Gobelins

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Gobelins

Place d’Italie, the central junction of the 13ᵉ, is one of those Parisian roundabouts that takes half an hour to cross. On its north side is the mairie of the arrondissement, while to the south is Kenzo Tange’s huge Gaumont Grand Ercan Italie building, whose curving glass frontage cleverly advertised the giant screen within – the two were roughly the same size – until the cinema was shut for lack of profit. In 2007, rumors that the entire building was going to be demolished sparked outraged protests among Paris’s cinéphiles.

The avenue des Gobelins stretches north from the place d’Italie. In the fourteenth century, this was the main route into Paris from the south, and the principal street of a satellite town called the Faubourg St-Marcel. It was guarded by the Château de la Reine Blanche, of which the surprising fairy-tale rump can still be seen off rue Geffroy. Just off rue des Gobelins. The turreted wing (now luxury apartments) was built in the 1520s and 1530s by the aristocratic Gobelins family, but it occupied the site of a much older château turn down after the tragic party in 1392 in which the young Charles VI of France nearly died. Charles and five friends had disguised themselves as tarred-and-feathered savages but one of them brushed against a candle flame and the costumes of all five went up like torches. The king’s sanity never recovered.

On avenue des Gobelins itself stands Gobelins workshops, at no. 42, where the highest – quality tapestries have been created for some four hundred years. On the hour-long guided tour (in French only; Tues – Thurs 2pm & 2.45pm; €8; ⊕01 .44. 61. 21. 69; M° Gobelins), you can watch tapestries made by painfully traditional methods; each weaver completes between one and four square meters a year. The designs are now exactingly specified by contemporary artists, and almost, all of the dozen or so works completed each year are destined for French government offices.

The site of the works owes everything to the presence of the river Biévre, whose course is still marked by curves of rues Berbier-du-Mets and Croulebarbe. Once a hellish ditch polluted by tanners and dye-makers, the river was finally covered over in 1910. The green space of the Square René-le-Gall was once an island between two branches of the river – known as the Ile aux Singes for the jugglers’’ monkeys that once lived there. A row poplars now marks the course of the Biévre; plans to uncover the river for the first time in a hundred years have to date, come to nothing. A short distance west, the métro station Glaciére ("icebox" in French) gets its name from the Biévre’s winter overflow, which attracted hundreds of skaters in the nineteenth century.

Over to the east, towards the gare d’ Austerlitz, the ornate, bourgeois boulevards St-Marcel and Vincent-Auriol are dominated by the immense Hôspital de la Salpêtriére, built under Louis XIV to disposed of the dispossessed, and later used as a psychiatric hospital; today it’s a general hospital. Jean Charcot, who believed that susceptibility to hypnosis proved hysteria, staged his theatrical demonstration here, with Freud as one of his fascinated witnesses.