La Rue Mouffetard

Since the days of the Enlightenment, or maybe the French Revolution, we've been ascribing sacral importance to places and things borne out of mankind's achievements. We find spiritual enrichment not only in ecclesiastical phenomena but also in concentrations of happenstance, spontaneity, blood, sweat, and tears, as living vestiges of our collective and all-too-human struggle through the ages. Pardon the cheap balladry, but this is something of the way I feel when I wander along one such concentration, the Rue Mouffetard, a lively and celebrated street by locals and tourists alike which also lends its name to my blog.

I can't proceed further without paying due tribute to Ernest Hemingway, my favorite "travel" writer. Perhaps the most iconic American ever to have walked the famous street, or to have lived in Paris for that matter, Hemingway embraced this thin and ancient market street in his memoir from Paris, A Moveable Feast, and in doing so probably contributed more to its present-day fame than any American. For the best reference on this street and the Left Bank in particular, this is a must-read.

I don't plan on challenging Hem's authority, so I'll spare much descriptive prose in his honor. But take a moment to put yourself in my shoes. Very often I play the archetypical Parisian flâneur, wandering aimlessly through Paris' latticework of Middle Age and modern streets, chancing on a new discovery. When I come across the Mouffe', south of the Panthéon in the heart of the fifth arrondissement, I know I'm not discovering anything new, but I'm nonetheless always moved by the architecture, commerce, and aloofness of locals to these spectacular surroundings. After a surface-level review of the street's history, the aloofness of the local population should come as no surprise. The street at first stood at the banks of the now-extinct Bièvre river which fed into the Seine, propping up a cottage industry of leather tanneries and market spaces, supporting a large trading class, and linking Paris to Lyon and Rome since the city's earliest days. So it was always commercial, and thus always forgettable.

But to the modern eye of an outsider, nothing speaks Paris more than this windy patchwork of limestone, plaster, and whitewash, complete with the charming red and gray tuiles which adorn most Parisian homes. Peculiar to the Mouffe' also is its uncanny structural and social preservation, escaping the 19th century urban renewal projects of Haussmann as well as the ever-encroaching spectre of gentrification. Surely this rather accidental beauty of fifteen hundred years saw many events, student protests, proletariat uprisings, landgrabs, and commune infighting. That there are no more tanneries and relatively few outdoor markets left makes no difference. The street's been changing since its inception, and it will continue to record its passage through time with incomparable grace.