Paris memories: Le Pierwige

Yesterday Ellen and her husband Paul came to spend the afternoon. She's American and he's French. They live in a close-in Paris suburb — they are virtually in Paris since they have quick and easy subway connections into the city.

We sat out on the terrace and had a cup of coffee as we got acquainted. Then Ellen, Paul, and I took Callie for a walk out to the end of the gravel road through the vineyard and back, about two miles. We inspected the garden and I noticed several big round green summer squash that need to be harvested. There's no sign yet of tomatoes turning red.

The Pierwige hotel occupied these two buildings. Now
HSBC bank occupies the ground floor, and
the upper floors are apartments.

Back when he was a student, I have learned, Paul lived in a residential hotel in the Latin Quarter for several years. I'm talking about ancient history — the late '60s and early '70s. As it turned out, Ellen came to France from the U.S. to be a student in Paris for six months in 1970. She and other students in her group ended up staying in the same hotel. They met and were married a couple of years later. They've lived in Paris ever since.

By coincidence, I stayed in that same hotel — it was called Le Pierwige — in the spring of 1970. A palace it was not. A room couldn't have cost more than three or four dollars a night. It was on the Boulevard St-Germain, just off Place Maubert. I had just turned 21.

Looking up the Rue des Carmes toward the Pantheon,
one of the neighborhood landmarks

I didn't meet Ellen and Paul back then. They might have been on spring vacation from school when I was there; I was on my spring break from a study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence and had decided to spend my two weeks in Paris, alone. Most of the other students in the program took off for England, Scandinavia, Greece, Italy, or Spain.

I just wanted to go to Paris. The weather was lousy. It was late March. It was cold, gray, windy, and rainy. It snowed at least one day. That particular day, I had taken the train out to Versailles to walk around the park and see the palace. Big wet flakes fell fast and furious for most of the day. Coming from North Carolina, seeing snow fall was exciting and memorable.

One of the local cafés is named after a famous Loire Valley poet
of the Renaissance (500 years ago), Pierre Ronsard.

On rainy days when I didn't feel like walking around Paris with wet shoes and clothes, I spent hours in the hotel lobby talking with the woman who ran the place and listening to her conversations with others. I called her Madame Suzanne. I remember her as being heavily made up and having a lot of fake blond hair. She seemed old to me, but she was maybe in her 40s or early 50s. It's hard to remember. She was very talkative, though, and I understood French well enough to follow along with her stories, opinions, and observations of life in Paris and the doings of other people staying in the hotel.

I took a lot of my meals in little restaurants around the Latin Quarter during those two weeks. One in particular that I remember was called Le Restaurant St-Michel, located on the boulevard of the same name. Dinner there cost 5 French francs, which was a little less than a U.S. dollar. For that sum, you got four courses — an appetizer, a main dish, a cheese plate, and dessert — along with two glasses of wine. Even I could afford that.

A Paris bar-brasserie (the R is dark) is what we would call a café.

I can't remember how I first found the Pierwige hotel in Paris. I probably just walked the streets looking for a place to stay when I arrived in the city from Aix by train. I stumbled upon the place, and the price was right. I know that I met other English-speaking young people who were staying there over the two weeks of my residence, but the only one I can remember by name was a girl named Denise who came from Christchurch in New Zealand. She and I spent some days touring around Paris together.

I wish I had met Ellen and Paul back then. It's possible that we crossed paths without noticing each other. But if I had met them then, I wouldn't have had the pleasure of meeting them 41 years later and reminiscing about our days at Le Pierwige and in that Paris neighborhood. Nearly everything about Paris has of course changed. You can't stop progress.

This is the hotel we stay in nowadays, just around
the corner from the site of the old Pierwige.

In fact, much of my life since 1970 has revolved around that and other parts of the Latin Quarter. I worked there as a teacher for several years in the 1970s. Even now, when I go to Paris, 1 often stay in a hotel that is just around the corner from the one I first stayed in back in 1970. That one doesn't exist any more, but we who knew it still do.