The Most Beautiful Walk in the World

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World

1
To Walk the Walk

Every day, heading down rue de l’Odéon toward Café Danton on the corner of boulevard  Saint-Germain or toward the market on rue Buci, I pass them.

The walkers.

Not all are walking, however. They’d like to be—but their stroll around Paris isn’t working out as they hoped.

Uncertain, they loiter at the foot of our street, at the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain, one of the busiest on this side of the Seine. Couples, usually, they’re dressed in the seasonal variation of what is almost a uniform—beige raincoat or jacket, cotton or corduroy pants, and sensible shoes. Huddling over a folded map or guidebook, they look up and around every few seconds, hopeful that the street signs and architecture will have transformed themselves into something more like Brooklyn or Brentwood or Birmingham.

Sometimes they appear in groups. We see a lot of these because our street, rue de l’Odéon, is to literature what Yankee Stadium is to baseball and Lord’s is to cricket. At no. 12, Sylvia Beach ran Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookshop that published James Joyce’s Ulysses. Sylvia and her companion, Adrienne Monnier, lived in our building at no. 18. Joyce visited them there often. So did Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and of course Ernest Hemingway.

Most days, when I step out of the building, a group stands on the opposite sidewalk while someone lectures them in any one of a dozen languages about the history of our street. They regard me with curiosity, even respect. But often I feel like a fraud. Instead of thinking lofty literary thoughts, I’m compiling my shopping list. Eggs, onions, a baguette…

After that, they set off again, a straggling column, following the guide’s flag or, in bad weather, her umbrella. Few take their eyes off this object. They’ve learned that Paris for the pedestrian is both fascinating and deceptive. What if they did pause—to browse that basket of books outside une librairie, or take a closer look at a dress in the window of a boutique? The tour might turn a corner, disappearing from sight, casting them adrift in this baffling town. They would be forced to buttonhole a passing Parisian and stammer, “Excusez-moi, monsieur, mais . . . parlez-vous Anglais?” Or worse, surrender to the mysteries of le métro. A few lost souls are always hovering at the entrance to the Odéon station. Staring up at the green serpentine art nouveau curlicues of Hector Guimard’s cast-iron archway, they may read Metropolitain but they see what Dante saw over the gate to hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD. Copyright © 2011 by John Baxter. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers