By Bill Simons
Europe draws us in.
From Stockholm to Rome, intimate villages and curious neighborhoods appeal. Istanbul, Mykonos, Sienna, Sevillle, Venice, Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Edinburgh are all celebrated. But few are more compelling than Paris’ Odeon district, the Sixth Arrondissement, the jewel of the Left Bank.
Nearby, the ancient, still murky, waters of the Seine flow slowly. Notre Dame Cathedral’s storied towers loom high, and hordes of eager Sorbonne students still study hard, play easy and ask many a quixotic question.
But it is the street life of the Left Bank—the back alleys, bustling cafes, and hidden courtyards—that still delights with long-ago tales and fabled narratives.
Refugee, outcast, rebel, scoundrel and tourist have all walked these rough-hewn aging cobblestones.
There’s Café 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 the nearby Les Deux Magots cafe.
Just a few blocks away is the print shop of the much-romanticized Marat, the people’s herald, who (before Hitchcock’s Psycho came along) suffered the most infamous of bathroom deaths, when he was knifed in his bathtub: quite a mess.
Death does lurk here. Centuries ago the good doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin popularized his guillotine, which was seen as a far more humane way to be executed than hanging. The gritty masses were gently reassured that when its heavy blade fell, all that King, Queen, or commoner would feel was “a light freshness on the neck.” “They chop off your head, we are told, then they 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 amidst the greens of the nearby Luxembourg Gardens.
So we see L’Hôtel, where the broken genius Oscar Wilde came from a British world of fierce derision and painful imprisonment to the sweet freedom of a tiny 10′ by 10′ room (which you can now rent for $900 a night, thank you very much). Wilde coyly advised us, “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
Maybe that’s it. This town has long been forgiving. Josephine Baker broke free of her clothes and danced. 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. And after her pal Pablo Picasso painted her now-famous portrait, some bristled that she didn’t even look like it. Picasso countered, “She will.”
In the weathered passages of this throwback enclave, you see vestiges of the old academies that once ruled with a iron fist. They were the thought police of ideas, language, and the beaux arts. Oh well, these days you spot an avant-garde French fusion restaurant next to an old eatery that offers frogs legs. Wooden doors—weathered and massive—open to hidden worlds that were once filled with grand horses and elegant carriages, bonnets and berets. Over there is a reminder of England’s George Orwell, whose claim, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” somehow still rings true.
Every other corner has some intrigue. There’s the home of George Sand, the tiny woman rebel who in 1839 escaped with her dear companion Frederic Chopin to the Mediterranean to pen A Winter in Mallorca. Now, 177 years later, Mallorca’s Rafael Nadal comes here each May to write his singular history, “My 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. After all, it was 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’Odéon. Such a nice place to be pampered—warm towels, long shampoos, lilting French accents. But then I suffer a kind of mental whiplash when I learn that the site used to be site of 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 of intellectual adventurers and pilgrims of the soul, 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 doing nothing, really doing nothing.” The question remains: What better place is there on this earth to create telling insights of the mind, and eternal images of beauty?
Note: This piece was based in large part on a wonderful tour arranged by Travels With Soha. For info, please visit twstennistours.com.
