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The largest public square in Paris, Place de la
Concorde is the place where more
than a thousand people were beheaded
during the French Revolution
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Offbeat in Paris
Lalita Phadkar, 56, visited the City of Light this September with her husband and returned enchanted. She tells us why
Paris in autumn is beautiful. Crisp, cool days. Sunshine alternating with a misty scarce-felt rain. Warm enough to allow jeans and a light sweater; cool enough to encourage a colour burst of scarves, caps and capes. Russet leaves drift down from tree-lined avenues. Grand architecture overwhelms. The city’s edgy flavour makes one tinglingly alive.
Divided into Left Bank and Right Bank by the grey slow-moving river Seine, Paris is a walking city; safe enough to wander in, interesting in the contrasts it presents at every turn. Much of the Right Bank is about style and luxury. Broad boulevards, the poshest shops on earth, elegantly turned out people and the incomparable sweep from the Arc de Triomphe up the Champs Elysee to the Place de la Concorde. It’s great, but it does nothing for my emotions. To me it is Business-Paris: power-dressed people, hastening on activities of weight and moment just like in any other city on earth.
The Latin Quarter on the Left Bank, on the other hand, is a ferment of students, tourists, hippies, drunks and intellectuals intent on experiencing, exploring, discovering. Writer Ernest Hemingway got drunk in the many street side cafes here; artist Pablo Picasso lived on the Rue des Augustins and painted, brawled, loved and argued his way through the cobblestoned alleys of the Quarter; philosopher-feminist Simone de Beauvoir sipped coffee and wrote her existentialist The Blood of Others here at the Cafe de Flore. That feverish vibe of Life lived at full tilt still survives. To be honest, however, it now lives cheek by jowl with trade, commerce and tourist activity. Some once bohemian roads like Rue de la Huchette are today given up entirely to cheap eateries, tourist traps and souvenir shops and should be avoided.
The main thoroughfares of the Boulevard St. Germain and the Boulevard St. Michel are imposingly grand if rather commercial. However, snaking off them are little alleys and streets, all carrying the promise of the unexpected and memorable for anyone who ventures into the non-tourist unknown. Scattered through the area are ‘squares’ (called ‘places’) with benches inviting one to buy a baguette sandwich and a citron tarte from a nearby bakery and eat amid the greenery, flowers, birdsong and beautiful public art. Often enchantingly ringed with cafes, they are spaces for children to run, old men to snooze, berets tilted over eyes, and locals to play at boules (or petanque, a traditional game played with metal balls).
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The Eiffel Tower presides over everything that
came before and after it
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One such square, just across the road from the cathedral of Notre Dame, has the oldest tree in Paris, planted in 1602. Stroke its bark gently, the locals say, and the Robinier (so called after the gardener who planted it) will protect you from ill luck for years. Walking on the Boul’ Mich’, GalloRoman ruins strike the eye from the grounds of the not-to-be-missed National Museum of the Middle Ages, the Sorbonne University intellectualises around its fountains and cafes, the
Luxembourg gardens invite you in with their sculpture-lined landscaping full of autumnal flowers.
At the head of this road on one side is a personal favourite: the Place St. Michel. Here towers the 1860 bronze sculpture of St. Michael killing a dragon by Gabriel Davioud, the centre point of a stepped waterfall fountain. It has always been the rallying point for street-protests in the city. In the 1968 students’ rebellion that almost brought down the Charles de Gaulle government, the young leaders facing riot police and tear gas, proclaimed this square, in all seriousness, an ‘independent state’. Today the Fountain attracts loungers, cheering on buskers of both sexes, debating hotly on how to save the world, climbing high onto the dragons and teetering there for that one perfect photograph, meeting, eating, loving, living.
Across the road is the entrance to the St. Michel metro station. Just how art-filled Paris is hits me as I realise that the entrance and signage are the original art nouveau wrought iron and bronze artistry of Hector Guimard who created all the Metro entrances around the year 1900. I was told, around 80 remain in Paris today; one sign has ended up at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.
You can’t come to Paris and not expose yourself to art—it's everywhere. In the grand museums of course: the Louvre, the Musee Rodin, the Musee d’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou...the list is endless. But way beyond this is the living art of the city: the music, dance, public art and happenings. One evening we visited the most beautiful chapel in Europe: the Sainte Chapelle whose walls are sheer stained glass without any visible framework. We were there to attend a concert of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. As the chapel filled with music and the stained glass catching the twilight sun glowed with jewel colours, I felt cradled in sheer beauty. This is a cherished memory.
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