Into A Paris Quartier by Diane Johnson

Author:Diane Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2005-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE ARCH

[The church was] originally lit by high arched windows (traces of which can still be seen from the outside).

THE SIXTH ARRONDISSEMENT: A GUIDE TO ITS HISTORY AND ARCHITECTURE

For awhile, a mystery remained, outside our kitchen window, about the bricked-up arch in the wall the chapel (and my kitchen) are attached to. One of the great torments of my life was the wish to know what that archway was or what it once led to. I asked Emmanuel Schwartz, the librarian of the École des Beaux-Arts, whose book on the chapel has been fascinating and useful; he knows all about the chapel, but he couldn’t explain about the arch, no doubt because my description was so imperfect. I had not yet realized that the arched wall ran along to become my kitchen wall.

At first I wondered if it were a part of some ancient wall enclosing Paris? I went to check again the vestige of the wall of Philippe-Auguste that remains in the parking garage on the Rue Mazarine, a few minutes’ walk from Rue Bonaparte. I was fairly sure that my wall was not a part of that ancient wall, built to defend the Paris of 1200; old maps and drawings show the wall of Philippe-Auguste a little to the east. But I wanted to look again, to see if there was any resemblance that might indicate a date for mine; so I descended into the parking lot on Rue Mazarine, as if I was looking for my car.

Most people are interested in archaeology whatever is dug up. In California, when we remodeled our 1906 house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, the workmen unearthed old whiskey bottles, the bones of two cats, and a shoe. I kept the old bottles. Bottles seem to survive everywhere, strangely resilient testimonials to the habits of vanished times; and in the Louvre one can see old bottles from around here, shimmering little things of glass dating from the Roman beginnings, dug up in the course of some repairs to the Louvre or Notre-Dame cathedral.

My wall makes me marvel at the way the French have built on history—that is, using it concretely, recycling the bricks and mortar and stones, to found the new. Buildings, like the Musée de Cluny, are sometimes built over Roman beginnings and the vestiges of medieval ditches influence the modern names. We have seen that, at the north side of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, remnants of things that were torn out of it during the Revolution are affixed to its sides. The physical dismantling of so many monuments and buildings vandalized during the Revolution (to say nothing of melting down the statues and scattering the bones of their kings) seems in contrast to, say, the Russians who during their revolution tended to preserve the artifacts of the tsars, their art and palaces, the contents of museums, and so on. Of course, the Russian Revolution was later by more than a century, and people’s attitudes must have evolved everywhere, though to say that is immediately to remember the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas.

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