The sad fact is, although I had so much to say about the 5th that it took two posts (and I still didn't fit it all in), I don't have nearly as much to say about the 13th. This is particularly disheartening because it's where I lived when I was here in 2008!
As I said all the time back then, the northern part of the 13th is very residential, quiet, and frankly almost boring. However there are a few things of note: the 13th is home to the extremely cool National Library and the only prison in Paris, which I lived next to last time and I wrote about once before.
The BNF (Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the National Library) is an almost brand new site and kind of interesting architecturally. It mainly consists of four large towers (representing areas of learning: time, letters, law, and numbers) that are supposed to look like open books. They don't, really, to me. These pictures aren't mine.
Between them is a large, inaccessible courtyard, but underneath that there are more levels of the library. Anyone can get a membership and study there (I'm a member of a different branch).
Two areas of the 13th are distinctive neighborhoods: there is Paris' Chinatown in the south/southeastern part (the only place to get good, authentic Chinese), and the Buttes aux Cailles, the only cute area in the arrondissement, which used to be a village to itself.
You get a lot of this type of thing in the 13th, as below: some late 19th/early 20th century buildings juxtaposed with quite moderns ones.
That's basically all I would remark on in the 13th. But that's me; there is another person, long dead, who wrote a good deal about the 13th in his second most famous novel. A good portion of Les Miserables is in fact set in the 13th, and Victor Hugo describes one particular area in some detail.
I was going to talk a bit about how the 13th is one of the newest areas of the city, and not so long ago it wasn't even considered part of Paris, but why would I do that when there is a much better writer to tell you about it?
Hugo was a native Parisian and although the scenes he's describing here were set between thirty and forty years before the novel was published (1862) he remembered the city as it was in meticulous detail. By the mid 1800's the 13th had become more integrated into the city - as Hugo notes, a train station was built there in the 1840's and "wherever it is placed on the borders of a capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a city."*
So I'm going to give you some quotes from Les Miserables describing the Place d'Italie area of the 13th, and show some modern pictures of the places he's talking about. I'll try to edit him as best I can!
“[In 1823], a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country...reached a point where it might be said that Paris disappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it, then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert place where there was some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery.”
He's talking about going southwest down the Boulevard de l'Hopital; here are a couple shots from the walk I took based on his directions (these were taken on Sunday, which was very sunny!):
“The rambler, if he risked himself...after leaving on his right a garden protected by high walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps, sawdust, and shavings...then a long, low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in mourning, laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the spring; then, in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building...this daring rambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel.”
Those "little known latitudes at the corner" are roughly here, just before you reach the Place d'Italie. Now the Place d'Italie is one of those huge roundabouts, but at this time it was a "barrier," or a little station attached to low city walls, marking the official end point of the city. As he says, it was a rather deserted area then called a suburb rather than actually part of Paris. Here is that corner today, first the corner itself then looking into the Place d'Italie.
After a lot of surveying the area and going over old names of roads I think this is where the house/"decrepit building" he refers to would have stood (funnily enough now a police station - in the book lots of crimes take place in the house):
"Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue de la Barriere des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved, planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the season, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odor of copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory."
The factory he mentions was one of the dyeing factories that served as part of the Gobelins manufacture, a large business that made tapestries and cloth. The Gobelins had been functioning in that spot since the mid 1400's and had expanded to include large factories after the industrial revolution. Parts of these factories are now museums. Here is the modern Avenue des Gobelins (what he refers to as the "barriere des Gobelins) where it meets the Place d'Italie.
And one of the late 19th century factory buildings, which is now the main museum for the manufacture.
“this Place Saint-Jacques, which was, as it were, predestined, and which has always been horrible, probably the most mournful spot on that mournful boulevard...”
This is where he's talking about, across the roundabout from where we started.
This is now a large boulevard with a divider; where the divider meets the roundabout there is now a WWI monument to the fallen of the 13th - strange that it's there when he had described that exact intersection as "the most mournful."
And now his overall impression of this neighborhood:
“The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts which assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpetriere [a hospital], a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicetre [an old prison just south of Paris], whose outskirts one was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women [hospital] and the madness of men [prison]. As far as the eye could see, one could perceive nothing but the slaughterhouses, the city wall, and the fronts of a few factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stood hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white walls like [funereal] winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground, not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial, regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief. Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hopital might have formed the entrance to it.”
Depressing, no? I thought the above pictures might be the modern version of what he's talking about. I wouldn't currently describe it the way he does, but this area of Paris is certainly one of the ugliest, least creative, and - he's still right about this - symmetrical in the city.
Anyway, starting at that roundabout and going south and southeast is Chinatown, and that area certainly has a more interesting energy. I wish I had pictures of Chinese New Year there because it's fun and awesome - they have a parade of dragons and lanterns, lots of people, food everywhere, and just cool stuff.
That about sums it up for the 13th; sorry it was a rather depressing description. I don't mind the 13th particularly, it's just not that interesting to write about!
*All the quotes are from Volume II, book IV, chapter I of Les Miserables. For those who know the story and might be wondering, this is where Valjean rented a house after adopting Cosette, and, years later, where Marius and the Thenardiers had rented rooms just before the uprising - the implication is that Valjean wanted to get lost in the vast population of unfortunates, while Marius and the Thenardiers were forced to live in such a terrible area because of their poverty.
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