I look for the quiet Paris.
I find the quiet Paris in small, out-of-the-way cafes. Families are having breakfast, students are writing, tourists are resting blistered feet. I can sit, jot notes, look up words, and nurse a cafe creme without feeling swept up in a I’m-here-in-Paris-to-have-fun! kind of mood that squirts from the pores of large student groups. In a quiet cafe I can listen to accents, look at a map, plan my next move.
I find the quiet Paris in small museums. La Musee Eugene Delacroix was on a back street in the Quartier St. Germain. Housed in his last studio, the museum is made up in Delacroix’s small rooms including the bedroom where he died. His actual atelier (“studio”) was a detached building overlooking a garden and patio. There were three other tourists there the drizzly day I visited, and I sat all alone in a little chair on his glistening garden patio, thinking about Delacroix trees, Delacroix flowers, Delacroix windows.
Another quiet Paris museum is the Marmottan, far from the tourist paths pounded into the Rue de Rivoli and Rue de Lille. The cartoons, figures, and scribbled oil nympaheas (“water lilies”) of Claude Monet are hung on the walls of Paul Marmottan’s mansion in this more sedate residential area.
I find the quiet Paris early in the morning. Many Parisians are rushing to work, but most tourists aren’t up till 9 to have coffee and croissants before the museums open at 10. Joining the miniature green street sweepers at dawn, you barely have to look both ways to cross the street.
I find the quiet Paris on my little rue (street). Just off two noisier streets, this throughway is a one-way, one-truck, one-pedestrian-to-a-sidewalk alley: great for motorcycles, trickier for cars. As soon as I’ve bought the wine, bread, and cheese in some noisy little shops and I’ve turned away from the cafe-sitting drinkers, smokers, and chatters, I’m back into the peace of working-class people measuring and sewing in this garment district. I punch in my security code, ascend the worn wooden stairs, contemplation returns, and I’m happy to sleep another night in quiet Paris.
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