Cour du Commerce St. Andre & Cour du Rohan

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Just off  Blvd. St., Germaine, near the l'Odeon, is an ancient passageway called Cour du Commerce St. Andre.  It goes back to the 1200's-1300's.  It's very narrow and the buildings are all sort of leaning in towards the street....  It's not a street really...more like a passageway or alley.  The cobble stones are very large and all tipped in various directions from the morter between them being gone and the ground beneath them slipping away.  Much of the history of Paris was acted out on and near this place.  It has the oldest, still operating restaurant in Paris, called Procope.  It was started in the late 1600's  Over the years a diverse assortment of rouges have spent time there.  From Marat, the blood thirsty instigator of the revolution, to Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to Voltair and later George Sand and Oscar Wilde.  At one end of the street, Dr. Guillotine carried out his bloody experiments for the perfection of his new invention.

Just off the Cour du Commerce St. Andre is a series of little courtyards called Cour du Rohan.  I have read much about it's history, but almost everything I read said..."good luck seeing it..."  Apparently the residents got tired of tourists parading through their quiet courtyards and put up a big...I mean big...iron gate to keep them out.  It has a security pad that you need the code in order to open the gate and it's so high you can't even see over it.  So I was resigned to not being able to see it.  I was trying to take a picture of what I knew had been, in the 1500's, the studio of the artist Balthus, when a guy came by and punched in the security code, the gate swung open....he looked at me....I looked at him....and he motioned for me to come on it.  As the gate clanked shut behind me, he pointed out where the button was that you pushed in order to open the gate to get out....sooo....there I was.  Inside.  And it was as lovely as I expected.  It also dates from around the 1300's.  If you ever saw the movie Gigi with Leslie Caron, they filmed some of the scenes here.
This first picture is from outside the gate....the artist's studio picture I was taking..you can kind of see the upper story with all the glass, which must have been the actual painting studio.

This funny-looking thing, below, by the gate is something called Pas de Mule.  From what I've read, they say this is the only one left in Paris, but they used to be all over the place.  They were like a permanent step stool for getting up on your horse.

                    This gate leads to the third courtyard, and another gate to the street, but I did not open it.