Pélérinage balzacien: rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève

Another of the touristic perambulations which I undertook in October might better be described as a literary pilgrimage.  The rue Tournefort is deep in the 5e arrondissement, running southwards from the Panthéon, and Honoré de Balzac, the great nineteenth-century novelist whom I might have mentioned once or twice, knew it well enough to set Le Père Goriot there. 

 
Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, est une vieille femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, entre le quartier latin et le faubourg Saint-Marcel.

My effort at a translation: Madame Vauquer, née  de Conflans, is an old woman who for forty years has kept a boarding house in the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, between the Latin Quarter and the inner suburb of  Saint-Marcel.
  

Much has changed, mercifully:

           ...les maisons y sont mornes, les murailles y sentent la prison....  Nul quartier de             Paris n’est plus horrible, ni, disons-le, plus inconnu.'

    ...the houses there are grim; the walls suggest a prison... No part of Paris is more horrible nor, it      might be said, more unknown.

Much has not, though:

A brusque and rude slope

Elle est située dans le bas de la rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, à l’endroit où le terrain s’abaisse vers la rue de l’Arbalète par une pente si brusque et si rude que les chevaux la montent ou la descendent rarement.

 [The boarding-house] is to be found at the bottom of the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, where the land drops down towards the rue de l’Arbalète so abruptly and roughly that horses rarely go up or down it.

What is also striking about his description of the area are the 'tons jaunes' and sombre colours: he described the street as a 'cadre de bronze', a picture-frame of bronze well-suited to the picture he was about to paint.  Much of what inspired this description must have disappeared with the smartening-up of the street, but there is still a papery yellowness about it.  Certainly the relative quietude remains.

It is generally accepted that the house to the left is the Maison Vauquer, also described in meticulous detail by Balzac.  Here he played out the first episode of his great drama: here Rastignac planned his conquest of Parisian society, here Goriot, because of his compulsive generosity, had to move progressively further upstairs as he gradually tightened his belt; here Vautrin met his come-uppance!  It is fascinating to  find the settings of books or places frequented by authors and by people I admire.

  
'La façade de la pension donne sur un jardinet, en sorte que la maison tombe à angle droit sur la rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, où vous la voyez coupée dans sa profondeur.

   The front of the house overlooks a little garden, and it is at a right angle to the rue Neuve-Sainte-  Geneviève,  which cuts it in section from top to bottom.

In an imminent post I will follow the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève to its namesake, the tomb of St. Geneviève at the church of St-Etienne-du-Mont.

À nous deux maintenant!

It is already the end of my first week in Paris.  Probably I ought to have known that I would not have time, nor be calm enough, to produce any prose pretentious enough for this blog's pretentious title before now! 

 It is exhausting to arrive in an unfamiliar city: bus tickets and pedestrian crossings hurl the newcomer into consternation.  He wonders what use it was looking up the French for 'anvil' when he can't ask for a filled sandwich on the top shelf.*  He makes a public nuisance of himself trying to see what everyone else does as they glide through ticket barriers, without going through himself.  He (literally) cannot get his head around looking in the right direction as he crosses the road.  However, the question mark hovering above my head is at last beginning to fade and I think I have recovered enough to record my first and raw impressions...

1. This is real! Here am I, not merely staying but living and (soon) studying in Paris!  The great slabs of parchment-coloured apartment blocks with their cast-iron balconies are real;  the broad straight corridors of the avenues penetrating through the city are real; and, outside the classroom and lecture theatre, the French language is real.                                
2. Some of what the British imagine about the French is actually true!  They really do carry baguettes down the street, for instance  (and who can blame them: heavenly manna or some other celestial panary essence falls daily from Heaven onto the shelves of a million boulangeries).  Another example is the proliferation of paperwork involved in the opening of a bank account (just in case any worldly riches come my way – one never knows!) which testifies to the famous French bureaucracy.  Motorists give the impression of making up the rules as they go along,  though I feel that Parisian driving is no more aggressive than London's for the greater reliance upon motorists’ discretion.
3. There is more graffiti in Paris than in London: a warning which drivers of pristine white vans should heed.
4. The French are not slaves to their mobile phones.  There are plenty around and in use, but in public they are no more evident than books or newspapers.
5. More people – and certainly more young people – smoke in Paris than in London. 
6. Plenty of time is taken over meals.  The sort of food which, in Britain, is beyond the powers of the average wallet and palate, is in France expected, duly received and savoured in the company of one's beloved, one's friend or one's newspaper.
7. The French language is supremely beautiful (and therefore deserves its own blog-post!).
8. There are moments of euphoria when I feel that France is better than Britain.  No!  No!  I didn’t mean that!  I think this the general effect of arriving in a foreign culture: that certain particularly noticeable novelties make the whole seem better or worse, even though it is always composed of the currents of goodness and corruption.  In the same way that turning a kaleidoscope produces a new pattern (that might be called better or worse) but does not alter its nature, the human condition is borne here in slightly different ways, in some ways better, in some ways worse, even though the human condition is invariable.

I shall write soon about Meudon, the town to the south-west of the city where I am living.  Here is a panorama of Paris from the Observatoire at the top of the town: visible are the Tour Eiffel, the Tour Montparnasse, les Invalides, the Seine and La Défense.  Eugène de Rastignac had a view like this (from the north-east) at the end of Le Père Goriot.  He too was a student unfamiliar with Parisian society (though he was also fictional): so like him I can say, ‘À nous deux maintenant!’

Click to enlarge... I Spy 20 points for each landmark.

*enclume (f).  One of these days it will come in useful, mark my words!