By Bill Simons
Grand Slam tennis fans can choose from numerous travel providers. Some offer luxurious service and on-site dining. Others offer tennis play and instruction as part of their packages.
Soha Yamin‘s longstanding Travels With Soha offers great seats, tennis clinics and insights into local culture. At the Australian Open, she will take customers to the wine country, or escort them on informative tours of Melbourne. Similarly, at the French Open, Soha whisks you off to the champagne country and leads extraordinary Parisian walking tours. This appreciation of the Left Bank was written after one such tour.
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Europe draws us in. From Naples to Helsinki, intimate villages and curious neighborhoods appeal. Few are more compelling than Paris’ Odeon district, the Sixth Arrondisement, the jewel of the Left Bank.
Nearby, the ancient waters of the Seine flow slowly. Notre Dame Cathedral towers high, and hordes of eager Sorbonne students study hard.
But it is the street life of the Left Bank—the back alleys, bustling cafes, and hidden courtyards—which still delights with its long-ago tales, its fabled narratives.
Refugee, outcast, rebel, and scoundrel have all walked these rough-hewn aging cobblestones.
There’s Cafe Procope, the oldest cafe in Paris, where coffee was introduced to already-hyper artists. Founding father Ben Franklin hung out there, and Papa Hemingway wrote at nearby Les Deux Magots.
Just a few blocks away is the print shop of the much-romanticized Marat, the people’s hearld, who, long before Janet Leigh’s gory shower murder in Psycho, suffered the most infamous bathroom death, when he was knifed in his bathtub. What a mess.
Death does lurk, for around here the good doctor Joseph Guillotine tested and popularized the guillotine, which was seen as a far more humane way to die than hanging. It was claimed that all King, Queen, or commoner would feel was “a light freshness on the neck.” Here in France, we are told, “They chop off your head, then put up a statue of you.”
Still, these streets were also a haven. Artist and author alike took refuge in tiny apartments, painting canvases and writing treatises, novels, and poems, in assorted cafes and the nearby Luxembourg Gardens.
So we see L’Hotel, where the broken Oscar Wilde came from a British world of derision and imprisonment to the sweet freedom of a tiny 10′ by 10′ room (where you can now stay for $900 a night, thank you very much). Wilde advised us, “Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.”
Maybe that’s it—this town has long been so forgiving. So we in turn can excuse the fact that now, amidst the ancient wonders, there are more than a few tacky edges.
After all, here James Baldwin sought renewal, Jean-Paul Sartre changed mindsets, Albert Camus offered absurdist insights, and the iconic Gertrude Stein told us, “The good thing about France isn’t what France takes from you, it’s what France doesn’t take from you.”
Of course, Stein wasn’t always content. After her friend Pablo Picasso painted her now-famous portrait, she complained to him that it didn’t even look like her. “Don’t worry,” Picasso replied, “you will get to look like the portrait.”
In the weathered passages of this throwback enclave, you may look for vestiges of the old academies which ruled ideas, language, and the beaux arts—thought police with a French accent. Next to an avant-garde French fusion restaurant, an old eatery offers frogs legs. You may see grand and weathered wooden doors opening to a hidden world once filled with grand horses and carriages, bonnets and berets. You may look for a reminder of England’s George Orwell, whose claim, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” sadly still rings true.
Every other corner here intrigues. There’s the home of George Sand, that tiny woman rebel who in 1839 went with her lover Frederic Chopin to the Mediterranean to write A Winter in Mallorca. Now, 175 years later, Mallorca’s Rafa Nadal comes here each year to write his singular history, “A Summer in Paris.” There’s an inspired black sculpture, now seemingly ignored and in disrepair. Its prime use is as a motorcycle parking station—high art, modest function.
Ancient jewels endure a dash of unkind blight. Culinary treats—rich sauces and sublime eclairs—delight as clanging garbage trucks roll by: This is not a museum. Wasn’t it ex-pat F. Scott Fitzgerald who told us, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”?
So, I turn the corner, not far from a pigeon-friendly statue of the long-forgotten politico Georges Danton, and come upon my favorite hedonistic spot in town, Dressage, the hair salon on 7 rue de l’Odeon. Such a nice place to be pampered—warm towels, long shampoos, lilting French accents. But then I suffer a kind of mental whiplash as I learn that the site used to be home to the storied La Maison des Amis des Livres (The House of the Friends of Books), which introduced the French to Hemingway and courageously resisted the Nazis.
Even now, decades later, this place remains irresistible.
Time and ideas, evolving arts and continental comforts—the alleys truly are a moveable feast, a place of celebration for free-thinkers and crazed dreamers who sought this haven to sip dark coffee and vintage wines as they jousted in high-voltage salons and crafted major wonders. Here is an inspired cafe culture like no other, where brilliant minds somehow understood Gertrude Stein’s claim, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much and do nothing.” What better place is there on this earth to sit around and do nothing but create telling insights of the mind, and eternal images of beauty?
