Our neighbour, Colette, says we'll all be eating shoes soon. When we moved into our small apartment in the sixieme arrondissement 10 years ago, there was a Felix Potin grocery store downstairs, a chemist on the corner and a dry-cleaners one block away. Then the designer shoe-shops moved in.
For exorbitant prices, you can buy hideous snakeskin pumps in the former grocers, or Ralph Lauren loafers in the former dry cleaners. The chemists closed down this summer after a failed appeal to the government - the ministry told them French people take too much medicine because there are too many pharmacies.
A stone's throw away, the Place Saint-Germain-desPres has been invaded by designer boutiques from the avenue Montaigne and the rue du Faubourg St Honore. The denizens of the Left Bank were not pleased to see the bookshops of their snobby, intellectual, little neighbourhood supplanted by Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Cartier. Voltaire and Rousseau held forth in the nearby Procope Cafe in the 18th century, followed by Verlaine and Rimbaud 100 years later. After the second World War, Saint-Germain became the cradle of existentialism, and the ghosts of Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir still hover over the Cafe de Flore and Deux Magots.
When Giorgio Armani decided to open his Emporio in the former Drugstore opposite the Deux Magots, Juliette Greco, a famous singer of the 1950s and 1960s, launched the SOS Saint-Germaindes-Pres Association. The group's cast of celebrities - Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Aznavour, among others - failed to keep the Italian designer out of the neighbourhood. As a peace gesture, Armani donated the money he would have spent on an opening party to restore the 10thcentury Benedictine church - the oldest in Paris - on the far side of the square. I have never run into Jean-Paul Belmondo or Catherine Deneuve in the streets of the sixieme - although our former concierge boasted she once worked for the actress. Many of the people I speak to on a first-name basis are foreign - the Iranian woman in the photo-copy shop, the Camerounese deliveryman at the Grande Epicerie du Bon Marche, the Vietnamese hairdresser. The neighbourhood's central location (criss-crossed by three metro lines) and the glittering boutiques are a magnet for the poor, homeless and mentally ill. From morning to night, every day of the year, a wellgroomed, middle-aged man in a brown suit stands in front of a stylish men's shop in the rue de Sevres clutching a folder of poetry.
The Carrefour de la Croix Rouge, with its giant equestrian statue, belongs to a red-faced alcoholic woman with a sad voice who sells the homeless people's magazine. The beggars vie for time outside the post office in the rue de Rennes, where they ask only a franc or two for holding the door open. One particularly polite man looks like he has known better days. We always exchange a few words when he's "working" outside the post office. But when he's drinking on the metro platform with the other tramps, he ignores me. The Catholic church took roots in this part of Paris when Childebert built a monastery at Saint-Germain to house the relics he brought back from his Spanish expedition in 542. Shops selling religious books, statues and medallions are still squeezed in among the boutiques of the rue du Vieux Colombier. You often see priests and nuns in old-fashioned habits scurrying through the streets. They are usually elderly, and always seem to be in a hurry, as if eager to escape the worldly temptations of the quarter. The Eglise Saint-Sulpice - originally intended for the peasants of the Saint-Germain parish - is my favourite, perhaps because I hear its bells and see the top of its towers when I lean out the window.
A superstitious Muslim friend recently gave me a "miraculous medal" from the chapel in the rue du Bac, just across the border in the septieme arrondissement. I wandered in out of curiosity the other afternoon, and was astonished to find more than 100 people, many of them pilgrims from Africa and Asia, praying in front of the glass coffin holding the body of Catherine Laboure. In 1830, Sister Catherine is believed to have seen the Virgin Mary twice here.
"Make a medal like this one, and every person who wears it around their neck will receive many graces," the Virgin is supposed to have told her. In the first 10 years of production, starting in 1832, more than 20 million medals were sold. Two million visitors to the chapel buy three million medals every year now. I doubt any other district of Paris has a comparable mix of poverty and high fashion, the church and cafe society. But the sixieme's bestknown resident is Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who preferred staying in his ordinary apartment in the ordinary but beautifully named rue du Regard to living in the Matignon Palace. Jospin's biography tells how unhappy he was living for a brief spell on the grands boulevards of the Right Bank. Our neighbours like to think the police patrols and barriers make the area safer. But the shopkeepers grumble that it's bad for business.
