BRANDS ATTACK, TRADITION HOLDS ON

A BRAND REPLACING A WORLD-KNOWN BOOKSTORE

HIGHLIGHTS THE ASSAULT

A bookstore specialized in the performing arts occupied this site until 2016:

The bookstore specialized in performance arts (Fischbacher) occupied 59 rue de Seine until 2016.

Adapted from a Google map

But places away from the main arteries still define the area. Such as...

• Place de Furstenberg, which is the setting for the last scene of a movie about the 19th-century elite :

               -- The Age of Innocence by Martin Scorsese with

          Daniel Day Lewis, Michèle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder, 1997

•  Costume jewelry at the same address for 50 years:

Fabrice

 33 and 54 rue Bonaparte 

• A  café where works from the 1930's line the walls:

La Palette

43 rue de Seine

• A shop for antique dolls, facing the Senate:

La Maison de la Poupée

40 rue de Vaugirard (the Senate is reflected in the window).

#  #  #

Editors, printers, bookbinders and rare-book dealers remain:  

A family specialized in books has lived in this house for five generations. 

Rue Visconti (also site of Balzac's publishing house)

"Rare book purchase and expertise"

#  #  #

 "Saint-Germain managed to be both high-class and subversive" 

"The old stomping grounds of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein and on and on and on [...] were now those of stars of the media, of the intelligentsia, of creative entrepreneurs, of impassioned socialists with a taste of luxury, who lived in the center of town, just south of the Seine." 

 -- Rendezvous Eighteenth

by Jake Lamarr, an American writer living in Paris, 2001

Real estate in Saint-Germain

 is the most expensive in Paris,

and one comes upon stars of French culture

in shops and cafés.

 That intellectual elite obstructs

multinationals' sweep.

*    *    *

Next,

Art galleries' riches and traps