Our Summers in Paris

 We rent out our house to Parisians during the summer, so we off it to Paris while they’re in our home.

I dislike air travel and so does my wife. Thankfully, in France there are more civilized ways of traveling. Trains take more time but we're not in a hurry. A trip to Paris takes a bit more than five hours, but first class is comfortable and quiet, and if you buy tickets for the iDTGV section where mobile phones are prohibited and people behave in a civilized way, one has time to read, write on one’s computer, or just relax and look out into the lovely countryside of France.

Driving is not a bad choice either. In France, the motorways are very good, with plenty of nice rest stops, but they are to be avoided in summer, especially in August. So, when we do drive up to Paris we go by the national roads.

Our favorite is National 21. It goes up the very center of the country. We go east on A64 until we get to the junction of N21 near Tarbes. Then we turn north and go through old towns such as Mirande and Miélan, until we reach Auch, the old Medieval town with a wonderful cathedral. Then up we go on up through some of the loveliest countryside of France and through some of its nicest towns as the road meanders through the rolling hills of the Lot valley. We then cross the Geronne valley to the town of Agen, and later we come to Bergerac after the road has gone past the Chateau Montbazillac, and the small town of Castillonnes and then Cancon. We usually stop for the night at Perigueux. There is a small B&B hotel near the entrance to the town. Across the road from it is a Buffulo Grill where we order the Chili con Carne and ribs for dinner. Not very French but it is our only guilty pleasure during the trip.  

Then next day we head up and pass-by Limoges. It’s a very interesting city and we know it from having visited a niece who lives there, but we avoid it because of the traffic. Then the fun is over as we get onto the busy A10 for the final leg to Paris.

When we get there, we don’t go into Paris itself; but rather we go around it on the “peripherique” until we cross the Seine and into suburb of Suresnes, on the western side of the river.

Suresnes is a nice town. Quiet and mostly residential, although a lot of high-tech companies have installed their offices there, which makes for a busy mid-day and evenings as the young techies descend from their office buildings to have lunch in the restaurants in the center of town or have a drink after work.

Once we are settled in, we like to go into Paris. It is easy getting into town. One takes the tram to La Défence, and there the Metro’s Line 1 which has stops in all the main parts of the center of Paris, including one for the Louvre museum. We avoid all those stops because in summer they are crowded with the tourists that want to go to the Grand Palais, or the Champs Elysées, or the Louvre. We go past the stop for the Louvre and on to the next stop which has a correspondence to Line 7, the line that takes us to our favorite part of town, the 5^th Arrondissement, otherwise known as The Latin Quarter.

The Fifth is MY Paris. It has all the things I love about the city: the Rue Mouffetard, with its street stalls and market; it is the oldest street of the city since it was once part of the Roman network of roads. In the Fifth, there are also lots of narrow streets where one finds used book shops (like the one that sells books by the kilo), and rare book and document shops near the School of Medicine. There’s all sorts of eclectic cafés, and of course monuments like the Pantheon. Another of my favorite streets in the Fifth, is Rue des Écoles, where there are not only lots of schools, but cinemas that show old movies and my favorite Bistro that serves the best hamburger in town (as well as a great onion soup).

Although home to lots of schools and universities (Le Sorbonne is in this district), in summer it is rather quiet since most of the students have left for home or vacations.

I’ve liked this Arrondissement since the first time I stayed there fifteen years ago. I arrived there by accident. I had been offered an apartment for two weeks near Montmartre, but the girl renting it canceled at the last moment and a friend of hers offered her apartment in the Fifth instead. It was a great stroke of chance because the apartment was on the Rue de l’Arbalète, just a block away from Le Mouff, as Parisians call the Rue Mouffetard.

My love for the Fifth was cemented the winter of several years ago when my wife and I stayed there in a small apartment on the Rue Laplace, a small street that is perpendicular to Rue Valette, the street that goes up to the Pantheon.

My wife was in Paris helping her aunt send out correspondence to a conference auntie was organizing. Since she was busy with that most of the day, I managed to get permission to copy at the Louvre.

It was a very cold winter that year. So, every morning we would bundle up and walk down the Rue Valette, cross the Rue des Écoles, and then the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and then make our way through the network of little streets to the Quai de Montebello, at the edge of the Seine. There we would take Bus 24 which runs along the avenue that offers a great panorama of some the most beautiful monuments of Paris: Notre Dame, the infamous Quai des Orfebres Police Headquarters, and, of course, the Louvre, where I would get off at the Pont de Carrousel stop and cross the Seine to the Louvre and my wife would continue to the First Arrondissement stop where her aunt’s apartment was near the famous imitation of the Parthenon, La Madeleine Church.

The guards at the Louvre would shoo me out at 5 PM, so I would take Bus 24 to go fetch my wife and then we would walk out into the cold, crisp air of the afternoon and quickly duck into the Metro stop that was a half block from Auntie’s apartment.

Our Metro stop on the Fifth Arrondissement was Maubert-Mutualité, not far from where Hemingway lived when he first came to Paris as a young man. It is a great stop because close to it are a great charcuterie, a wine shop, a bakery, and other shops, so we would get something good to eat and drink for supper.

By the time we got home, Rue Laplace was lively because despite its smallness, it had a couple of bars, two good restaurants, and even a Subway franchise. The people from the bars would go out into the street to smoke, since smoking was now prohibited in enclosed spaces, and I would have to shout down to them to keep it down when we were in bed, but, the apartment was a cozy place and we loved the area.

Ever since then, every time we are in Paris, I make my way to the Fifth and just walk around. I have a strange nostalgia for the place. It’s as if I had lived there all my life, or had spent an important part of it there. Perhaps I had, in another time, in another life. As I walk around its streets, I feel as if I had been born too late, as if I missed something, as if I should have been there at another time. Maybe that is why I like Patrick Modiano’s novels so much.  I am reading a LOT of his novels and stories now; I like to go to the places he mentions in them. I often make notes of the streets and cafés and places his characters wander about there on the Fifth and on the Sixteenth Arrondissement as well.  Someday I will organize a “literary tour” of the places mentioned in his novels and the novels of other writers and artists. Who knows? It might become a summer job for me.