AS VIVIAN THOMAS notes below, “Anyone who’s been to Paris knows that it’s possible to fall in love with a street.” By extension, I am absolutely in love with this piece. And as you might guess, few other pleasures are as wonderful to me as accidentally discovering an old book (especially one in a series) with as much detail in it as the one Thomas describes. I have complete book envy! In an online search, I have found a variety of paperback and hardcover editions of Évocation du vieux Paris, and it is just a matter of choosing which one I prefer before a copy comes into my possession.
VIVIAN THOMAS is assistant editor of France Today. She also contributed numerous articles to the former Paris Notes, where this piece originally appeared.
SOMETIMES OPENING A book is like opening a door. For me, the door to the streets of Paris was opened by my friend Charles, a professor in the south of France. Scanning his bookshelves one day when I was visiting, he pulled down a slightly tattered copy of Jacques Hillairet’s Évocation du vieux Paris.
“Here’s a book you’d like. You can keep this one—I have another copy.”
Although published in 1953, the book looked older, with yellowed, brittle pages. Too bulky to be a guidebook, it was the second volume (Les Faubourgs) of a three-volume set. But leafing through it, I found myself mentally walking through Paris, street by street and house by house, looking at it through the eyes of a historian who seemed to know not just every building, but every balcony, courtyard, and doorknocker.
I couldn’t wait to get back to Paris and start walking with Hillairet as my guide. Now, many years later, I’ve walked most of Paris with him. I found an abridged one-volume edition called Connaissance du vieux Paris in a secondhand bookstore, and although it’s even heavier, I happily lug it with me as I explore unfamiliar streets and learn new stories about old favorites.
Anyone who’s been to Paris knows that it’s possible to fall in love with a street. It may be a tiny impasse or a spacious boulevard, but it’s so full of history, beauty, sweet memories, or pure Parisian charm that it becomes “your” street. It’s the one you head for first when you arrive, the one you dream about when you’re away from the city too long, the one you imagine yourself living on when you let your fantasies run wild. These are a few of mine.
I first walked down the rue Mouffetard just before Christmas when Paris was mostly unknown to me. It was early evening, dark and cold, but festive shop windows and groups of scurrying pedestrians enticed me all the way to the end of the street where a brightly lit market spilled into the street. Suddenly hungry, I was overwhelmed by the aroma of spit-roasted chickens stuffed with rosemary and the sight of a hundred cheeses with names new to me, vegetables arranged like Byzantine mosaics, and heaps of glittering fish so fresh they still smelled of the sea. The pièce de résistance was lying in state on a table in front of the boucherie: a huge bearlike animal that was, I was told, a sanglier, or wild boar.
Since that first eye-opening walk, I must have strolled down the Mouffe’ hundreds of times, always finding it the very essence of Paris. This is at once the youngest and oldest of streets. Youngest because, close to the Sorbonne, it’s full of students who make a cheap dinner from the panini or crêpes sold on the street, and linger with their friends for hours of discussion over one beer in the Place de la Contrescarpe. Oldest because the street itself goes back to Roman times.
Once the start of the main road that led from Paris to Italy, the rue Mouffetard was also the main street of the village of Saint-Médard, clustered around the church that still stands near the rue Censier. From the bank of the Bièvre River, the village grew until it reached the walls of Paris in the fourteenth century and was annexed in 1724.
The Bièvre was eventually polluted by wastes dumped by the weavers and tanners who lined its banks, and some historians claim that the name Mouffetard came from the stench that lingered here—mouffette means skunk.
The Bièvre now runs underground and the smell is history, but relics of the past remain. At the top of the street, the Place de la Contrescarpe has been a popular meeting place since Rabelais and his friends frequented the Pomme de Pin cabaret, whose carved sign remains, now above a butcher shop. Today the place is ringed with cafés like the Delmas, once La Chope, a favorite of Hemingway, who lived around the corner.
The street is lined with mansard-roofed houses, one of which contained a real buried treasure. When a house at no. 53 was demolished in 1938, workmen found over three thousand gold coins stamped with the image of Louis XV, along with a note stating that Louis Nivelle, a royal counselor, left them to his daughter. The money went to his descendants, the city of Paris, and the lucky workmen.
A sculpted oak tree decorates the façade of a tavern at no. 69—Le Vieux Chêne was the meeting place of a revolutionary group in 1848. And down the hill at no. 122, À la Bonne Source has the street’s oldest sign, a classified monument from the late 1500s showing water carriers at a well.
The market, which has operated since 1350, teems with basket-toting Parisians every day but Monday. And although the church of Saint-Médard is now an oasis of calm in the tumult, it was once the scene of religious hysteria so frenzied that the king was forced to intervene. When the death of a pious young deacon named François de Paris was followed by seemingly miraculous cures, unruly crowds mobbed the cemetery until Louis XV ordered it closed. The locked gates carried a stern message: “By order of the King, God is forbidden to perform miracles in this place.”
A wide arch at 130 boulevard Saint-Germain flanked by figures of Hermes and Hephaestus is the gateway to a time warp, the Cour du Commerce Saint-André.
This cobblestone passage is steeped in history. At no. 8, Marat ran a printing press that produced his revolutionary tabloid L’Ami du peuple. Standing in the narrow rue piétonne, I wonder if his press was loud enough to drown out the thumps coming from no. 9, where a carpenter was using sheep to test a new device he had built for its inventor, Dr. Ignace Guillotin. A year after Charlotte Corday murdered Marat in his bath, the guillotine would end the days of another famous resident. Danton, who moved into no. 20 in 1789, was arrested there in 1794 and executed six days later.
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson frequented this street as patrons of the Café Procope, where Parisians first tasted coffee. Opened in 1686 by Sicilian Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli (and still open today), Le Procope was also a haunt of the Encyclopédistes—you’ll see some of their portraits in the windows. The restaurant’s A-list literary clientele has included everyone from La Fontaine and Voltaire to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Today’s cour is half as long as it was before Haussmann created the boulevard Saint-Germain in 1866; Danton’s home stood roughly where his statue now stands, on the boulevard across from the entrance to the cour.
Although short, this street is full of lovely secrets. It originally followed the contrescarpe of Philippe Auguste’s wall, part of which still exists at no. 4. Inside the Catalonia tourist office’s gift shop are the impressive remains of a round tower, one of many that once studded the twelfth-century wall.
Another hidden treasure is the Cour de Rohan. This series of vine-draped courtyards linking the cour with the rue du Jardinet is where the bishops of Rouen once had their Parisian pied-à-terre. Its entrance is across from Le Procope.
No sleepy backwater, the cour is lively by day with shoppers and lunchers and by night with restaurants catering to the movie-going crowd of the Odéon quartier.
Paris est pour un riche un pays de Cocagne:
Sans sortir de la ville, il trouve la campagne.
—Boileau
In one of my favorite fantasies, the one where I can live wherever I like and money is no object, I head straight for the sixteenth arrondissement and pick out a house in the Hameau Boileau. Not really a street, the hameau is a cluster of quiet, leafy cul-de-sacs full of butterflies and birds, where pretty homes nestle in gardens far from traffic but close to upscale amenities.
Back when Auteuil was a country village, poet Nicolas Boileau- Despréaux bought property here, seeking relief from the city he considered too crowded, noisy, and dangerous (in the seventeenth century!). Describing it caustically in Les Embarras de Paris, quoted above, he complains that the rich can buy peace and quiet in the city:
Mais moi, grâce au destin, qui n’ai ni feu ni lieu,
Je me loge où je puis, et comme il plaît à Dieu.
When that was written in 1660, Boileau had not yet attained literary fame, although it was not quite true that he had “neither hearth nor home,” having inherited a small fortune from his solidly bourgeois father.
Twenty-five years later, when he was received into the Académie, he bought his long-desired sanctuary—a little country house picturesquely covered in vines, with gardens stretching to the hameau’s present-day entrance at 38 rue Boileau. He frequently entertained guests here, and Racine, a frequent visitor, wrote, “He’s happy as a king in his solitude, or rather in his inn at Auteuil.”
In the early nineteenth century, when financial speculators discovered Auteuil, Boileau’s former property was subdivided. Today’s houses, in a private community surrounded by woods, range from neoclassic to Art Deco in style, but most have the look of luxurious country homes. The most striking one is a turreted Gothic-style fantasy that dominates the avenue Despréaux.
Strolling along those tranquil roads under massive chestnut trees, I found it hard to believe that a short walk would take me to the Michel-Ange-Molitor Métro stop. The cynical Boileau would not be surprised to learn that, over three hundred years later, money still buys country calm in the city.
The magic of Montmartre is easy to miss. It disappears in the traffic and tourist traps, especially in the Place du Tertre. But the butte has old, romantic streets that are well worth seeing, and rue Lepic brings together all that is characteristic and captivating in this former village.
Before this street was built, Montmartre was a leafy hill covered in vineyards and topped with windmills. A hamlet at the top clustered around the place and its church—not Sacré-Coeur, but the much older Saint-Pierre—and thatched cottages on narrow lanes housed millers, workmen, artists, and quarry workers who dug the gypsum that made plaster of Paris.
One steep road, today’s rue Ravignan, linked the village to Paris for centuries, until the day in 1809 when Napoléon I rode out to inspect a new telegraph apparatus. Forced to dismount halfway up the hill and continue on foot, the emperor was not amused. Construction soon began on the rue de l’Empereur (now rue Lepic), which climbs the hill in a gentle curve.
It starts down at the Place Blanche, named for the permanent blanket of white powder left by plaster carts. Just off the place stands the famous Montmartre institution called the Moulin Rouge, where high-kicking dancers displayed petticoat ruffles, shapely legs, and occasionally a total lack of underwear.
Opened in 1889 (and still kicking, with several shows nightly), the Moulin Rouge in its glory days is shown on a mural near the theater’s entrance at 82 boulevard de Clichy. Toulouse-Lautrec sits at his usual table sketching dancers including slender Valentin le Désossé (the Boneless) and chubby Louise Weber, nicknamed La Goulue (the Glutton).
From Place Blanche, rue Lepic climbs through a lively market into a residential quartier where another artist once lived. Vincent van Gogh spent two years at no. 54 with his brother Theo, an art dealer who introduced him to Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Gauguin. Under their influence his palette evolved from somber neutrals to brighter colors before he left for Arles in 1888. Artists’ studios still stand on rue Lepic and neighboring streets like rue de l’Armée-d’Orient—look for buildings with large north-facing windows and skylights.
Van Gogh may have climbed this same stretch of rue Lepic when he was painting Le Moulin à Montmartre. At no. 77, I find his model. An arched gateway carries the name Moulin de la Galette, and looking up through the trees I see the windmill, tantalizingly inaccessible since it is now on private property. Of all the sites in Montmartre, this may be the one most loaded with history.
By the Middle Ages, Paris’s highest hill, where the Romans once had a temple to Mars, supported some thirty windmills. This one, built in 1621, stands on the site of a thirteenth-century predecessor. So famous were these mills that in 1570 the Italian poet Tasso wrote that two things struck him most about Paris: the stained-glass windows of Notre-Dame and the windmills of Montmartre.
Although carts usually lumbered up the hill loaded with wheat to be ground into flour or grapes to be pressed for wine, some wagons brought grimmer burdens. Montmartre’s height made it a strategic point whenever the city was attacked, and cannons mounted here fired on the Russians in 1814 and the Prussians during the Commune of 1871.
Peace restored, the Moulin de la Galette became a popular guinguette. Parisians loved Sunday promenades to the butte, where millers and their wives offered fresh milk and galettes, or cakes, made from their flour. Now they could spend the afternoon at an outdoor dance hall. In 1876, Renoir immortalized the moulin in his joyous painting of Parisians in their Sunday best, dancing and flirting in the dappled sunshine.
The guinguette is gone now—replaced by an apartment building. And of Montmartre’s many mills, just one other remains—you’ll pass the Moulin Radet at the next corner, several blocks before rue Lepic ends at the Place Jean-Baptiste-Clément.
Paul Verlaine, who knew both the glory and misery of the city’s streets, described them poetically in La Bonne chanson:
Le bruit des cabarets, la fange des trottoirs,
Les platanes déchus s’effeuillant dans l’air,
Toits qui dégouttent, murs suintants, pavé qui glisse,
Bitume défoncé, ruisseaux comblant l’égout,
Voilà ma route, avec le paradis au bout.
With Verlaine’s verse in mind and Hillairet in hand, I look forward to discovering many more streets of desire.