From the cafe at No. 8, Elaine Sciolino watches the Saturday morning show on the Rue des Martyrs.
"The actors perform on six mini-stages: my greengrocer and my preferred cheese shop and my butcher at No. 3, my second cheese shop and my fish store at No. 5, and the front of my supermarket, where an itinerant chair caner sets up at No. 9."
Word pictures like this carry the reader through "The Only Street in Paris," Sciolino's chronicle of her adopted street and the people who supply its pulse.
A former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, Sciolino moves to this gentrifying neighborhood in the Ninth Arrondisement from the fancier Seventh. Here, with her "strongly American-accented French," she tests the limits of a newcomer in Paris as she sets out to learn all about the Rue des Martyrs.
Famous names flow as she traces the street's history from Place Saint-Georges up the hill toward the white turrets of Sacré-Coeur Basilica. Dégas painted circus performers here, Truffaut filmed scenes there, Thomas Jefferson brought plants down there to a friend later guillotined.
The journey is just half a mile, but Sciolino treads slowly, stopping at shops, talking her way past locked gates.
Paris' past remains present in the woman who restores antique barometers and the retired Socialist Party adviser who carries the yellow star the Nazis forced him to wear.
But change is palpable. "Where once there were stores selling a surprising variety of useful objects, like fabrics and thread, now there are boutiques selling one frivolity at a time: choux pastries, madeleines, cookies, Spanish pata negra cured ham, and ice creams in New Age flavors like chocolate with espelette pepper."
