The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

by Elaine Sciolino

Overview

A New York Times Travel Bestseller

Part memoir, part travelogue, part love letter to the people who live and work on a magical street in Paris.

Elaine Sciolino, the former Paris Bureau Chief of the New York Times, invites us on a tour of her favorite Parisian street, offering an homage to street life and the pleasures of Parisian living. “I can never be sad on the rue des Martyrs,” Sciolino explains, as she celebrates the neighborhood’s rich history and vibrant lives. While many cities suffer from the leveling effects of globalization, the rue des Martyrs maintains its distinct allure. On this street, the patron saint of France was beheaded and the Jesuits took their first vows. It was here that Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted circus acrobats, Emile Zola situated a lesbian dinner club in his novel Nana, and François Truffaut filmed scenes from The 400 Blows. Sciolino reveals the charms and idiosyncrasies of this street and its longtime residents—the Tunisian greengrocer, the husband-and-wife cheesemongers, the showman who’s been running a transvestite cabaret for more than half a century, the owner of a 100-year-old bookstore, the woman who repairs eighteenth-century mercury barometers—bringing Paris alive in all of its unique majesty. The Only Street in Paris will make readers hungry for Paris, for cheese and wine, and for the kind of street life that is all too quickly disappearing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393242379
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/02/2015
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Only Street in Paris. She has lived in Paris since 2002.

Editorial Reviews

…what is freshest about Ms. Sciolino's book is her enthusiastic mash-up of the Paris of the past with her personal one of the here and now…Some purists might argue that Ms. Sciolino is not a real flâneur. She is not interested in the underworld, the destitute or the hungry…And her reporting instincts…interrupt her roamings, which are anyway focused on one street. And sometimes The Only Street in Paris seems less driven by flâneuring than by another French specialty: the morality tale. This one's purpose is to explain how people from different backgrounds can (within limits) transcend their pasts and become friends…That may sound corny. But Ms. Sciolino…makes the transformation touching by connecting it to her roots. She sees her own immigrant past in the stories of the Tunisian merchants driven from their country to make a life on her street.

The New York Times - Rachel Shteir

Anyone who loves Paris's remaining quirky "villages" will revel in Sciolino's meticulously reported accounts of the characters who work and live on the half-mile-long street.

The New York Times Book Review - Kate Betts

08/24/2015
Sciolino (La Seduction), an American-born writer who now lives in Paris, takes readers for a cultural and historical stroll along her adopted city’s venerable rue des Martyrs in this warmhearted, well-researched gem. The street, located in the vibrant ninth arrondissement, is largely untouched by progress, and the greengrocer, cheese shop, butcher, baker and other old-time merchants feel quaint; there is a cart-pushing knife sharpener and a mender of antique barometers. Famed transvestite performance nightspot Cabaret Michou, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette church, and the Grand Synagogue of Paris are long-lived neighborhood landmarks. Historically, the neighborhood was host to Thomas Jefferson, Emile Zola, and bohemian artists, musicians, writers, and critics; Sciolino occasionally feels their ghostly reappearance. “For me, it is the last real street in Paris, a half-mile celebration of the city in all its diversity,” she writes, adding, “This street represents what is left of the intimate, human side of Paris.” Sciolino, a seasoned journalist and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, also addresses contemporary culture such as France’s rising anti-Semitism, recounting the terrorist attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in January 2015, after which the street’s merchants placed “Je suis Charlie” signs in their windows. Readers will appreciate her mixture of the tenacity of journalism and a warm memoir-like quality. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"A sublime stroll. . . . The magic of the street is not only its scope—it’s about half a mile—but also its history."

Wall Street Journal

"The former Paris bureau chief of the New York Times shares her love for her adopted working-class neighborhood in this delicious and detailed look at the rue des Martyrs. Her knack for making friends and her reporter’s instincts keep this tour fascinating."

BBC

"Anyone who loves Paris’s remaining quirky ‘villages’ will revel in Sciolino’s meticulously reported accounts. . . .Sciolino doesn’t lack for inspiration; she has Paris at her feet."

New York Times

"Countless authors have used a city as their muse. . . . A blend of memoir and research, as Sciolino mixes her personal memories of expat life with the stories of artists and luminaries who walked rue des Martyrs before her."

New Republic

★ 10/01/2015
Rue des Martyrs is more than just a street, it's an enchanting and bustling community in Paris. At just over half a mile long, spanning between the Ninth and 18th arrondissements, this street is filled with four- and five-story buildings of varying architectural designs, with picturesque wrought-iron balconies and shuttered windows and small businesses at street level. As the author (La Seduction), a former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, explores her neighborhood, she describes its fascinating history, from ancient churches and the saints and martyrs the street may be named after to the 19th-century Cirque Medrano. The quaint cafés and shops remain locally owned, per Paris law, and their merchants and artisans are the leading characters of the book—and of the street. There's Roger Henri, who pushes a cart with a bell offering his knife-sharpening services; Michou, the owner and creator of the transvestite cabaret at No. 80; and Laurence Gillery, the woman who restores antique barometers, the last of her kind. The atmosphere on rue des Martyrs is refreshing and enticing in our modern world. VERDICT A must for readers who are interested in travel, Paris, or the expatriate life. [See Prepub Alert, 5/11/15.]—Melissa Keegan, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL

Library Journal

2015-07-27
After taking a tart look at her adopted country in La Seduction (2011, etc.), Sciolino shows a softer side in this affectionate portrait of her Ninth Arrondissement neighborhood. Not that the veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times and Newsweek indulges in unbridled sentimentality. Yes, the author fell in love with her apartment when she walked into its cobblestoned courtyard and "was transported back to the first half of the nineteenth century," and she praises the shop-lined rue des Martyrs 500 feet from her front door because it "has retained the feel of a small village." But in an early chapter lamenting the closing of a family-run fish store, Sciolino acknowledges that the frozen fish sold for half the price at the local supermarket is actually pretty good. She still misses the chance to linger and talk fish at the old poissonnerie. She relishes the formal intimacy of relationships with the merchants, and her brisk, lucid prose conveys the charm of unspoken rules that govern all interactions: newcomers must prove they know the code before they too get the freshest piece of fish cut in the back room or the loan of a book they can't afford to buy. Sciolino understands this mindset, because her Sicilian-American grandfather had the same distrust of strangers. Over the course of five years she became accepted enough to throw the wildly successful party bringing together the street's two halves: the more gentrified lower portion in the Ninth, and the tawdrier, cheaper stretch that runs through Montmartre. "Le Potluck" closes the book on an elegiac note, but chapters in between also chronicle darker moments: a columnist who survived the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo lives on the rue des Martyrs, and a high school down the way annually commemorates 19 students and one teacher killed by the Nazis. A pungent evocation of the conflict and compromise between tradition and innovation that define modern urbanism.

Kirkus Reviews

"Something interesting for everyone: If you like food, architecture, history, art or simply human stories, you will not be disappointed."

Christian Science Monitor

"Sciolino is a storyteller at heart. She loves to listen to and share other people’s stories…This is a lovely and intimate look at a magical corner of Paris."

Chicago Tribune

"Sciolino is a keen and tireless observer of this ancient little market street…She has written her love letter with such ingenuous passion it’s hard not to cheer up."

Washington Post

"The narrative takes the form of a ramble through shops, courtyards, cabarets, and time…Sciolino’s sharply observed account serves as a testament to the persistence of old Paris—the city of light, of literature, of life itself."

The New Yorker