Among the underappreciated charms of Paris is the old, one-or-two-star family-run hotel, with tiny lifts, creaky floorboards, narrow corridors full of doors that suggest cupboards rather than rooms, and wildly eccentric wallpaper of the kind that allegedly hastened the demise of Oscar Wilde.
The (one-star) Esmeralda has all the classic elements, minus the lift, but it outdoes most of the others for location and view. When I booked it, hastily, on a recommendation, I knew only that it was close to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and therefore to Notre Dame Cathedral.
Not until I arrived, however, did I remember it was named for the heroine of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, played by Maureen O’Hara in the 1939 film and rescued from the gallows by heroic Quasimodo, who swings down on a rope from the famous towers and sweeps her back onto religious property, invoking the law of “Sanctuary!”
Sure enough, after I climbed the steep spiral stairs to my room, suffering slight oxygen deprivation by the fourth floor, I was rewarded by being able to look out the window, across the river to the left, at the now scaffolded and spire-less gothic masterpiece.
The book now arriving on Platform 2 – Frank McNally on commemorating Ulysses in a Paris railway station
French Connection – Frank McNally on why Percy French may be the real hero of Finnegans Wake
Margins of Terror – Frank McNally on the Irish language editor and arch-pedant Risteard Ó Foghludha
Recovered Memory – the contrasting tales of two war-torn Jewish families
To the right, as a bonus, was the equally ancient church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. And immediately below me was a pleasant little park with, among other things, the oldest planted tree in Paris, thought to date from 1601 and somewhat propped up these days, like the cathedral, but still standing.
Not only is the Esmeralda just around the corner from Shakespeare and Company, it is encircled by the shop, which fronts onto to the river but also sneaks back through the block, via a series of nooks and crannies, to have a side door on the far end of the hotel.
Surrounded as we were by books, my room looked like something from an art gallery. Specifically, it bore a striking resemblance to Vincent van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, although that probably didn't have an en-suite bathroom, unlike mine.
The bathroom allowed for some entertaining speculation when, upon checking in, I read about the hotel's most famous guests. Back in 1968, the Esmeralda hosted Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, while they worked on a film called Slogan.
They were new to each other then and Gainsbourg was at first rude and distant towards Birkin, as in one scene when, she recalled years later, “he was sitting in a bathtub with an enormous pair of trunks . . . and I had to sit on the corner of the bath with, as per usual, nothing on.”
But soon, of course, they were performing “Je t’aime” together, a song that caused many listeners to ask whether, during the recording sessions, they were doing the actual thing they were supposed to be only pretending to do.
I wondered for a while if it had been my bath that Jane Birkin sat naked on the corner of once. As I now know, thanks to the affable hotel manager Francisco, it was not: they stayed somewhere nearer the ground floor. But while I was still wondering, the first morning, my room ran out of hot water. As if it thought I needed one, I was treated to a cold shower.
Many characterful hotels have guestbooks in the lobby. The Esmeralda has one in every room, or at least it did in mine. Entries were sporadic, but those who had written messages tended to be enraptured by hotel and Paris alike. Some were regular visitors, some returning after 30 or 40 years.
I don’t know if “Adrienne” had read Victor Hugo’s novel or seen the film, but on a visit in 2018 – her fourth – she echoed Quasimodo: “For me, Paris is a place of magic. This hotel, the wonderful people here . . . I arrived in need of sanctuary after a brutal year. That’s exactly what I have received.”
Only last month, a first-time visitor “Sophie” rhapsodised: “It feels somehow as if this room has been forged by a memory or a dream . . . almost like I’ve known and loved it already.”
By contrast, a person whose name I couldn’t make out, writing at 6am once before catching a train out of Paris, confessed to feeling at odds with the city, “maybe because I’m alone and not in love”.
He/she should have watched the 1939 movie, which reminds us that Paris is a place of lonely people as well as lovers. The poor hunchback (played by Charles Laughton) saves the girl but, being ugly, doesn’t get her. Watching the happy couple from his cathedral eyrie at the end, he turns to his equally unbeautiful neighbour, a gargoyle, and asks sadly: “Why was I not made of stone, like thee?”