English
One of the greatest cliches of the West, is the identification of Paris with the city of love. The beautiful neo-Gothic tomb of the tragic and calamitous Heloise and Abelard, finally together as if to prove that love, in fact, is stronger than death, in the mythical Père Lachaise cemetery (http://www.pere-lachaise.com /) is perhaps, not the worst possible starting points for a romantic alternative route through the city. At the end of the day, despite being gradually eclipsed over time, because they did not fit with the ideal of the courtly love, imposed with irresistible force through the literature in the years immediately following the death of both (second half of the twelfth century), it was one of the greatest love stories of the Middle Ages in the West and resulted in not only an extraordinary set of goliards songs, but also one of the greatest epistolary correspondence lovemaking of all time.
From there you can take the subway, always considered a place of astonishing and haphazard amorous encounters, governed by the laws of underworld, extensive and brilliantly documented by music, literature and film, to go to the Boulevard St-Germain and look closely, attached to the rue de Buci, the small attic that Theodore de Banville furnished to serve as housing for the fugitive and adolescent Rimbaud, as well as his meeting place with Paul Verlaine, a traditional couple of the decadent literature, determined, at least the first of them, to declare that, true life is absent and the consequent need to reinvent love.
This same idea of the reinvention of love, might lead us to walk from there to the evocative, melancholy two-floors-pavilion gardens of the number 20, rue Jacob that once were the residence of Natalie Clifford Barney, privileged witnesses not only of the creation of one of the most important literary salons of Paris between the wars, later characterized by its strong feminist movement and the predominance of female writers, but also abysmal loves and delicate as their own, as the one of Barney herself with Dorothy Wilde, niece of admirable Irish writer, who in more than one ways, as his niece, died for love.
The bridges of the Seine, particularly the Pont des Arts and Pont Neuf, are not too far away to be our next stop. Among the incomparable views, there are romantic freighters passing by, inevitably evoking Jean Vigo´s memory of L´Atalante (one of the greatest film love stories of all time) but they refer to the first meetings between Oliveira and La Maga in Rayuela and the second to the protagonists of the unforgettable Carrax Léos film Les amants du Pont Neuf.
And finally, at night, what better for the lovers than to return to the Latin Quarter to dance together, in the sweet and intimate darkness of the cave legendary jazz The Huchette, which just turned 60.
These are just some alternative ideas, but soon, you will realize, if you rent apartments in Paris that the list might be infinite.
Translated by: Hans
