A Cleveland native discovers a village universe.
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 Ile St-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 St-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 $8 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 St-Louis, on the tranquil Ile St-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 had been discovered, it has been called the Brasserie de St-Louis-en-l’Ile.
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 Ile St-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 note-book 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 Ile St-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 coat rack. As the years went by, I committed more novels, visited Paris as a tourist, and came to the Ile St-Louis to check on my coat. It was still there. “Soon,” I promised the waiters.
One May in the early ’60s, 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 St-Louis-en-l’Ile. And that tout Paris had discovered the happy place that in my secret mustard-loving heart will always be Aux Alsaciennes.
I often write at the Café Beaubourg, which strikes the English, who love crowded, smoky pubs, as disagreeably austere and new, but which I find airy and calm although there’s always something to see. It was built at the end of the 1980s, right across from the Centre Georges Pompidou and the giant digital clock that counts down the seconds that remain until the end of the century. At the corner is the always busy fountain designed by Niki de Saint-Phalle and her husband, Jean Tinguely, with a pair of red lips, water squirting from the tits of one of Niki’s famous fat ladies, or nans, a top hat that spins, a treble clef in black metal, and so on, all bobbling and twirling—and soaking passersby on windy days. Fred [the author’s dog] likes to walk by here because I encourage him to defecate on the grill above the underground center for experimental music, directed by Pierre Boulez, who once refused to give me an interview.
—Edmund White, Our Paris: Sketches from Memory
Anciently, the Ile St-Louis was two islands, Ile Notre-Dame and Ile-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 17th century the places were joined, and in a burst of elegant speculation, bankruptcies and re-speculation, 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 Ile St-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, St-Louis-en-l’Ile—lovely, tranquil, softly flowing, with devout deacons scrubbing the stone with straw brooms from a stock that seems to have been purchased by some 17th-century financial genius of a priest who feared inflation in the straw-broom market.
Contemporary Paris discovered it could find quadruple use for the Ile St-Louis: as an elegant residential quarter of the 4th 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, book shops, 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 17th 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 St-Louis-en-l’Ile. No change here.
Libella, the Polish bookstore on the rue St-Louis-en-l’Ile, 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 Ferdinand Halphep 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—50 brands of beer from all nations—gratification proceeds on its necessary course.
One in two French people have never set foot in a café.
—Paris Notes
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 60 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.
“And what else?”
“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 Ile St-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 St-Louisen-l’Ile, a few steps from each other, have been converted from 17th-century houses: the Lutece, the Deux-Iles and the St-Louis.
When I telephoned the Lutece 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-Iles to ask if they had a place. Also booked. So was the St-Louis. But on my arrival, I managed to persuade the daughter of the proprietor of the St-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 Sandoul 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, and inventor or hero—who didn’t have a connection with the Ile St-Louis?
The Ile St-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 of glamorous professions, live among broken-veined clochards (hobos) with unbagged bottles, tourists with unbagged guidebooks, Bohemians with bagged eyes.
Then I recalled Jean Cocteau’s saying: “Poets don’t die, they only pretend to.” They live on in their poems, songs, voices, and today it is not just Jacques’ songs that “whirl in the streets,” but his stories and anecdotes too, which have become part of his legend. One day for example he had came across a blind beggar sitting on the pavement in a town in the South of France, his hat in front of him on the ground to receive coins, and a placard saying: Blind Man Without a Pension.
“How is it going?” asks Prévert.
“Oh, very badly. People just pass by and drop nothing in my hat, the swine!” replied the beggar.
“Listen, let me turn your placard round and I guarantee you a fortune.”
A few days later he sees the blind beggar again, and asks how he is faring:
“Fantastic! My hat fills up three times a day.”
On the back of his placard Prévert had scribbled: “Spring is coming, but I shan’t see it.”
—Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris
The actual troubles of the world do not miss the Ile St-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 Ile St-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 Ile 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 Ile St-Louis passports were issued.) Monsieur Filleui, the fishmonger, used to advertise: “Deliveries on the Island and on the Continent.”
The Ile St-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 Ile St-Louis still expresses the shadow presence of the Ile Notre-Dame and the Ile-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 Ile St-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 Ile St-Louis, I am still home free, watching the Seine flow and eddy and flow again.
Herbert Gold also contributed “On the Left Bank” in Part I.
I walked outside, planning to stroll around in search of a last image to match that picture in my mind of a wonderful old man offering me the first waters of the Seine cupped in his hands. The moon mugged me. I mean, this was a moon, so huge and round it looked like an orange. I watched until it was no longer startling, just an unbelievably lovely source of light that splashed gold over the estuary. Its human face seemed animated, but this was no man. I swear to God, Sequana [goddess of the Seine] was talking to me.
—Mort Rosenblum, Secret Life of the Seine