From River to Odeon
From Paris Hotels Reviews
From River to Odeon
The riverside chunk the 6e arrondissement is define by rue St-André-des-Arts, a bustling street lined with the shops, cafés and restaurants which threads through the heart of the quartier from place St-Michel. If you step off this throughfare, however, and walk in the tall, narrow side streets that run down to the river, you’ll discover a more secretive and aristocratic world. Fine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mansions conceal private gardens and courtyards. There are older houses too, whose walls bulge out into the street in the faintest of echoes of the architecture of medieval Paris.
Of all Paris’s quartiers, this part of St-Germain is perhaps the most comprehensively soaked in literary, philosophical and artistic associations. Picasso painted Guernica in rue des Grands-Augustins, Molière stared his career in rue Mazarine, and Voltaire and Rousseau debated and drank coffee at the Café Procope in the rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie – it’s still open for business but you won’t find many philosophers there now. In rue Visconti, Racine died, Delacroix painted, and Balzac’s printing business went bust. In the parallel rue des Beaux-Arts, the Romantic and deeply disturbed poet Gérard de Nerval went walking with a lobster on a lead and Oscar Wilde died "fighting a duel" with his hotel room’s wallpaper – "one or the other of us has to go", he remarked. You can still stay in the hotel, now named simple L’Hôtel, or call for a (pricey) drink at its fashionable bar.
Some of these characters are remembered in the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, 8 rue de Nesle (Wed 1-9pm, Thurs-Sun 10-6pm; €6; M° Odéon), where historic letters and documents handwritten by anyone of note from Catherine de Médicis to Simone de Beauvoir are permanently exhibited. Churchill, Roosevelt and Eisenhower crop up in a handful of wartime letters, Einstein is represented by some scrawled equations, and there are some delightfully miniature letters sent by balloon during the 1870 siege of Paris, but otherwise you’ll probably need to be able to read French for the entry fee to be worth it.
At its western end, rue St-André-des-Arts spills into rue de Buci, which was once a proper street market, but has now been almost completely gentrified. The morning-only greengrocers’ stalls – known locally as jewelry shops, for their prices rather than the colour of the fruits – are now outnumbered by bakers and swish delicatessens. The oyster-seller works for the Atlas brassiere, and even the Bar du Marché has given in to a fashionable clientele, though the waiters wear natty cloth caps and overalls. A few steps east of the main Buci crossroads, look out for the intriguing little passage of the Cour du Commerce St André. Marat had a printing press here, and Dr Guillotin perfected his notorious machine by lopping off sheep’s heads in the loft next door. Backing onto the street is Le Procope – Paris’s first coffee house which opened its doors in 1686. A couple of smaller courtyards open off the alleyway, revealing another stretch of Philippe-Auguste’s twelfth-century city wall.
At its southern end, the Cour du Commerce opens out the Carrefour de l’Odéon, known for its infamous Starbucks too – when it opened in early 2004, along with another branch on Avenue de l’Opéra, this apparently unnocuous coffee shop was widely regarded in Paris as vanguard of the long-feared American corporate invasion of Parisian café culture. Climbing southeast towards the Sorborne, rue Monsieur le Prince is lined with budget and ethnic restaurants, of which the best is the classic bistrot, Polidor. At this eastern edge of St-Germain you start to feel the gravitational pull of the university, and indeed this area is sometimes considered to be part of the Quartier Latin. Around the Ecole de Médicine, university bookshops display skeletons and instruments of medical torture, and the restaurants become steadily less expensive as they aim towards the shallower pockets of a student clientele.
The defining landmark of the area is the recently restored Thèâtre de l’Odéon its proud Doric façade fronting a handsome semicircular plaza. Designed as a replacement home for the Comédie Française, this was one of the learned King Louis XVI’s last projects before the Revolution, a revolutionary all-seater design with a then unheared-of capacity of 1990.
