There is a little street that I walk down at least four times a day called Rue Malebranche. I use it to cut down towards my RER station and even though there is nothing really spectacular about it, I think it may be one of my favorite little streets in Paris. It doesn’t have any special stores, restaurants, or gardens. It is beautiful in its simplicity, in the quiet moment of calm that it offers in a bustling city. Knit in between the some of the quartier’s louder streets, Malebranche offers a perfect moment of peace. So many times I pause in the narrow, double level cobblestone passage to appreciate the utter stillness in the midst of an excitingly bustling city.
The street is a two level one, where the upper level dead ends and then has steps descending to a line of parking places below. On a GPS this doesn’t show up, and last year a car actually vaulted off the steps, smashing the cars below, but miraculously the driver emerged alive. Or so goes the story that the little girls relate every single time we pass the one smashed railing. It seems so hard to imagine someone so unaware of their beautiful surroundings that they would drive off a flight of stairs.
This little street is often commandeered by movie sets, for probably exactly the same reason that I like it. It seems timeless, the Paris you see in old black and white photographs or movies. The Paris that everyone intuitively conjures up. In fact, in the old Audrey Hepburn movie Love in the Afternoon, the apartment that she and Maurice Chevalier shared was on this little stretch of street.
But I liked it before I knew about Audrey, before I walked through a set on the way to work. I loved it the first time I stepped into this empty passage at twilight, with the only sound being that of my footsteps on stones worn smooth from years of Paris sojourners walking slowly across them.
I like seeing these things on your blog and saying, “I’ve been there!” Very pretty pictures 🙂