Mouffetard
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Mouffetard
East of the Panthéon, the villagey rue de la Montagne-Ste-Genevieve descends towards place Maubert, passing the pleasant cafes and restaurants around rue de l’Ecole-Polytechnique. Heading uphill from the rue de la Montagne-Ste-Genevieve, rue Descartes climbs past a landmark blue mural of a tree, by the Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky – a tree which the accompanying poem by Yves Bonnefey invites passers-by to contemplate – before suddenly arriving at the oasis of place de la Contrescarpe. This intimate, pleasingly run-down square has long been the hub the Mouffetard quarter’s café life. On its sunny side, the Café Delmas was once the famous – and much less swanky – café La Chope, as described by Ernest Hemingeay in A moveable Feast. He knew it well, as he lived just round the corner on the fourth floor of 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, in a miserable flat largely paid for by his wife’s trust fund. Just to the east of the square, the curved frontage of a municipal crèche on rue Lacépède was inspired by the shape of a pregnant belly.
Place de la Contrescarpe once stood at the edges of the medieval city. Passing through Philippe-Auguste’s fortress walls, travelers would leave Paris along the narrow, ancient incline of rue Mouffetard, which followed the line of the old Roman road to Italy. "La Mouffe", as it’s known to locals, was for generations one of the great market streets of Paris. These days, its top half is given over to tacky eating places and touristy shops, especially around rue du Pot de Fer, but the marklet traditions still cling on at the southern end, where you’ll find fruit and vegetable stalls in the mornings, shops selling fine cheeses and wines, and a couple of old-fashioned market cafes, notably Le Verre a Piedi (see p.331). Some traces of the past can be found on the old shopfronts, most obviously the two cows adorning a former butcher’s at the no. 6, and no. 12’s hand-painted sign depicting a black man in striped trousers waiting on his mistress, with the unconvincingly legen, “Au Nègre Joyeux”. At no. 69 there’s a fine old carved oak tree, while no. 122, labeled “ La Bonne Source” (the Good Spring), seems to advertise the fresh water – or possibly, more obliquely, the fresh produce – once availablke there.
At the foot of rue Mouffetard, just beyond the beautiful painted façade at no. 134, St-Médard (Tues-Sat 8am-12”30pm & 2”30-7:30pm, Sun 8:30am-12:30pm & 4-8pm; M° Censier-Daubenton)was once a country parish church, and only brought within the city walls during the reigh of Louis XV. The church twice achieved notoriety: in 1561, when it was saked by Protestant rioters in the so-called Tumult of St-Medard, and again in 1727, when fanatical supporters of Francois de Paris – a leading light in the reforming Jansenist movement, which had been condemned by pope and king alikje but drew massive popular support in Paris – gathered at his fresh grave. Rumours of miracles led crowds of “convulsionnaires” into collective hysteria, rolling on the ground around their saint’s tomb, eating the earth and even wounding ot crucifying themselves in sado-masochistic frenzies. These excesses helped split the Jansenist movement, and led the authorities to post armed guards at the church gates in 1732, beside a sign reading “De par le roi, defense a Dicu/ De faire miracle en ce lecu” (By order of the king, God is forbidden to work miracles in this place). The church today preserves its simple, narrow Gothic nave and more elaborate later sixteenth-century choir, with fine fluted columns in the ambulatory. The organ loft is astounding, and not just for its size – it’s topped by noble statues carved by the great Renaissance sculptor Germain Pilon in the 1640s.
Below St-Medard lay the marshy gound of the now covered River Bièvre, where tanners and dyers worked in the Middle Ages – which may explain the origin of the name Mouffetard, form a slang term for “stinking”. Today, Avenue des Gobelins leads into the 13e arrondisment, passing the Gobelins tapestry workshops (see p. 188) on the way up tpo busy place de I;talie.
