St-Germain

From Paris Hotels Reviews

St-Germain is one of the most picturesque and lively quarters in the city. Encompassing the 6e arrondissement and the eastern fringe of the 7e, it has all the sophistication of the Right Bank – and, these days, most of the same shops too – but a certain easy-going, thoughtful chic makes it uniquely appealing. The quartier has moved ever further upmarket since the postwar era, when it was the natural home of arty mould-breakers and trendsetters, but it still cling to its offbeat charm. Broadly speaking, the further west you go to the posher the shops, house and restaurants become.

Historically, St-Germain has stood outside the city proper for most of its life. From the sixth century onward, its fields and riverine meadows fell under the sway of the giant Benedictine abbey of St-Germain des Prés – “St Germain of the Fields” – of which just the church remains today. Marie de Médicis built the Palais du Luxembourg, now the Senate, in the early seventeenth century, but the area only become urbanized a hundred years later, as aristocrats migrated across the Seine from the Marais in search of new, spacious plots of land for their fine mansion hôtels. The Faubourg St-Germain thus created became one of Europe’s most fashionable districts, its heyday only eclipsed by the Revolution.

The now-celebrated boulevard St-Germain was driven right through the heart of the quarter by Baron Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century, but it became famous in its own right after the war, when the cafés Flore and Les Deux Magots attracted the resurgent Parisian avant-garde – Sartre debated existentialism with de Beauvoir and Boris Vian sang in smoky cellar jazz bars. As Guy Béart and, later, Juliette Gréco sang “il n y a plus d’ après à Saint-Germain-des-Prés” – there’s no tomorrow in St-Germain.

Of course, there was – even if an older Juliette Gréco tried to fight it with her movement SOS St-Germain in the late 1990s. the glitterati may still prefer the Left Bank – apart from Gréco, Serge Gainsbourg lived here until his death in 1991 – but high-rolling publishers, designers and politicians have long since shouldered out boho intellectuals and musicians. Fashion, now, is king. The streets around the Carrefour de la Croix-Rouge and place St-Sulpice, in particular, swarm with internationally known clothes boutiques, while a little further west the historic Bon Marché department store stocks an ever-classier range. Towards the river, it’s antique shops and art dealers that dominate, with one pricey cluster around rue Jacob and rue Bonaparte, and another in the “Carré Rive Gauche”, the three blocks south of Quai Voltaire. After shopping, eating and drinking are the main attractions, though, once again, the scene is distinctly chichi these days. Well-heeled foodies now flock to the gastronomic restaurants of celebrity chefs like Hélène Darroze and Joël Robuchon, and foreign visitors fill the bistrots around Mabillon.

There are excellent markets and cafés to take in as you shop or stroll, as well as some fine buildings – from the domed Collège de France, by the river, to the churches of St-Germain-des-Prés and St-Sulpice – the latter recently featuring as a key location in a certain best-selling thriller. Two small, single-artist museums, the Musée Maillol and Musée Delacroix, make intimate antidotes to the grand Right Bank institutions, while the art exhibitions at the Musée du Luxembourg are regularly among the city’s most exciting. And of course there’s the Musée d’Orsay, at the western edge of the quarter, loved as much for its stunning railway-station setting as its Impressionist collection. But St-Germain’s most beguiling attraction lies in the southeastern corner of the quarter, hard up against the Quartier Latin. Notoriously romantic, and often packed with students, the Jardin du Luxembourg is one of the largest and loveliest green spaces in the city.