Rue Mouffetard

Our first introduction to Parisian life took place on the Rue Mouffetard, nearly five years ago. We had visited Paris before, staying in a hotel and being entertained by raucous Bastille Day celebrations, doing all sorts of touristy things and loving them. Almost a decade later we decided to take a different kind of break in the city, renting a tiny apartment at the top of a tall, old building for ten days. There we started to fall in love with Paris properly and now we make the trip from the Right Bank to the Left Bank regularly to revisit our old haunts.

The Rue Mouffetard is an extremely lively street, set on a hill running down from the Place de la Contrescarpe to the Place Monge. In places it has tacky souvenir shops, créperies and bars, but there are also the many little essential outlets that remind you that locals live here too. We stayed at number 106, directly opposite a dry cleaners where we could see the clean clothes spinning round on a carousel, bagged and fresh, ready to be reunited with their owners in a swoosh and a sweep. Just a short walk from our front door was a bakery that sold the lightest, fluffiest brioche au raisin, swollen to perfection with a rich, vanilla-infused créme patisserie filling. My husband got into the very French habit of going there early every day for pastries and bread. He also started to eat vast quantities of fresh fruit. It was spring and the combination of greengrocers on the street and the twice weekly market on the Place Monge provided us with an abundance of produce.

The weather was just starting to warm up after the winter and on Sunday morning we flung open the high French windows to find the street below even more alive with activity than usual. A band was playing and soon the street was covered in confetti as a parade passed through. Children from the local nursery school emerged wearing home made hats and masks, and there was a general festive atmosphere in the bright spring light. It turned out that it was Palm Sunday and a procession had been organised, wending its way from the church of St. Etienne du Mont, just behind the Panthéon, round the 5th Arrondissement and down the hill to the church of St. Medard, just at the end of the street where we were staying. We had ended up with a front row seat at a big local celebration, the music and sunshine streaming into the apartment and making us feel part of the whole thing.

In the years that followed we began to stay elsewhere in the city, but returning to the Rue Mouffetard retained that pleasant feeling of familiarity. We happened to watch the film “Three Colours: Blue” and discovered that the street and the surrounding area play quite an important role in the plot. The central character goes there to effectively start a new life, and the cafés and alleyways that become home to her over time were recognisable to us. When we go back now we quite often stop for coffee in the bar featured in the film. The chairs there are rickety and the staff often possess a harassed, almost surly air, but perhaps we love it all the more for that. It's certainly a good place to sit for a while and watch the busy street, where there is always something going on. Good humoured loudness abounds into the early hours, when people are out buying crépes and kebabs amongst the closed up shop fronts of the grocers and the fishmongers, their voices echoing off the graffiti covered walls.

Living in the Marais is great, but the character of the place is noticeably different. People seem more polished. There are designer boutiques aplenty and you notice well-groomed individuals stepping out with looks that have definitely been “put together”. Across the river there are more students, who are content to wear worn-in clothes for years until they fall apart. I remember my first adventures out and about on the Left Bank, seeing ladies wearing battered old Converse trainers and flat, sturdy brogues with skirts and dresses, their hair waving free of the tyranny of straighteners. I felt instantly at home, which is probably what continues to draw myself and my husband back there. In what we think used to be an old bookshop, innocent at the front but getting progressively more “adult” as you ventured further into it, there is now a lovely Salon de Thé. Where once an old man sat behind a grubby counter in the half-light, there are now racks of tea caddies, all neatly arranged against freshly painted, pistachio green hues. You can sit and sip tea on light coloured, overstuffed sofas, admiring the limed-oak floor and looking out at people passing by the window. They walk down the street that we know so well, that unforgettable place where we first lodged properly in the city, the place where the chain reaction that brought us back here first started. Satisfied, we cross the bridge and go back again to the place that we now call home, seeing all the names on the doorbells as we pass and wondering who they belong to, what brought them here and which special places they know in Paris that bring the comfort of the familiar to them.