Quiet may not be the first word that occurs to most people on a trip to Paris, but it's the one that struck me early last week as I browsed the beautiful, iron-gated little poetry section at Shakespeare and Company bookstore; and the word continued to weave its way through my impressions of the city during an all-too-brief visit.
On our third day in Paris, we began the morning with innocent optimism at the Musée d'Orsay, where we discovered an enormous and noisy line of tourists and vacationing students outside, snaking around the plaza and down the street. Bundled for a mid-March snowstorm, some braced their umbrellas against a bitter wind while others negotiated with the parapluie vendors.
We declined to join the frozen queue. Since almost any postponement in Paris is an opportunity, we just kept walking along the slick sidewalks--often taking necessary and irresistible detours on narrow side streets--in the general direction of Shakespeare and Company, which would, we were certain, offer much-needed warmth and shelter from the storm to weary readers.
After the anxious buzz of the museum crowd, followed by traffic noise and pedestrian chatter, a near silence inside the bookshop was almost as breathtaking as the cold wind had been. We browsed for a long time, exploring the ground floor stacks as well as the library upstairs.
Because it's my business even when on holiday, I also watched the booksellers, who were young and knew their stuff, fielding questions in French from the locals; changing direction instantly for an Australian man's query about "social justice in literature"; then deftly handling an American woman's request for some Ken Follett, Nora Roberts or Pat Conroy. It was a drill most frontline booksellers would recognize: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I thought, more or less.
Just a day before, I'd been amazed by the high "shushing quotient" at the Louvre, which was fending off its own invasion of student and tourist groups. By contrast, the quiet in Shakespeare and Company was simply expected and natural, inspiring even an energetic band of chaperoned young Americans to tone it down a notch. Their muted conversations ranged from shocked recognition of classic novel covers on display to a report from a pair who'd strayed and then returned with breaking news of a place nearby selling "cheap little pizzas" (Croque-Monsieurs). Low volume conversations from unexpected sources are also a form of quiet, I decided.
We bought several books, of course, and then ventured back outside. It was on this wet and chilly walk across the Seine at Pont Neuf and back to our apartment that I began thinking about quiet as image.
Ultimately, this notion lured me to Shakespeare and Company again a couple of days later to photograph the iconic exterior. From there, we headed to nearby Notre Dame, where my obsession with "quiet" was probably entrenched as the week's theme. Following a boisterous crowd being funneled through the cathedral's ancient entryway, we were greeted by signage that proved to be a relatively effective international commandment: SILENCE.
Quiet as image.
It stuck, even when I wasn't taking photographs. I remember visiting Flammarion's La Hune bookshop near the Boulevard Saint-Germain one night on the way to dinner and being, well, intoxicated by the distinctive sound of two wine bottles clinking gently together as a bookseller carried them upstairs, where an author event was about to take place. 
There was also a measure of visual quiet in bookstore exteriors, including the closed (Librairie Paris et son Patrimoine), the high end (Taschen Kartell), even the expat (W.H. Smith on the Rue de Rivoli).
And then there was that small but exquisite bookshop tucked within the passageway to the courtyard of the Musée Carnavalet. As the days and our endless strolls accumulated, so did all of these beautiful, bookish images. Merci, Paris, for showing us the exquisite quiet of your librairies. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now).
