Le Vieux Paris - La Mouff

stroll through history in la Mouff . . .

starting after you exit the front door of the building and facing Place Bernard Halpern, turn right, and then turn right again around the building and walk through the small alley (this was the size of streets in Paris in prior centuries) to the pedestrian street directly in front of the supermarket, Franprix. This is the famous rue Mouffetard, one of the liveliest market streets in Paris and was in ancient times the main Roman road from the southeast into Paris. There are a great many stories about this district and everyone who has spent much time in Paris will probably have some personal stories-either heard or experienced-to add. The cobbled pedestrian street goes up a small hill toward the Pantheon and Jardin Luxembourg. The foot of the hill and bottom of the rue Mouffetard is home to the historic church Saint-Médard, dating to at least the twelfth century AD. Referred to in many places in French literature including in Les Misérables, this church is the focal point of historic events in the area. Religious warfare broke out in the 16th century between Huguenots who had created a Protestant Temple in the Place des Patriarches and Catholics of Saint-Médard. The Huguenots lost and in 1561 were burned alive roughly where the Place Bernard Halpern is now situated. The Place Bernard Halpern, often called the "Place des Patriarches," still contains one of the few original nineteenth century Wallace fountains (most were stolen after World War II) in Paris.

The famous cemetery at Saint-Médard once extended beyond the current church properties and was used to bury large numbers of people in mass graves until 1765 when a law was passed forbidding burials within city limits. After that time, neighborhood residents continued to be buried there in secret through the time of the Revolution. The most famous corpse was François Pâris, a Jansenist saint who died in 1727 and whose grave became a gathering place for admirers who believed miraculous cures could be obtained at the site. The true believers were quite fanatical, often eating dirt, falling to the ground in convulsions, and having themselves beaten and tortured at the spot until January 27, 1732 when the government finally had the cemetery walled off and put under guard. Within hours of the new law, an unknown poet inscribed on the locked gate the wonderful rhyme:

De par le roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu

(In the name of the king, it is forbidden for God
To create a miracle in this place).

The religious ecstatics, mostly young girls, continued to have themselves tortured, pierced, crucified and subjected to other forms of martyrdom in the name of François Pâris, but at private homes and convents in the neighborhood. In 1807 the tomb was finally opened and Pâris' remains distributed between eminent Jansenist families and an unmarked area under the church's main chapel and now one must attend a rock concert to see pierced, feverish teenaged ecstatics.

Every day except Monday, the rue Mouffetard hosts perhaps the most famous street market in all of Paris and historians have traced the origins of this market to AD 1350 and possibly earlier. Unlike most street markets in Paris with temporary stalls and goods brought in, the area's permanent shops place their goods on the pedestrian street and thus have a great stake in preserving the character of the area. Like most shops in Paris, those on the rue Mouffetard typically close in the early afternoon Sunday and stay closed until mid morning Tuesday. The street market is at its busiest on Sunday mornings and historians tell us that it resembles the market of medieval times although today's focus is mostly on food. Fresh fruit and vegetables bursting with flavor abound. Fromageries and crémeries display hundreds of different kinds of cheese, all purer than any of the pasteurized kinds found in supermarkets. One could spend a lifetime trying all the foods displayed on a busy market day on the rue Mouffetard. You can't find fresher vegetables, meats, cheeses, ears, snouts, seafood or other delicacies anywhere! Although there are several boulangeries on the rue Mouffetard, including the somewhat healthy Le Moule a Gâteau at no 113, the owner's favorite is the more sinful and traditional variety at the intersection of Rue Monge and Rue Mouffetard.

Almost all of the buildings along the rue Mouffetard date from the seventeenth century and the city of Paris has long gone to great pains to preserve this section of town. I have never seen a place in any other city where one can enjoy some truly great architecture and shopping at once. If you want to impress chocolate lovers back home, stop by Jeff de Bruges at no 112 for beautifully wrapped gifts. If you want distinctively Parisian non-chocolate gifts, check out Occitane (no 130), just across from a wonderful cheese shop at no. 131. The bas relief above the door at no 122, A la Bonne Source (At the Good Spring) dates from a 1592 wine shop. There is no shortage of wine shops today and several have serious wine tasting and a selection that will amaze Americans. As you meander up hill toward Place de la Contrescarpe, stop by no. 69 with the carved oak tree above the door and ask the proprietor about the curse on the property (a violent death is said to occur every seven years). Or better yet, don't mention it because it has driven at least the last four owners away from the property. For a truly unique gift, try the shoe shop at no. 64. It dates from 1890 and still sells wooden shoes worn by farmers and other peasant footwear that will probably disappear before too much longer. In 1938 a hidden treasure of three thousand gold pieces was found inside the walls of a building at no. 53 (now a Comfort Inn) by construction workers, eventually traced to a nobleman who had disappeared in 1757 and finally divided among the construction workers and the nobleman's living descendents in 1952. Approaching the top of the hill of rue Mouffetard, take a quick jog to the left along rue du Pot de Fer and check out the amazing variety of restaurants with tables spread out into the walking street. George Orwell lived at No 6 from the spring of 1928 until he moved to London in December, 1929 and describes the place in the beginning of Down and Out in Paris and London.

If you continue up the rue Mouffetard to Place Contrescarpe, the street radiating out at 2 o'clock is the rue Cardinal Lemoine. Earnest and Hadley Hemingway lived at the second building on the left, marked with a sign indicating so, from 1921-24 when their son, Bumby, was 1-4 years old. Earnest wrote in a rented room around the corner. (Paul Verlaine had lived in the same building and died there, but the sign noting this is on the rue Mouffetard side.) The Joyce family lived a few doors down and across the street at no 71, in an apartment loaned to the family by the poet Larbaud, during the time when James Joyce was proofing the manuscript of Ulysses, published by Sylvia Beach, whose 6th arrondisement bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, was the center of literary activity in Paris from 1919 to 1945. It can safely be said that the birth of the literary description of the modernist condition occurred in this area. Many important writers, from Rabelais to Catherine Anne Porter, had something to say about the Mouff and there was even a Mouffetard scene in the recent film Amelie, which showcases some of the unique and wonderful neighborhoods in Paris.

The rue Mouffetard tapers off after Place de la Contrescarpe, now a hangout for people watching with as long and bloody a history as the other end of the rue Mouffetard. Drunks or beggars that might inhabit the Place late at night are harmless (in France mentally ill and socially disruptive people are provided with professional care and not left on the streets). The crowd here is younger, hipper, and poorer than that at the lower end, and restaurants are cheaper. If you take one of the streets to the left after rue Mouffetard passes Place Contrescarpe, you will reach the Pantheon in a few minutes and it's a short walk down the street to the Jardin Luxembourg. It's a lovely walk on a warm evening and if you're a jogger you will fall in love with the urban path toward as well as the jogging paths inside the idyllic Jardin Luxembourg. A favorite Hemingway story has to do with a poor young Hemingway catching and roasting the pigeons from the park, but I've never seen any independent confirmation of this.

Other walks in the neighborhood include the Jardin des Plantes, five minutes straight down rue Censier from the studio (rue Censier appears to end a block away but there are stairs that connect it to the next segment), the huge mosque adjacent to the Jardin, and the Gobelins, an upscale neighborhood that begins near the confluence of the rue Mouffetard and rue Monge and contains parts of the Sorbonne. In La Mouff, you are truly in the historic center of perhaps the most fascinating city on earth and you will find stimulating sights and sounds around every corner without the stress or fear associated with large American cities. North of the Jardin Luxembourg one encounters Montparnasse, the charming neighborhood immortalized by Hemingway and others, les Invalides and the Eiffel Tower. Walking late at night is not a problem anywhere except near Pigalle (Metro Pigalle, Abbesses or Anvers on the Right Bank) or major train stations such as the Gare du Nord where there are some pick-pockets. One could embark on a different stroll every day of the year starting from La Mouff and never see all of the amazing sights in Paris' Left Bank.