Paris Revealed Page 13

  After the Revolution, the Duc d’Orléans actually became a member of the new, more democratic parliament and diplomatically changed his name to Philippe Égalité. He even voted in favour of Louis XVI’s execution. This didn’t save his royal neck, though, and he in turn was guillotined in 1793.

  His gardens, however, had already taken on a lusty life of their own. They had become a popular strolling place because the Duke, a bit of a stirrer against his brother even before the Revolution, had declared the Palais-Royal off-limits to police. Parisians could come here to speak and act without fear of repression, and they did so en masse. The arcades housed fashionable shops, cafés and gambling clubs, and the gardens and the discreet galleries had quickly become a notorious cruising zone for prostitutes.

  And it was here, on 22 November 1787, that an eighteen-year-old Frenchman experienced one of the most amorous moments of his life, which he recorded in some detail in his diary. The young Napoleon Bonaparte, then a recently qualified artillery officer, was up in Paris and feeling depressed, so he went for an invigorating walk at the Palais-Royal. Just a stroll through the gardens, you understand—he wasn’t looking for a temporary amoureuse. It was a chilly night, though, and after a while he turned towards the warmth of the cafés. In the arcades, his eye was drawn to a rather attractive girl. He knew she was almost certainly a prostitute, and, as he assured his diary, he ‘detested prostitution’,****** but the girl seemed timid compared to most of her brazen colleagues, and possessed a soft voice and pale cheeks, so he struck up a conversation with her. He told her that it wasn’t good for a frail young mademoiselle to be out all hours in the cold, asked her where she was from (Brittany) and how she lost her virginity (to an army officer), and then took her back to his hotel to lose his own.

  These days, the hookers have all gone elsewhere, but if you find yourself strolling through the Palais-Royal gardens in search of tranquillity, it is touching to think that the amorous adventures of one of France’s greatest leaders began here. Later in life, under the weight of responsibility, he would become famous for telling his Empress Josephine ‘not tonight’, but something about the atmosphere at the Palais-Royal meant that on that November evening in 1787, he could think of nothing else but the joys of female company.

  Martian fields

  Another romantic strolling place in central Paris also has Napoleonic connections. The teenage Bonaparte was a student at the École Militaire, which is still a military college today, and he almost certainly performed manoeuvres on the former training grounds in front of the school, the Champ-de-Mars (named, of course, after the god of war).

  The fact that this was where generations of French officers practised ordering their troops to march into hails of musket fire and cannonballs isn’t inherently romantic, of course, but today, these 780-metre-long gardens are a sort of strollers’ driveway towards the Eiffel Tower. At any time of day, and especially at night, as you walk from the École Militaire, the sheer proximity to the Tower gradually becomes breathtaking. Even at the start of your walk it looks huge, but as you head right up to its splayed legs, pretty well every bolt of the magnificent metal latticework becomes visible, while its sloping sides curve away to the pointed summit. In such a low-rise city, the effect is mesmerizing—you really need a glass of Champagne afterwards to get over it.

  This in itself is the stuff of a romantic evening, but the Champ-de-Mars goes further than that.

  It was the main site of the 1867 Exposition Universelle—this wasn’t the expo for which Eiffel built his landmark (that was in 1889), but it was the show at which the bateau-mouche was first introduced into Paris. This age-old venue for Parisian snuggling was given its first outing during the Expo, after a boatbuilder called Michel Félizat was commissioned to bring thirty or so specially built sightseeing vessels up from his workshops in the Mouche area of his home city, Lyon.

  And one of the most famous visitors to the 1867 Exposition, who therefore certainly came walking in the Champ-de-Mars, was Paris’s greatest-ever romantic, the future King Edward VII of Britain, or Dirty Bertie as he was known to his friends (and no doubt to many Parisiennes) when he was still just a prince.

  Bertie was so fond of organizing romantic getaways in Paris with his mistresses—and, it should be added, his wife—that at one point the French secret police was having him followed to make sure that he was only meeting up with politically ‘safe’ lovers. And every time he received an official invitation from Paris to come for a state visit, he was on the boat almost as fast as you could say RSVP. We can be sure, then, that it was a very cheerful Prince Bertie, with a pronounced romantic glint in his eye, who came to the Champ-de-Mars in 1867.*******

  He was back at the Champ for the 1878 Expo (to see the recently invented telephone and the head of the future Statue of Liberty) and yet again in 1889 to admire the Expo’s spectacular entrance arch, aka the Eiffel Tower and, of course, to revisit the Folies-Bergère and his private room at Paris’s most luxurious brothel, Le Chabanais.********

  What Edward didn’t get was a chance to wander through the Champ-de-Mars gardens, arm in arm with his loved one du soir, as the Eiffel Tower’s 20,000 lightbulbs explode into shimmering splendour, filling the whole night sky in front of them. This intensely romantic experience, provided courtesy of France’s excellent electricity network, is reserved for modern lovers …

  A room with (or without) a view

  On my first trips to Paris as a penniless student, I never bothered to book a room. In those days, there were no cheap on-line reservations, and no websites to help you choose. The thing to do was to emerge from the railway station and find somewhere affordable that looked as though the plumbing might work. Preferably a place that had locks on the doors.

  It all felt incredibly romantic, mainly because Paris was the only capital city in Western Europe where a penniless student could afford to sleep somewhere other than a youth hostel, campsite or railway-station bench. Cuddle up with your girlfriend in a hotel double bed? Only millionaires could afford that, surely?

  Looking back with slightly less fuzzy hindsight at my first forty-franc (about six euros) room near the Gare du Nord, the lack of windows and fire escapes was potentially lethal, the slimy green patch on the wall was probably not an abstract oeuvre left behind by a Dadaist painter, and it really wasn’t that convenient to share a bathroom that was about half an hour’s walk away along dingy corridors littered with drunk students.

  Luckily for visitors, many of those old hotels have now been revamped to attract better-off clients. This means that Paris’s accommodation is gaining in style (and price), but is also creating new dangers—it is, for example, becoming essential to make sure that you don’t book a hotel so boutiquey that you can’t work out how to sit on the chairs or turn the lights on.

  Despite all the guidebooks and travel websites, however, choosing a hotel in Paris can be difficult. In any part of the city that takes a visitor’s fancy, there will be dozens of hotels, many of them in the same price bracket. But more than the neighbourhood, it’s vital to check up on the exact location of the building and its different rooms—on a large or small street, near a junction with traffic lights, above a café, overlooking a street market. All of these can ensure that you will be seeing (and hearing) more of Paris by night than you might have planned.

  Many visitors think it’s romantic to open their window in the morning and gaze down on a typical Paris street scene. But often they are heading for disappointment—instead of seeing a flour-encrusted boulanger carrying a fresh batch of baguettes to the corner bistro, or a concierge throwing out an artist’s used paint tubes, early-morning street voyeurs are more likely to see office workers dashing for the métro, a green-clad street cleaner brushing out the gutter, or, of course, a dog owner taking the mutt for a spot of surreptitious pavement polluting.

  Guests who have been given a room on a lower floor will probably have opened the window before dawn to ask the binmen if they could possibly fit pad
ding on to the wheels of the dustbins, or to try and identify the whirr-hiss, whirr-hiss noise, like a motorized python, that wrenched them from their sleep. It will probably be a little street-cleaning vehicle with a rattling engine and high-power water hose—a guaranteed dawn wake-up call.

  Even those who have chosen a hotel room on an upper floor in a quiet street, with good double-glazing to deaden the noise of midnight revellers, can find the Paris experience disappointing if the only thing romantic about their room is that it’s so small they can’t actually get out of bed.

  Below, therefore, are three of my favourite romantic hotels, which take all this into account, and should provide something for all tastes.

  A night in the Cinquième Dimension

  The Hôtel des Grandes Écoles is for people who believe that romance blossoms against a backdrop of medieval history, with a whiff of literature and maybe even a touch of Latin. The hotel is in the 5th arrondissement, just behind the Panthéon and a stroll away from the Sorbonne and the École Polytechnique. James Joyce once lived next door, and Ernest Hemingway used to drink and write (probably in that order) in the nearby place de la Contrescarpe.

  The hotel is set in a courtyard so long and deep it almost amounts to a private road—no danger of clattering binmen at dawn. It’s a very rare location in the dense old city centre. As you wander in from the street (the rue du Cardinal Lemoine), you see a low pinkish building that looks like a country house imagined by Renoir. The cobbled entrance opens out to reveal a walled garden, where a second, matching pink house appears amongst the trees.

  The hotel (three buildings in all) used to be a pension de famille, a lodging house providing term-time accommodation for students and teachers at the Sorbonne and the Polytechnique. They were all evicted when the owners sold up in 1964, and the place was converted into a hotel.

  Today, it is a real family affair (the owners live in situ), and feels like a country inn. The furniture is a warm, wooden hotchpotch of new and Louis-Philippe style, the wallpaper is somehow tastefully riotous—in one wing, the rooms are papered with Toile de Jouy, a traditional style of wallpaper, here with illustrations of an early balloon ride over a rustic scene. The story ends badly, with the balloon punctured and some yokels poking at the rip in the fabric, but this shouldn’t spoil the romantic mood, because the hotel possesses all the ingredients for a sublimely peaceful lovers’ weekend.

  The rooms all look out on to the cobbled private lane or the walled garden, so opening the windows should bring you nothing more stressful than birdsong and rustling leaves. You can even ask for a top-floor garret room if you need to get that impoverished young-Hemingway-in-Paris feel (though he probably didn’t have a fitted bathroom).

  And there are three other things about the hotel that ought to guarantee a romantic Paris experience. First, there is no air-conditioning, which not only limits the noise, it also reduces the number of aircon-loving guests who shout all the time because they’re used to conducting conversations against a backing track of rattling machinery.

  Second, and most importantly for people who have come to Paris to get away from it all rather than to see as many portraits of Louis XIV as possible, breakfast is served, either in the dining room, the garden or in bed, until midday—paradise for those with an early-morning appetite for something more than a croissant.

  And finally, for couples who are at a stage in their relationship where it is better to avoid all possible sources of argument, there are no TVs in the bedrooms. This is wonderful news, not only because French TV is generally abysmal, but also because it means that there is no danger of the day ending in a decidedly unromantic argument.

  Readers will probably recognize the male and female voices in the following bedtime dialogue:

  ‘Big European match tonight, darling, mind if I just watch the football highlights before …’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Uh? Where’s the remote control?’

  ‘I said: before what?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, before, you know, darling …’

  ‘Before you fall asleep snoring and I have to switch the TV off for you?’

  ‘No, dear, we’re in Paris for a romantic weekend, so naturally …’

  ‘… you’re going to spend it watching Real Madrid play the Harlem Globetrotters?’

  ‘No, darling, the Harlem Globetrotters are a basketball team—oh I get it, you were joking.’

  ‘And so are you if you think anything remotely sexual is going to happen after you’ve spent half an hour watching football.’

  ‘Five minutes, no more, I promise … er, darling, why are you putting on that pair of thick pyjamas?’

  Yes, some TV remote controls might look like sex toys, but they can kill your love life stone dead.

  Royale romance

  Pigalle is a lot less sedate than the Latin Quarter, but somehow it can actually feel romantic to stroll past the massage parlours and girlie bars with your loved one, thinking how great it is that you don’t need to descend to drinking fake Champagne with a girl who’d prefer to be at home in the Ukraine studying to become an architect.

  The Villa Royale is right at the steamy hub of Pigalle—the hotel overlooks the semicircular place Pigalle with its Théâtre X and its Ciné X. A few yards away is a street of girlie bars with names like Les 3 Roses, Soho Bar and (this is no joke) Dirty Dick.*********

  The hotel is not exactly secluded—it’s for lovers who want to be in the thick of the city—but the rooms on the higher floors only let in the noise like a backing track to the Parisian romantic comedy you’re creating.

  Appropriately, the Villa Royale goes for the boudoir look. The décor is all gold and red velvet, a sort of Moroccan baroque, which is actually a good description of French Romantic art, and the tented lobby wouldn’t be a bad setting for one of Delacroix’s orientalist paintings.

  The rooms don’t have numbers, and are named after famous people, most—but not all—of them French. Guests can opt for someone classical, like Debussy, Bizet, Victor Hugo and Renoir, or quintessentially Parisian like Édith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and Serge Gainsbourg. You can even boast that you’ve been in Catherine Deneuve’s bedroom, and not many men can say that nowadays. (You can also overnight in Madonna’s—no comment.)

  Not that the rooms necessarily reflect the artists they’re named after—the chambre Édith Piaf doesn’t have a tiny bed, for example, and the Gainsbourg doesn’t smell of cigarettes. They’re all snugly perfect for a winter hideaway, with plush wallpaper, gothic lamps, sheeny curtains and kitsch walnut and velvet furniture—yes, it all has a very bordel parisien feel to it, except that you won’t be kicked out after an hour, and there’s no danger that the police will burst in and demand to see your carte d’identité.

  The beds are big enough for 360-degree antics (except, perhaps, for basketball players), and so are some of the bathtubs—the Catherine Deneuve room comes with a king-size Jacuzzi. ‘Her’ bathroom even has a view of the Sacré Coeur, if you don’t mind people up in Montmartre ogling you through those tourist telescopes.

  A true-love hotel

  A few years ago, the sultry ambiance of Pigalle became even hotter when it was announced that the people behind the very trendy (or ultra-tendance as the Parisians like to say) Hôtel Costes and Café Beaubourg had created a Tokyo-style love hotel in Pigalle—an artily decorated place called the Hôtel Amour where you could rent a room by the hour.

  As far as I know, no hotel in Paris had advertised such a service since the brothels closed in 1946. The city’s hotels haven’t needed to, because lovers wanting an afternoon or evening of intimacy simply go to any of them, and book a room for the night. The fact that they’re not there at breakfast time won’t bother the staff in the slightest. It just means less work for them clearing tables.

  But with the Hôtel Amour, Paris seemed to be making a statement. Illicit love was going to set up its official head office (if that’s not a gruesome pun) just a couple of hundred metres s
outheast of the Place Pigalle.

  I didn’t really become interested in the place until I started doing the research for this book, and wondered which chapter to include this hotel in—‘Romance’ or ‘Sex’? I decided to call up and make an appointment to have a look around.

  The hotel’s voicemail was as erotically charged as you’d expect.

  ‘Pour joindre le restaurant tapez un,’ a naughty-sounding woman purred, ‘pour joindre l’hôtel, tapez deux, et pour joindre les serveuses, tapez … mais pas trop fort.’ (To translate the risqué message: ‘To reach the restaurant, hit one, to reach the hotel, hit two, to reach the waitresses, hit … but not too hard.’)

  Anywhere except Paris, they’d get raided by feminists. Here, though, apparently anything goes. I set up a meeting with the PR man for a few days later at 1.30 p.m., the time, he told me, when the cleaning ladies go into the rooms. Would they be contractually obliged to dress up as French maids, I wondered. Surely not.

  On the appointed day, around lunchtime, I emerged from the métro at Pigalle, and turned south, the bright neon of the Sexodrome erotic supermarket flashing red in my peripheral vision. I passed the tired-looking Theatre X, its neon distinctly less flashy, and walked down the rue Frochot, where the Play Lounge and Dirty Dick’s were closed and shuttered, and headed down the hill, past the corner café where an old fur-coated prostitute used to hang out. I know this not because I was a customer, but because when I used to play in bands, I would often come to the guitar shops in the neighbourhood to buy strings or get my bass repaired.

  Next left, and I was in the rue de Navarin, and from a good fifty metres away, even in the early afternoon I could see the pink Amour sign protruding from the left-hand streetline, a beacon for lovers in search of a place to get undressed.