Park With Walls Once Marshland

A park here is encompassed by buildings of exactly the same height so that it seems like a huge, ceilingless room with red-brick, windowed walls.

The streets leading to the park are narrow and run through a poor neighborhood, like hallways in a tired, sad house. The park has six entrances, one at each corner and two through thick, arched stone gates.

Prepared only by guidebook descriptions, one has a feeling of expectancy approaching a corner of the square. To the left the buildings continue. On the opposing side they stop abruptly, yet the park is hidden from sight until the entrance is reached.

Walking through it is stepping from darkness into light. Here are trees where there were none. Where there was closeness there is space. It is a conjurer’s trick, dazzling with illusion so that reality is forgotten. It is a trick that has been played for 370 years.

What is now a park was once marshland, owned in the Middle Ages by the church and occupied by its monks. And though it was drained hundreds of years ago by the Knights Templar and inhabited in their turn by the nobility and the workers of Paris, the district is still known as Le Marais (swamp or marsh).

The Place des Vosges, the park, is large and grassy, with carefully positioned, well-pruned trees, and a playground to the side with children riding seesaws under the canopy of a tall tree.

Along the edges are many benches, comfortable and attractive, places to sit quietly insulated from the working quarter outside. Behind are arched brick roofs of the arcade that traces the perimeter of the square, and above, the pink facades and tall slate roofs of old mansions. It is very civilized.

Age of Chivalry

It was not always so. In the late 1400s, before the place existed, civilization meant something very different. It was the age of chivalry, and jousting was a favorite recreation. The object of the sport was to shatter one’s lance on an adversary’s chest, the knight with the most lances broken proclaimed champion of the tourney.

Early in the summer of 1559, not far from today’s children’s park, King Henry II, a formidable athlete and avid sportsman, was host at a day of feasting and games. He had jousted twice with the captain of his Scottish Guards, and twice won. He insisted on yet another contest. This time the captain prevailed. The king’s visor was pushed up and his eye pierced by the shattered lance.

For 10 days he lay wounded. Four criminals were decapitated so the court physicians could study their cranial anatomy. But the king died, and his wife, Catherine de Medici, had his palace destroyed. Those ruins were to be the site of the Place des Vosges.

The weather in the park, protected as it is, is mild even in winter, and elderly people of the neighborhood like to sit on the benches, talking and feeding the pigeons. In the afternoon, children spill out of the schools that occupy some of the old mansions and race noisily about.

At No. 2 and No. 25, the place’s elegant restaurants, Coconnas and La Guirlande de Julie, serve fine, expensive meals. One will more likely find the tradesmen and shopkeepers of the Marais in the brasseries outside the gates.

Sense of Timelessness

A visitor might choose to eat outdoors, picnicking on a bench and enjoying the almost tangible sense of timelessness. All the noise and violence of the past, the jousts and parades and festivals, have given way to this, one of the most gentle and peaceful spots in Paris.

Until the end of the 16th Century the ruins of the king’s palace were used for trading horses, a kind of medieval used car lot and place that attracted unsavory characters. Then at the turn of that century Henry IV chose the site for one of his urban renewal schemes.

Paris, in those days, had the unfortunate reputation of being, in the words of a contemporary, a “stinking sewer,” but this Henry had a vision that was to transform the city.

It was his idea that buildings should be the same height and have similar facades, that avenues should run straight and lead the eye to vistas at either end, and that formal parks should relieve the congestion of residential quarters.

Near the place where his grandfather had been killed he planned the construction of 38 connected mansions around an open square, unornamented except for intersecting paths cut into the lawns.

Two years after his death the Place Royale was inaugurated with a three-day “carrousel,” and the square was crammed with innumerable horses, 10,000 observers and participants, some dressed as American Indians, and two rhinoceroses.

The Place Royale became the showplace of Paris, awing visitors with its size and grandeur, and was soon the most desirable address in the city.

Old patterns gave way to new; chivalry was dead, replaced by strict codes of honor, and the armored joust evolved into the gentlemanly duel. Encouraged by their ladies, the cream of French youth seemed bent on theatrical self-extermination, and the Place Royale was their stage.

To stop the slaughter Cardinal Richelieu, who owned the house at No. 21, banned dueling in 1627. The very next day, four young men fought at his doorstep. Two were captured and punished in the time-honored French way: the removal of their heads. Dueling continued unabated.

The ladies who lived in the royal square were of a new order. Openly and unashamedly promiscuous, they vied with each other in their number of lovers.

Creating a new form of social evening, the precursor of the literary salon, they opened their homes to the wittiest and brightest of Parisian society, inviting them to gather in that most serviceable room, the bed chamber. The life seemed to agree with them, for though their lovers often died violently, most of them lived to a ripe old age.

All too soon, fashion changed again, and in the 18th Century society abandoned the Place Royale for Faubourg St. Honore. Artisans and tradesmen, Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the working poor of Paris took their place, and the Marais became a commercial district. The magnificent houses were saved from destruction only by their usefulness as factories and storehouses. The stately arcades were chopped into stalls and became a teeming bazaar.

The symbol of privilege became the slums of the oppressed, and it was from the Marais and the Place Royale that revolutionary mobs streamed to attack the Bastille and to lead to the guillotine the descendants of noble families that had, a hundred years earlier, inhabited their own quarter.

In 1800 the Place Royale ceased to exist, renamed the Place des Vosges in honor of the first department of France to pay taxes to the new revolutionary government.

The Marais remained a depressed area, but gradually the Place des Vosges began attracting wealthy businessmen and artists. In 1832 Victor Hugo moved with his family into No. 6, followed by other young writers who took residence in the place. His home is a small museum now, containing not manuscripts and first drafts but handmade furniture and woodwork and hundreds of lovely drawings.

By the 1950s the once royal park had declined almost beyond rescue. Then in the ‘60s Andre Malraux, Minister of Culture under De Gaulle, ordered the area rehabilitated, a second royal edict 350 years after that of Henry IV.

Reconstruction continues. The arcades are once more open and elegant. Facades of the mansions have been or are being restored. The park has been planted with trees, a bone of contention with those who would like it to be a broad, unobstructed expanse, as originally designed.

Many of the doors to the inner courtyards of the houses are unlocked and open, revealing unexpected treasures. Some contain lovely gardens or vestiges of ancient stables or small ateliers. Others house schools and galleries and many retain sculpture and decorations from the earliest days.

Tucked under the arcades are small shops fitted gracefully into the old structures. Some sell paintings and prints, antiquities and country artifacts. There are gift shops, a bookstore, and even a popular sporting goods store.

In spite of its present utility, the Place des Vosges is unlike any place else in Paris. After all the centuries of turbulence and change it seems, at last, to have found its proper function. It is a haven, a cloister, a refuge from the city’s rush, a place for anyone in search of beauty and peace.

At least for now.

For further information, contact the French Government Tourist Office, 9401 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 840, Beverly Hills 90212.