A soothing passage.

Of gardens and libraries as places of rest.

Thank you to the ever wonderful Alain Choukroun for the image.

The 2^nd Arrondissement is the smallest one on the map of Paris, the plan of the latter reminiscent of a curve of a snail shell.

It is a lovely quarter - different in its architecture than the surrounding ones. The snail shell has its tightest swirl in the middle and this is what walking in the 2nd Arrondissement feels like to me. A swirl of narrow streets that sometimes open up to a town’s square, with a  monument or a church. These squares look and feel like more like those in provincial towns or maybe on movie sets, they are smaller and more intimate.

A door to the secret passage without a doubt.

The rather well known Parisian covered passages- such as Galerie Vivienne- are part of the Arrondissement. They offer a refuge from the rain and a slower rhythm for your walk, with less jostling than takes place on the narrow sidewalks outside. They also house often unexpected boutiques and transport you from one street to another without you really realizing it. The garden that we’re going to visit today is also a passage of sorts.

Between its narrow streets, unexpected squares and covered passages, the whole arrondissement feels like a tight embrace, a refuge. Gardens are refuges too and so, of course, are libraries. Come sit with me for a while in a place that has both of these.

The National Library of France is situated since 1994 in a location that was built for it specifically. However the building where it used to be still exists and has kept part of the library’s catalog. I find that rather fittingly it houses a collection of maps, as well as books about art. After all we are travellers who are sometimes in need of an inn in order to rest and to be able to continue our journey.

The building- a private XVIIth century palace that belonged to cardinal Mazarin- was recently renovated and so was the garden. The latter’s renovation project carried a title Hortus papyrifer (a papyrifera garden) and it contains many of the plant varieties that were used as writing and printing surfaces: mulberry, bamboo, papyrus, birches. The garden has kept the traditional “French style” lay out- a large central fountain surrounded by four distinct parts of planted lawn.

It’s hard to believe that we’re in the centre of a big city, isn’t it?

I arrived to the library on a rainy November day. The rain was a piercing one, long needles of it making the fabric of my coat wet in no time. It kept changing direction, as if trying to attack me from all sides and take me by surprise. But while I was walking in the garden, the rain has stopped- leaving droplets of water on everything and softening the lines. The air stayed misty and grey.

Lamps glow inside

Lily of the Incas- bright orange

Accepts angry rain

Bright orange and red lilies of the Incas have accepted the rain with joy. There weren’t many of them, each a flash of colour among the long grasses. Droplets of water also stayed on the chairs scattered on the paths, placed as if in a conversation.

Well, here the conversation seems to have come to a halt.

This garden leads to the library and is also a part of it. In the warmer days one can sit outside and even when it’s cold people came out for a few moments to smoke a cigarette or make a phone call. When I’ve walked into the library- already calmed by the garden- I’ve settled for a while in the Oval room. Its form offers a protection, a refuge and yet it is also an opening, an opening through the books into other worlds. Maybe this is what a verrière of the ceiling is hinting at, an opening. The pale green lamps glowed on the long tables, the galleries full of books were lit up by warm orange lamps and large sofas and arm chairs still offered some free spots.

Of course I loved that the lowest level mostly housed children’s books. A little girl and her dad were sprawled on one of the couches reading a picture book and probably waiting for the rain to stop. I thought how wonderful it was that for this little girl this incredible structure of the library was already a place she could enter freely feeling like she belonged here. Not some walled in temple of knowledge but a stop on the way when the going gets rough. Whether the usual flow of life is interrupted by something as relatively harmless as rain or by a kind of dramatic event that we all experience one way or another. A library, just as a garden is a place to sit, to regroup, to look for guidance in the leaves of a tree or pages of a book.

My drawing of the lily of the Incas and a quite imperfectly written haïku in a self made sketchbook.

P.S. If you are curious to learn more about the library, you can do so here:

La BnF à Richelieu | BnF - Site institutionnel