shrewdness by paying eight dollars for the rustiest, most battered bicycle I could find so that I could leave it unlocked.
Behind Notre-Dame, across the narrow footbridge of the Pont Saint-Louis, on the tranquil Île Saint-Louis, which did little business and did it negligently, I leaned my bike against a café that served large coffees, rich chocolate, and few customers. I remember it as Aux Alsaciennes, because it served Alsatian sausage, corned beef and cabbage, choucroute garnie at lunchtime; but for many years, now that the place has been discovered, it has been called the Brasserie de Saint-Louis-en-l’Île.
Somehow, here I couldn’t think about Bergson and Diderot and the hyphen between them, a little-known idea-smith named Maine de Biran, my thesis. Maybe it was the action of pumping a rusty bicycle; maybe it was the red-faced waiters, the black-dressed postwar girls with bruised eyes; but on the Île Saint-Louis I graciously allowed the history of philosophy to continue on its way without me.
My bike had no carrier for books; instead, I could stick a notebook under the seat. While warming myself at Aux Alsaciennes, I began to write a novel.
Nearly two years later, when the stationery store lady wrapped the package for mailing to Viking Press, she figured out what it was and gave it a sharp slap, crying out, “Merde!” I was startled because I thought I knew what that word meant and took it as a judgment of my coffee-and-choucroute-fueled, eighteen-month creative frenzy, but she explained that it meant “Good luck!”
(The book, Birth of a Hero, about a Resistance hero who happened to be stuck all his life in Cleveland, was published. I went home to Cleveland to buy the three-cent stamp with my picture on it but they were still using George Washington. I like that first novel now mostly because it instructed me that I had the right to do it.)
At some point in the creative process, I left a GI overcoat—the vestmental equivalent of my bicycle—on a rack at the brasserie. The waiters kept asking when I would take it again, but spring came, the birds sang on the Île Saint-Louis, and other birds allowed me to buy them hot chocolate; I was too overwrought.
Later, I decided to see how long the coat would live on the coatrack. As the years went by, I committed more novels, visited Paris as a tourist, and came to the Île Saint-Louis to check on my coat. It was still there. “Soon,” I promised the waiters.
One May in the early sixties, I noticed that the narrow, swaying footbridge across which I used to wheel my rustmobile had been replaced by a wider, stabler cement product, although it was still blocked to automobiles. And my coat was gone from the café, which had changed its name to the Brasserie de Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. And that tout Paris had discovered the happy place that in my secret mustard-loving heart will always be Aux Alsaciennes.
Anciently, the Île Saint-Louis was two islands, Île Notre-Dame and Île-aux-Vaches (Cow Island). You can buy old maps that show the walls of medieval Paris and this tiny pasture in the Seine, from which cows and milk were brought by dinghy into the city. In the seventeenth century the places were joined, and in a burst of elegant speculation, bankruptcies, and respeculation, a dense web of hôtels (fine mansions) were spun.
The Hôtel Lambert and the Hôtel de Lauzun are two noble examples, but the entire island, its narrow pre-Detroit and even pre-Citroën streets, its encircling quays for strolling and breeze-taking by the Seine, has a comfortingly unified classical pattern.
The decoration and architecture date from a single period of French elegance and are protected by fanatic preservationists, among whom was former president Georges Pompidou, who helped stuff other districts of Paris with freeways and skyscrapers. (Pompidou lived on the Île Saint-Louis.)
There is an ice cream shop, Berthillon, with perhaps the best and certainly the most chic sherbets in France. Usually the lines stretch out onto the street—people waiting for their glace café, sorbet, crème—as others in other places wait in line to pay taxes or to see if their portrait is on the three-cent stamp.
There is but one church on the island, Saint-Louis-en-l’Île—lovely, tranquil, softly flowing, with devout deacons scrubbing the stone with straw brooms from a stock that seems to have been purchased by some seventeenth-century financial genius of a priest who feared inflation in the straw-broom market.
Contemporary Paris discovered it could find quadruple use for the Île Saint-Louis: as an elegant residential quarter of the fourth arrondissement; as a strolling museum neighborhood, a sort of Tricolorland with no parking meters, no movie house, or cemetery (if people die, they have to be taken to the Continent); as a quiet corner for small restaurants, antiquaries, bars, bookshops, hotels, Mme Blanvillain’s 160-year-old olive shop (she was not the founder), and a pheasant-plucker named Turpin in case you need your pheasant plucked; and the fourth use is optional.
On my most recent visit, the spirit of the place was expressed by the aforementioned Berthillon, the studio for ice cream masterpieces with the seventeenth-century aspect. It was early July. A cheerful sign said: “Open Wednesday, 14 September.” Where else would an ice cream shop close for the hot months?
I was relieved by this assurance of little change in the weekend-maddened, vacation-crazed spirit of the French commerçant. No matter how greedy he might seem to mere mortals, plucking money from the air and sewing it into his mattress, the flight to seaside or country cottage remains sacred.
Throwing duffel on bed, not even glancing at the exchange rate, I seized a notebook in jet-lagged claws and made a quick tour of the few streets and circumnavigating quays of the island, trying to find what had changed, what had remained the same, and what might persuade my body that it was time to sleep. The fact that I had cleverly scheduled my visit to come near the July 14 celebration, when France dances and drinks and makes new friends in the street till dawn—all because their ancestors tore down the Bastille—did not induce thoughts of prudent shut-eye.
(In my student days, when an American friend studying in Belgium bicycled into Paris for the first time, he happened to arrive on Bastille Day and found colorful lights strung from everywhere, accordions, embraces, a fierce festival glitter in every eye. He fell upon my little room crying, “Oh, I always knew Paris would be like this!”)
A street sweeper with the timid face of a peasant come to the metropolis was scrubbing down the stones in front of the Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. No change here.
Libella, the Polish bookstore on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, reminded me that Paris has always been everyone’s other home. The wall above Libella bears a stone plaque telling us that in 1799 the engineer Philippe Lebon discovered, in this building, the principle of lighting and heating with gas—the word “principle” and past experience suggest that the French did not actually get around to doing it for a while.
The island is crowded with such notices—tributes to poets, advisers to kings, soldier heroes, men of God, and even a film critic immortalized on a plaque affixed to the place where he analyzed Jerry Lewis as auteur.
There is also a plaque on the wall of the Fernand Halphen Foundation in the rue des Deux-Ponts:
To the Memory
Of the 112 Inhabitants
Of This Building
Including 40 Children
Deported and Killed
In the Concentration Camps in 1942.
No island is entire of itself, exempt from history. Across the street, in the ice cream shops, bistros, the Bateau Bar—fifty brands of beer from all nations—gratification proceeds on its necessary course.
It was time to sit at a café table for the island equivalent of my typical San Francisco after-racquetball vitamin and health hi-pro yogurt shake; in this case, a coffee with “yak”—cognac.
Two helmeted Vespa people came skidding to a stop in front of me. Like space warriors, they were encased in huge plastic headgear. Evidently they knew each other, because they fell to kissing, their helmets thudding together. I peeked at their faces when they came apart. They were both about sixty years old and hadn’t seen each other in hours.
A fisherman nearby, when I asked what he caught with all his equipment, assured me that trout hover near the fresh underground springs at the head of the island.
“A moment of meditation. A view of Notre-Dame. There are gargoyles, sir. At this season, there are roses.”
During the morning, a fisherman was catching roses; that night in front of the footbridge leading to Aux Alsaciennes, the Communist Party sponsored a rock celebration of Bastille Day. A girl in a “Wichita University Long Island” T-shirt danced to a French knockoff of “Lady Jane” and other Rolling Stones hits. Instead of a male partner, she held a contribution box for Humanité, the party newspaper.
The little park at the end of the island where the Pont de Sully links the Left and Right Banks of Paris—leading to the workers’ quarter of Bastille in one direction, the Quartier Latin in the other—has a grand stone monument to “Barye 1795–1875” at its entrance. The sculptor seems to be telling a busy story, including naked lads, heroes, a foot on a screaming animal, a sword, a staff, a few less boyish youths. Who the heck was Barye 1795–1875?
He may be there to provide a little relaxation from all the really famous people who lived and live on the Île Saint-Louis. (He turns out to have been a watercolorist.)
The square Barye, surrounded by the Seine on three sides, is quiet, peaceful, scholarly, artistic, with occasional summer concerts; kids sleeping on their backpacks, workmen with bottles of rouge; Swedish au pair girls watching the babies and sunning themselves with that passionate solar intensity only Swedish girls achieve—happy sunbathers when it’s hot and moonbathing when it’s not; haggard widows in black, wincing with their memories; birds chirping and barbered bushes and peeling-bark trees and neat cinder paths: all honor to Barye 1795–1875!
Three small hotels on the island located on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, a few steps from each other, have been converted from seventeenth-century houses: the Lutèce, the Deux-Îles, and the Saint-Louis.
When I telephoned the Lutèce from San Francisco for a reservation, the place was booked, but the good madame leaned out the window and yelled next door to the Deux-Îles to ask if they had a place. Also booked. So was the Saint-Louis. But on my arrival, I managed to persuade the daughter of the proprietor of the Saint-Louis to find me a corner room.
On the short walk home—saying “home” comes quickly in this island universe—I noticed that Hippolyte Taine and Georges Sadoul did their work in the same building. Marc Chagall and Charles Baudelaire, Voltaire and Mme Pompidou, dukes and barons, and chanteurs de charme, plus a stray prince or princess, an inventor or hero—who didn’t have a connection with the Île Saint-Louis?
The Île Saint-Louis is like France itself—an ideal of grace and proportion—but it differs from the rest of France in that it lives up to itself. Under constant repair and renovation, it remains intact. It is a small place derived from long experience. It has strength enough, and isolation enough, to endure with a certain smugness the troubles of the city and the world at whose center it rests.
The self-love is mitigated partly by success at guarding itself and partly by the ironic shrugs of its inhabitants, who, despite whatever aristocratic names or glamorous professions, live among broken-veined clochards (hoboes) with unbagged bottles, tourists with unbagged guidebooks, Bohemians with bagged eyes.
The actual troubles of the world do not miss the Île Saint-Louis—one doesn’t string hammocks between the plane trees here—but the air seems to contain fewer mites and less nefarious Paris ozone.
The lack of buses, the narrow streets, the breeze down the Seine help. And as to perhaps the most dangerous variety of Paris smog, the Île Saint-Louis seems to have discovered the unanswerable French reply to babble, noise, advice, and theory—silence.
One can, of course, easily get off this island, either by walking on the water of the Seine or, in a less saintly way, by taking a stroll of about two minutes across the slim bridges to the Left Bank, the Right Bank, or the bustling and official neighbor, the Île de la Cité.
Island fever is not a great danger, despite the insular pleasures of neatness, shape, control. Some people even say they never go to “Paris.” (In 1924, there was an attempt to secede from Paris and France, and Île Saint-Louis passports were issued.) Monsieur Filleui, the fishmonger, used to advertise: “Deliveries on the Island and on the Continent.”
The Île Saint-Louis, an elsewhere village universe, happens also to be an island by the merest accident of being surrounded by water. Its bridges reach inward to shadow worlds of history and dream, and outward toward the furor of contemporary Paris.
Shaded and sunny, surrounded by the waters of the Seine like a moat, it remains a kind of castle keep that is powerful enough in its own identity to hold Paris at bridge’s length, a breath away. Amazingly, it has occurred to no one powerful enough to do anything about it that this place, too, could be high-rised, filthied, thoroughfared, developed. There is no Métro station. The breezes down the Seine keep busy, sweeping and caressing.
Despite the claims of metropolis on all sides, the Île Saint-Louis still expresses the shadow presence of the Île Notre-Dame and the Île-aux-Vaches. The ancestor islands make a claim to be remembered because they have been forgotten, and both the aristocratic and the chic who live here, and the gratteurs de guitare, who occasionally come to serenade the ghosts of counts and courtesans, know that they tread in a palimpsest of footsteps, including ancient Gauls, Romans, and now, chirping and clicking beneath the willows, the occasional polyester-clad, camera-breasted tourist.
A more characteristic sight is that of the professional anguish of a French intellectual walking his dog. The rich tend to live like Bohemians here. (Only the poor, as Anatole France said, are forbidden to beg.)
The Île Saint-Louis is one of the places where a postwar generation of Americans in Paris loosened its military discipline—if we happened to have any—studied peace and art and history and depravity (called it freedom, called it fulfilling ourselves), lived in awe before our fantasy of France (still do just a little).
We bought old bicycles and new notebooks. We pretended to be students, artists, philosophers, and lovers, and, out of our pretensions, sometimes learned to be a little of these things.
Remarks are not literature, Gertrude Stein said, and islands are not the world. But some remarks can tell us what literature is about, some islands can tell us what a sweeter, more defined world might be. In Spinoza’s view, freedom consists of knowing what the limits are. I came to Paris as a philosophy student but left it as a novelist. On the Île Saint-Louis, I am still home free, watching the Seine flow and eddy and flow again.