The week before Christmas I was puttering around the apartment and decided I needed to go somewhere in Paris I hadn’t been before. I had heard from numerous sources that there were some precious streets near Parc Montsouris in the 14th that were worth checking out, so I hopped on the RER and rode down to Cité Universitaire armed with little more than my camera, my Paris Pratique, and the names of a few streets rumored to be notable.

I’m sure Parc Montsouris is as charming as I’m told, but it is winter and the trees are bare, so I’ll give it a more thorough appraisal at an appropriate time of year. That said, there are a couple of interesting attractions at the southern terminus of the park: the RER station house, and the Paris Meridian.

The Gare de Cité Universitaire predates both the RER and the park itself, having once been a stop on the old steam “Ligne des Sceaux” (Seals’ Line) that connected Limours and Plessis-Robinson to Paris from the mid-19th century to the 1930s. The building originally dates from 1846, but was rebuilt around 1936 – about the time that Paris-Orleans line ceded the railway to the “Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris”, or CMP, the precursor to the SNCF. It’s a squat, Art Deco building, with much of the air of a pre-War bank, but I find it handsome in its way.

The next stop was the southern marker of the Paris Meridian, a very interesting artifact in these days of GPS and Google Maps. The Paris Meridian was established in 1667 during the planning of the French national observatory, whose future site it was to bisect. A couple of years later, astronomer Abbé Jean Picard used it to triangulate the length of one degree of longitude, and subsequently calculated the circumference of the earth with a startling degree of accuracy. Along with Ferro’s Meridian, Paris’s remained one of the primary international datelines until the Greenwich Meridian was adopted in 1884. It is curious to note that by this point there were, according to Wikipedia, at least nine other contenders: Berlin, Cadiz, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Rio, Rome, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, and Tokyo – a fact I’m sure can be explained by the rise of nationalism in the 19th century. What tickles me is that, while China has called itself “The Middle Kingdom” for millenia, Europe didn’t assert its various “centers of the Earth” until after the Enlightenment, with science, rather than myth or religion, in the service of the state.

Speaking of myth, the Paris Meridian has inspired its fair-share of conspiracy-mongering – Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is but the latest in a long history of esoteric intimations. As I understand is the case with much of his research, Brown conveniently mistakes the Paris Meridian for the “Rose Line” found in Eglise St-Severin in the 6th, an older, local meridian which is roughly 100m west of the Paris line. Moreover, the Arago medallions that the main character follows back to the Louvre were set down in 1984, using (to my knowledge) contemporary surveys. The Arago line does not cross the Louvre pyramid, nor does it directly correspond to the stele in Montsouris. Scissors and glue do not a puzzle solve.

But back to the stele. It’s about 4m high, and has a hole through top to provide a sightline. Though its northern counterpart was erected in 1736 in a private park on Montmartre, near the Moulin de la Galette, this was put up 3/4 of century later by Napoleon, in 1806. The inscription, however, is marked by a deep rectangular trough where the emperor’s name should be, thanks to his post-Waterloo damnatio memoriae. It’s a toothsome irony, I think, that the name of he who stretched France’s borders farthest should be effaced from a tool of reckoning those borders.

Montsouris Moderne

My curiosity exhausted, I left the park, heckling a couple of sinister crows on the way, and proceeded down its western border (rue Emile Deutsche de la Meurthe, which become rue Nansouty). It is the streets that spur west from here – impasse Nansouty, villa du Parc de Montsouris, rue du Parc de Montsouris, rue Georges-Braque, and Square de Montsouris – which are rumored picturesque, and which were my general destination. I must admit that, at the time, I was guided more by intuition that information, and subsequently failed to visit a couple of streets with notable addresses. I knew that Braque had lived on his eponymous street (it was previously rue de Douanier – street of the Customs Agent), but I didn’t know the address (it’s No. 6) and the street seemed rather uninteresting. One thing I completely overlooked was the Villa Guggenbuhl, a 1926 Cubist townhouse by André Lurçat at 14, rue de Nansouty. The Cubists were not having it today.

The first street I ducked down was the rue du Parc de Montsouris. It was a good choice. At the end of the street, framed beneath a looming, nondescript apartment building, two precious 19th-century townhouses formed the corner, an iron gate between them. The one facing me was done in smooth stone, asymmetrical with double balconies on the first floor and two half-timbered gables, one narrow and one wide, jutting from the roof. A steeply pitched garret poked out from behind the smaller gable, adding a bit of fairy-tale fancy. The shutters, timbering, brackets, and decorative iron floor anchors were all in green, and the stone crawled with vine, it’s green gone for the season. Not a particularly beautiful building, but pleasing for its idiosyncrasy and unexpectedness. To my left was a more traditional brick house with three identical gables. What it lacked in architectural interest it made up for with decorative charm: brick dentils, lemon-meringue windowframes and latticework, rust-red iron railings and headers, and a patinated three-panel door topped with a generous transom (I love transoms).

After looking at these two buildings for a bit, I turned around and noticed an even more out-of-place one behind me, occupying with its courtyard the whole western half of the interior block. It had an octagonal, vaguely italianate tower in one corner, and a large, somewhat Art Deco solarium on the top floor. Paris may have Hausmannian vistas of infinite mansards, but is predictably lacking in domestic vernacular architecture. I felt it was an auspicious beginning to my walk.

Turning the corner of rue de Parc de Montsouris I found another peculiar house, this one more defiantly modern with its single sawtooth roof and obvious plainness. Further down the street a very simple, cubical house sports long wooden balcony above the pitched grade. Across from it is a mid-sized postwar apartment building. Unimpressive as it is, it made me notice something that it shared with many the other buildings along the street: abundant creeper vines. Vines are, of course, nothing new in house-dressing, but in the streets near Montsouris they deploy with such ferocity that even this ugly building benefited from their organic iterations. I know nothing about vines, but I know that ivy doesn’t go out of season. Whatever these were, with their woody stems and red leaves their purpose seemed to be less to cloak a wall in green and shadow, than to wrap them with their vascular patterns. I will only know for sure when I return in spring, and see if they have bloomed. But they are beautiful as they are.

Continuing back onto rue Nansouty, I passed rue Georges-Braque and ran into Square de Montsouris. The building on the northern corner stopped me in my tracks, it was so wonderfully filigreed in vine. Looking up the street, which crosses the spine of a hill, I realized this was the strip from which the neighborhoods reputation derived. Most of the buildings appeared to be from the interwar period, and though there were many less-interesting, run-of-the-mill structures and none of the free-standing rogues of rue de Parc de Montsouris, there were plenty of houses with personality, and detail worth seeking. A few seemed more nostalgic – with Queen Ann touches, one even affecting haunted Tudor – while others, more stodgily modern in geometry, were splashed with Art Deco mosaics of blue and gold sunflowers. The whole street was unified by rampant vines and a preference for glass-and-iron porch awnings. The effect was delightful.

At the end of rue de Parc de Montsouris – or, ordinally, its beginning – was a striking modern specimen whose design was obviously the work of a more progressive talent. It had no frills or ornament, and was instead distinguished by the proportion and construction of its functional elements. A concrete spiral staircase with a ribbon handrail – whitewashed as the rest of the crisp façade – twisted up to the first floor entrance. Above on the left, a narrow 16-light window covered (I’m assuming) the interior staircase; to the right, a corner of faux-factory 4-over-1-light windows enclosed an airy loft. A roof deck, fenced with trellis, capped the whole. I found out later that this, 53 av Reille, was the Maison-atelier Ozenfant, Corbusier’s first French commission, executed with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, in 1923. Apparently the original roof was a more overtly industrial sawtooth – which would have been a bit heavy handed, I think, and smacks of idealogical ornament. Though I can do without the trellis, the roof deck is much more sensible. So much for function, Courbie.

Reservoirs Montsouris

Exiting onto av Reille, I saw something I had not previously comprehended from the map: the Réservoirs de Montsouris. Of all civil engineering and public works architecture, none have such a fortified aspect as the urban reservoir. Whether its walls inspire containment or defense depends upon their design. While the Central Park Reservoir, with its canted slab granite, has the air of a prison, the Réservoirs de Montsouris look the perimeter of a sentimentally fantastic city. Firm grassed earthworks are buttressed by stone walls. Dainty Victorian pumphouses, frosted glass and black iron, perch tiered on each side. Watchtowers become winter gardens. A Wallace fountain was in the courtyard, of course. I took my shots.