“Beauty is in the streets,” they say in Paris. We travelers know our favorites, Parisians know theirs. Jean Genet liked to stand with his friend Giacometti at the foot of rue Oberkampf, taking in its long uphill from the Marais to Belleville. Simone Weil loved walking the quays of Île Saint-Louis in her native river city. The scruffy streets of the ninth were François Truffaut’s muse and mother.
As cities evolve and erupt, streets change; Parisians come and go. But the beauty remains. The gray light shifts, we see from new angles the stunning mosaic that is the City of Light. One by one, the streets of Paris, their multiple personalities—charming, broken, lyrical, dirty, elegant—wind along the past and present, through the storied worlds of Parisians ancient and modern. Walking in their footsteps, we sense the hauntings of history, connect with sites of memory.
The Streets of Paris focuses on twenty-two life stories of brilliant and passionate Parisian characters in their physical settings, along the streets that tell the stories of their inspiration, of how they became the icons that Paris—and history—still celebrate. In this book, the streets are stories. To paraphrase Rebecca Solnit’s words about the where of all our lives: “Places are stories.”
Travelers who love to walk in cities, searching out the backstories in the narrow old streets, are walking in imitation of so many famous people of Parisian history who also walked their city and took its street life to heart. As the Anglo-French historian and indefatigable walker Richard Cobb put it, “Paris should be both walkable and walked, if the limitless variety, the unexpectedness, the provincialism, the rusticity, the touching eccentricity are to be appreciated.”
With The Streets of Paris as your guide, you’ll walk the quartiers of such original geniuses as Patrick Modiano, Édith Piaf, Colette, Jean Moulin, good king Henri IV—you’ll find all these names in the book’s Contents. Exploring the contexts of their life stories, we enter the complex mind and heart of Paris from the Middle Ages to the present. It comes through in these twenty-two portraits of writers, philosophers, lovers, patriots, royals, rebels, painters, composers, scientists, saints, and filmmakers. Each one reveals a major theme of the Parisian mosaic, the city’s ambiguity, the courage and wit, the élan.
A few examples of their stories that do not show up on historical plaques or in the voice-overs of flag-waving tour guides:
• Honoré Daumier of Quai d’Anjou on the Île Saint-Louis, caricaturist, political satirist, for whom “the streets of Paris were his school and college, his occupation and pastime, his career,” to quote one biographer. Daumier went to jail for his subversive cartoons of the powerful.
• Seventeen-year-old Héloise, the first troubadour, who, waiting for her lover Peter Abelard, hid in the shadows of the medieval Notre-Dame Cathedral Close, its winding unlit streets still winding today, a labyrinth of secrets and intrigue. “Heloise is worth a thousand Abelards,” said Henry James, preferring the passionate girl and her unrepentant love letters to the great medieval theologian (and father of her child) turned repentant monk.
• The antifascist hero Jean Moulin of Montparnasse, leader of the French Resistence, sometime bohemian and artist, who lived a double life along the streets of southern Paris.
• Albert Camus, philosopher, writer, Résistant. He walked everywhere, Left Bank, Right Bank, recording the particulars in his Notebooks. “Camus loved the world. He was uneasy with those indifferent to its beauty,” wrote a recent biographer.
• King Henri IV, lover, urban designer, and pluralist, made Paris a miracle of tolerance and beauty after a century of the brutal Wars of Religion. He even thought to put sidewalks on his Pont Neuf—all the better for strolling and opening up what many feel is the most beautiful prospect in Paris.
• Walking south, into the Latin Quarter, you’ll find the beloved statue of Michel de Montaigne along the rue des Écoles, a street dating from the Middle Ages when Paris became the academic star of Europe. The father of all enlightened moderns, Montaigne adored Paris as the inscription on his statue, a quote from his essay “of Vanitie” shows:
I love that citie for hir own sake … I love hir so tenderly that hir spottes, hir blemishes and hir warts are deare unto me.…
No sedentary philosopher, he loved to walk the streets of Paris: “My business is to keep myself in motion.… I walk for the sake of walking.…”
(Four centuries later, Julia Child echoed Montaigne. As she said in My Life in France, “You learn Paris on your own two feet.”)
Following in the footsteps of such Parisians, you walk the city’s main geographic quartiers: Île de la Cité; Île Saint-Louis; the Left Bank and its quartiers (Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain); Southern Paris (Montparnasse); Western Paris (Passy); the Right Bank and its quartiers (Pigalle, Montmartre, the Marais); Northeastern Paris (Picpus, Belleville, Ménilmontant). Hitler came close to bombing the northeast into the ground because it produced nothing but insurrection, those detestable noisy unions. And windmills.
The Contents names all these areas, organizing the stories in the clear way that travelers found helpful in my book Hidden Gardens of Paris: A Guide to the Parks, Squares, and Woodlands of the City of Light. This organization is an easy plan that helps travelers—with such street maps in hand as the little red book, Paris par Arrondissements, available at most news kiosks or bookstores; and/or the folding map Streetwise Paris—find their way without having to join an organized tour.
With The Streets of Paris as your guide, explorations of the city are original and leisurely rather than superficial and exhausting. (To quote Julian Green, “Paris … is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers.…”) And, as many travelers and travel writers have commented in The New York Times, although they pack and carry their electronic devices, in the interests of depth and originality of content, they still buy and bring along the travel book.
There’s no need to join an organized tour if you’re not in the mood; you can sit and rest your feet, eat lunch in any park or square—like the Parisians do—whenever you feel like it. The book tells you which métro to take (maps of the métro are available inside the métro stations) and which street(s) to follow on the way to your destination, say, the quiet streets of the southern Marais leading to the Hôtel de Sens at the end of pretty rue du Figuier where Queen Margot—La Reine Margot—earned her undeserved reputation as a bloodthirsty sex maniac.
A number of Parisian streets are havens of peace and solitude, perhaps unlike the tenor of the stories they tell: Reine Margot’s rue du Figuier. Daumier’s Quai d’Anjou on the north side of Île Saint-Louis. Marie Curie’s Quai de Béthune on its south side, facing the back of Notre-Dame. On a Sunday morning, the deserted quad of Simone Weil’s L École Normale Supérieure in rue d’Ulm. Colette’s rue de Beaujolais bordering the exquisite Palais Royal.
A popular feature of Hidden Gardens of Paris that appears in The Streets of Paris is the listing of “Nearbys” that follows each selection: a few good cafés, bookstores, movie theaters, gardens, museums, churches, pâtisseries. The “Nearbys” help travelers find the rich—and often hidden—variety of a particular quartier.
What this guidebook does not offer is a listing of hotels or Best Shopping and practical tips about doing the laundry, finding a taxi, or a dentist.
For armchair travelers, the Sources—or bibliography—at the end of the book enlighten a journey whereby the places and people profiled in the book can come to life in the imagination if not on the actual Parisian streets. Nancy Mitford’s novel, Voltaire in Love, for instance, serves as a wonderful companion while sitting, in your imagination, in the hôtel (now a shadowy café on Quai Voltaire) where this brilliant bon vivant died.
Like reading a great novel—or a fat biography that’s never gone out of print—walking the streets of Paris helps us experience the sources of the love of life so vital in this city. We see transactions of friendship, love, work, beauty; we taste the good wine, the incomparable bread. So many wonderful books in the countless librairies, the good newspapers in the green kiosks. The laughter in so many dark eyes, the quickness in the air, of conversations overheard. The courtesy. We remember and cherish these pleasures long after we go home.
Victor Hugo named the most important source of his art: He said he got the ideas for his novels by chance, in the streets.
The striking photographs of streetscapes included in this book present the proof that the Paris of genius and beauty is as seductive and irresistible and possibly as life-changing as it ever was. The physical evidence of the photographs make the case: Paris lives, its radiance and esprit intact and largely the effect of the people who have lived and worked there.
And the effect of the river Seine must always be spoken: Its presence and power are at the heart of the city’s joy and sensuality. Paris, as one old mapmaker once said, is a gift of the Seine.
—Susan Cahill
New York City