Paris enjoys a reputation as the most romantic city in the world—hardly a place that one would call a “Side Road” destination. It is the most chosen destination in the world for tourists to visit, with millions of visitors every year. Its beauty is undeniable: the Seine curving it's way through the middle of of the city, crossed by bridges that are works of art in themselves, the view from one of the boats that make their way up and down the river every day and every evening lighting up the monuments as they pass, giving a different point of view of each bridge the Louvre with its brilliantly faceted pyramid, Notre Dame’s graceful buttresses-- all this is enchanting.
At night Paris is a special delight. Evening is a most romantic time. The phrase "City of Light" is less a cliché than an obvious description when wandering around the quiet streets at night seeing famous monuments lit up against a dark sky. There is a special poignancy in looking into a room with its lights on, seeing a timbered wood ceiling or a tapestry hanging on a wall or a chandelier sparkling. Occasionally you see parties going on with music and laughter spilling into the sreets along with the light. A couple can be standing on a tiny balcony drinking wine, their hair lit from behind with a halo of light. Early evening when the lights are coming on is a magic time in Paris.
The popular song said, “I love Paris in the Springtime, I love Paris in the Fall.” We do too, but we especially love Paris in the winter. By November, Paris is beginning to put on her winter dress. Christmas decorations appear in the windows of the department stores, an annual delight for children. At Galeries Lafayette, there is a small, elevated wooden walkway in front of the animated windows for the tiny tots, making it impossible for taller, older adults to block their view. The frosty air and the sparkling lights make it impossible not to feel the holiday spirit, even in the midst of frustrations with the transportation strike that hasn’t entirely paralyzed the city but has certainly frayed tempers and drained patience.
If Paris doesn’t quite seem right for the category Europe’s “Side Roads,” there are nevertheless side streets here that do indeed qualify, that bear much closer exploration than they usually get from Americans on short visits, especially first-time visitors. Yet some of the city’s best charms are found there.
Eighteenth century bells on the roof of a convent tucked away in the depths of the 12th arrondissement.
Visiting the brocante on Saturday took us into the upper reaches of the ever-popular Marais, a well-visited section of the city in its lower reaches. Easily reached from the busy square of Republique, which bustles with contemporary Parisian life, the Carrefour du Temple, or Temple Square, houses an immense nineteenth-century iron covered market space, yesterday filled with brocanteurs.
The square itself was the site of the central chateau of the Knights Templar, one of their many throughout Europe, but one of the richest. Bankers and financiers who invented international financial exchange, by the fourteenth century they had become so rich and so powerful they threatened the Kings, particularly Philippe the Fair, King of France. He had them arrested in 1307, in an incident that has rung notoriously down through the centuries, had Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Templars, burned with 54 Templar knghts in 1314 on the Isle de la Cite, the central island in the Seine that flows through the middle of the city. Legend says that the King watched from the towers of the royal palace there, vestiges of which can still be seen in the Conciergerie that became a terrifying prison in the eighteenth century and remains a working prison today. As the flames engulfed him, Jacques deMolay cursed the king and the royal family, predicting that by the end of the century, they would all have died and disappeared. The curse, indeed, came true, as the family line died out in a saga of soap-opera dimensions.
Later, in the eighteenth century, the Temple also became a prison. The ill-fated King of France, Louis XVI, was held there with his wife, Marie Antoinette, their two children, and his sister, Madame Elizabeth. He was taken from there on a cold winter day in January in 1793 to what is now the Place de la Concorde and to the guillotine that stood there, and beheaded before a large crowd. His poor wife was moved to the Conciergerie before her own execution several months later. The saddest memory held here, though, is of their young son, who disappeared into the depths of the prison and into the mists of history. His bones, proving the cruelties that he endured after losing his parents, were found several years ago and buried in the magnificent cathedral at St. Denis, along with the memories if not the actual remains of generations of his royal ancestors.
A map on the corner of the wall commemorates these events, reminding the visitor, as so much in Europe, of the layers of human experience that reverberate on every street and through even the most ordinary-seeming buildings.
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