I sense impending celebration. And although the word “impending” has a sense of doom about it, perhaps because of the “pend” part, it does not have to presage disaster; I checked. So, I’m going to use it to signify an important celebration, coming my way soon. For those of you stateside, this is old news, although I know you too are still limited in your movements and restrained by your concerns about Covid. But here in France, it seems…it seems…that in May, we will be released from our confinement, which will be a big deal. We will be once again free to travel further than ten kilometers from our homes without filling out some damned form. There may even be some restaurants that can open. It will indeed be the merry month of May! Therefore, and merrily, my saint is the patron of bakers, pastry chefs, florists, flour merchants, and oil refiners…huh? That last is a detail from Wikipedia; maybe you can shed some light on it. For my part, I’m sticking with the edible references. As our saint is responsible for a very extravagant dessert and also a very extravagant street and neighborhood in Paris, I think this essay will emerge as something short and sweet, and more about urbanism than about architecture.
Honoré (Honoratus in his day) was born to a noble family, who lived near Amiens, sometime in the mid-sixth century. His date of death is also a little shaky, but generally given as May 16, 600. One biography describes him as a pious youth who enjoyed fasting, which would be a sweet irony as the dessert that’s named after him is anything but pious or lean. But another has him as an unruly youth who boasted to his nursemaid that he would be bishop of Amiens one day. And here I’ll indulge myself in a little fantasy, based on divergent histories that are centuries old. We are in the kitchen yard where Honoré’s maid is in the process of shoveling bread into the oven with her peel. Honoré has just told her about his grand plans. She stops short and puts her hands on her hips. “Aren’t you the little saint!” she scoffs. “The day you’ll be bishop will be the day a tree grows from my peel!” And she thrusts the handle of her peel in the ground—her bread having been put safely in the oven—and she leaves it there (she has several other peels). The years roll on, Honoré spends enough time around bishops to become adept in their ways, and to hunger for some of that bishop-power that gets you a palace and associated perks, and he manages to be listed on the ballot for bishop in 554. Just as the votes were being counted, his nursemaid’s peel sprouts into a mulberry tree, a miracle is declared, and bakers throughout the land rejoice for the power of their peels. So, you see, the fact that Honoré is the patron saint of bakers has nothing whatsoever to do with him, but rather everything to do with his nursemaid.
That’s about it for Honoré. He was probably a good bishop, and he’s reported to have found the relics of three martyrs (Victorius, Fuscian, and Gentian), who can be seen immortalized in stone at the North portal of Amiens Cathedral, holding their heads in their hands. When Honoré died c. 600, he was buried in Port-le-Grand (then, a village near Amiens). His remains were exhumed and moved to Amiens a few hundred years later, to preserve them from the invading barbarians (the usual suspects: Vikings and Normans), and he began his post-life gig as a miracle worker. In 1240 he worked miracles in a monetary sense as his remains were used to solicit funds for the new cathedral; a medieval Kickstarter campaign. If this were another story I’d move on to this cathedral and its structural history, which is fascinating, but it’s a story about pastry. I would be remiss however, not to mention Honoré’s urban and architectural legacy in Amiens. Even as bishop of the cathedral, Honoré had his own church there, which was most recently rebuilt after WWII to recapture its Art Deco identity given it for the World’s Fair of 1937. A quick look at this one and I moved back to pastry. More recently, his name graces a suburb of Amiens created in 2012 that also carries the name of Joan of Arc, and you’ll see why in a little bit.
Honoré was literally put on the map of Paris through the work of a medieval baker, and subsequently linked to the ne plus ultra members of the Luxury Goods Club as well as to the French President’s palace. But let us begin our story in Antiquity, for it was then, perhaps even before, that the east-west route that became the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and the Rue Saint-Honoré was a critical artery for the people that lived in what is now Paris. This artery is known to have been used in Roman times by timber suppliers coming from the western forests to deliver wood to the city, which was then called Lutece and was concentrated on the island and the left bank. This long street appears as one of the few from Antiquity still in existence in Paris, and was probably a decumanus, an E-W road that typically crosses the cardo, the N-S axis of a Roman town. In the sixth century, when Honoré was on his treasure hunt for saints’ relics in Amiens (about 140 km north of Paris), the only wall that protected Lutece was the one encircling the large island in the Seine River that we know as the Ile. This wall was still in place in 584 based on a story told by that gossip-monger Gregory of Tours (539-594), who described Queen Fredegund hiding her jewels in the wall after her husband King Chilperic was assassinated. A little detour; if you want a good read about dramatis personae of the Early Middle Ages, nothing beats The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours. Just to read the Index entry for Fredegond will give you the heebie-jeebies: detailed murder plots, multiple lovers, bribes to the bishops…Game of Thrones had nothing on Fredegund.
OK, back to the lay of the land. Until the twelfth century, the life of Paris was mostly concentrated on the Ile, as it had been in Antiquity, with some monasteries and residential quarters on the left bank, the right bank being too marshy to be easily developed. Still, the right bank had at least two major attractions that gradually pulled the city fabric towards the north: the shrine of Saint Denis, about 3 miles north of the Ile, and lots of flat space to either side of the E-W artery that accommodated the activities of merchants and artisans. The first record of a market on the right bank dates to 1135, when Louis VI established one near the road that would become Rue Saint-Honoré. With the markets came road improvements, more traffic, and the need for refreshment along the way. Hence our baker…
Who was Renaud Cherins. The year was 1202, the same year that construction on the palace and fortress of the Louvre was begun. The king was Philippe-Auguste (ruled 1180-1223), and not only was he building a palace that would become world-famous, he was in the middle of building what was arguably the most significant of the seven walls built around Paris, even if it’s not the largest. Built to protect a population of about 50,000 from the encroaching Normans and Plantagenets, it influenced street development, was a massive masonry project, and it’s the only one you can still find sprouting out here and there, playing hide-and-seek with passers-by in the city center. This wall, on average about 30 feet high, with its gate towers twice that, enclosed 253 hectares (or about 625 acres), was punctuated with 77 towers and 15 gates, and was protected with extensive ditches cut around its exterior. A little more than 100 years later, Charles V (1364-1380) added extensively to P-A’s wall on the right bank (north of the Ile), but left the earlier wall in place to the south. Paris then (c. 1360) counted its population at 200,000.
Our baker Renaud and his wife Sibylle, having grown rich with the profits of their shop, donated about 12 acres to the city for the construction of a chapel, dedicated to Honoré because he was already the go-to saint for bakers, with a small college for canons, or priests. These donations of land were common, because they were a good way for the wealthy to ensure their salvation, and they helped disseminate Christian education. Renaud and Sibylle had their chapel complex built just outside Philippe-Auguste’s wall, and you guessed it; they chose a site that would guarantee widespread recognition of their generosity right on that main trade route! Sixteen years later, in 1218, this thoroughfare became the rue Saint-Honoré, and as Paris grew and developed suburbs, its extension was called the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, and through the successive wall-building projects, massive gates were built across this street to guard against the entry of unwanted traffic.
And if this street wasn’t already, in the fifteenth century, one of the most important in Paris, it became engraved in the political memory of France on September 8, 1429, when Joan of Arc led an attack on Paris with the Lord of St. Vallier to restore her champion Charles VII to the throne (the English king Edward V had taken control of the city) and was wounded at the Porte Saint-Honoré. The attack was unsuccessful and Joan recovered, only to later meet the tragic fate that we know awaited her.
Just as the dessert Saint-Honoré is often sprinkled with powdered sugar or other miscellaneous sweet particles of goodness, this long street is densely sprinkled with famous names and events. I’ll give you a brief roll call, and let you do the rest the next time you visit Paris. On rue Saint-Honoré, moving from east to west, starting roughly at the intersection with the rue de l’Arbre Sec, or very near the Oceanographic Center of Jacques Cousteau for you marine biologists out there and: Nos…93: druggist of Henry IV (1589-1610); 96: birthplace of Molière in 1622 and Richard Wagner’s residence for a stay in 1839; 145-152: location of the first gate (wall of Philippe-Auguste); 182-192: location of the chapel established by Renaud and Sibylle; 202: one of the first opera houses in the early-eighteenth century; 204: the royal palace; 155: Delamain bookstore, est. 1700 elsewhere and moved here in 1906; 161: the second wall and gate—it was here that Joan of Arc was wounded, and you will find a plaque in her honor, and, it was later the Café de la Régence, whose habitués were Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Ben Franklin! I imagine there to be a virtual whirlwind of vibes at 161! To continue, at 185: home of Alexander Dumas Sr., author of the Three Musketeers among many other works; 308: a house rented by Jean de La Fontaine in 1685; 370: home and salon of the Marquise de Pompadour who protected the “Encyclopedists;” 390: hiding place of Allied aviators during the German Occupation under the protection of Madeleine Lévy, Esther Nordmann, and the Abbot Henri Ménardais; 422: location of the gate in the wall of Louis XIII (1610-1643).
And now, to move into the lap of luxury…following numbers on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré from east to west (effectively continuing west along our route), at 22: Jeanne Lanvin launched her house of fashion in the late-nineteenth century; 24: Hermès since 1879; 25: hangout of princes of Monaco and Igor Stravinsky; 41: home of Louis Visconti, some Rothschilds, then the American embassy after 1948, now the home of the American ambassador; 55: Palais de l’Elysée, home and office for the French president; 59: Pierre Cardin boutique; 112: Bristol Hotel (all your money, honey!); 217: Eileen Gray’s gallery named for an imaginary owner; 235: artists studios designed by Gustave Eiffel c. 1850; 240: home of Gustave Flaubert; 255: Helena Rubenstein’s beauty institute opened in 1909.
Not to mention parades, political events, demonstrations…who needs the rest of Paris when you can have a history lesson in one long street?
Let’s sew this up with pastry and bakers. In the Department of Bakers, let’s take a quick trip to Rome. Do you know about Eurysaces the Baker and his Tomb in Rome? If not, take a quick detour to Wiki to check it out. Eurysaces was a first-century BC Roman baker, who just like Renaud, worked an important bakery in a big city with his wife, and, as they lived in a time and a place when tombs were important monumental expressions of a life’s work, they created a massive oven-tomb just outside the Porta Maggiore, and it’s still there. Ah, better add a leg to Italy on this long-awaited European tour!
But in the end, as May 16 rolls around, I urge you to consider making, buying, imagining a Saint-Honoré for your dessert. I tasted this marvel for the first time at a friend’s birthday party several months ago, when we were still free to assemble, and it brought me nothing but delight. Here's the essential recipe:
· Make a flat pastry base of your choice: feuilleté (puff), brisée (short), or sablée (sugar); although really, why would you consider anything other than puff?!
· Make a bunch of little choux (puff shells and the easiest of all to make) pastries to arrange as a structure; think of them as the rocks that will frame the waterfall of whipping cream you’re going to create.
· Make a lot of heavy whipping cream and butter cream that you can pipe into beautiful shapes. The official Crème Saint-Honoré is a custard with beaten egg whites to stiffen it.
· Use the flat pastry base as your sculpture stand and have at it!
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References for Weeks 18 & 19: Honoré
Websites:
The St. Honoré Boulangerie in Portland, Oregon:
https://www.saintHonorébakery.com/mission/
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Hillairet, Jacques. Connaissance du Vieux-Paris (3 volumes). Paris; Editions Gonthier, 1954.