Mabillon and St-Germain-des-Pres
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Mabillon and St-Germain-des-Pres
North of St-Sulpice, pretty rue Mabillon passes the Marché St-Germain, a 1990s reconstruction of a covered market originally built in the early nineteenth century. The site is more ancient still, having been the venue for the raucous St-Germain fair, held at the abbey in the medieval times. The creamy stone arches of the modern halles are very successful in architectural terms, but sadly the market stalls have been replaced by boutique shops and a swimming pool and gym complex.
The area around the Marché, on rues Princess, Lobineau, Guisarde and des Canettes, is something of a hub for eating and drinking. There are one or two good addresses, notably the wine bar Chez Georges (see p.334), but many of the restaurants are surprisingly disappointing, given how promising they look from the outside.
The boulevard St-Germain was bulldozed right through the Left Bank under Baron Haussmann (see p.453). For much of its length, it looks much the same as any of Paris’s great avenues, but a short stretch around place St-Germain-des-Prés (M° St-Germain des Prés) forms the very heart of the quarter. The famous Deux Magots café stands on one corner of the square, while the equally celebrated Flore lays a few steps further along the boulevard. Both are chiefly celebrated for the postwar writers and philosophers who drunk and debated there – most famously the philosopher – novelist Simone de Beauvoir and her existentialist lover, Jean-Paul Sartre. Although both cafés charge high prices and attract plenty of tourists, they’re still genuine St-Germain institutions – albeit patronized by designers and directors rather than writers these days. The cognoscenti judge Flore to have maintained that edge of authenticity. Brassiere Lipp, across the boulevard, is another long time haunt of moneyed intellectuals, and maintains its traditions proudly. All three are viewed on pp.334-336.
The powerful tower dominating the square belongs to the church of St-Germain-des-Prés, which is all that remains of an enormous Benedictine monastery whose lands once stretched right across the Left Bank. Having survived a post-Revolution stint as a salpetre factory, the church itself is one of twenty-first-century Paris’s oldest surviving buildings, a rare Romanesque structure that dates back to the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The choir however was rebuilt in the fashionable Gothic style in the mid-twelfth century – work that’s just about visible under the heavy greens and golds of nineteenth-century paintwork. The marble columns of its middle tryforium level date from an even earlier church on this site, erected in the sixth century, which housed the remains of the Merovingian kings. A late tomb, a simple slob engraved with the name René Descartes, can be found in the last chapel on the south side. Outside the church, on the corner of rue de l’Abbaye and rue Bonaparte, there’s a pretty little garden with some strange fragments of Gothic stonework. These, along with a single stained-glass window in the apse of the main church, are the melancholy last remains of a thirteenth-century chapel. They make a perfect backdrop to the Picasso statue of a woman’s head which also stands her, dedicated to the memory of the poet Apollinaire.
