AN AUSTRALIAN IN PARIS
An Australian in Paris - Luxury Travel Magazine
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An Australian in Paris | |||||
| By: Michael Gebicki, Issue 34 – Autumn 2008 | |||||
| (Paris, France) | |||||
| LIVING LIKE A LOCAL IN THE WORLD’S CHIC-EST CITY. | |||||
| By sheer good fortune, we find ourselves in the happiest of circumstances. Our apartment lies on the third floor, close to the top end of Île St-Louis. It has a purple door and a red carpet on the tightly winding staircase that I have time to study because the climb always leaves me short of breath, and bent. The apartment faces into a courtyard rather than the street outside which is the quieter of the two, although this is not a rambunctious neighbourhood, and the bells of Notre Dame wake me regardless. Even if they didn’t, I’d be up with the sparrows. The courtyard is home to a bakery and the smell of fresh croissants, baguettes and fruit tarts wafting upward in the warm Summer air banishes even the most agreeable of dreams, and sends my feet flying down those stairs. Now excuse me if I seem to be suffering a mild attack of the Jane Austens but 19th century prose seems to fit Paris’ 4th arrondissement, and Île St-Louis most particularly. | |||||
| Île St-Louis is a mini treasure, yet it comes in a plain brown paper wrapper. It sits in the lee of the Île de la Cité like a small and slightly unimpressive barge being towed along by its far grander neighbour. While the Île de la Cité is a stronghold of spiritual and temporal power – home to Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, the Conciergerie, the spectacular Palais de Justice – Île St-Louis is home to nothing much more than about six thousand lucky Parisians. It is also almost totally overlooked by visitors. Only a fraction of those who queue beneath the rose window on the façade of Notre Dame will wander to the lovely rose gardens at the back of the church. Fewer still turn around and notice the island on the far side of Pont St-Louis, and what they would see does not exactly invite further investigation. | |||||
| At the top end of the island there’s a couple of cafés and a salon de thé, with the narrow rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile disappearing like a corridor down the middle of the island – and that’s it. But to a comforting degree, the island is almost totally self sufficient, a small and neighbourly world with consolations for body and soul. Immediately outside the door of our apartment is an artisanale patisserie – the shopfront for those heavenly smells that wake me up each day. A few paces in the other direction is a cheese shop full of runny delights and opposite, a grocery where Camilla, my daughter, witnessed the following exchange: | |||||
| American Tourist: “Do you speak English?” | |||||
| Shop assistant: “Non.” | |||||
| AT (speaking louder): “Okay. We want two percent milk. Do you have that? Two per cent milk?” | |||||
| Within 50 metres of the front door on rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile there’s a wine shop, a swanky gift shop, a crêperie, a chocolaterie and several shops selling Berthillon glaces, which is to ice cream what Mandarina Duck is to carry-on luggage. Directly opposite our front door is Mon Vieil Ami, an offshoot of three-Michelinstar chef Antoine Westermann’s Buerehiesel, and a name to titillate the gourmand’s taste buds. Down the street and across rue des Deux Ponts is Jean-Paul Gardil, possibly the most celebrated butcher in all of Paris. All the miscellaneous services are here too – hairdressers, pharmacies, antique shops, art galleries, a newspaper shop and a post office. Edmund White, the prolific man of letters who lived here in the 1980s, reported that some elderly residents would leave the island only a few times a year, when they would announce that they were ‘going to Paris’. | |||||
| Not that I’m even tempted to abandon Paris – heavens – because the other great thing about the island is its location: smack in the middle of just about everything there is worth seeing. A five-minute stroll to the north and I’m in the Marais, the boutiquified gay quarter of Paris and home to the Pompidou Centre and the Picasso Museum, the heart-melting Place des Voges and countless brasseries, cafés and restaurants. The same distance in the other direction and I’m in the Latin Quarter, poking around in Shakespeare & Co for a book and en route to the Luxembourg Gardens. I can saunter down to the Quai de Montebello and catch a BatoBus, the riverboat shuttle service, along the Seine to the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay or the Eiffel Tower. The small and funky village of St-Paul, Rue Oberkampf, the polar centre of cool, the snazzy shops of Boulevard St- Germain, the pick of the private galleries around the École des Beaux Arts – all are within walking distance. | |||||
| An apartment is the way to go in Paris. Ours was a single-bedroom affair with a sofa bed in the lounge room, yet within its modest dimensions it had all that was needed, including a kitchen with a dishwasher and a washer/dryer. From research to payment, the internet transaction was totally fuss-free. | |||||
| The best part about having an apartment here is that it brings with it a glorious sense of ownership. I belong, even if it’s only fleeting, so pardon me if I jangle my keys a little as I approach our apartment. And here’s a confession. When I go downstairs to the bakery for a baguette to have with our evening reblochon, I often take a stroll along our street. This is quite unnecessary. It’s three steps from apartment door to bakery – but I’m indulging myself in a little fantasy. “I live here,” says the baguette tucked under my arm as I dodge mad cyclists and avoid eye contact with camera-toting tourists who are – oh no – zeroing in on me, a local, moi, and – ça alors! – they’re wanting directions. “The Eiffel Tower? Sorry, no, I would ‘elp you but I do not speak Anglais.” | |||||
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