Strolling in Saint Germain des Prés

Over the Arts and Letters

Delacroix, Balzac, Molière, Wilde and Rimbaud, each walk in the 6th wake pattern with the silhouettes seem to pass through the streets. Far from the simplistic image of Sartre and Beauvoir in Les Deux Magots, a thousand literary and artistic paths are emerging here. Just walk randomly, head in the air, traveling through time books and prints, the look stopped by a doorway, a plaque or a masking dome perhaps a secret theater. It is believed see Balzac based street characters Visconti, the Gide of high school students discussing philosophy in Luxembourg or the musketeer Athos hitching his horse to leave the Férou street. We chose a route of many that will take you from the Institute Vavin, via the Rue de Seine, the Rue du Dragon and the Place Saint-Sulpice. When listening, always, stories that these facades have to tell us.

When looking at the left bank of Arts from the bridge, suspended over the Seine, the silhouette of a building in the majestic dome stands out: the Collège des Quatre-Nations, wanted by Mazarin and built by Le Vau between 1662 and 1688, which hosts since 1795 the Institute of France or the meeting of the French Academy, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy moral and political sciences. In 1200, the speaker Philip Augustus ended here by the tower of Nesle, built opposite the tower of the Louvre..

In 1661, in his will, Cardinal Mazarin bequeathed his fortune to the foundation of a college for the education of schoolchildren sixty territories annexed to France Artois, Alsace, Pinerolo and Roussillon. At his death, he wants to be buried in the college chapel, with the image of Richelieu at the Sorbonne, which had created the French Academy in 1635 with a mission to set the language and write the dictionary, the Immortals write now the fourth book in the 9th edition.

In the middle of the bridge with railings covered in padlocks, back to the Louvre, the tip of the island city on the corner of the eye, a classical pediment enclosing a clock is fixed.

The hour of departure has arrived. One approaches the dome of the Institute whose two wings open, as if to invite the visitor to get to the Mazarine Library, open to the public, or to discover the works exhibited under the flag of the painted ceiling of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. We cross the courtyard of the Institute for accessing the oldest public library in France who, having inherited the vast personal collection of Mazarin, contains 200,000 rare and valuable books, manuscripts and 4700 incunabula 2370, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. After a splendid staircase, the library here wrapped in a luxury studious, where readers alongside marble statues.

The lavish decor of Pierre Le Mute, unchanged since the 17 th century, welcome rows of tomes hedges golden and a scholarly exhibition of medieval illuminations. It reveals also rare magazines like Intermediate researchers and curious answer, since 1864, with unusual questions from its readers. The Institute also has a library reserved to its Members who holds, among other treasures, the largest set of Balzac s manuscripts in the world !

Among the passages of Paris, there are tiny: and that of the Institute, immortalized by Philippe Soupault in New Paris Nights. If the city there appears a modern light, major book pays homage to Surrealist Nights of Paris Restif de la Bretonne, including his contemporary Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a former student of the College of the Four Nations, praised in his Tableau de Paris. When a storm comes up, the narrator and the mysterious cross busy Boulevard Saint-Germain take refuge "in the air stream that perpetually raging under the arches of the passage that leads from the street to the quay of the Seine, in creeping into the institute ".

From this porch open to you the Rue de Seine and Rue Mazarine which enclose the garden Pierné Gabriel, the center of which stands the fountain Evariste Fragonard, son of the great painter. Here once stretched "pre Clerics in" Queen Margot on which he built his castle after seeing her lover murdered 18 years out of the Hotel de Sens, 5 April 1606. You have to imagine the entrance of his palace between 2 and 10 rue de Seine, with 10 and 14 rue Mazarine, the Jeu de Paume of Métayers, where the young Molière moved with Armande Béjart his Illustre Theatre between 1643 and 1645 before moving on shore right on the existing pier Celestine.

Rue de Seine, past the Rue des Beaux-Arts, whose eponymous hotel was home to Wilde and Borges, one discovers the building at number 31, that lived and George Sand, a century later, Raymond Duncan, who set up his dance academy. At the junction with Rue Visconti, an ancient building is topped with a crest at the sign of Petit Maure, cabaret where the car encanaillaient poets Tallemant of Réaux and St. Amant, academician who wrote part burlesque and comic first dictionary. He died in 1661 following a beating after the prince mocked in a song. At 41 stands the Arras hotel, Armande Béjart habitat after the death of Molière.

Penetrate the Rue Visconti, formerly Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, dedicated to Italian filmmaker but not the architect of Napoleon III, is a journey in time, attracted by the narrowness of these facades behind which lived Racine or Balzac, or by old street lamps that cast a colorful glow to the Callot, whose street at the next intersection, mark the location of the Palette frequented Cézanne, Picasso and Braque.

The story here is pregnant. On the ground floor of the building of 17, having lived rue de Tournon, Balzac knew one of his unfortunate business by engaging in printing. Between 1926 and 1928 he made himself founder, printer, publisher, helped by his muse, Miss de Berny. Delacroix, who had his studio on the second floor of 1836 to 1844, it made many portraits, including that of George Sand her neighbor. "Here Jean Racine died April 21, 1699," we read, engraved in the stone of the majestic mansion located at 24, carriage entrance and terrace. The playwright lived there seven years before dying, sad and crippled with pain, deprived of the king favors.

Turn left twice and this is the rue Jacob, which must observe the mythical building number 27, not only because Ingres there was a small apartment before going live to 17, but mostly because it is the historic seat of Seuil, whose logo immortalized yew and grille.

On the right, take the rue de Furstenberg. Past the old workshop Balthus at number 4, strolls on this plot on which four magnolias give a provincial look. Here is the Delacroix museum, where the painter of Rue Visconti had his studio and his home in 1857 when he entered the Institute until his death in 1863. The center of the square was once the courtyard of an abbey palace built in 1586, and which can be seen, the Abbey Street, a section of the Renaissance facade. After Scipio Sardini hotel in 1565, it was the second Parisian building to consist of such a mixture of red brick and stone, typical of the Place des Vosges.

It runs along Street of the abbey, the famous Saint-Germain-des-Prés, ancient basilica Saint Vincent Holy Cross built by Childebert, son of Clovis. Imagine, in the corner square, the former home of Alphonse Daudet. It advances to the rue Saint-Benoit, then passes the Flore, Boulevard Saint-Germain before joining the very old Rue du Dragon, where lived Jean Giono, Victor Hugo and Roger Martin Du Gard. Formerly called rue Saint Sepulchre, it is lined with doors and beautiful ironwork gates.

In the building at number 30, with a strange corbelled an attic was home to 19 by Victor Hugo, who wrote part of Odes et Ballades praised by Chateaubriand, before residing in the parents of Adele Street Cherche-Midi.

Arrived at the Vieux-Colombier the street, along the theater founded in 1917 by Jacques Copeau, before reaching the Place Saint-Sulpice, which hosts an annual market of poetry. An ancient and mysterious atmosphere emanates pillars, arches and asymmetrical towers of the church, which Servandoni imagined the court in the manner of a Roman site. We must listen to the rustling of the octagonal fountain erected by Louis Visconti - whose eponymous crossed the street - around which stand the bishops of the time of Louis XIV, Massillon, Fléchier, Bossuet and Fenelon, and water-breathing lions. We stop at the Café de la Mairie, where Perec wrote in part his Attempt to exhaustion of a lieuparisien, to show "what we usually note does not, which is not noticeable, which has not matter: what happens when nothing happens, otherwise the time, people, cars and clouds ".

Going up the street Férou to Luxembourg, one crosses, alas, neither Musketeer Athos nor Madame de La Fayette, but passers reading from right to left the fresco of the "Drunken Boat" Rimbaud, reproduced on the wall of Hotel pregnant taxes. The Dutch foundation Tegen Beeld created this inverted calligraphy, imagining that the wind was from Saint-Sulpice to Férou street, when the child Charleville declared for the first time the poem instead of a window. At the corner of rue de Vaugirard, Hotel de Liancourt housed the literary salon and garden of Madame de Lafayette, including Madame de Sevigne said he was "the most beautiful thing in the world ".

False Cash Counting Gide in mind, we enter Luxembourg, where Bernard Profitendieu finds his high school classmates, " near the Medici fountain in the driveway that dominates ". After skirting the Orangery into a museum, past the monument to Jules Daloux Delacroix, one of 106 statues of the park, we arrive at the ancient cave became fountain, while echoing the romantic speculation of a comrade Bernard " what I want, said Lucien, it s telling the story, not a person, but a place - like, for example, a garden path, like this one, what to tell what going on there - from morning until night. " Is this where Perec drew the idea of a book whose subject would be a place ?.

No answer, it runs along the pool where always sail skiffs portrayed by François poeia in "In the Garden of Luxembourg": "When the children of boats, bowing their area, fleeing the basin lined with a fresh wind, For me those bricks and these cute dwarf frigates evoked the ocean and distant races. "Imagine, between the statues, the silhouettes of Wateau, Verlaine or Théophile Gautier. Released by the gate instead André Honnorat, the inventor of the summer time, and while it borrows the gardens of the Observatory, that stands here as out of nowhere, a Saharan palace, ocher and embattled. It is the Institute of Art and Archaeology, classified as historical monuments, which once housed the Jacques Doucet Library.

Skirting the building by the Rue Michelet, we arrive rue de Assas, where a narrow passage indicates the entrance of Zadkine museum, which anima interwar School of Paris with Modigliani, Foujita and Cendrars. The studio house where he lived from 1928 to his death just been renovated, donant canopy on a leafy courtyard, where you can admire blocks carved in stone, wood, plaster or marble. Leaving the horizon cut by the tall buildings of the courtyard is only a ribbon of green and red bricks under the blue sky: the botanical garden of the university Descartes.

Assas street was continued toward the Rue Vavin, which dates back to the junction formed by the Brea street, at the Henri Sauvage stepped building, a rare example of Parisian Art Nouveau. At the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Rue Brea, you come face to face with a Balzac carved in bronze by Rodin. Here we are in the Vavin-Raspail- triangle, HenryMiller claimed that it is the "navel of the world". What a journey from the Institute !

Queneau not he said, after having "visited Paris, with diligence and love," between 1936 and 1938, when asked three questions every day on the capital readers Intransigeant, he had "the impression having toured the world " ? Paris is also a journey through time.

NB: There was no city, Séguier Street, the last home of Albert Camus, nor where Charles Cros housed Rimbaud who Torcha with his manuscripts before Théodore de Banville offers him a room Buci street, where he is bared to the window to be deloused. He then remained in the young poet zutique circle at the intersection of Rue Racine and the Ecole de Medecine, to get drunk alcohol and hashish brought by its members. We have not mentioned, in 1918, the filing of the journal Literature by Aragon and Breton in the library of Adrienne Monnier, rue de Odeon or coffee Source, Boulevard Saint Michel, where Breton and Soupault wrote the following year the first book of automatic writing.

Point mentioned, either, the workshop of 7 rue des Grands Augustins, where Picasso painted Guernica, nor the 3, where Apollinaire hosted by Delaunay wrote "Zone", the manifesto poem that opens Alcohols. We did not say, finally, that Baudelaire was born Hautefeuille street, among the tower houses, and after reading the Volupté Sainte-Beuve wrote to Rouen hotel, he made in 1841 to bring its at the Institute, while he was librarian at Mazarine.

All these journeys are to be undertaken. For the sixth district weaves the fabric of an endless story.

Two major books have helped draft this walk:

Knowledge of old Paris of Jacques Hilairet (Princess editions) and crossings of Paris Alain Rustenholz (Parigramme).).