I
never knew the charm of spring
I never met it face to face
I never new my heart could sing
I never missed a warm embrace
Till April in Paris, chestnuts in
blossom
Holiday tables under the trees
April in Paris, this is a feeling
That no one can ever reprise
I never knew the charm of spring
I never met it face to face
I never new my heart could sing
I never missed a warm embrace
Till April in Paris
Whom can I run to
What have you done to my heart.
Nicole and Becky,
I hope you enjoy this day I’ve planned out for you two, around some of my favourite small nooks and crannies around Paris. You’ll each want to pick up a day metro pass, since you’ll be mostly travelling underground to guard against the possibility of April showers. It’s a full day, so try to wake up early and both be out enjoying Paris by 8:30 am. Your first reservations are for 9, just as an added incentive. Please do take photographs for me!
With fondest wishes, Patrick
1. Café de Flore
When I’m in Paris, this becomes
my office as well as my home. It’s
one of those blissful Left Bank cafes where you can happily stay all day over
one cup of café au lait, and they let you. Sartre did, after all.
So did Simone de Beauvoir.
Do get a café au lait, and anything that strikes your eye off of the
menu. Becky, being more of an
ovophile, may want to try the soft boiled eggs with long strips of bread, which
are something of a local delicacy. (Opportunity here for bad joke: in
Britain, these strips of bread are known as soldiers. During the Second World War, there was a joke in this
country: ‘What’s the difference between Italian men and white bread? A: You can
make soldiers out of the white bread.’ Note my mother is Tuscan and my passport
carries a licence to repeat jokes of this nature.)
You are spending today on the Left Bank, and you are in the heart of the Latin Quarter now. The neighbourhood was named after the language of the Sorbonne studentry in the mediaeval period, and Saint Germain exists as its principal throughfare. There are two famous cafes here on the Rive Gauche, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots (preferred of Hemmingway and Joyce, and so named after its two statues). Each has its partisans. The Flore was the centre of surrealism in the inter-war period (Apollinaire, Aragon, Andre Breton all took their espres here), and of existentialism in the postwar decade (Camus, Juliette Greco, Boris Vian). More broadly, at least at a notional level the Rive Gauche has always been the province of artistic and literary bohemia, the Rive Droit that of bourgeoisie. This distinction gets periodically elided, as bohemias rarely stay put where they’re meant to be, and the neighbourhoods they’ve left become trendy and subject to cross-over spillage from the other bank – hence the phenomenon of Bo-Bos, those who live in the Right Bank but as though they’re from the Left. It’s good coffee in any event.
2. Musée du Louvre
Métro Louvre Rivoli
From Café de Flore, it’s a blissful ten minute walk to the Louvre (walk north along any street, but perhaps at the corner with the neighbourhood’s eponymous St Germain, to the Seine which you will cross at Pont Neuf, then walk left along the river), or if weather precludes for now, you could take the underground. There are audio guides available if you’d like to be chaperoned around Winged Victory, the Venus of Milo, and columns from the palace of Darius, king of Persia. Or you could just walk and soak.
3. Crêperie des Josselin, Montparnasse
Botanists of the crêpe, some of them at any rate, hold
Josselin’s out as a premier example.
Where you are in the heart of Montparnasse, there are a number of Breton
restaurants specialising in crêpes, tracing to a tradition of immigration from
Brittany to Montparnasse. The monstruous Montparnasse Tower, at 209 m the tallest
building in Western Europe when it was built, marks several blocks which
earlier in the century defined the term ‘starving artist’. In its interwar heydey, waiters at
Montparnasse’s cafes (the principal ones: Le Dôme, La Closerie des Lilas, La
Rotonde, Le Select, and La
Coupole) were instructed not to wake
impecunious artists who occupied tables all evening for a few centimes if they
slept at their table. Many of them
still sleep here: in the Cimetière du Montparnasse nearby, Baudelaire, Sartre,
de Beauvoir, and Beckett are all buried.
4. Musée d’Orsay
Metro Solferino or Assemblee Nationale, 12 line (green) or Musée d’Orsay, C line (yellow). From Montparnasse, take 12 (green) toward Porte de la Chapelle, eliding at Assemblee Nationale.
The d’Orsay specialises in the period from 1848 to 1914 – Seurat, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, Rodin, Van Gogh. Hemmingway was particularly attached to the Cézanne landscapes, though they were housed at the Louvre then.
5. Jardin du Luxembourg
If time and weather permit, do have a stroll through the Jardin de Luxembourg, gently sprawled between the Sorbonne, Pantheon, and Sénat, and one of my favourite spaces. There’s a quite nice chocolaterie on rue Bonaparte called Pierre Arnay if you can find it. If time and weather today don’t permit, move on to Bistro Allard and come back to do this tomorrow morning if you have a chance.
6. Bistro Allard
41 rue St-André-des-Arts, 6e. Metro Odéon. If
coming from Luxembourg, you can just walk over – it’s only a few blocks.
This is the textbook instance of a traditional bistro. Some favourites: saumon avec sauce au berre, duck with olives, escargot, foie gras, veal stew, and frog legs. For desert, my vote is for the tarte tatin, the carmelised apple pie. Do have a look at the zinc bar in the front room. You have reservations for 7 pm, under my name.
7. Duc des Lombards
The Duc des Lombards is to put it mildly the best in French jazz. Your tickets are at the door under my name. The concert of the night (Javier Girotto, an Argentine saxophonist) begins at 9, and runs until wee hours.
Don’t come back before dawn, ladies.