Today, those of us who walk through the narrow streets and passageways of the historic Marais district in Paris are in all likelihood on our way to the Musée Picasso, housed in the beautifully restored Hôtel Salé. This is a mansion (hôtel) built in 1656 for a rich salt tax farmer—in the ancien régime all tax farmers were of their nature and profession unpopular and well-to-do. Nearby is the Musée Carnavalet, a particular favorite of mine, where one may shudder anew at the document stained with Robespierre’s blood from his jaw, broken as he was hurried to the guillotine. It was in a wing of the Carnavalet mansion that Mme. de Sévigné, brilliant observer of society in the reign of Louis XIV, resided for nearly twenty years. Consummate letter writer at a time when the letter was a valued literary genre, she was born in the Marais, in the family house in the Place Royale in 1626, and was married in the church of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais only a stone’s throw away. Her loyalty to friends who were in political disgrace was one of her many attractive qualities. At the very heart of the quartier so familiar to her there shines the symmetrical grace of the Place Royale— known today as the Place des Vosges--completed in 1612. In this square, too, stands the house (now a museum) where Victor Hugo lived before he went into exile.

The author of A Corner in the Marais, the American novelist Alex Karmel, has occupied with his French wife a pied-à-terre in this district since 1982. Their small, modernized apartment lies at the top of an old house on the corner of the rue Vieille-du-Temple and the rue des Rosiers (itself famous as the once bustling hub of the Jewish area). To reach their flat they have to climb a narrow winding staircase with picturesque wooden beams—illustrated in this delightful book along with other architectural curiosities of the neighborhood. Alex Karmel has known and loved Paris since he first saw it (like myself) from the train on the gray approaches to the Gare du Nord. In his case, that was in 1949, at the height of the doom and gloom of the existentialist period. He has had the excellent idea of researching the history of the house and the lives of its inhabitants, however obscure or “anonymous” they may be. To satisfy his intense and fruitful curiosity he has also inquired into the fascinating background of the Marais itself.

In the Middle Ages, a part of the Marais (the marshland or swamp) served as a kitchen garden for the Knights Templar, those mysterious powerful figures who play such a large part in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century conspiracy theories. (See Umberto Eco’s playful novel Foucault’s Pendulum for a contemporary view; or the more solemn, far-fetched bestseller, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.) Their presence survives in street names like the rue du Temple and the rue Vieille-du-Temple. Various monarchs resided in the Marais in palaces that no longer exist. Though some of the surviving great houses of the nobility—like the hôtel Carnavalet itself—were built in the sixteenth century, not until the seventeenth century did the quartier become highly fashionable.

The active center of it was then the Place Royale.

The active center of it was then the Place Royale. It was built by order of the ill-fated reformer Henri IV to serve as a pleasant spot where the inhabitants of Paris could stroll and take their ease after the grim years of the Wars of Religion. This was where people felt they had to go to meet and exchange gossip, to see the latest fashions and to be seen. Sometimes it would also be used for splendid royal ceremonies. Corneille—before his play Le Cid made his name and aroused the hostility of Cardinal Richelieu—wrote a bizarre comedy, or rather a comedy with a bizarre anti-hero, entitled La Place Royale. It was the company of actors of the Marais who gave the first performance. A contemporary of Corneille’s named Claveret, a lawyer like himself, had written a play called La Place Royale some years earlier and was consequently extremely annoyed. He said that Corneille’s play could have been named after anything, since the Place Royale itself played no significant part in it—which was strictly true. Presumably, Corneille had chosen the title to catch the eye of the public, simply because the square was then such a well-known and frequented meeting place.

Many of the great hôtels particuliers, or mansions of the nobility and the wealthy, that survive in the Marais were built or extended in the seventeenth century and have been brilliantly restored. Among them is the very grand Hôtel Sully owned by Henri IV’s influential Finance Minister. They are constructed in the characteristically French style “entre cour et jardin,” with an enclosed courtyard in front, a carriage entrance on the street, and a garden at the rear. As Alex Karmel observes, this style may seem rather dull at first but its subtle qualities gradually become more apparent.

If the pleasures of reading embrace those that uncover something new and those that recall the reader’s own experiences and impressions, Alex Karmel’s book does both. How right he is to say that the best time to see the Place des Vosges is on a sharp wintry day—when the bare branches of the trees are dusted with hoarfrost. Like him, I first knew the Marais when it was not the most salubrious district in Paris. Most of it was shabby and decaying and in real danger of destruction. Fortunately, that great mythomaniac and novelist-adventurer André Malraux, then de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, came to the rescue. He inaugurated the policy of protecting districts in their entirety, and by 1964 the preservation of the Marais was guaranteed. Since then, of course, a residence there has become highly desirable.

In its great days in the seventeenth century the Marais was the resort of poets, writers, and wits, as well as nobles, lawyers, and financiers. Here, the cruelly disabled satirical poet and novelist, Pierre Scarron, author of Le Roman comique, held court, his beautiful intelligent wife being one of the major attractions. After Scarron’s demise, his widow would eventually be transformed into Mme. de Maintenon, the powerful morganatic wife of the Sun King, Louis XIV. In her fascinating and well-researched historical novel, L’Allée du Roi, which purports to be the memoirs of Mme. de Maintenon, Françoise Chandernagor has vividly recreated the language of the time and life as it was lived in the Marais in the seventeenth century.

By the eighteenth century, though, the Marais was no longer the height of fashion, and many members of the aristocracy had moved either west, to the faubourg Saint-Honoré, or south, to the faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank. The aging few who did remain appeared to observers—in the years immediately before the Revolution—as particularly reactionary and narrow minded. However, Alex Karmel has discovered that in 1776 Beaumarchais was living in the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande in the rue Vieille-du-Temple. Notable year! Beaumarchais, whose activities—watchmaker, musician, speculator, sat- irist, playwright, diplomat, secret agent, among others—were more multifarious than those of his Figaro, was engaged at the time in gunrunning for the Americans. This was a year after Le Barbier de Séville and just before the Declaration of Independence.

In the early nineteenth century, the Marais was still sufficiently respectable for Balzac’s family to have a place there at 40 rue du Temple. In the same house lived a dowager who had known Beaumarchais and who talked to Balzac about him. In Balzac’s tale Les Deux Rêves, the creator of Figaro is made to converse with Marat and Robespierre. During his early struggles the young Balzac occupied a garret in the Marais—doubtless similar to the one “reeking of poverty” that figures in his novel La Peau de chagrin. For him, the Marais was simply a backwater. Eventually, it would be left to impoverished members of the aristocracy and to notaries, shopkeepers, and artisans until its modern revival.

Alex Karmel has unearthed the fact that the house in which he has his pied-à-terre is much older than he thought at first and that it dates from the Middle Ages. Through local archives and legal documents he has found that most of its inhabitants were respectable tradespeople, including a pastrycook to the king. More surprising in the records is the presence of that penetrating seventeenth-century artist Philippe de Champaigne, who was pursuing through the courts the recovery of a debt from the heirs of certain tenants. To him we owe the enduring grandiose image of Cardinal Richelieu robed in power, as well as the intensely probing portraits of the austere, vulnerable nuns of the convent of Port-Royal, an institution later to be condemned for Jansenist heresy. It is salutary to be reminded of Philippe de Champaigne’s more mundane activities.

That withering Parisian irony can be hard to take—especially when one is young.

Together with a great many others around the world, Alex Karmel cannot help wondering why he loves Paris so much, in spite of the well-known Parisian indifference or even hostility towards foreigners. That withering Parisian irony can be hard to take—especially when one is young. He recalls fondly how, for a while after the 1939–45 war, Paris “remained as if suspended in a pre-war limbo,” with many of its streets unchanged since the end of the nineteenth century. Then, of course, a great deal did change. Came the din and the danger of the motorway along the Seine, and the towers of Montparnasse and La Défense altered the skyline forever. The author lists reasons for his devotion to the place—the cuisine, the language, the sheer beauty of the city, and, finally, “there is living with history.” I would add, naturally, living with literature. Yet there are other places where one can live with history and literature, but with London, say, these treasures are perhaps more secret or less concentrated. Besides, it cannot be forgotten that many have been drawn to Paris because it was regarded as the center and model of civilized life, taste, and culture from the seventeenth century to the 1939–45 war—maybe even up to the decline of French existentialism. In the end, though, it has to be admitted that, as with any love affair, rationalism yields to imponderables. As Montaigne famously said of his affection for his friend La Boétie, “Because it was he, because it was I.”

This charming book, with its stress on human beings, the “ordinary” people overlooked by history as well as some of the gifted, takes its place in the considerable library of works whose non-French authors have been enamored of Paris. I have only one modest complaint: the omission of a modern street map of the Marais (as distinct from the antique map partially reproduced on the endpapers). This would save the reader the time and effort of referring to another source while avidly accompanying the author in his investigations and peregrinations. All the same, this small book, though not intended as a mere guide, will surely prove an extremely agreeable companion to all explorers of the Marais.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 Number 7, on page 65
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