The lobbying worked, and after the convent was demolished, the half-excavated area became a public garden. However, it wasn’t until 1917 that serious restoration was carried out, proof perhaps that by that time Paris was confident of winning the First World War and hanging on to its capital.
Today, this much-abused place has been absorbed into the city’s everyday life. It is a half-hidden, half-forgotten park, almost invisible except from the apartments that overlook it, and accessible through entrances that seem specially designed to keep it a secret.
Standing outside the rue Monge entrance, the only sign that you are near anything Roman is a blank area of wall in an apartment building, and an archway decorated with a gladiator’s helmet. A narrow passageway leads to what looks at first sight like a fairly typical Parisian park. An open area of gravel where local boys play football, a few green benches in fenced-off flower gardens, a terrace on which a dozen people are holding one leg in the air like dogs learning to pee against a lamppost—a Tai Chi class.
It is a million miles from the fully restored arènes in Arles, Nîmes or Orange. The amphitheatre is visible, though—the steps leading up to the top rows where the upper classes would have sat, out of reach of the blood and sweat of the gladiators, and the arcades from which big cats, armoured men and masked actors would have emerged, now put to modern sporting use as goals.
Apart from the shouts of the boys training to be temperamental modern footballers, the place is usually very peaceful these days, and remarkably empty. The small lawns up on the terraces are so little used that the park-keepers haven’t even bothered to put up the notorious Pelouse Interdite signs, which usually make me want to laugh and cry. Laugh, because it seems absurd to erect a sign saying ‘lawn forbidden on a lawn. (What’s it going to do, apologize and stop growing?) And cry because the sign means more than just ‘keep off the lawn’. It is saying ‘no fun or relaxation here’.
In the Arènes, however, lawn-based lazing is legal, and on a dry day it is a great place to lie down, stare up at the sky and wonder how this amphitheatre, one of the oldest vestiges of the ancient city, can be so rudely ignored.
Not that it’s always so peaceful. Modern Parisians have their own version of the blood and drama of the gladiatorial arena—pétanque tournaments. Almost inevitably, the amphitheatre’s gravel floor has been adopted by a pétanque club, the Amicale Bouliste des Arènes de Lutèce. The club has met there since the end of the Second World War, and regularly evicts the young footballers to take over the arena for its tournaments, at which point the stadium rings out once more to the clash of metal on metal and the groans of the vanquished.
No respect for history
In the third century, the Romans left their mark on Paris in another, even more memorable way. It was after they beheaded Saint Denis, the man who introduced Christianity to the region, on high ground to the north of their city that the place of his execution was named ‘martyr’s hill’ or Montmartre.
From then on, things went rapidly downhill for Paris. In the fifth century the city was seized by the Franks, and then snubbed by the greatest Frankish King, Charlemagne, who set up his capital in Aachen. The Vikings regularly came pillaging, and soon all that remained on the Left Bank of the Seine was a clutch of convents, presumably with heathen-proof gates.
However, in the tenth century, Paris again became a capital, albeit of the tiny realm governed by the Kings of the Franks, and this elevation in status was the cue for some impressive refurbishment. The ancient cathedral on the Île de la Cité, which probably dated back to the fourth century, had survived the heathen onslaught and was one of the biggest in Europe, some 70 metres long, with five colonnaded naves decorated with mosaics. It must have risen above the hovels on the boggy island like a shiny new pair of Wellingtons in a muddy puddle.
So what did the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, do in 1163? Well, Maurice was the son of a humble woodcutter, so it was perhaps inevitable that he should decide to hack the old cathedral to the ground. This lack of respect for history was not unique to Paris, of course—practically every ancient cathedral stands on the ruins of an even more ancient church. Sully commissioned a new cathedral—Notre-Dame—in the gothic style that was all the rage at the time. And thus it was that for the next two centuries, the centre of Paris was a gigantic religious building site.
This huge project was just one sign of the way Paris was flourishing. Despite the murderous civil wars caused by les Anglais, which the Parisians helped to end by sending out some of their clergymen to prosecute the troublemaker Joan of Arc,**** Paris gradually established itself as the capital of a rich and stable nation, one of the power centres of Europe. It also began to assume its modern identity as a travel icon.
There is evidence of this double status in one of the most fascinating parts of the Musée Carnavalet, devoted to the Renaissance. Here, the democratic mix of exhibits works wonderfully: in the same room, you have the portrait of a glum-looking Mary Queen of Scots—who grew up in Paris and became an unhappy teenage Queen of France by marrying the short-lived King François II—and a party scene, with a drunken man groping a lady in front of a backdrop of Notre-Dame and the old city, a sort of Breughel on a dirty weekend in Paris. This latter picture looks as though it’s a pre-photography version of a ‘Your Face Here’ portrait—you no doubt paid the artist to have your portrait set against a stock background. In this case, the
