Delights of Paris : History Is Alive on Left Bank Street

The scene has changed barely at all in this century. If you look down Rue Saint Dominique today and compare it with a photo taken around 1910, you will see the Eiffel Tower hovering over the same frenetic, curving street crowded with little shops, busy pedestrians and frustrated traffic.

Some men wore boater straw hats then and all women wore dresses down to their ankles, and many vehicles were still horse-drawn buggies. But then and now the scene offered, and offers, the heart of Paris. In 1910, a visitor could buy a picture postcard of the street in black and white, and today a visitor can buy a picture postcard of the street in full color.

Paris has perhaps a hundred streets like Rue Saint Dominique--hardly changed under the weight of history, full of surprises and special wonders, beckoning a walker to pick his or her way through its delights. These streets are the glory of Paris. To savor the city, a resident usually adopts a few close by. Rue Saint Dominique on the Left Bank of the Seine River happens to be my favorite.

Two Distinct Moods

Rue Saint Dominique, named in the 16th Century after a Dominican monastery that once stood there, has two distinct moods--one of luxury, the other of commerce. The street begins in the east at the famous Boulevard Saint Germain. Although within walking distance of such well-known Paris sites as the Champs Elysees and the Place de la Concorde, the neighborhood used to be considered a suburb of Paris, and the rich and noble built huge mansions there in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, away from the hurly-burly of the city.

The mother of Napoleon lived in one of the mansions in the 19th Century, and the philosopher and jurist Montesquieu died in another in the 18th Century. The illustrator Gustav Dore and his mother offered celebrated Sunday dinners in a Rue Saint Dominique mansion in the 19th Century for such celebrated guests as the composers Gioacchino Rossini, Franz Liszt and Charles Francois Gounod, the writers Alexandre Dumas and Theophile Gautier, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt.

Transformed Into Offices

Many of these mansions--called “hotels” in French--still dominate the first few blocks of the street but no longer serve as the houses of wealthy families. They have been transformed into elegant offices for government ministries and embassies or divided into apartments. From the street, most of the mansions are hidden by enormous walls, and a stroller has to visit museums or read history books or arrange an interview with a government official in order to see the incredible decorative wealth inside.

The rarest object in this luxurious section of Rue Saint Dominique, however, is not a painting or a piece of antique furniture inside one of the hotels but a pissoir outside.

Pissoirs, the green metal stalls that expose the feet and heads of the men who use them, were ubiquitous in Paris in the early part of the century. But it was easy to denounce them as unsanitary, unsightly and unfair to women. Throughout the city most of them have been replaced by futuristic, gray, unisex cabins that clean themselves automatically with chemicals, have Michael Jackson music piped in continually and allow entry only after a one-franc coin is put into the slot.

The pissoir on Rue Saint Dominique, one of the few left in Paris, stands at the edge of a small park near the St. Clothilde Church. French composer Cesar Franck was the organist of the church from 1858 to 1890, and the park honors him with a statue. But the drivers who park their taxis on Rue Saint Dominique from time to time and rush to the green metal stalls probably do not know this.

The hotels all have their history. The Hotel de la Vrilliere, for example, once owned by the mother of Napoleon, was turned over to the Ministry of War by Louis XVIII in 1814. It still serves as the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense.

When Gen. Charles de Gaulle entered Paris on Aug. 25, 1944, after its liberation, he did not head directly to City Hall, where a crowd awaited him, but stopped first at this hotel of the Ministry of War on Rue Saint Dominique.

‘Duty to Restore It’

“I was immediately struck by the impression that nothing had changed inside these venerable halls,” he wrote later. “ . . . Nothing was missing except the state. It was my duty to restore it.”

A visitor today who looks past the soldier at the gate can see a relief sculpture of the Cross of Lorraine on the facade of the hotel. The cross, the symbol of De Gaulle’s Free French Forces in World War II, was cut into the old building to honor De Gaulle’s use of it as his headquarters after the liberation.

The most famous American to live on Rue Saint Dominique was the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, who moved into the Hotel Sainte Suzanne with his family in April, 1831, and stayed there, on and off, for two years.

Cooper wrote one of his least-known novels, “The Bravo,” there and became chairman of the American-Polish Committee that helped support the many Poles who fled to Paris after the failure of their rebellion against Russian rule in 1830.

Cooper offered an open-house breakfast of buckwheat cakes every morning. There, according to one account, “many a distinguished, but impoverished, Polish refugee ate his only meal of the day.”

Training U.S. Chefs

No plaque commemorates James Fenimore Cooper, but Rue Saint Dominique still has an American presence. La Varenne, a well-known cooking school, is just across the street from Cooper’s hotel. La Varenne specializes in training young American chefs in French cuisine.

On a recent morning, Claude Vauget, the head chef of the school, carefully explained to 10 students how to prepare a gigot of lamb. Vauget spoke in French and a senior student translated his instructions into English--all dutifully written down by the white-coated, white-aproned students. “Do not throw away the pulp and seeds of this tomato,” Vauget said. “We will use them later.”

Just past the cooking school, one crosses an enormous boulevard broken by long grass and dirt fields used by players of petanque, the game known as bowls in England and bocce ball in New York. This boulevard, the Esplanade des Invalides, leads to the tomb of Napoleon and separates the luxurious sector of Rue Saint Dominique from its commercial sector.

Bazaar-Like Scene

Commercial Rue Saint Dominique, curving beneath the Eiffel Tower, presents a bazaar-like array of little shops and tiny inns and simple, inexpensive restaurants, the mood broken occasionally by cheap clothing stores that are factory outlets.

Some of the picturesque shops, especially the bakeries, are straight out of the 19th Century, with sculpted wood, elegant tiles and pastoral scenes painted on glass. Even if you are on a diet, it is worth slipping into one to admire the antique decoration while waiting for a chocolate eclair.

On a recent morning, one old-fashioned bakery was the scene of an incident that seemed to have come directly from an old French movie.

A pigeon flew into the shop and, fluttering its wings, hopped from strawberry tart to strawberry tart. The woman behind the counter screamed. The baker ran after the pigeon. The pigeon was finally taken away. But no one removed the tarts. They remained in the window, for sale.

One Clock Remains

Many of the merchants once displayed large and fancy clocks outside their shops, but only one remains, a two-faced clock broken on both sides, topped by enormous bells that no longer chime. Another oddity, the huge Fountain of Mars, breaks the pattern of shops on Rue Saint Dominique. Napoleon ordered the fountain built as part of his campaign to beautify the city and make life more comfortable for Parisians. The fountain, not far from the Champs de Mars, an old military parade ground, has a sculpture of Hygeia, the Goddess of Health, bringing water to Mars, the God of War.

Most of the buildings on the commercial end of Rue Saint Dominique were built in the 19th Century, but the city has allowed a few nondescript, flat-walled, modern buildings to go up in the place of older structures that could not be saved. One of the new buildings is disliked heartily by most residents of the neighborhood, but not for architectural reasons. It contains the Treasury offices that collect income taxes from this area of Paris.

Another new building houses a more favored establishment--Ed, the grocer. “Ed” is an acronym for the initials of the store’s name in French, Epicier Discount , or, in English, “Discount Grocer.”

French housewives usually prefer to do their shopping in little specialty stores rather than in supermarkets, but Ed is rather special--a small supermarket that offers no-frills, generic foods at discount prices. It does a booming business.

Classy No-Frills

But since it is a French no-frills supermarket, Ed’s offers no-frills products that might astound an American. The shopper can buy such items as no-frills duck liver pate, no-frills Dijon mustard, no-frills lobster bisque, no-frills capers, no-frills snow peas, no-frills cassoulet and no-frills Emmenthal cheese.

After 11 city blocks, Rue Saint Dominique reaches its end at the Champs de Mars, the parade ground that is now the site of the Eiffel Tower. The tower stands like a giant over Rue Saint Dominique. The French writer Guy de Maupassant used to eat lunch in the tower. “It’s the only place in town,” he said, “where I don’t have to see it.”

But that is another story.