My Quest Trip to Paris
the Parisian summer is just ending,
exhausted trees hanging onto their remaining foliage with difficulty.
Outside the Place St-Michel Metro stop,
the oaks have pretty much given up the fight.
The Seine too looks ready for a quiet spell,
thick with the churn of summer's hordes.
As I wander away from the river,
I spy my goal, Rue de la Huchette,
one of the Left Bank's most famous streets.
It reminds me of my quest -
nothing less than to find the literary
heart of the world's most literary city.
It's a daunting task.
Almost every great writer in history
waxed lyrical about Paris and many lived in its complex layers.
But I've started well.
The scruffy mid-20th century bohemians of the Left Bank
were immortalized not far away in Elliot Paul's
The Last Time I Saw Paris.
It was around here too that the -
Beat Generation hung out,
most notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
I try to find Kerouac's Cafe Gentilhomme,
so beautifully evoked in his book Sa tori in Paris.
I have no luck, running into the infamous Parisian 'non' at every turn.
Undeterred, I make for the grittier end of the suburb and suddenly,
unintentionally, hit the jackpot
when I accidentally land up outside Ginsberg's favorite hotel,
the Hotel du VieuxParis, at 9 rue Glt-Ie-Coeur.
It still looks just as I had imagined it to be,
a glorified pension heaped atop a filthy pavement
with only history to hold it up. Pure Ginsberg.
Inside things are a little less authentic.
Ginsberg's presence is not so much felt as read,
on a much too neat notice board about his time at the hotel.
I tick one off my list for the day.
Next is Rue Monsieur-Ie-Prince,
called Yankee alleyway
because American literary refugees
seem to have congregated around here through history.
I pass the now recorded homes of Whistler,
Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kerouac and Hemingway.
Hemingway's favored restaurant,
the Cremerie Restaurant Polidor,
at 41 rue Monsieur Ie Prince, 6 E.,
is still making excellent stroganoff.
After a bowl of the piquant dish,
I head for the Crillon Hotel with its remarkable history.
The bar is popular among movie stars and other famous figures -
and Hemingway set a, dramatic scene in the The Sun Also Rises here.
The hotel is very glitzy-
the Crillion obviously knows it's famous.
Instead of feeling like F. Scott Fitzgerald ,
who also dined there, I sense that I am out-of-place,
little plastic and slightly embarrassed.
So I take my leave and head over to the literary equivalent of Piccadilly Circus, a bookshop back on the Left Bank within spitting distance of Notre Dame called, oddly enough, Shakespeare and Company.
Its owner George Whitman,
who has nothing to do with Walt,
has made it his mission to stock his shop with writers
who've lived in or been synonymous with Paris.
It's scruffy and wonderful inside and authentic.
It smells like the starving poets who are allowed
to spend the night in the shop if they've nowhere else to go.
They're in good company.
Orwell starved in Paris once, as did Hemingway.
My resolve fortified and poetry on my mind,
I head for the Luxembourg Gardens.
If elegance were a flower,
it'd grow in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Umpteen writers and poets have immortalized it.
Victor Hugo used it in Les Miserables and Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.
Up the road I find a plaque on a tatty building
on Rue de Fleurus in homage to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
It was here that Stein held her famous afternoon workshops
while Alice poured the tea.
Having seen the plaque,
I go in search of the spirit of the past as reinterpreted
by the new generation and head back to
the cafes of the Left Bank.
Two of them have succeeded in re-establishing themselves
as modern-day hotbeds -of literary cacophony.
The Cafe de Flore and the Cafe Aux Deux Magots are loud, polluted and awash with literary life.
I ascend to the second floor of the Deux Magots, away from the tourists, and join the writers and editors, publishers and failures drinking thick coffee and discussing the Next Big thing.
There's a display case against the wall which startles me when I look at it.
It appears I'm sitting in Jean Paul Sartre's seat!
I have a minor existential moment looking at the faded picture
of the odd little man perched on my chair.
The caption says that the cafe became his study and living room.
I try to think how anyone could have come up with anything
as explosive as existentialism in such a raucous environment.
Perhaps you have to be French.
When I put down my coffee cup,
I notice a scrawl on the table.
Someone has penciled Jean Cocteau's quote to Picasso
about poetry on the tabletop.
'Poets don't draw.
They untie handwriting and then retie it in another way.'
After my Sartrean moment, I'm feeling very in sync with alternative Paris
and decide to finish my day's literary
ramble at the shrine of Cocteau.
The shrine of Cocteau? It's all of Paris.
Fittingly I think, as I re-cross the Seine,
because Cocteau was the ultimate expression of artistic Paris.
He knew no borders.
His work crossed over so many it tied itself in knots.
Cocteau knew everybody and did everything.
He was photographed by Man Ray,
sketched by Picasso, wrote a libretto for Stravinsky,
joined forces with Erik Satie and Picasso to produce Parade,
wrote beautiful poetry and then,
to confound his critics,
briefly managed the career of
bantamweight boxing champ Panama AI Brown.
But then I succeed in finding a physical shrine to Cocteau.
It's the remainder of the Cocteau retrospective at the
hi-tech steel-and-glass modern art
museum, the Pompidou Centre, held to great acclaim in 2003.
There in the cool halls,
Cocteau's exquisite 'Le Testament d'Orphee'
stares me in the face. Part poem,
part drawing,
it is achingly beautiful.
An appropriate heart of Paris, I think.
PEARIS OF PARIS I GUESS:
Whether your preference is for art and culture or shopping, Paris offers sophistication and glamour for every taste. No matter how many times you have visited the city, you simply have to return to the famous Champs Elysees Boulevard, walking its length from the Arc de Triomphe monument to the famous Place de la Concorde. If walking is not your scene, orientate yourself by taking a cruise on the River Seine, which divides the city into the Right and Left Bank.
This way, you will glimpse the spectacular Notre Dame cathedral and other landmarks.
No visit to Paris is complete without a trip to the Montmartre district
and the prominent, white- domed Sacre Coeur cathedral
The Pompidou Centre is great for modern art, but the Louvre
is considered by many as the world's greatest art museum for good reason.
You simply have to join the queue, even if it's to see just a fraction
of its more than 300 000 works of art. And there's always shopping -
Chanel, Gucci, Valentino, Hermes and Ralph Lauren on the Left Bank
and the elegant jewelers on Place Vend6me. Or join the rich and famous
at the Galleries Lafayette department store, with its art nouveau finishing.
For more relaxed shopping,
there are numerous street stalls,
second-hand shops and markets
with clothes, flowers, food, stamps and bric-a-brac to explore.
End the day with a meal at one of Paris's wonderful restaurants-
not for nothing is the city known as the home of gourmet eating in the World -
and then take to the bustling streets,
go to a show or mingle with the club or bar crowds.
If you cannot make it into the trendy
but packed Buddha Bar
just off the Champs Elysees,
pop into nearly any of the many others in
the area to get the vibe of nightlife.
« return.