Bordeaux and Palmiers

I love that landmarks that everyone’s heard of just blend into the background in Paris. In the end, Les Deux Magots is just another café. Notre Dame is just another church.

Last time we chatted, I was heading down boulevard Saint Germain. Today, I’m going to explore the Saint Germain des Près neighborhood with you. As I headed up the boulevard, I noticed an image that, for lack of a better word , had me completely bouleversée. I know that I should be used to the Paris landmarks, and for the most part, I am. It’s when they creep up on me, like being able to see the tip of the Notre-Dame cathedral from a few blocks away, that they still take my breath away.

The Saint Germain des Près neighborhood begins here: where the boulevard Saint Germain still runs vaguely parallel to the quai of the Left Bank of the river Seine. As such, it starts at the border of the Latin Quarter, which is as opposite from Saint Germain as can be. While Saint Germain is not nearly as ritzy as the 8th, home to the Champs Elysées, over the years, this section of the 6th arrondissement has started taking on more and more upscale shops, and restaurants and cafés have gotten more and more expensive.

One such restaurant is Les Deux Magots, whose famous patrons included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemmingway. The café is still opened, along with its equally famous cousins, Brasserie Lipp and Café Flore.

For me, the continued popularity of these restaurants are merely signs that this neighborhood’s quirks are long gone: writers like those mentioned and many more used to frequent Saint Germain and the Latin Quarter because, at the time, this part of the Left Bank was extremely inexpensive. The fact that these cafés have since jacked up their prices so that you can sit where the masters sat is just another example of milking a neighborhood’s history long after the history is gone.

You can probably tell that Saint Germain is not one of my favorite areas in Paris, and yet I spend quite a bit of time there: the easiest way to walk from where I used to live, in the 7th, to where I live now, in the 5th, is to walk along this stretch of boulevard. When I lived in the 7th, I was often in the 5th, and now that I live in the 5th, I find myself having to head back to my old neighborhood every once in awhile.

I’ve come to appreciate certain things about Saint Germain… small things that I sort of hope to myself that no one else notices.

For example, I love this street: Passage de la petite boucherie. A passage is sort of like the English word “alley:” too small to be called a street. I love the street name: small butchershop’s alley. It makes me think of the shop that probably inspired the street name, a butchershop that I assume is long gone now that the neighborhood has become upscale. But the street name remains as a physical memory of what once was.

In the same vein is this church: the church of Saint Germain. A sign proudly touts it as the oldest church in Paris, but you won’t see a lineup of tourists like you would at the nearby Notre Dame.

It’s directly across the street from the aforementioned Deux Magots, but instead of rich American tourists, often the only people coming and going here are actual parishioners.

Actual parishioners make me smile.

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