By wink of water

A Moveable Feast is one of my favorite books and Hemingway is one of my favorite writers. He wrote it, thirty years after the fact, about his life from 1921-1926: But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. This romantic idea of moving to Paris, this adventure, was born in the days when I was young and in love and we would read aloud to each other from A Moveable Feast.

The book opens with a description of a bar on rue Mouffetard, Café des Amateurs, which hosts an ice cream shop today. The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. Rue Mouffetard is only a few blocks from where I work, and I had dinner along it last night (very good and very cheap!)

It is still wonderful, narrow, and crowded, full of people and little shops, relatively inexpensive all around. I walked up Rue Mouffetard to Hemingway’s little flat, described in my previous note.

From there, I headed around the corner to where he wrote most days, on rue Descartes, which was a hotel those days.

…the climb up to the top floor of the hotel where I worked, in a room that looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter, was a pleasure. The fireplace drew well in the room and it was warm and pleasant to work. I brought mandarines and roasted chestnuts to the room in paper packets and peels and ate the small tangerine-like oranges and their their skins and spat their seeds in the fire when I ate them and roasted chestnuts when I was hungry. I was always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working.

Rue Descartes is very near the Panthéon, which I’d stumbled across one day while trying to get home but hadn’t fully taken the time to appreciate. The Place du Panthéon is incredible – three gorgeous, imposing buildings, lovely 18th century apartment buildings on the streets leading up to the Place – the scale is very hard to convey with photos, but I’ll try.

(What follows are completely unverified internet facts.) The Panthéon was originally commissioned as a church by Louis XV. It is in the shape of a cross that is 352 feet long and 272 feet wide. The height of the dome is 272 feet, and Leon Foucault hung an iron ball from the dome of the Panthéon to demonstrate the rotation of the earth.
I’ve tried to give some idea of the scale. The doors are enormous. There were a lot of students out today, but also tourists taking pictures (like me!) Across from the Panthéon is the the Mairie du Véme, basically the town hall of the 5th arrondisement. Apparently when the Panthéon was commissioned, it was to be flanked by a school of law and a school of theology, but the school of theology was never built. In its place, the Mairie was built.
The school of law is associated with Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Université Panthéon-Assas Paris II and has the Revolutionary slogan Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité across the front.

Contuning on, I passed the Sorbonne, where I will be taking classes this summer. The Sorbonne was founded in 1253 as a theology school, but the building today was commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in the 1620s. I turned on Boulevard Saint Michel (the first chapter of the book is titled “A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel”), making my way to the heart of the Latin Quarter. This area is crowded and fun, kind of touristy, but for the most part I only heard French.

And now I’ve arrived at Shakespeare and Company, the very same place Hemingway describes in that beloved chapter. It has moved from its original location on rue de l’Odéon and is now almost directly across the Seine from the Notre Dame.It is still as Hemingway described, piled and piled with English language books everywhere, old and new. I will come back some day that’s not Saturday, and properly explore. I love books and old bookshops, what a great way to spend a few hours.
This was actually very close to the bar I had drinks in with Animesh (from INRIA) and the authors of a podcast on Paris, Kylie and Katia.

To be continued…more pictures below.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.