Books

Chapter One: St.-Germain-des-Prés

St.-Germain-des-Prés. This old quarter on the Left Bank is known for its beautiful church as well as for its narrow streets, antique shops, restaurants, cafés and cellars. The church, the oldest in Paris, and the abbatial palace are all that remain of the famous Benedictine abbey.

-Guide Michelin

The quarter of St.-Germain-des-Prés may be the most visited and written about of all Parisian neighborhoods, and at first it seemed to me that there was little to add about these oft-trodden precincts—the coffeehouses Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés itself, the Luxembourg gardens, Brasserie Lipp … The ghosts of Sartre and de Beauvoir and Hemingway are surely tired of being invoked, the echo of Edith Piaf faintly but audibly protesting.

All these belonged to the recent past, the heyday that comes to people’s minds when you say “St.-Germain-des-Prés,” the era from the forties through the sixties, famous for jazz and existentialism. In many ways, those were not easy decades. France was liberated but damaged, rancorous, and poor, yet it seems to have been a time of excessive gaiety, camaraderie, artistic achievement, erotic freedom, and political change, the haunt of so many of the talented, beautiful, or merely energetic people whose names have come to be associated with it now—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to be sure, but also the writers Boris Vian, Albert Camus, the model Bettina, African Americans like Richard Wright.

I have a friend, a painter now in her seventies who was one of the most beautiful and energetic members of the “golden age” of St.-Germain-des-Prés (others have told me; she wouldn’t say that of herself), who describes the life: You went every night not to just one but three or more fashionable night clubs, a certain regular itinerary that never changed, until tourists (mostly French) turned out to view the beautiful people at play, thereby spoiling it. No one had any money, so you drank very little, usually whiskey, but you ordered a “baby,” a mere drop, all you could afford. You danced—the music was jazz, often American jazz and often played by American musicians. There were dinner shows at the Club St.-Germain, the Vieux Colombier …

It looks in photos of young women flying through the air, their New Look skirts ballooning, swung by skinny guys, as if the dance was the jitterbug. So much smoking! It almost hurts to imagine what the air was like in the Tabou, one of the most popular and famous nightclubs. At the Café de Flore, Sartre held forth, drinking and writing. He and de Beauvoir would stay there all day, especially in cold weather, and it is said they had their own telephone line. Those two, while appearing sociable, were working seriously at their philosophical writings—establishing the prevailing philosophy, existentialism, an elaboration of what in the less reflective partygoers was just nihilism and a devil-may-care attitude. The politics was communist—this was the gauche caviar, as well-heeled leftists would come to be called in Mitterand’s time.

It is hard now, in the glossy consumer paradise St.-Germain has become, to imagine that frenetic life, and above all the intellectual spirit then. I suppose Greenwich Village, or Berkeley, or North Beach in San Francisco during the sixties, might have been equivalents nearer to home: a time of excitement, changing mores, political dissent. In Paris, people went to the Nuages bar—“That’s just where you went,” says my friend Marie-Claude, “you” meaning “everyone”; but everyone could not mean all of Paris—it must have only meant the fashionable world of intellectuals and artists, welded into a kind of milieu that, looking back, seems to the outsider a milieu that would never have let “one” in, rather as in all those American short stories I have mentioned.

Alas, while the glamorous people were at the Tabou, someone had to be home cooking dinner. That was me during the sixties in California, a woman with small children, completely missing the zeitgeist, and it would have been me—and most of us, surely, during the reign of Sartre in Paris. What would one say to Jean-Paul Sartre anyway? It’s me now, frankly, still marginal, contentedly mooning around the side streets, communing with seventeenth-century Parisian architecture and buying groceries for dinner, instead of hanging out at the Café de Flore. People do hang out there, though, and also at the Café Bonaparte and Les Deux Magots, crowded with people drinking coffee or wine at any hour. They are mainly tourists, but they may have always been tourists, for above all this is the haven of the foreigner, the stranger, the escapee.

Sometimes I arrange to meet a friend at one of these cafés at the end of the day for tea or a kir royale, often enough to get a glimpse of this public, sociable French custom, and of these cafés where so much of politics and art got started, and now continue the very long traditions of this quartier. The Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots have been here since the nineteenth century.

The café life is partly a function of Paris being a “walking city.” Is this the place for a diatribe about the automobile? I didn’t realize until I came to Paris, and I’m convinced that most Californians (Americans in general?) don’t realize, because they don’t have an opportunity to enjoy, the richness of a life that allows them to walk everywhere, to learn how much more fascinating and more amusing it is to walk, stopping to stare into store windows, sitting down at a sidewalk café for a coffee, meeting someone you know by chance or by rendezvous. New Yorkers have this privilege, but do the rest of us? In most of our cities, where would you walk to? Would you be safe?

Reprinted with permission of the National Geographic Society from Into a Paris Quartier: Reine Margot's Chapel and other Haunts of St.-Germain by Diane Johnson. Text copyright ©2005 Diane Johnson.