Europe Journal 1999
Paris So Far
This report is a little long, since it covers two weeks.
This part of the trip has been very different. It's been much more relaxed, and not so packed with interesting experiences. This means I haven't had much to send back in the way of
Without the need to get up and hit the road, we've been sleeping in. That's too bad, really. Partly I blame the bed we have which is cheap and we don't sleep too well on it. Also, I've been a little sick all this week, and needed the extra sleep anyway.
Part of the idea of spending a month in Paris was to have a taste of what it feels like to really live in Paris, to be an ex-pat. Well, I don't know that we're getting the real experience because we don't need to commute to work every morning. Still, we've had to do some very ordinary things: we went to the hardware store for glue and a screw-hook (how do you say screw-hook in French? I still don't know), and of course we've gone grocery shopping a lot. Finding the apartment insufficiently appointed, Eric bought a large coffee cup, a stovetop espresso maker, a decent knife, and a cutting board (we'll take many of these things with us when we go). We also had to buy a top sheet; our apartment came with two sets of sheets for the bed, including comforter shams, but no top sheet, a situation we decided we didn't like.
Eric has been to all of the major English-language bookstores in the area, and is reading like a demon. He reread all of Jane Austin's novels and some of her short stories, and also read The Hunchback of Notre Dame, among countless other things. After he reads them, he sells them back to the bookstores as used books in exchange for more books. We are also getting a taste of Paris when the weather is not ideal – in other words, we are seeing the real thing, like a model with no make-up on. Some days it's dreary and gray, other days it's beautiful and sunny, and some days it rains, and quite often it oscillates between the three. When I lived in New England, we often said that the weather changes rapidly: "if you don't like the weather, just wait." Then I moved to Chicago, where that turned out to be even more true. Well, now I've found a city with even more unpredictable weather. Yesterday, it was sunny and clear – no clouds at all – when we left the house for the Cluny Museum of medieval art, and it was raining when we left the museum about an hour later. Above us the sky was an ugly yellow-green color, and on the edges it was still blue, with light fluffy clouds. After that storm cloud passed, it was sunny again.
And I'm taking French classes. One important thing I'm gaining is confidence – I now don't feel like I'm misleading people when I say I speak French. Also, I'm greatly improving my ear, which was sorely neglected at Classical High School, and I'm gaining current vocabulary. I'm learning a lot of expressions that people use every day that help to give nuance. Where I used to be about to say "I will never learn French," now I can say "I will never manage to learn French." (This is what I say when I'm discouraged, but the fact that I can say it better and better disproves my fears, right?) Now all I need is a new job in which I can use this new talent.
We are eating well, eating at home often. Every week we buy fresh homemade ravioli from a stand at the local market, brought up from Provence. We buy enough for two meals, and it's really delicious. We also buy all kind of dry sausage and other preserved meats, and cheese, cheese, cheese! We have also gone out for some very good French meals, and also some not very good French meals (I take it back – there is bad food in France, though admittedly not as much as in the US). We've also gone out for Japanese and Tex-Mex. It seems very French to me that a clear distinction is drawn between Mexican (i.e. authentic) and Tex-Mex (i.e. inauthentic) – but don't take that to mean that the French don't love that American perversion of Mexican food, or at least their French perversion of an American perversion of Mexican food. The Tex-Mex restaurant was a little disappointing, but pretty good, and judging from the crowd, quite popular. Chicago has spoiled me, I suppose – we've got great Mexican food, which we call "Mexican food". The Japanese restaurants were pretty good, both different from how they would be in the US, and also different from other Parisian restaurants. We went for sushi once, and the restaurant didn't offer the classic omelet sushi (tamago) – I suppose it is a little too sweet for French tastes.
This silly apartment hasn't made me crazy yet. It's kind of fun, though more than a month would be too much. I am impressed with the way they have created a pretty nice space in such a weird way, though I'm also impressed at all the things they haven't done to make the space better. For example, these old timbers everywhere create a nice cozy feeling and look good, but they take up precious ceiling space. The staircase, though small, is big enough to take up a lot of space, and a ladder would be safer anyway. But we make the space work for us, and I've come to really appreciate what we've got in Chicago.
Parisian architecture is beautiful, though not as interesting as I'd thought. So much of it dates from the same century, and is built in variations of the same style. After a while, you stop looking up. The boulevards on one side of the city look a lot like the boulevards on the other side of the city.
What is different and special is the squares where the boulevards connect – at the Madeleine, a church which looks more like a library, with its Greek-revival columns and flat roof; at Place St. Augustin, with église St. Augustin, an filigree-like ornate gothic church; at St.-Germain de Prés, a hodgepodge church and abbey built around the ruins of previous incarnations of itself, showing edges where walls used to be, with jagged stones sticking out like a puzzle with missing pieces.
It is no coincidence that the squares I mentioned have churches in them – this is largely the case in Paris, a city loaded down with churches and references to Saints. My subway is St. Michel, the major street to the west of us is St. Jacques, which crosses the river and becomes St. Martin. It's easy to get lost if all you remember is Saint-something. I told a French friend we were at St. Denis, instead of St. Michel. St. Michel is where the students are; St. Denis is where the prostitutes are. We cleared that up, though, so we didn't send her to a seedy part of town.
It's been a good two weeks, all in all. It's an experience, which is what we wanted. In January, though, I think I'll be happy to be home.
Now, some excepts from my journal from over the past two weeks:
Oct 23: So, in the morning, we had breakfast and went out to the market at Place Maubert. The market was very exciting and a lot of fun – and there were a remarkable number of Americans there (I thought I saw someone I knew in junior high school, who could very well be in Paris, but couldn't be sure and so didn't do anything about it). This was not like the market in Foix (where they sold a lot of clothing and housewares); this one was mostly food. There was every kind of food seller: butchers, charcutières, vegetables, confit sellers, poultry specialists, even fresh pasta sellers. It all looked so good, I didn't know what to do with myself. There were some unsettling things: a row a geese, plucked and gutted but with their feet still attached, neatly tucked by their sides, and their heads still attached, each one hidden in the cavity of the one ahead of it – like a row of geese with their heads up each other's butts; and a severed skinned calf's head, with the eyes, open, gazing off to the side, languidly accepting its fate.
We bought two kinds of fresh ravioli, some pesto, tiny radishes, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, shallots, basil, rosemary, thyme, something like prosciutto, a roasted chicken, eggs, and flowers to put in the vase Eric bought in Spain. We also bought baguettes from the bakery on the place.
Then we went home and ate lunch. We made sandwiches with the baguettes and the saucisson sec Eric bought yesterday.
Then we went out for a walk and to go shopping. We walked through the jardins de Luxembourg, where children play with little boats in the pond. I wished I could play with the boats, and theoretically I could have, but I only saw children playing, and I decided it was almost as good to watch them play with the boats. These boats are the model sailboats which actually work by catching breezes, though their trajectory is often uncertain. They can be rented from a man beside the pond – I think the same thing exists in Central Park in New York.
Oct 24: We wandered to the Louvre, through the Tuileries, and up the Champs-Élysées.
The Champs-Élysées has become a sculpture garden for the year (like the cows in Chicago, but much less kitschy, more like art), and so we looked at some of the work. Perhaps it was my mood, but I didn't care much for a lot of it. It was all perfectly nice, but none of it had that effect that large pieces of modern sculpture should have – it should touch you in ways you can't explain.
We rested a bit at the rotunda in the middle of the Champs-Élysées, enjoying the weather and basking in the feeling of nothing in particular to do.
....
We stopped at the English language bookstore near us, Shakespeare and Company. Eric had been there, but I hadn't. It is something else. It is quite old, though I don't know how old – but on one bookcase is written a reference to Henry Miller calling the bookstore something (which doesn't make it ancient in the Parisian sense, but in the Chicagoan sense). The building itself looks medieval on the inside, though it's likely younger than that. The structure is timbers and plaster, with an odd arch in the middle. But what stands out the most is that the walls are covered – covered – with books. Every scrap of wall, including the small section of wall above an old timber arch that serves as a partition of the main room, is covered with bookcases. In the very back there is an exceptionally narrow, exceptionally steep staircase leading up to a library; the stairs have been built to serve as cubbyholes for books from the side. In the front room is a very old man behind a desk operating a cash register very quickly with two hands – punch-punch-punch! – who also stamps the bookstore's name in every book as he sells it.
Oct 25: We went out to finish a walking tour of the Ile de la Cité that we'd begun another day. First we went to the WWII memorial to the deportees – it was very effecting and somber, not quite so much as the Vietnam memorial in DC, though that one benefits from the number of vets and vets' families in front of it looking for the names of family and friends. This is a sort of crypt you descend into. First you head down one of two narrow staircases to a sort of cement courtyard (the cement contains rocks from every department of France), with a spiky grill at the point which forms the tail end of the island. On the wall opposite the grill is the crypt entrance, a narrow passageway between two large rock-like blocks. Upon entering, you find a metal circular plaque with a single lit up glass globe in the middle, and around it are written the very effecting words "Ils alleront à l'autre bout du monde et ils ne sont pas revenus": "They went to the other side of the world and they didn't come back." Written on the walls of this triangular room is a list of all the concentration camps. Also written on the walls in that room and the two small adjoining square rooms are quotes from writers who were inspired by the holocaust. These were hard for me to understand, not least because they were written in a difficult-to-read cuneiform font, though certainly also because of their poetic language. Also in the adjoining rooms there are in the outer walls triangular holes inset in the walls, which contain (apparently) urns (though they don't look like urns) containing soil from the camps with ashes from the crematoria, each urn labeled with the name of a camp. Most importantly, directly in front of you as you enter the first room is a long room extending away you; on each side of it are panels inset with thousands of lit-up glass rods, one for each of the 200,000 deportees; and in the center toward the front is a tomb, the tomb of the unknown deportee. The victims of the holocaust from France are referred to throughout the memorial as "déportés", emphasizing that they were French citizens who were denied their rights and sent away as though they were not really French.
Then we went to the Conciergerie, a part of the Palais de la Justice which served for a while as a prison for the condemned. It makes a weird museum, in fact, with somewhat cheesy wax figures in some of the cells. It was interesting, thought it certainly lacked the impact of the memorial. Nonetheless, it doesn't lack impact altogether. It gives a lot of attention to Marie Antoinette, who they do not paint as the aristocratic monster I learned about in Western History class. I overheard a guide say that every year French "loyalists" come to hold vigil in memorial of the death of Marie Antoinette, even today.
From there we went to the Sainte Chapelle, the gothic church hidden in the courtyard of the Palais de la Justice, which is quite extraordinary. It has massive stained glass windows, and the supports between them are more or less hidden, first by being turned sideways and built on the outside of the building, and second by being covered on the inside by many tiny columns, which makes them look less substantial. The whole thing is painted in rich hues, and the stained glass is also in rich hues – so you are surrounded by rich and brilliant colors. It's a space which would be difficult, at best, to photograph, because it is so dark.
Oct 26: We had a leisurely breakfast and headed out to see the Panthéon, which serves as a sort of secular church to France. It was built as a basilica to St. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, and it replaced an earlier church. Its history is rather complex, as it changed names an purposes again and again.
It was built to have the same sort of awe-inspiring effect as St. Peter's in Rome, and it is almost on that scale. It lacks the light of St. Peter's, although when it was built it had windows all around which were later filled in. It also had more decoration then, and so now it is a little austere. The more upsetting thing is that one is not allowed to walk in the middle of the sanctuary (which has no pews nor an altar anymore), but must stay in the cloister-like galleries. There is a good reason for this, though: it has in recent times dropped a few pieces of masonry from the ceiling, and so I don't mind walking under the nets in the galleries if it means I won't have my head smashed in.
Where the windows used to be are beautiful paintings from the late 19th century – some in a sort of "triptych" style, all evoking renaissance styles, and sometimes medieval on top of that. The legend of Joan of Arc is represented (with the placards at its base mysteriously empty – it doesn't see to have been finished) in a romantic style. Her face is pale and glows in comparison to those around her. Her eyes are delicate, black, and exceptionally round and winsome. It is only the last frame, oddly located on the far left, which is a bit over the top: Joan of Arc, on the cross, about to be burned, a gold crucifix held about her head, gazes skyward and extends her lips to kiss the form of Jesus on the cross. There is something desperately cute about it, something that does not convey the violence of the occasion, focusing more on her as a girl and as devout. It reminds one of Japanese comics and animation.
Others included Saint Dennis picking up his severed head (on Montmartre), which he then carried down to the base of the mount and collapsed. This picture did convey the violence on the occasion. Some other paintings seemed to reflect biblical passages (it was written in Latin, which I couldn't really decipher) and were painted in a beautiful impressionist style, but with the sharper edges of medieval styles. The conversion of King Clovis or the Franks (King Chlodwig, is his own tongue), as well as scenes of him in battle, was shown also. He is portrayed similar to a Viking, blond, with a mustache, braids, and big blue eyes. These paintings are also romantic. Under the scenes of the death of St. Genevieve, the placards describe them not in modern French but in an older variety (she is called Saincte Genevieve), although the paintings are all, as I mentioned, late 19th century (or even early 20th – I don't recall exactly).
There are also statues of battles – the sort of high-action vertical statues that appear to spill forth out of the wall, a kind of bas-relief come to full life. The scenes are very active – every man and horse is in the midst of an action. To accommodate the shape of the statues, a more-of-less triangular vertical badge-like shape set right up against the wall, the characters are all on top of each other, so lying on the ground, some crouching, some appearing to ride the backs of others. It's a bit odd, but very dramatic, and affecting.
In the basement is the crypt, where the remains of France's great minds lie – Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Gambetta (heart only, and technically not in the crypt but in an urn outside in back), and many others. The leader of the WWII French resistance (known as "Max" at the time, but his real name eludes me) is there, and many others. Informative signs tell of those whose remains were put in and then removed – like Marat – and those who are supposed to be in the crypt but whose remains mysteriously aren't there.
Looking through the windows into the mausoleum-like crypt rooms is in fact quite creepy; one can't help but think that inside that stone sarcophagus is what remains of Victor Hugo – a decomposing body? A pile of ashes? It's best not to think about it too much.
Oct 29: At about 11:30 we left to go see the Arène de Lutèce, or the Arena of Lutetia, which is a stone arena – one of two or three remnants of the ancient Roman city, Lutetia, which was on this site.
The arena is a small thing, and only impressive if you think about what it is. It just appears to be a simple circular space, which entrances on the sides and some banked stone bleachers. I may have seen it last time I was here and not known what to make of it. When you look at it from the perspective of it being a two-thousand-year-old structure, it seems a little different. It's amazing that it still stands – and it's in use! A group of kids around 12 to 14 years old (I suppose) were playing soccer in it. There seemed to be a school nearby, and they must have been on lunch or recess, and a rather large group of them was playing soccer. I wondered if those kids were aware of the fact that they were playing soccer in an arena where games had been played – in the exact same place – for some two thousand years. The games have changed, but I think the spirit has not.
Of course, its use may have changed over the years. It may have been used as a market, for example. It seems to me that I read that when the founder of the Sorbonne began classes (having more or less defected from the Notre Dame school, and therefore having no buildings to use) he conducted outdoor classes, possibly at the arena. Anyway, it would make sense – if I were looking for a good place to conduct outdoor classes, I would choose that. Its small banks of bleachers could double as amphitheaters, making it a good site for classes.
Oct 31: Today was the sort of glorious fall day that one feels very appreciative and thankful for. We walked along the Seine, by the lower walkway/road (the road was pedestrianized today), enjoying the sun, the trees, the water. The air had a good chill to it but was essentially warm. You couldn't have asked for a better day.
Our destination, about an hour's stroll away, was the Paris sewers (les égouts). We had expected to see the sort of place where the phantom of the Opera would live, or where Jean Valjean took Marius. Well, it's not like that anymore. It's not creepy and damp (well, it is damp). It smells, which we expected – not unlike the way the Providence River used to smell on hot summer days, but rather stronger. It was never too much, but often almost too much. The sewers are sort of a museum to sewage treatment, explaining the history of the creation of the Paris sewers, along with the parallel histories of water treatment, city growth, and the bringing in of fresh drinking water. The sewers themselves are well lit. The elliptical arched sewers have narrow walkways running along the beds where the sewage runs, but this would not be safe for visitors, so they have covered the sewerbeds with the kind of grating one often finds going over a bridge (the Point Street Bridge in Providence, for example). Looking beyond the protected tourist area one could see the areas which looked more like what you would imagine, but still very pedestrian, unromantic. Walking over these grates (particularly to read the histories printed on signs over the sewerbeds in the middle of one big hall) was a little unnerving. I don't like it on the Point Street bridge because of fear of heights – I always feel that these grates will give way and I'll fall. I felt similarly on these grates, without the sense of pathological fear one gets with heights, but with a touch of obsessive fear (knowing it probably won't happen, but remaining nervous) – it's not so far to fall, but if you fall, you fall into raw sewage. But of course we didn't fall. The histories were very interesting because of the way they detailed the rise and development of Paris. Napoleon apparently did a lot to create the urban city we know today, and I think he began the real sewer system (though something had existed before).
All in all it was extremely interesting, but disappointing nonetheless.
We came home (another hour walk) and relaxed, quite spent. I spoke to Mom and left a message for Dad, and then we went out to meet Graziella. Graziella and some friends were going out for Halloween (since the French get off All Saints Day, the adopting of Halloween as a night to go out is really quite natural; they call it "Halloween"), and Graziella invited us to join them. We begged off for dancing, but agreed to go to dinner at the Hippo, a local chain restaurant (sort of a French TGIF's). We had a nice time.
Everyone else was in costume, but what could Eric and I have worn anyway? We packed pretty lightly, and didn't bring any costumes. French costumes seem to be less specific than American ones – people just dress up to look sort of creepy, without having something in mind. No one dresses as Micky Mouse or Scarlett O'Hara or a mailbox – they lack the kitschy and the playful costumes. But they have a great deal more style. Some of them just look like Goths (modern Goths, not ancient Goths), and all seam to wear black and white, with some red. Even the kids wear black, white, and red. Dressing as a witch is very popular – no one seems to say "oh everyone's a witch, I have to do something different."
Nov 5: This morning we left the house and went to Les Halles, to shop at the Forum des Halles. Les Halles is the location of the former Parisian marketplace (very large), and the Forum is the mall in it. It's interesting. It must have been built in the 50's or 60's, and it has that aging-modern-architecture look that often doesn't work so well. It's pretty nice on the inside, though – but no great shakes. American malls, at least the newer ones, work very hard to create a pleasant interior (like Chestnut Hill near Boston, or 900 North Michigan in Chicago. This wasn't like that, it was more basic. We went to fnac, a store which is like Best Buy, Tower Records, and Barnes and Noble all rolled in one. We bought some CDs: one American, and two French. One CD I bought based on a song I've heard on the radio here a lot. We've found a radio station here which we like a lot – I haven't liked a station this much since I was 17.
Nov 6: In the afternoon we went to the Cluny Museum of the middle ages. It's housed in an old gothic "hôtel", though I'm not sure what that means in this case, and the ruins of the Roman baths in Paris. The Roman baths were one of the reasons I wanted to see the museum, but really they don't look like anything but ancient buildings.
The collection of the museum is the real reason to go there, of course. It's really nice, and it made me think of Mila a lot, because she studied art history, focusing on medieval art. In the artwork there are little details everywhere, and so I moved through the museum very slowly. Some of my favorites were the fragments of cloth, which contained images of animals, people, plants, and patterns. The people, probably because of the limitations of weaving, were very stylized in a way that I liked. They didn't have that same "medieval look" that one always sees; they were almost like something you might find in this century.
The painted altarpieces showed a lot of attention to the shadowing and contouring of the robes of the subjects, and even more attention to their faces – but not so much attention to the background, except to make it a pretty pattern and color. The faces almost looked out of place, like little photographs cut out and glued on the necks of the paintings.
We also looked at the famous tapestry set, the lady and the unicorn, which should more properly be called the lady, the unicorn, and the lion. They are quite beautiful even though they are also rather faded. Five portray the five senses, and the sixth is a little ambiguous – the description offered by the museum is that she is putting her fine necklaces away in their coffer and the inscription "à mon seul désir" means that she is giving up these excesses of sense. That is the moral, religious interpretation, though I read somewhere another, but I don't recall it – it was something sort of opposite to that. The inscription could be translated as "to my sole desire," or "by my own will," apparently. Well, I don't have enough information to interpret it myself, but the interpretation offered there was by far not the only clear correct interpretation.