Place Dauphine, Paris 6me. July 2002. 9 a.m. 29°C. Fine red dust blankets the city. Settling overnight, the coppery powder films windscreens and dulls the hue of flowers. In sidewalk cafés people rub their fingertips together, sniff them like a spice, and nod as if in appreciation. No need to mention the Sahara; it is in their eyes.
IT WAS MORE THAN TEN YEARS BEFORE I MOVED PERMANENTLY TO Paris. The identity of my companion changed, but Paris remained much the same.
Born on the world’s largest island, I struggled to adjust to life on one of the smallest.
The Île de la Cité, a sliver of land in the middle of the river Seine, would have made a roomy but not ostentatiously large Australian backyard. But differences in size were dwarfed by the cultural abyss between my old life and the new. Speaking little French and knowing not a soul in France, I had nevertheless followed a woman halfway across the world to share her tiny studio within sight of the Louvre. No Robinson Crusoe was ever more comprehensively marooned.
The Île de la Cité.
Unknown. Île de la Cité. Service photo, Mairie de Paris.
And yet I’d seldom been happier—a bliss that only increased when a few months later, Marie–Dominique became pregnant. Occasionally, a fragment of verse from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” drifted through my mind: “I sang in my chains like the sea.”
If one had to be beached in France, there were worse places than the Île de la Cité. Imagine an ocean liner of stone, moored in the very heart of Paris. Its prow points north, toward where, almost two hundred kilometers away, the Seine joins the English Channel at Le Havre. Dominating the stern of this vessel is the cathedral of Notre Dame, the bells of which—Quasimodo’s bells!—toll over the city each Sunday.
Clustered at the other end are the Sainte–Chapelle, with its soaring Gothic arches and stained glass; the Conciergerie, where Louis XVI and his family languished before their execution; and France’s high court, the Palais de Justice. And beyond these, at the very bow of this vessel, is Place Dauphine.
Triangular and no larger than a couple of tennis courts, this had once been the kitchen garden of what is now the Palais de Justice. None of that vegetation remained. The surface, like that of many public places in Paris, was coarse beige grit, hard packed. And though there were trees—about twenty chestnuts—they existed only on sufferance. Every few years they disappeared, unplugged like so many light bulbs, to be replaced with saplings that by the summer had come into leaf and provided a fresh canopy of shade. It was my introduction to the variety of Paris and a culture that, like an art gallery, periodically closed, to reemerge displaying new images, insights, and experiences.
From the moment Henry IV laid it out in the 1600s, Place Dauphine was a select address, and a magnet for celebrities. Four centuries had not changed that. Most days, portly stage actor and occasional film star Jean Desailly walked his Saint Bernard here. Standing by in approval, he’d watch as this massive pooch, with the casual condescension of someone signing an autograph, deposited a turd the size of a torpedo. Movie actor and singer Yves Montand, another neighbor, gave interviews on a bench just below our window. Later, we inherited his housekeeper. I’m still enough of a fan to be pleased that my shirts were ironed with the expertise once lavished on a man who’d slept with both Édith Piaf and Marilyn Monroe.
In 1928, André Breton, founder of surrealism, conferred immortality on Place Dauphine by using it in his novel Nadja as the home of its mysterious eponymous heroine. Calling it “one of the most profoundly secluded places I know of,” he continued, “I confess that this place frightens me,” but he overcame his disquiet to further observe that the three–cornered space deserved its description as “the pubic triangle of Paris.”
It’s in the nature of pubic triangles to be discreet. Every pedestrian crossing the Pont Neuf passed the narrow lane that gives access, but few turned aside to enter. A seventeenth–century hauteur in its buildings discouraged loitering. Even dogs attempting to irrigate the trees were defeated by the metal grilles that enclosed them. Finding no soft spot in the gritty sand, they made a desultory swipe or two with their back feet and got the hell out.
In Nadja, Breton implied that his heroine knew of other mysteries in Place Dauphine, even beyond those that were visible. “She is certain that an underground tunnel passes under our feet,” he wrote, “[and] is disturbed by the thought of what has already occurred in this square and will occur here in the future.”
Like many of his pronouncements, this was prescient. Just after I arrived, the city excavated a vast pit under the square to construct a subterranean parking lot. Sand, trees, benches, and streetlamps were then put back in place, leaving, aside from a discreet pedestrian entrance, barely a sign of the garage’s existence. Nadja got her tunnel—just sixty years late.
Time robbed Breton of an arresting postscript to this piece of civic improvement. During the first rainstorm after the opening, water failed to drain away, turning the pubic triangle into a pond. For a city as house–proud as Paris, which spends more per head on sanitation than does any other conurbation in the world, such a fault could not be allowed to survive. Resignedly, the public works department ripped up the work, rebuilt the drainage system, and restored our square to its former state.
By the spring, I was coming to terms with France. Those months of isolation, physical and intellectual, had saved me. Instead of letting me choke on a cultural feast, Paris put me on a diet, spoon–feeding me its riches sip by sip.
Formerly incomprehensible objects and events became subjects of study. On my way to the boulanger for an early–morning baguette, I would pause to browse the day’s supplies piled in front of the restaurant next door, their changes reflecting the passing of the seasons: green–gold olive oil from Provence; butter from Guérande, gritty with sea salt; oysters from the Atlantic coast, not—as in Australia—jumbled in sodden burlap bags but packed in boxes woven from paper–thin shavings of white wood. A few weeks later there would be the first yellow–red Napoléon cherries, prunes from Agen, and wheels of Saint–Nectaire cheese from the Auvergne region, their gray rind scumbled like the skin of a elephant.
Later in the morning, skirting the men from La Monnaie (the Mint) who congregated here every day to play boules, I would take a coffee at the café opposite.
On one such day, a couple holding a folded map stopped by me. The young man said, in halting French, “Excusez–moi, monsieur . . . the Sainte–Chapelle?”
I nodded toward the Palais de Justice. “It’s on the other side. Take a left and the next right. You’ll see the queue.”
Just then the waiter brought my express, with the customary tumbler of water and sugar cubes wrapped in paper. Hand on hip, he looked after the walkers.
“Tourists!” he said, not unkindly.
I shrugged, as neighbors do, but I felt like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, a stranger until someone even more out of his depth asked for directions: “I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.”