Love of Many Sorts in the Galérie Vivienne
Agnès Madrigal and Sara Parrot
The Galérie Vivienne in Paris is a charming glass-covered passage where the city’s history, and even some of its literary inspirations, conspire in chic boutiques, a beautiful bookstore, a grand wine shop, and secret spots. It also serves as the backdrop for a new fictional story.
Reflections of one of the grand arcades in the window of Librairie Jousseaume in the Galérie Vivienne in Paris. Photograph by Madrigalit
An Out-of-Time Visit to the Galérie Vivienne in Paris by Sara Parrot
Galérie Vivienne is one of about twenty-five remaining arcades, or passages couverts (covered passages), in the city of Paris. These predecessors to the modern shopping mall were originally constructed in the early nineteenth century and numbered more than one hundred fifty before the controversial urban renovations of George-Eugène Hausmann under the orders of Napoleon III. Such practical—and also beautiful—iron-and-glass covered shopping areas inspired the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin to commence his massive collection of writings (Passengenwerk or The Arcades Project) on life in Paris in the nineteenth century. Although unfinished at the time of Benjamin’s death, parts were published posthumously, including texts on such topics as literary history, the French poet and writer Charles Baudelaire, and the French artist Honoré Daumier’s social caricatures. The Galérie Vivienne is also the setting of another literary subject—its iconic spiral staircase once led to the apartment of Eugène François Vidocq, who is considered to be the first private detective. Vidocq inspired such French and American writers as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Edgar Allan Poe, ushering forth the fiction genre of detective stories that are still enjoyed by contemporary readers.
A spiral staircase, once tread by Eugène François Vidocq, in the Galérie Vivienne in Paris. Photograph by Art Jazz
Today the Galérie Vivienne is a lovely spot to visit for shopping or refreshments, nestled in the city’s second arrondissement, near the Palais-Royal and a short walk to or from the Palais Garnier—in fact, I came here for a glass of wine before easily heading to the ballet. Along with pretty boutiques and eateries, the arcade hosts one of my favorite book stores in Paris, Librairie Jousseaume, where one can find volumes old and new, an array of stationery items, and historical prints. Founded in the Galérie in 1826, it is a delightful way to explore “old” Paris through the shop’s unique setting and its piles and piles of books. And not forgetting that glass of wine mentioned above, this passage also houses the sprawling rooms of the wine merchant Legrand Filles et Fils. Opened originally as a gourmet shop in the 1880s, it is today one of the oldest—and grandest—wine shops in the city, featuring a cellar and store, a white-tableclothed restaurant, and a casual wine bar. It is a perfect place to pick up a few bottles of wine to bring home or meet a friend to sip a few glasses at Le Comptoir.
“The Couple at the Comptoir des Caves Legrand” by Agnès Madrigal
Kate was not looking for a story. She was tired. She gets to the bar before her friend, orders a glass of the crisp Chablis. She’s alone, she checks her phone, then tucks it away politely, attends to the wine, regards the large room around her, a space with walls all filled with lain bottles of wine. The room extends into another and maybe another. It’s difficult to ascertain its shape, its size, from her perspective at the bar. It is magnificence, she thinks, and that is enough. It’s early, well before the ballet, so the bar is mostly empty. The bartender speaks to her kindly, in her broken French, in his better English. A man to her side orders a wine from Greece and this surprises her. A couple on the other side of the bar share a bottle of wine, something red—they are far enough from her that she cannot read the label. They are far enough from her and yet she reads them.
They intrigue her. They engage with one another with a fondness not typically seen in older couples. They talk liltingly, laughing often. He is American, Kate thinks, only speaking better French; she is French, lapsing into English sometimes with a thick accent. He reminds Kate of men she knows, men she likes—the professors in her family, her uncles; her friends, the English majors from school; her husband. Yes, she likes this man immediately, with his cornflower blue sweater over a striped and collared shirt, his large heavy-framed glasses, his longish curly hair that is a little gray and a bit mussed and greasy. The woman with him is lovely, too. She smiles whenever she catches Kate’s eye, a warm, genuine smile that cannot be faked. The woman has dyed blonde hair that falls neatly over her shoulders and she wears a tight shirt with a plunging neckline and thin gold necklaces that dangle into the neckline with some of them disappearing there. She appears as a woman who wants to appeal to a man, but not in a manipulative way. With her fashion, with her smile, this woman wants to please genuinely, from a place that seems so good, so golden, like the glistening jewelry, that Kate can hardly conceive of it or at least not see it completely.
In a grand wine cave, with walls lined with lain bottles, a woman attempts the impossible—trying to understand another couple. Photograph by Dual Logic
She thinks the man an academic, a publisher, someone who resembles the men she knows in her other life, the life that is not the one happening now, the one is she is pretending to have instead, the one she is having, at least for the moment, in Paris. The woman is more perplexing, with a wedding ring on her finger with a diamond so large that it sparkles in one of the halogen lights above the bar sometimes when she gestures with her left hand. It does not seem like the kind of ring the man in the blue sweater would have given her, could have given her, and it’s then that Kate realizes it, their affair. It then makes sense, their light amorousness together: they do not live together, do not share the mundane routines of life that wear other couples down over time. No, he has left the wife, the children at home, somewhere in the middle States, Kate thinks. And the woman, she is married to someone else, too, someone who bought the big ring for her, maybe someone older who is too weak to travel now, and so she goes off on her own, however she describes it to him. She still loves her husband, that must be true, otherwise the smile could not work as it does. And perhaps he loves his wife, too, and that this affair enables the marriage to carry on, offering the surprises and the passions that a long marriage so often must necessarily forego.
Kate feels no ability to judge this couple for such indiscretions, whatever they may be exactly. Even as she considers one of her oldest friends, Julia, who will be meeting her shortly, whose life had been shaken when her husband left her for another; even as she thinks about her own well-worn relationship, now without the little affections the couple across the table are sharing so easily—he gently licking her fingertip, she kissing the ridge of his nose after another swallow of the bloodlike wine. No, somehow Kate loves this couple, loves them in all their ways, whatever ways she has imagined of them. She loves them especially in however they are balancing this moment, this lovely one at the bar in the old arcade in Paris, with all of the other moments, the ones at home, the ones with the potentially ailing husband, the screaming children, the monotonous jobs, or the bland daily chores that make up lives. She sips her wine, she closes her eyes. The wine is more complex than she had realized, slightly sweet.
This story continues in another article, which you can find here.