Diane Johnson's

Into a Paris Quartier: Queen Margo's Chapel and Other Haunts of St. Germain

Review by John Baxter
Author of We'll Always Have Paris

Of the many and growing number of expatriate writers about Paris, Diane Johnson is incontrovertibly the kindest. Not only does she absolve of blame the multitude of foreign visitors who throng her adopted city (and mine); she even forgives the French, finding their punctilio endearing and their pride in France's cultural accomplishments entirely justified.

More than any books written since the days of Edith Wharton and Henry James, her trilogy of novels LE DIVORCE, LE MARIAGE and L'AFFAIRE define the hazy intellectual and cultural frontier between the modern French and those foreign converts to their way of life who decide to live here. In INTO A PARIS QUARTIER, subtitled REINE MARGOT'S
CHAPEL AND OTHER HAUNTS OF SAINT GERMAIN, Diane, who
divides her time between Paris and San Francisco, offers a glimpse of the district of St German des Pres on the left bank of the Seine where she and her husband, Doctor John Murray, make their French home.

Paris is drenched in history, nowhere more so than in that area defined by Rue Bonaparte, Rue du Bac, Rue des Saint Peres and the other narrow streets sloping gently uphill from the Seine opposite the Louvre to collide, by the church of St Germain des Pres and the café of Les Deux Magots, with the most imperial of Baron Haussmann's mid-19th century grandes boulevardes, the tree-lined Boulevard Saint Germain. An enthusiastic amateur sleuth, Diane can't pass a scrap of 17th century wall or the ghost of a bricked-up doorway without quizzing locals about their provenance, then disappearing into France's National Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, to ferret out more information. What she finds is usually astonishing. Numerous
version of Dumas's THE THREE MUSKETEERS have familiarised us with the fiery young Gascon D'Artagnan who, carrying nothing but his father's sword, arrives in Paris and is immediately embroiled in duels with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the three Musketeers who become his lifelong friends. It's a surprise to learn from this book that D'Artagnan actually lived, and,
moreover, lived on Rue de Fossoyeurs, now Rue Servandoni, the narrow street that runs from the Luxembourg Gardens to the wall of the church of St.
Sulpice (and is home to one of the Left Bank's most agreeable and popular local restaurants, Au Bon Saint Pourcain.)

Anyone who saw Isabelle Adjani's ferocious performance as Queen Margot in Patrice Chereau's LA REINE MARGOT must wonder how close Adjani came to the original, and how well the film recreated the enmity between
Catholics and Protestant Huguenots that erupted in the slaughter of Saint Bartholomew's Day. Diane wonders if many of the excesses attributed to Margot by history (and repeated in the film) aren't just part of a
traditional fantasy that all queens have secret and libidinous private lives, and a tendency to execute lovers who displease them. Look at Queen Elizabeth I
and the Earl of Essex, for instance.

Citing also Turandot in Puccini's opera and the lover of Julien Sorel in Stendahl's THE RED AND THE BLACK who preserves his head after death, she goes on to muse “Perhaps it was some special French fascination
with heads that led them to invent the guillotine”, then to track down the Cour du Commerce off Rue St. Andre des Arts where Dr. Guillotin conducted his first experiments (on sheep, by the way), and where marks in
the stone still indicate the actual spot this historic piece of research took place.

One of this delightful and informative book's most engaging qualities is Diane's ability to bridge the gap between pre-Revolutionary Paris and our own time. Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and Nathalie Clifford
Barney, Paris's ranking lesbian between the wars, all made their homes in this corner of Paris, and, consciously or unconsciously, replicated many of the
diversions and depravities of their historical antecedents. Picasso kept his studio on Rue des Grands Augustins and painted his agitprop masterpiece
Guernica there, while, in a café on Rue Jacob, within sight of Nathalie Barney's temple of Sapphic love, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald had the famous encounter, described in A MOVEABLE FEAST, where Scott demanded that Hemingway adjudicate on Zelda's claim
that his penis was too short. About all these people, French or foreign, Diane is generous and understanding.

“Finally,” she writes, “I cannot escape the idea that St. Germain des Pres,
French as it is, is also ourselves, the foreigners who have always been here. And, if you have always been here, can you be foreign? St Germain des Pres, in extending its welcome, seems to know that its strangers are part of the whole.”

INTO A PARIS QUARTIER is an absorbing study and an indispensable guide, on no account to be omitted from the luggage of any visitor who really wishes to understand Paris.

John Baxter

John Baxter is the author of over 40 books including two critically acclaimed volumes of memoir, A POUND OF PAPER and the brand new WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: SEX AND LOVE IN THE CITY OF LIGHT.

Enjoy an Evening with Diane Johnson, July 7th, at the Hotel Rex, San Francisco.