Paris: Le Marais, Notre-Dame & the Heart of the City

Look at the three portals beneath the towers. The central Portal of the Last Judgment shows Christ presiding over the saved and the damned, the blessed floating upward, the wretched dragged below. Above the portals, the Gallery of Kings — twenty-eight stone figures representing the kings of Judah — were smashed during the Revolution when Parisians mistook them for French kings. The original heads are in the Cluny museum, just across the river.

The rose windows. This is what you came for, even if you didn't know it. The north rose window, twelve point nine metres in diameter, dates from twelve fifty and survived the fire almost entirely intact. The south rose window, thirteen metres across, has been part of this building since twelve sixty-seven. When the light hits them and the colours pour through the stone tracery into the interior, you understand why medieval people believed this was the closest a human building could come to heaven.

And the gargoyles. They're not merely decoration. Each one is a waterspout, channelling rainwater away from the walls so the limestone doesn't erode. The grotesque faces and the gargling sound of water through stone throats gave us the word: gargoyle, from the French gargouille, throat. They have been making the rain disappear for eight hundred years.

None of this might exist if Victor Hugo hadn't published 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame' in eighteen thirty-one. By then the cathedral was in terrible shape — neglected, vandalised, patched with bad repairs, threatened with demolition. Hugo's novel made Notre-Dame famous and romanticised it. Public outrage at the cathedral's condition forced the city to commission Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's restoration, beginning in eighteen forty-four. Hugo literally saved this building with a book.

Before you move on, look down. In the square directly in front of the facade, you'll find a small brass octagon set into the cobblestones. This is Point Zéro des Routes de France — kilometre zero. All distances in France are measured from here. You are standing at the very centre of a country.

The structure is divided into two chapels, one stacked above the other. The lower chapel, with its low vaulted ceilings painted in deep blue and red with golden fleurs-de-lis, was for the servants and lesser members of the court. The upper chapel — you reach it by a narrow spiral stair — was reserved for the royal family and their guests. That is where you want to go. That is where the glass is.

When you step into the upper chapel, stop. Don't move for a moment. There are fifteen windows containing six hundred square metres of stained glass covering two-thirds of the wall surface. The stone walls, the structural skeleton of this building, are almost invisible between the glass. This should not be architecturally possible. The Gothic engineering — flying buttresses, pointed arches transferring load outward rather than downward — makes the walls redundant as structure and turns them entirely into light. One thousand one hundred and thirteen scenes from the Bible are illustrated in this glass, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. A medieval person who couldn't read could come in here and read the whole story of the world.

The colours shift through the day. Morning light hits the eastern apse and the deep blues and reds glow like jewels. By afternoon, the rose window at the western end ignites. The Apocalypse window — the last one, fifteen metres tall, installed in fourteen hundred and eighty-five — shows the end of time in a blaze of scarlet and gold.

Louis IX died on crusade in twelve seventy, long before he could be certain his purchase had been worth it. He was canonised in twelve ninety-seven. The Crown of Thorns is now held at Notre-Dame — it was one of the first objects rescued from the two thousand and nineteen fire, carried out by a priest through the smoke while the roof collapsed above him. The chapel Louis built to house it outlasted the war of religion, the Revolution, and two world wars. It is still here, still impossible, still full of light.

George Whitman opened this shop in nineteen fifty-one, originally called Le Mistral. He named it Shakespeare and Company in nineteen sixty-four, with permission from Sylvia Beach, the woman who had run the original Shakespeare and Company at a different address until the German occupation forced her to close in nineteen forty-one. Beach's shop had been the centre of English-language literary life in Paris for two decades. She published James Joyce's Ulysses in nineteen twenty-two when no one else would touch it — Joyce's wife Nora typed some of the manuscript herself. When the Nazis came, Beach refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a German officer, and he had the shop shut down.

Whitman's version carried the spirit forward. The policy of allowing writers to sleep among the shelves — he called them tumbleweeds — in exchange for a few hours' work a day and the reading of one book per week created a transient community of literary people passing through Paris who had nowhere else to go. Henry Miller slept here. Allen Ginsberg slept here. William Burroughs was a regular. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Anaïs Nin. At any given time in the nineteen sixties, there might be a dozen writers sleeping between the books upstairs, sharing a bathroom and writing at the desk by the window overlooking Notre-Dame.

Above the door of the shop is the inscription: 'Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.' Whitman took it from Hebrews thirteen, two, but it became the philosophy of the place — a belief that any person who walked in off the street might have something extraordinary inside them. George Whitman died in two thousand and eleven at the age of ninety-eight. His daughter Sylvia — named for Beach — now runs the shop.

Browse for a while if you can. The English-language literature section is genuinely excellent. And the view of Notre-Dame from the bench outside, with a book in your hand and the Seine a few metres away, is one of the few Paris experiences that is exactly as good as advertised.

The equestrian statue of Henri IV that stands at the centre of the bridge is not the original. The first statue was melted down during the Revolution for cannon. The current version, cast in eighteen eighteen, contains within it, according to one account, a small statue of Napoleon and some royalist propaganda — placed there secretly by the foundry workers who were loyal to the Bourbon restoration. Paris keeps its secrets in bronze.

In nineteen eighty-five, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the entire bridge in forty thousand square metres of champagne-coloured fabric. For two weeks in September, one of the hardest, most permanent things in Paris was soft, billowing, transformed. It took ten years of negotiations to get permission. Paris said no again and again, and Christo waited. The wrapping lasted fourteen days before it was removed, every piece of fabric catalogued and archived. The bridge was exactly the same afterwards, and somehow also not the same at all.

Stand at the centre of the bridge and look east. The towers of Notre-Dame rise above the roofline of the Île de la Cité. Look west and you'll see the Louvre stretching along the Right Bank. The river flows green-grey below you, barges moving slowly, bouquinistes setting up their book stalls along the quays. Paris has been looking exactly like this, more or less, for four hundred years. The Pont Neuf has been here through all of it — the Revolution, the Terror, the Empire, the Commune, the Occupation, the Liberation. Oldest bridge. New Bridge. The city's best joke on itself.

This is Paris's oldest planned square and one of the most harmonious public spaces in Europe. Thirty-six pavilions of red brick and cream-coloured stone arranged in a perfect square, each one identical, each one with arcaded ground floors that allowed people to walk around the entire perimeter sheltered from the rain. Henri IV ordered the square built in sixteen hundred and three; it was completed in sixteen twelve as the Place Royale, inaugurated with a three-day festival of tournaments and fireworks for the marriage of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. The crowds that filled this square for that celebration would have looked up at the same facades you're looking at now.

The name changed during the Revolution. In eighteen hundred, the Vosges became the first département to pay its revolutionary taxes in full, and in gratitude or flattery — Parisians always suspected it was flattery — the square was renamed in their honour. The name stuck.

Victor Hugo lived at number six, on the southeast corner, from eighteen thirty-two to eighteen forty-eight. He wrote much of 'Ruy Blas' and large portions of 'Les Misérables' in the apartment upstairs, looking down into this garden. Molière performed in this neighbourhood. Descartes lived nearby. Cardinal Richelieu had a townhouse just off the square. The arcades were lined with duellists and aristocrats and philosophers and swordsmen, all of them rubbing shoulders with market vendors and pickpockets in the way that Paris has always specialised in.

The garden in the centre is formal but not intimidating: plane trees, a central fountain, gravel paths, wrought-iron gates at each corner. Children play here. Old men read. Tourists eat sandwiches on the grass. The arcades are filled with galleries, antique dealers, restaurants, and a handful of shops selling things you don't need at prices that make you want them. On a warm afternoon when the light hits the brick and turns it the colour of dark honey, the Place des Vosges is what people mean when they say Paris is beautiful. They mean this square, even when they've never been to it.

Before you move on to the next stop, take a slow walk around the full perimeter under the arcades. Each pavilion is identical but the details reward attention — iron rings for tethering horses still set into the stone, the ghost of an old clock face on the north side, the way the sound of the city disappears the moment you step under the vaulted ceilings. This geometry has been absorbing the noise of Paris for more than four hundred years.

He returned to France in eighteen seventy, a seventy-year-old man walking back into Paris as a national hero. The Franco-Prussian War had just ended, the Commune was beginning its brief violent experiment, and Paris was in the process of tearing itself apart again. Hugo walked through it all, enormous, white-haired, worshipped, occasionally shot at by conflicting factions who each wanted him on their side. He died in eighteen eighty-three. Two million people followed his coffin through the streets of Paris.

But in this apartment, before the exile, before the heroism, before all of it, there is something more intimate. Hugo was an obsessive interior decorator. He designed rooms the way he wrote sentences — layered, dense, theatrical, lit from unexpected angles. The Chinese salon on the second floor, which he designed himself, is covered floor to ceiling in lacquered panels and hung with lanterns and silk, a fantasy of the Orient built in a seventeenth-century Parisian apartment. He designed it for his mistress Juliette Drouet, who lived a few streets away for fifty years.

Hugo was also a visual artist of genuine quality, making pen-and-ink drawings of gothic castles and sea monsters and ruined fortresses that look like they were made by someone who had read too much of his own work — which, to be fair, may have been the case. The drawings are displayed throughout the apartment. They are strange and alive and nothing like what you'd expect from the man who wrote 'Les Misérables.'

Look out the window from the second floor. That view of the garden and the arcade below is the view Hugo had. In the morning light, with the plane trees casting their dappled shadows, it is very easy to understand why he stayed here as long as he did.

The falafel wars are still ongoing. Chez Marianne and L'As du Fallafel are separated by about fifty metres on the Rue des Rosiers and each has partisans willing to argue the point loudly. L'As du Fallafel is more famous — it has been written up in every guidebook since Lenny Kravitz ate there and apparently told everyone about it — but Chez Marianne's devotees will tell you the falafel is better and the queue is shorter. Both serve theirs stuffed into pitta with cabbage, aubergine, hummus, and harissa, handed through a window to be eaten standing up in the street. This is the correct way to eat falafel in Paris.

But the street carries something heavier than its food. On the morning of July sixteenth and seventeenth, nineteen forty-two, French police — not German soldiers, French police following French government orders — conducted the Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup. Thirteen thousand one hundred and fifty-two Jewish men, women, and children were arrested in Paris and its suburbs. Four thousand four hundred and twelve were children. They were held for days in the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a cycling stadium with no running water and almost no food, before being transported to Auschwitz and other camps. Fewer than one hundred adults survived. None of the children did.

The Rue des Rosiers was one of the roundup's centres. Families were taken from these buildings. A plaque at number ten marks one of the targeted addresses.

The French government did not acknowledge its responsibility until nineteen ninety-five, when President Jacques Chirac gave a speech that broke with decades of official mythology that had portrayed the Vichy regime as a separate entity from France. 'These black hours,' he said, 'for ever sully our history, and are an insult to our past and our traditions.' It took fifty-three years.

The neighbourhood is still Jewish — still has its bakeries, its synagogues, its memories — but it is also more expensive, more gentrified, more visited. The gay village that grew up in the streets to the east has made the Marais one of the most diverse and contested urban spaces in France. The falafel shops are still here. The plaques are still here. The cobblestones remember everything.

When Pablo Picasso died in nineteen seventy-three at the age of ninety-one, he left an estate of such complexity and such size that it took six years to settle. The French government accepted a large portion of the estate in lieu of inheritance taxes — a process called dation en paiement — and the result was a collection of five thousand works: paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, ceramics, and Picasso's own collection of work by other artists, including Cézanne, Matisse, Degas, and African masks that changed everything.

Those African masks. In the summer of nineteen oh seven, Picasso visited the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris and was stopped cold by the masks from sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands. He was twenty-five years old and working on what would become 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.' The encounter with the masks — their flattened faces, their simultaneous frontality and profile, their refusal of the single perspectival viewpoint — gave him the key to Cubism. He said later that it was at that moment he understood what painting could do that it hadn't yet done.

The museum gives you the full arc of seventy-eight years of work. The Blue Period — the paintings made in Barcelona and early Paris when Picasso was barely surviving, paintings of beggars and blind musicians in cold blues and blue-greens that feel like grief given colour. The Rose Period, warmer, the circus people and acrobats. The Cubist breakthrough, where every surface is simultaneously multiple surfaces. The Surrealist work, the women's faces fractured into planes. The portraits of his wives and lovers — Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque — each one painted in the visual language of that particular period of his life, each one an act of love and, his lovers often said, an act of possession.

A single artist who kept reinventing himself, decade after decade, refusing to settle into a style, refusing to become his own monument while he was still alive. In the Hôtel Salé, surrounded by the salt tax's proceeds, you can follow that refusal room by room.

When it opened, the reaction from Parisians was volcanic. 'A refinery.' 'An oil platform.' 'A catastrophe.' One critic called it a cultural Beaubourg — Beaubourg being the name of the neighbourhood, a word which, in French, carries a faint implication of ordinary, unglamorous, working-class. The building was occupying the site of one of the oldest market quarters in Paris, and its industrial aesthetic felt like a provocation. The newspapers ran competitions for the best insult.

And then, gradually, Paris fell in love with it. Not because tastes changed but because the building worked. The enormous open plaza in front — the Piazza Beaubourg — became the most successful public space in Paris almost immediately, filled with street performers, jugglers, fire-eaters, portrait painters, and the enormous crowds that gather wherever free public space is genuinely welcoming. The escalators in their glass tubes become, as you ride them, a moving viewpoint over the city — Paris tilting and rising around you as you ascend. From the top, the view takes in Notre-Dame to the south, Sacré-Coeur to the north, the Seine to the left, and the whole dense grey-cream grid of Paris spreading to every horizon.

Inside is the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe — one hundred thousand works, from Fauvism to the present — housed in spaces that change shape and size to accommodate each exhibition. Matisse. Kandinsky. Duchamp. Warhol. Klein. Bourgeois. The permanent collection alone takes hours. And this is the right order to see it: after walking from Notre-Dame through eight centuries of Europe, the twentieth century's explosion into abstraction, into colour field, into conceptual art, into neon and video and found objects makes a peculiar, clarifying sense. History accumulates and then it detonates.

There is also, on the top floor, one of the best views of Paris available without going up the Eiffel Tower. Rooftop terrace, free with a museum ticket, and from here you can trace the whole walk you've just done: the towers of Notre-Dame to the south, the Marais stretching east, the Seine curving west toward the Pont Neuf.

The building turns fifty in twenty twenty-seven. It does not look nostalgic. It looks like something that was built for the city Paris has not yet become.

The square in front of you is the place where French history arrives. Executions here during the Revolution and the Terror. The liberation of Paris on August twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-four, when General Charles de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées and then came here, to this square, to this building, and from the balcony delivered the speech that burned its way into the French language: 'Paris outragé, Paris brisé, Paris martyrisé, mais Paris libéré.' Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated. Two million people had lined the streets. German snipers were still shooting from rooftops. De Gaulle walked through it all with a calm that was either extraordinary courage or a carefully calculated political performance, and possibly both.

Nineteen forty-four. The same square where, two years earlier, French police had gathered Jewish families for deportation. The same square where, in eighteen seventy-one, the Commune had made its last stand. The same square where, in seventeen eighty-nine, the Revolution had begun. Paris does not resolve its contradictions. It accumulates them, layer by layer, and goes on.

This is the end of the walk. You've crossed from the beginning of France — the kilometre zero marker in front of Notre-Dame — through eight centuries of books and bridges and squares and art and catastrophe and light to this spot, which is as close to the beating political heart of the city as you can stand without a security pass. Find a cafe, sit down, order something. Watch the square. Paris will keep moving around you, indifferent and beautiful, exactly as it always has.

Merci de m'avoir accompagné. Thank you for walking with me.