Paris Part 3: Pilgrimages

Many of the reasons why I had wanted to go to Paris was all the artistic history that I had combed over and read up on in the last 19 years. I took a year off of college after my second year and moved to Santa Cruz to be near my boyfriend at the time.During that time, I read Diana Souhami's biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude and Alice. This book was to leave a DEEP impression on me. At the time, I read it as two women who created an entirely artistic life. Gertrude wrote and Alice cooked and they entertained everyone from Matisse and Picasso to Hemingway and Fitzgerald in their Paris apartment. I think this was the book that really started me on the way to fantasizing about Paris. So there were MANY literary and artistic places that were at the top of my list. We went on a hunt for Stein and Toklas' two apartments--the main one on 27 Rue de Fleurus. I imagined Virginia Woolf's sister the painter Vanessa Bell going through these doors, and Ezra Pound, and Sherwood Anderson. So many geniuses! So little time! It made me shake my head when I saw the graffiti tags by the door--I kind of think Gertrude would have approved. She might have been a GREAT appreciator of TAGGING.

High up on my list was the two now FAMOUS (a.k.a TOURISTY) cafes, Les Deux Magots and Cafe de Flore.

On our first afternoon, it looked like some dark rain clouds were coming in and so,what better place to shelter the storm than the cafe that Hemingway, Sartre & de Beauvoir wrote at, Cafe de Flore? This way, you can eat lunch and look up at the spectacular sky through the sun porch:
Coming from New York, where the only place relaxing and non hurried is Central Park, cafe life was quite a delightful surprise to us. I kept sitting there thinking, "You mean, I can order coffee and then STAY here for AS LONG AS I LIKE?" That was just CRAZY TALK to these two New Yorkers. The waiter did not mind. The cafe was FILLED with people doing just that. And we sat there and just WATCHED them all.

Next door at The Deux Magots, which was once a department store, but quickly was turned into a cafe where Sartre and de Beauvoir moved their cafe "offices" to after World War II. Picasso met Dora Maar there. Man Ray hung out and created Dadaism there. Rimbaud and Verlaine fell in love there. I ask you, what is not to LOVE about Cafe life?

Not far from the cafes resides another landmark in literary and artistic culture, Shakespeare and Company. I think just about every writerly/bookish type makes a pilgrimage to this English language bookstore. The original was started by Sylvia Beach and was frequented by Hemingway, Stein, Pound, Joyce, among many others. Sylvia Beach was the first to publish Ulysses for PETE'S SAKE. The Nazis had the bookstore on their hit list when they rolled into town, but when they arrived the shelves were mysteriously empty. Sylvia and supporters had taken all the books and stashed them in a nearby apartment. Sylvia's bookstore, however, was never to open its doors again. Instead, another ex-pat named George Whitman opened his own version at its current location in the 1950's. It has existed as mecca for writers and literary tourists like myself ever since.

It doesn't hurt that it's incredibly QUAINT with wall to wall books and little nooks like this one, where you can sit in MOVIE seats to read a book.


I LOVED it. I also thought that I had left hip Williamsburg at home in Brooklyn, but apparently its spirit of hipsters in beards can be found behind the counter at Shakespeare and Company (listening to Sigur Ros no less!). I bought George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, a book I had looked for in New York before our trip to no avail. It seemed better to buy it this way. The nice hipster boy stamped it with the Shakespeare and Company stamp and sent me on my way--DELIGHTED.