La VIme Arrondissement

Now that the company is gone and we are falling into a daily routine, this place is starting to feel more like home and less like a vacation. We are living in Paris, in Sixth Arrondissement, in the neighborhood known as St. Germain des Pres. Welcome to my neighborhood.

Paris is divided into twenty districts, or arrondissements, kind of like New York's boroughs, only smaller and more intimate. The Sixth is on the Left Bank of the Seine, which along with the Fifth Arrondissement is known as the Latin Quarter. It got its name because ever since the Middle Ages it has been the home of the University of Paris, also called the Sorbonne. In the Middle Ages students came from all over Europe to study here, and the common tongue was Latin.

Our neighborhood, St. Germain des Pres, takes its name from an old church, St. Germain of the Fields. It was once a monastery church, but much of the monastery was destroyed in an explosion during the French Revolution, and only the church remains. What was once a little monastery village is now a bustling university neighborhood, full of cafés, bookstores, and art galleries. Down the street is the famous café Les Deux Magots, the stomping grounds of existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and a favorite watering hole of Ernest Hemingway.

Today we visited the church of St. Germain des Pres, one of the oldest churches in Paris. It is also the burial place of René Descartes, the rationalist philosopher who is famous for his dictum cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Descartes, a great mathematician as well as philosopher, understood that one may well doubt one's existence. But for there to be doubts there has to be a doubter, which thus proves the doubter's existence. Good to know. I'd hate it if "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" has the true meaning of life, and life really is but a dream. (Descartes' tomb marker is the middle one. The bust on top is not his.)

We also visited a bigger, grander, and more famous church. St. Sulpice is a little smaller than Notre Dame, and is thus the second largest church in Paris. It is mostly in the Baroque style, and has what Albert Schweitzer called the best organ in the world. The church's organist, Daniel Roth, gives recitals after high mass on Sunday morning. It looks like we're going to have to be Catholics at least one Sunday while we're here.

St. Sulpice is also famous as the site of the climactic scene in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. It has  an undeserved reputation as a haven for heresy, thanks to a set of documents known as the Dossiers Secrets that were explored in detail in a book called Holy Blood Holy Grail, one of Brown's primary sources for the Da Vinci Code. According to the Dossiers Secrets much of the history of Europe has been determined by a secret society known as the Priory of Zion (Prieuré de Sion). This group claims to possess evidence of a great secret, that may or may not be that Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene, that this child was brought to France by Joseph of Arimathaea, that this child was the father of the original Merovingian line of the kings of France, and that an heir to the throne, a descendant of the House of David through Jesus and Merovingians, is alive today. Among other things, the Prieuré de Sion built St. Sulpice, as demonstrated by the P and the S in the north and south rose windows, and the fact that a line that bisects the altar of the church runs right down the middle of Paris.

Heady stuff, huh? The only problem is that the Dossiers Secrets are likely a hoax. The P and S stand for the patron saints of the church, Saints Paul and Sulpice. And the line running down the middle of the altar doesn't come anywhere near the center of Paris. These are facts, Dan. The church leadership vehemently denies any historical association with heresy, and refused access to Ron Howard when he was making the movie version.

But I still think I live in an interesting neighborhood.