Free Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie Page A

the townhouse has survived almost intact, naturally without anything the heirs could un-nail and sell, meaning period furniture and original paintings. However, the venerable Versailles parquet creaks satisfyingly underfoot. Several tons of gold glitter from delicately decorated beams and walls, and when light pours through the many-paned windows the effect is blinding. Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier slummed here in the 1840s when the gilding had gone black—no doubt in part because of the hash fumes spewed by adepts of the Club des Hachichins (pronounced Ha-She-Shans). Baudelaire’s hashish-induced hallucinatory poetic visions—of nude women and cloudscapes—apparently derive in part from the mansion’s music room, a salon garlanded with dreamy plasterwork damsels.
    Love Conquers Time was the title given to a second-story ceiling decoration but alas, it has succumbed to the centuries. The catalogue of short-lived unions enacted beneath it, and in the island’s many other similar townhouses, suggests au contraire that Time Conquers All. That’s not a bad motto for the Île Saint-Louis, though I can think of an even better one, given the isle’s ostensibly unchanging qualities—its stony mansions and merry-go-round of wealthy inhabitants. It’s a saying coined by French wit Alphonse Karr in 1849: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Montsouris and Buttes-Chaumont: The Art of the Faux

Let us stroll in this décor of desires, this décor filled with mental misdemeanors and with imaginary spasms …
—L OUIS A RAGON at Buttes-Chaumont, Paris Peasant
    he leaves of the horse-chestnut trees overhanging the sidewalk broke into a sudden jig. Smoke and steam shot through them, puffing up over the tops of the hedges along the street where we were strolling, outside the historic park of Montsouris in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Alison poked her head through the hedge and beckoned me to follow. I heard a swish and a chug and saw an old black steam engine dive into a tunnel under the park, on the tracks of the Petite Ceinture—theoretically an abandoned railway. A ghost train? I’d read somewhere that back in the nineteenth century those tracks had linked in a loop the outer edge of Paris. I’d also read that they were used occasionally by train buffs to exercise vintage rolling stock.
    By the time Alison and I had ambled across the shady, landscaped curves of Montsouris and dug into our picnic on a lakeside bench, we’d forgotten about the train. The quacking ducks and shifting light, the luxuriant greenery and human parade passing by lulled and enchanted us. There were students from the nearby Cité Universitaire campus and the usual selection of au pairs, plaster-spackled workers in blue dungarees, and tourists shod with running shoes. The gingerbread Pavillon de Montsouris, a restaurant filled with hoity-toity Parisians in their Sunday best, seemed plucked from the proverbial Impressionist painting. So too the oversized prams, the fancy picnic hampers, and the awkward 1870s statuary dotted around us on freshly mowed lawns and raked gravel paths. Exception made for the tourists and joggers, and the cars parked outside the gates, much was as it might have been when the park was built atop abandoned quarries almost a century and a half ago, by Napoléon III’s planners.
    Mont Souris means “Mouse Mountain.” I couldn’t help chuckling at that as we circled the flower-edged knolls covering about forty acres of prime real estate. It seemed an unlikely moniker for the site of an ancient Roman burial ground originally strung along the road leading south from Paris to Orléans. Among the sepulchral monuments once stood the tomb, now lost, of a supposed giant: the gravestone measured about twenty feet long. The giant’s name has come down to us twisted from something now forgotten to Ysorre, Issoire, or possibly the mousy-sounding Souris. “Issoire” lives on in the Avenue de la Tombe-Issoire,