Saint-Maur-des-Fossés

Saint-Maur-des-Fossés occupies one of the loveliest accidents of geography near Paris: the Marne bends into an almost complete loop here, and the town fills the peninsula, so that water lies at the end of nearly every street. The name records the abbey of Les Fossés, founded in the seventh century on the neck of the loop; when the relics of Saint Maur arrived in the ninth, monastery and town took his name, and the abbey became a pilgrimage of rank — Rabelais himself held a canonry here in the 1530s and praised the spot's healthfulness, a judgement the riverbanks still support. The abbey is gone, but its site, its old church of Saint-Nicolas and the town's twelve leafy quarters keep the memory in the street plan.

The Marne gave Saint-Maur its second identity: the age of the guinguettes, when Parisians rowed, danced and lunched along these banks, fixed the town in the Sunday imagination of the capital, and the towpaths remain a promenade of anglers and plane trees. The town's musical life has real substance — its conservatoire is one of the region's most reputed, a nursery of professional musicians — and the Théâtre de Saint-Maur anchors the public seasons: concerts, opera and drama in a house that draws artists of international rank to the peninsula. An abbey's name, a river's embrace, and a proper stage: the formula has worn well for eleven centuries.