PARIS, May 17 — As Cole Porter sang, “I love Paris in the winter when it drizzles / I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles.” I am in the drizzle camp, and I’m lucky: Rain erupts all year long, sending the pigeons flapping and the crowds darting under cafe awnings. The 21st-century bustle subsides, and the Paris of the past — damp gardens, beaux-arts town houses, art nouveau métro canopies — emerges into the foreground. It’s perfect weather to revisit the city’s prophets, painters, poets and mystics.
And departed spirits. Just outside my door in the Bastille neighbourhood is the Café des Anges, a symbol of both the city’s suffering and resilience. During the horrifying terrorist attacks of Nov. 13, several regulars were murdered while celebrating a birthday at a nearby restaurant. But the cafe reopened within days, and I find myself regularly at the counter, sipping espressos among the morning crowds.
November 13 did nothing to diminish my affection for North African and Islamic culture, which pervade Paris city life: Moroccan restaurants, Algerian pop music, corner hammams, water-pipe lounges, exhibitions of the Institut du Monde Arabe.
Architecturally, the influence is most vivid at the Grande Mosquée de Paris, an Arabo-Andalusian marvel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Constructed in the 1920s by artisans from North Africa, the whitewashed walls and green tile roofs of the vast mosque complex also enfold a courtyard cafe and indoor restaurant. Both are favourites of Parisians of all faiths and stripes. Entering the keyhole-shaped doorway, I feel Paris fall away and find myself amid striped banquettes and a ceiling painted with geometric patterns. Steaming plates of couscous and glasses of mint tea complete the journey.
Arcaded passageways are welcome companions on a rainy day. I like the ones enclosing the 17th-century Place des Vosges and its manicured greenery. Footfalls echo as you pass the Victor Hugo museum and multiple art galleries. Two always merit a stop: the gallery of Nikki Diana Marquardt, a former assistant to Man Ray, and Galerie Mark Hachem, which features contemporary Middle Eastern artists. Carette is also worth a visit. There’s nothing cool about this dowdy tea salon. It’s a place to bring your aunt — especially if she is a hot-chocolate addict. Served in a silvery teapot, it pours out in a lavalike wave. It wakes me up every time.
Sun would destroy the shadowy ambience of the Musée National Gustave Moreau. Moreau, a 19th-century painter obsessed with Greek myth, biblical tales and Shakespeare, filled his creaking town house with strange, gloppy canvases depicting Salome, Eve, Moses, Hamlet, Pericles, the angel of death and additional otherworldly characters. A winding staircase carries you higher and higher, like Jacob’s ladder, into his mysterious universe.
By night, the stone fireplace in Robert et Louise, a rustic restaurant, is a favourite spot to devour flame-grilled meats. Fat sizzles, smoke billows, and beef, lamb, duck or whatever I fancy appears before me in this cosy carne-copia.
Down the street, I finish my evening at the zinc counter of La Belle Hortense, alongside regulars like Basile the novelist and Philippe the professor. The bar sells wine and books. The bartender Cendrillon — French for “Cinderella” — pours Côtes du Rhône, and a 3-euro folio paperback edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal offers poetic intoxication. “Comes the Charming Evening ...” begins one Paris work. Soon, I am drifting along the lines of his imagery, deeper and deeper into the Parisian night. — The New York Times
