Latin Quarter

Apologies for our silence! We have been working hard and playing hard, but neglecting to write about it. Mostly, so far, we have played by going for walks: it's free, it's beautiful, and we can retrace the steps of so many people whose works we've read.

One project of ours has been exploring the Latin Quarter. Last semester I read the memoirs of Raissa Maritain, wife of the twentieth-century Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, which talk about their spiritual and intellectual lives in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I recommend it for many reasons, including the window it gave into life in that world: they were close friends with so many brilliant thinkers, and they were of course always going to churches and gardens in Paris. So we've been following them a bit. Our first expedition on the left bank was in search of the (somewhat redundantly named, as Raissa points out) Jardin des Plantes, where, as young students at the Sorbonne, full of despair over the atheistic naturalism of their professors, they pledged to kill themselves if they couldn't find life's deeper meaning within a year.

But they did. First they encountered the philosophy of Henri Bergson (although they later came to disagree with him, it was the first not-merely-naturalist worldview they had heard seriously defended by a professor), and then after befriending Leon Bloy they were baptized Catholics. That conversion, of course, also opened up the way for Jacques Maritain to rediscover the works of Thomas Aquinas,  which informed the rest of his intellectual life.

Anyway, the Jardin des Plantes was something of a disappointment, as seems to be the way of French gardens in the winter (lots of gravel, mud, and bare trees in straight lines). The neighborhood is also not what it was in 1901! On a second trip to the left bank, we had better luck. This plaque tells us that the street we stumbled on by chance was the home of the journals published by their friend Charles Peguy:

On this trip we were headed to a cafe called l'Ecritoire, recommended by a friend, which is now right outside the Ecole Nationale des Chartes. Seeing the school was exciting to me because of how much time I have spent thinking about manuscript studies in the past few months, if perhaps less exciting to normal people. It also, as we discovered, was across from a wonderful bookstore, the Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin:

The store was crammed with nothing but philosophy books, as you might guess, although J. Vrin is a press I've also come across for history. Unfortunately for T (but fortunately for our bank account), most of the books were in French! It followed a trend we've noticed with French bookstores, though. They seem on the whole much more serious than American ones. The volumes are mostly plain, without pictures on the covers. They're lined up on shelves going up to the ceiling, and there isn't a lot of room to maneuver between them--not (usually) displayed on stands in welcoming, wide rows. And there isn't any mickey mouse stuff, as T would say. All in all, it seems like the French bookstores expect you to be interested in the books, where American ones are more likely to try to woo you.

On yet another trip to the left bank, we stepped into Saint-Germain-des-Pres. This former monastery owned most of the neighborhood nearly until the revolution, and also incidentally owned the manuscript I'm looking at now at the BnF. It was the home of a lot of early work into French medieval history, and had a busy church, too. Here's one of the monks well known to me for his antiquarian work. He's buried inside, next to his confrere and fellow-historian Bernard de Montfaucon, and Rene Descartes (!):

It's pretty depressing inside now. The area around the church is extremely fashionable and expensive. The church, which has a romanesque-ish nave (11th-12th century), painted all over, and a more gothic-ish but still transitional apse (12th century), and which ought to be beautiful, is in disrepair. Some of the repairs that have been done, which seem aimed at 'modernizing' the church, are regrettable. It took us ages to find the new tabernacle, for example, shoved off to the side behind some chairs ("they've taken my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him"!) The repairs may have been done out of good intentions and I'm sure with very little financial support, but it's still sad. As Dante says, better not to speak of it: look, and pass by.

To end this post on a less depressing note, here's the Jardin du Palais-Royale in the beautiful snow, which we've had for the past few days: