Paris à pied
By Mark Abley

Stay in the neighbourhood near canal Saint-Martin, where it’s 115 steps up to the best view in the city

“YOU DON’T MIND CLIMBING STAIRS, DO YOU?” a friend asked when she heard my wife Ann and I would be spending a week in a small apartment overlooking Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. She knew it well. Like other lucky members of the Unitarian Church of Montreal, she, too, had previously won the stay during BidNite, an annual church fundraising auction. The week cost less than a couple of nights at a mid-priced Paris hotel. But you have to know what you’re getting into — or, rather, what you’ll be climbing.

Ann and I arrive on a steamy morning in July — Bastille Day, as it happens. We had tried and failed to pack lightly. And so, by the time we heave our way out of Gare de l’Est train station, through the narrow streets of the 10th arrondissement, past a line of close-cropped plane trees and across a footbridge that arcs high above the canal, we are a little tired. Claire Desmichelle, a psychologist who lives in the apartment for most of the year, is waiting to greet us and explain its small idiosyncrasies. We ring the bell by the building’s front door, and she buzzes us inside. Then we start to climb.

The first 19 steps aren’t hard, even for a semi-sedentary writer in his fifties gripping luggage in each hand. The steps curve onto a landing that leads to the next 19 stairs. And so on.

And so on. By the fifth set of steps, my hands feel as if they are being ripped from my arms and my heart is rehearsing for some percussion extravaganza. Surely, I think, this must be the final flight. I’m wrong. Claire’s apartment is six floors up, off a landing where tall plants grow oblivious to the poverty of light, 115 steps above-ground.

“Bienvenue à Paris,” she says, giving me a concerned look. For the next week, she will stay across the canal in an apartment that contains her consulting office, while we inhabit the flat bought many years ago by her Aunt Geneviève — now a Montréal Unitarian. Claire had cleared space for our food in her little fridge and moved her personal effects out of the miniature bathroom.

“Could you be careful,” she says, “when you water the plants on the balcony?” I step outside to make sure I understand and the city takes my breath away. “If you pour too fast,” she cautions, brandishing an elegant watering can the size of a large wineglass, “you’ll hit the people down below.”

I find it hard to focus on herbs and geraniums when, straight ahead, the hill of Montmartre leads up to the pale stonework of Basilique du Sacré-Coeur and, off to the left, the Eiffel Tower rises above a forest of roofs and chimneys. I crane my head and even glimpse the dome of the Panthéon across the Seine.

Claire leaves us to settle in. We unpack and read about the neighbourhood. I’d been surprised, lugging our bags from the refurbished Gare de l’Est, at how spruce, even chic, the 10th arrondissement now seemed. Visiting Paris as a young man in the 1970s and early 1980s, I’d found the areas surrounding the northern and eastern stations to be scruffy at best. The canal itself — one of the great engineering projects of Napoleon’s era — was still industrial back then. As its commerce dwindled, some halfwitted planners wanted to drain it and install a freeway.

That risk has passed, thank goodness, and in summer, the canal comes alive with long, slender tourist boats that keep their occupants waiting at each of nine locks, the watery equivalent of staircases. Impressionist painters such as Sisley and Monet loved the effects of light on the canal and Paris’s grimy stations. They might be shocked to see how the area has been cleaned up and transformed by bistros, boutiques and boulangeries. Part of the movie Amélie was shot here. It’s where Paris parties. Well, a good chunk of youthful Paris, anyway.