Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  Rosenberg has finally concluded that the only solution is to give the Mona Lisa a room of its own. “It is a little bit sad,” he notes. After all, what a museum of this size has to offer is context—a number of major works by a master, in the company of the paintings of some of his important teachers and followers. In this case, however, the obligation to educate has been vanquished by human traffic problems.

  By Rosenberg’s estimate, the range and depth of the Louvre’s painting collection is matched only by the National Gallery in London. The public had a chance to experience the depth at the end of 1992 when the Louvre opened 39 refurbished rooms in the Cour Carrée, the oldest part of the museum, showing only 18th-and 19th-century works of French art. One-fifth of the exhibition had been in storage for years.

  Reviews were mixed. Some critics thought the installations were entirely wonderful, “a sumptuous gift.” A serious French arts magazine complained about the murky colors of the painted walls—too dark—and suggested that under the natural lighting some still lifes looked as if they were in an “advanced state of decomposition.” Interspersed among pieces by such important painters as David and Ingres were fairly underwhelming efforts by such secondary figures as Flandrin and Chasseriau. In all, the galleries show 700 paintings, about a hundred pastels, drawings and miniatures, and a captivating three-walled woodland scene executed by Corot for the bathroom of a patron’s home. Taking in the entire survey of two centuries of art in a single visit is something like consuming three gourmet meals in one day.

  But the Louvre was not meant for visual snacking. The new Richelieu installation is a feast: 860 paintings of the Northern European school, including the Dutch, Flemish, and German treasures in the collection; 3,000 large and small antiquities from the Middle Eastern excavations; 33 rooms of French sculpture; a string of rooms for a prime collection of objects of decorative art—among them, at last, the space to hang 80 large, rare Renaissance tapestries.

  Interestingly, it was a sudden inspiration for the Richelieu in the planning stage that Pei believes won him the unwavering support he needed from key figures at the museum. In the hard winter days of 1982, bruised by the fierce attacks on his designs, Pei went off to Arcachon, a summer resort in southwestern France, to talk things over with the Louvre staff and with Emile Biasini, the agile civil servant whom Mitterrand had chosen to coordinate the project for the government. The Richelieu had one small and two large courtyards where Ministry of Finance functionaries habitually parked their cars. Pei proposed installing glass roofs over them so that the museum could use those gloriously decorated spaces to display large works of sculpture, including some eroded outdoor pieces removed from the adjoining Tuileries. The smaller space would be set aside for some of the rare pieces from the Middle East.

  It was, he says now, one of those obvious lightning-bolt solutions that, with luck, arrive in an architect’s moments of desperation. If the Louvre leadership had been vacillating about his ideas, it became at that moment a solid constituency for Pei’s leadership.

  Theoretically, the construction rigs and the workmen should be gone soon. But nobody believes it. Pierre Rosenberg is given to saying that, like the great castles and manor houses of Europe that are eternally engaged in addition and renovation, the Louvre will forever be a work in progress. Michel Laclotte is wryly certain that when the last picture has been hung and the last piece of carved ivory placed in its glass case, the curators of all seven departments will probably be heard complaining that they must have space, more space.

  Helen Dudar is a freelance writer and former staff member of the New York Post. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and other major U.S. publications. She lives in New York with her husband, author Peter Goldman.

  Suddenly Rosy, my ten year old, gasps, stiffens like a pointer, and darts down the wide corridor, brown hair and jacket flying behind her. Dodging the multitudes in her wake, I take off in pursuit, leaving Grandma with the guidebook: I have no idea what has spooked Rosy, but, since a very dapper French gentleman inexplicably stooped at a street corner earlier this morning to untie my shoelace, I am prepared for just about anything. I catch up as she skids to a stop in her little sneakers before the broad staircase, eyes and mouth agape, gazing upward, her face rapt with astonishment.

  Towering above us, three or four times larger than life, and blazing ivory and gold in a pool of afternoon sunlight, is the marble statue of Nike, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The familiar headless figure is arrested in a movement so animated with vitality it is as though she has flashed through the ages and materialized on the pedestal before us to herald the fulfillment of some ancient prophesy. My daughter, who is bored with art and hates museums, has stopped breathing in spite of her exertion, and silently slips her hand into mine. Rosy has found a symbol to mirror her innermost fantasies, a goddess so invincibly unfettered, so inspired with freedom and urgency and power that we can all only pause to pay homage as my mother quietly arrives at my side.

  —Lois MacLean, “Rosy in Paris”

  MARYALICIA POST

  Excusez-moi, Je Suis Sick as a Dog

  When laid low in Paris, help is close at hand.

  IF YOUR WORST TRAVELLING NIGHTMARE IS WAKING UP IN A strange hotel room knowing you are really sick, let me reassure you. If it should happen in Paris you have it made.

  The French are really into handy telephone numbers. Allô Vert, for example, is not a number for a football squad but a help line if your green plant has gone yellow. There’s a number to call if you need a Grandmother in a hurry. For example, if you are a working woman and your child is suddenly ill, who will hasten to the house while you sort something out? Dial-a-Granny, that’s who. And so it goes, with the solution for just about every imaginable problem just a telephone call away.

  And that includes the problem of the individual, local or visitor, who becomes malade. In that case, SOS Médecin is at your service. A while ago, holidaying in Paris with a friend, I experienced this for myself.

  The procedure is extremely simple. Every hotel desk has this handy number...it is also listed in the “What’s on in Paris” type magazines which appear weekly. Depending on the state of your health and/or your French, you or the kindly hotel desk clerk simply dial this number and before you can say “Mon Dieu,” help will be on the way.

  I finally decided to ask for help about 5:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon. My friend, who had awakened that morning feeling pretty miserable, was suddenly running a spectacularly high fever. Not that I could explain how high...as my thermometer was in a different scale from theirs. But I showed it to the lady in reception, pointing maniacally at the little red line way above which the mercury most obviously was—in any language. She nodded calmly but seriously (the French take ill health very seriously) and dialed the SOS number.

  “They come immédiatement, Madame,” she assured me. I had hardly retraced my steps up to the room when the phone rang with a sad message from Madame. “SOS is désolé, Madame, but it is the hour of the rush and they will be retarded in arriving. Patient yourself for twenty minutes I am afraid.”

  As I had not expected help to be beamed in, twenty minutes did not seem too long to wait. But in fifteen minutes they were there, a pair of very serious looking young men, who immediately upon entering our two-star hotel room, gave it the air of a surgical suite.

  Most efficiently they re-checked the temperature, prodded and poked. Looked down throat, in ears, up nose. Listened to chest. They murmured questions in Franglais and accepted answers such as “ouch” or “stop that,” seeming to find them meaningful.

  The prodding over, they pulled the two rickety breakfast chairs up to the rickety table for the dignified conference. Some slight differences of opinion were thrashed out between them most eloquently. (“Ah, mais oui!” “Alors!”) I felt I was listening to a rather advanced tape on Teach Yourself French. Then they began filling out prescriptions. Rather a lot of them.

&nb
sp; The French have one of the the world’s highest rates of pharmaceutical consumption.

  —JO’R, LH, and SO’R

  It remained only to hand over the franc notes. (Madame had told me the price previously—250 francs. At that time it compared very favourably with the cost of a housecall back home in Dublin, but like fevers, the prices of things tend to mount steadily in France.)

  With considerable reassuring shaking of my hand and studiously unworried shoulder shrugging they indicated that my friend seemed to be suffering from a virus, but to be on the safe side had written prescriptions covering a wide variety of look-alike ailments.

  I was guided to the window where they pointed out the pharmacy across the street. In common with all open-for-business French pharmacies, it could be identified by its lit Green Cross shop sign. I could also see the doctors’ white car with the solemn black letters—SOS Médecin—across its side.

  The two had hardly left the room when Madame was on the phone to me again. In passing, the Médecins had mentioned to her that the shop across the street would soon be closing and to save me having to walk a short distance away to the area’s on-duty pharmacy, I should be advised to go as quickly as possible to have the prescriptions filled.

  The visit to the pharmacy passed without words—prescription handed over, pre-packed medicines handed back. The story ended happily. The patient was sufficiently recovered the next morning to totter out and see some sights.

  But for me, “SOS Médecin at work” was a more Parisian sight than the Bluebell girls could ever be!

  Maryalicia Post is a freelance journalist who lives in Dublin. She travels widely but Paris is her favorite destination—in sickness or in health.

  My little cousins call them “toilets of death.” Legend has it that a woman, desperate to use a Parisian pay toilet but lacking correct change, had dashed in after a previous patron but before the toilet had begun its automatic cleaning cycle. Inside, she was trapped and killed by the fumes. When I told my friends about this, they were understandably concerned, nature’s call aside.

  Finally, a volunteer stepped forth bravely into the green plastic shell, leaving the rest of us huddled outside. We must have brightened many a Frenchman’s night: seven American tourists clumped nervously outside a public toilet, praying for their friend’s survival. She emerged unscathed, though later admitting to a fierce adrenaline rush, and the rest of us took our turns in relative peace.

  —Arwen O’Reilly, “Paris Vignettes”

  JAN MORRIS

  Within the Périphérique

  Paris exerts an unusual gravity.

  PROUD WELSH PATRIOT THOUGH I AM, AND THEREFORE FRANCOphile almost by historical definition (for did not the French come to our help in our last great rising against the English?), I generally get no nearer to the heart of Paris than the Périphérique. I shy away from the city centre like a horse frightened by a ghost, and the spectres that scare me are my own insular prejudices.

  To name a few at random, I do not much like the songs of Edith Piaf, the boulevards of Baron Haussmann, the furniture of Louis XIV, the sound of Gertrude Stein, the vainglory of Napoleon or the conceit of Charles de Gaulle. I distrust, at one level, people who turn ideas into movements; at another, ideas themselves if too pressingly articulated. In a paranoia common but not often acknowledged among Britons of my World War II generation, deep in my semi-conscious I probably resent the fact that, while London was blitzed in victory, Paris remained inviolate in defeat.

  Yet I am haunted, as so many of us are, by the suspicion that Paris knows something other cities don’t, that it has an advantage over them somehow, and is handling our brutal century more intelligently. So when invited to spend a long weekend in the place, I determined to restrain all bigotries, whether of taste or of bias, and look at Paris once more altogether from scratch—exploring my own intuitions about the place as I wandered footloose, Friday night to Tuesday morning, through what they used to call (but not lately, I notice, the idiom being too slushy perhaps for modern Paris) the City of Light.

  I arrived after dark, and when I walked the next morning out of my hotel near the Bastille, almost the first thing I saw, through a bright-lit first-floor window, was a middle-aged scrawny man flexing his upper torso rhythmically before a mirror to a muffled beat of not very heavy rock. He clenched his modest muscles, he moved his head this way and that like a woman trying on a wedding hat. I could not resist stopping to stare, and doubtless sensing my gaze on the back of his neck, he turned and gave me, still twitching, a mordant, joyless smile. I thought of using him as an image in this essay, but when it actually came to the point I could think of nothing he was imaginal of.

  Whenever I reached a high viewpoint I was at once excited and disturbed by the spectacle of La Défense, Paris’s newest quarter, baleful beyond my Périphérique. Its skyscrapers seemed to me to stand there resentfully, brooding over their exclusion from the city centre. They have an allegorical look, especially seen through the imperial frame of the Arc de Triomphe, as though they represent a future being kept calculatingly at bay or in reserve.

  Certainly with calculation, either way, for carefully selected envoys of Modernism have of course been allowed to enter the gates, and actually there is something about the ambience, or perhaps merely the design of Paris, that makes futurism seem easily at home. Place de la Concorde, especially after dark with its lights and streaming cars, seems to me very like a space launchpad, preparing to send its obelisk into orbit. The cruelly disciplined Seine, for my tastes the most overrated riverscape in the world, provides the perfect channel for those glass-roofed restaurant boats which glide beneath the bridges at night, headlights blazing.

  Seen from the top of the Montparnasse Tower Paris looks an utterly modern city, laid out by computer beneath the vapour trails of its jets, while if you need a human figure to represent the coming age, you could hardly choose better than the solitary policewoman who, bathed in unearthly floodlight, patrols Place de l’Hôtel de Ville at midnight with her pistol at her hip.

  The Centre Pompidou, which seemed a few years ago so reckless an imposition, already appears perfectly at home, its pipes and girders almost as organic as the sinuosities of Art Nouveau, its forecourt ever more reminiscent of the great square at Marrakesh. Like many an exaggerated emblem of Parisian assertion—the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon, the Eiffel Tower, the Opera, the Champs-Elysées itself—it has been reduced by sheer osmosis to a proper metaphysical size. As to I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid, I foresee that it will soon be cherished as an integral and indeed redemptive part of the monstrous palace around it. Already it provides, with its Napoleonic connotations, one of the city’s most truly characteristic coups d’œil. Spouted around by its rumbling fountains, glassy as the sky above, seen through the gateway to the east it looks to me as though it has been dropped there ready-made from some meticulously navigated spacecraft.

  Athousand years from now, perhaps, a man will stand as I am standing behind a windowpane and look as I am looking at this landscape of houses behind trees and this sky scattering spring rain. I try to imagine having crossed that great space of time and being that man. What is he thinking about? Is he happy? Does he sometimes wonder what he is doing on this earth and why at one period rather than another? What does he believe? What can he see? This same curiosity that he arouses in me, others had about us before they passed away in the days when Lutetia was first emerging from the mud. Maybe on this very spot where I am standing a Barbarian mused about the men that were to come. And here am I, dreaming of that Paris of the future, raised up on the space that is now ours, where shuttered concrete, glass, steel, and possibly other materials as yet unknown will be the ingredients of a limitless beauty.

  —Julian Green, Paris translated by J. A. Underwood

  In the Musée d’Orsay eight very, very small children sit on the floor around one of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings. They are addressed with an exquisite lack of condescension by their teacher, who expla
ins in detail the composition of the picture, the flow of its colours, the relationship between its characters, human and animal. What fortunate infants, I think as I eavesdrop, to be born in such a city, to live among such beauties, to be treated with such courtesy! They listen with intense intelligence, their eyes shifting from teacher to painting and back again; but when they take up their drawing boards to copy the masterpiece, starting with an oblong frame to set the proportions, hastily I move on in case they one and all prove to be without talent.

  I am agitated by the timelessly emblematic quality of Paris. It is not like other capitals, living for the moment and the cash. It is as though the whole place consciously stands for something or other, so that almost nothing is simply itself. Just as in Mao’s China every single action, public or personal, had to fall into a political category, so in Paris I sometimes feel that every street, every event, every gesture is dedicated to some aspect of Parisness.

  Elsewhere civic generalizations are generally out of date, overtaken by shifting styles and standards. Here they remain almost disconcertingly valid. The plan of the arrondissements still provides a sociological and aesthetic index to the city, and here as almost nowhere else the idea of a city quarter is not obsolete. There really are whores around Pigalle, there really are tramps beside the river, there really are Breton cafés around the Gare de Montparnasse, you really can buy a live common-or-garden hen on the Quai de la Mégisserie. Publishers visibly frequent St-Germain-des-Prés, and hardly had I read in my guidebook that the Café Floré, where I had stopped for a cup of chocolate, had lately become a homosexual rendezvous than I was greeted by an eminent gay novelist of my acquaintance.