Clichés come true, too. Parisian chic exists, Parisian live-and-let-live lives on—where but in this capital would the layabouts be left in peace on the warm floors of Beaubourg? Black people walk about Paris with such elegance, such panache of cape and flaunt of fur, that they might be living models of negritude. The Lebanese, the Vietnamese and the North Africans, however intrusive they may seem to the more racist of the indigènes, to an eye from across La Manche truly do appear to have been gracefully assimilated.
Just over the hill from Place du Tertre, I found myself wandering through a district which appeared so entirely and authentically petit bourgeois that girls still played hopscotch in its streets and neighbours actually talked to each other—I saw it!—out of their windows; and on the Sunday morning I walked from the Arénes de Lutece, where elderly gents were playing boules in the pale sunshine, to Place de la Contrescarpe, where the butcher and the baker faced each other in almost rural intimacy, where pigeons and drop-outs lazed bucolically around the square, and where I could hear from far down rue Mouffetard the strains of an ebullient brass band.
How is it done? By a natural conservatism, perhaps a cautious view of change, and possibly not least of all by a serious acceptance of surprise as a constructive element of municipal style. The surprise indeed often seems as deliberate as everything else. The Métro is purposefully impregnated with variety, to dispel the sense of menace that other subways have; and when one morning I saw a small fire on the track down there, extinguished not with extinguishers (none of which could be made to work) but by a man jumping off the platform and stamping it out, I really thought it might have been specifically arranged for our distraction.
I helped a blind woman over a street-crossing near the Gare de Lyon. She looked particularly irritable, cross, and demanding, but though born and bred in the 12th Arrondissement, turned out to be diffidently gentle. It was a lesson to me not to misjudge the hard-mouthed, sharp-eyed, fast-shoving, middle-aged Parisian housewife, who may well be sweeter than she allows. I took the blind lady first to the post office, then to the pharmacy, and when I left her she said: “Now I give you back your liberty.”
Sometimes it seems to me that Paris is marking time. Emerging from a recent past without, not to put too fine a point upon it, all that much honour, it is girding itself for a future to which it already seems much better attuned than most of its peers. Perhaps the Centre Pompidou digital clock, ticking away the seconds towards the end of the century, is counting down for the city itself; perhaps the escalators, elevators, and walkways, which already move faster here than they do elsewhere in the world, are being imperceptibly speeded up, year by year, to accustom Parisians to the pace of the millennium. The ideas, it appears, are on hold—one hears of no successors to Existentialism or Structuralism—and French films, books and plays also seem to be holding their fire.
But then they are in the wrong language. That’s the underlying reason, I dare say, why Paris gives me this watching, waiting, plotting impression. The most obvious anomaly of the city today, the most obvious cause for civic neurosis, is the fact that the French language has lost its cachet. Except among captive cultures like the Gabonese, I would guess that Spanish, German, Russian, even Chinese, and Japanese, are all more in demand in the language classes of the world. Not to mention, of course, English. The Parisian complex about the English language must hit every stranger in the eye. Walking down the short arcade which connects the Centre Pompidou with the new Quartier de l’Horloge, I noted the following shop signs: Paris Basket, Tie Break, New York New York, Scoop, Blue Way, Award’s Academy, Yellow, Bubblegum, and Lady—all in 100 metres of Parisian shopping! The graffiti of Paris, if they are not of the mindless Manhattan sort which disfigure the Métro trains, frequently indulge themselves in Anglicisms such as Fuck Off Skinheads, Kill The Cops, or Crack Snack; as for Richard Branson’s Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Elysées, it is like a people’s temple, before whose alien gods all young Paris dances.
Nevertheless I still get the sensation that Paris may be stealing a march on us all. Cities do not think or conspire, of course, and one should not think of them anthropomorphically, but sometimes one senses that a profound historical instinct animates the spirit of a place, and I sense it about Paris now. I feel that it aspires to be, not the political capital, but the most resplendent and influential metropolis of the terrific new Europe. Figuratively, those skyscrapers are held at a distance only while the future they represent is assessed and prepared for. The Centre Pompidou, the Pei Pyramid, the Montparnasse Tower have been allowed in as one might permit double agents into the halls of chancery, and the plan that won the competition for the new Seine bridge is, I note, the most insidiously Modernist of the entries. Technically, Paris seems to me more ready than any other European capital for the opportunities of a 21st-century federal continent; only the language, only the magnificent language, preys on its mind, inhibits its manners, and breaks out in Franglais.
Wandering into Notre-Dame on a Sunday night, I found a choir and orchestra celestially performing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. The cathedral was full, a reverent multitude of young people sitting on the floor, if they could not get a seat in the nave, or simply milling about like me. It was magical. All Paris seemed to be there, singing its heart out or half-lost in the marvel of it all. When I discovered that the choir and orchestra came from Germany, and realized that half the listeners were as foreign as I was, it only seemed more magical still.
So I left Paris as I came, in an ambiguous frame of mind. More clearly than ever I realized it to be one member of the supreme metropolitan trinity, with New York and London, one of the three cities where anything can happen, anything can be found, anything can be done, everyone comes. “Drop a plumb-line into Paris,” Balzac said, “and you would never find bottom.” It is an impertinence even to try to gauge the condition or the intention of such a prodigy.
Yet at the end no one ever left Paris willingly. The city became a state of mind which you carried with you for the rest of your life: you interiorized your displacement, your deracination. Real exile begins when you no longer pine for “home,” when it has been lost forever, buried in the recesses of the psyche, and the only home you have is Memory.
—Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris
Yet whether it be out of historicism or out of the collective unconscious of my own people, the city still leaves me uneasy. Just as I think I have exorcized my prejudices, new ones materialize. I feel that Paris, though patently more clever than most of its peers, is not necessarily more wise. I feel that given the chance, more readily than most capitals it would impose its will upon the rest of us. It seems to me somehow too harmonious for our times, without its natural element of chaos. I miss the unpremeditated clash of styles and patterns, and of all the street musicians who entertained me during my visit, the ones that beguiled me most were an unkempt English rock group—somehow they seemed more spontaneously outrageous than the rest.
For it is a humourless city at heart, I cannot help feeling; grand, of course, beautiful, brilliant, inexhaustible, indestructible, in many ways incomparable, but short on natural fun or fantasy. Perhaps that’s why, when I drive by on the Périphérique, superstition keeps me out.
Welsh journalist, biographer, and novelist Jan Morris is the author of more than forty books. She is considered one of Britain’s foremost travel essayists and historians, and her trilogy on the British Empire, Pax Britannica, was hugely popular when released and remains an enduring work of literary history. She is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales and her novel, Last Letters from Hav, was a finalist for the Booker Prize. What she has called her final book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, was published in 2001 to great acclaim, and her first book, Coast to Coast: A Journey Across 1950s America, was recently reissued by Travelers’ Tales. She lives in Wales.
The Parisians have been very good at creating visual delights. They have managed it partly by cunningly enhancing what was there alread
y—the river especially—but partly by the most brilliant and inventive creation. One of their fertile techniques has been to use or if necessary invent forms that are not merely striking in themselves but have a double role: for example, things that can be seen through—the Arc de Triomphe or the Carrousel or the Porte Saint-Denis or the transparent Pei Pyramid—or seen around—the Vendôme column, the Concorde obelisk—or seen between—the long lines of clipped trees in the Palais Royal, the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg Gardens—or seen underneath—the pretty bridges, the great arch of the Eiffel Tower or the new Défense arch. I have seen no other city where such devices have been so widely and so skillfully deployed. It is this combination of imagination and ruthlessness that gives Paris its unique character.
—David Gentleman, David Gentleman’s Paris
PART TWO
SOME THINGS TO DO
LOREN RHOADS
The Empire of Death
Do you know what’s in store for you?
Un monstre sans raison aussi bien que sans yeux est la Divinité que l’on adore dans ces lieux on l’appelle la mort et son cruel empire s’étend également sur tout ce qui respire.
(A monster without reason and without eyes is the God one worships in those places where one recognizes death and his cruel empire extends equally over all who breathe.)
OSSUARY, FROM THE LATIN FOR BONES, MEANS A CONTAINER OR vault for the remains of the dead. A friend who’d lived in Paris had placed the Municipal Ossuary, the Paris Catacombs, on our must-see list. I wasn’t entirely convinced. As much as I loved the busy, funereal jumble of Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the Paris Catacombs would be an encounter with death of a more embodied nature. I’d never seen a defleshed human skull before, never confronted the harsh reality of our interior structures. Death had come and gone from Père-Lachaise; in the catacombs, death lingered. Despite my curiosity, I was in no hurry to look the grave in the eye—such eyes as it had.
However, Paris during the Gulf War was bitter cold and increasingly menacing. While my husband and I had heard from friends about the anti-American protests in Barcelona, the propriety of the International Herald Tribune had shielded us from the war’s reality. Several days into our trip, we stepped out of the medieval splendor of the Musée de Cluny to find police cars and paddy wagons lining Boulevard Saint Michel. The sidewalks stretched away, ominously vacant. Turning a corner to escape, I stopped short in front of the dripping muzzle of a water cannon. The police had tested it in anticipation of the protest march.
Mason and I decided to avoid the Left Bank for a while. Our solution was to go underground.
Heureux celui qui a toujours devant les yeux l’heure de sa mort et qui se dispose tous les jours à mourir.
(Happy are they who have always before their eyes the hour of death and who prepare all their days to die.)
For centuries, Christian philosophy taught that the soul was fundamental and the body mere dross, to be discarded. Simultaneously, the Church preached of the bodily resurrection. When the trumpet sounded on the final day, the dead would rise out of their graves to be judged. Bodiless spirits could not rise. Therefore, bodies could not be cremated or otherwise destroyed. They had to be buried, preferably in hallowed ground. Of course, such an interment required a donation to the church. Aristocrats and wealthy merchants might purchase coveted space inside the sanctuaries, but everyone else squeezed into the churchyards. The clergy were not eager to part with a guaranteed source of income by condoning burial in just any old place.
Unfortunately, the dead piled up faster than churches could be built.
The Cimetière des Innocents (near Les Halles) served as Paris’s chief graveyard since the Middle Ages. For over 500 years, corpses were laid cheek by jowl in 30-foot pits, then blanketed thinly with earth. Cadavers were stacked layer upon layer, until they filled the graves. An estimated 2,000 bodies were interred there each year. Five hundred times 2,000...my mind boggled.
The Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, glutted with corpses, inspired a theme in medieval art that found its highest expression in the woodcuts of Hans Holbein the Younger. The first known Danse Macabre was painted as a mural on the surrounding walls in 1424. The Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, depicted the equality of all humanity before Death. Rank, wealth, and privilege offered no protection. Death, personified as a gaunt, anonymous corpse, always led his chosen victim away. In one of the earliest Parisian illustrated books, woodcuts thought to have been based on the Holy Innocents’ murals show Death emasculated and naked, his abdomen yawning open upon shadows.
Insensé que vous êtes, vous promettez-vous de vivre longtemps, vous qui ne pouvez compter sur un seul jour.
(Fool that you are, you promise yourself to live a long time, you who are unable to count on a single day.)
Let the dead join the dance! Begin dancing when midnight sounds and the entire nave rocks with the strains of its mournful harmony. Black clouds fill the sky, owls fly above the ruins, the universe becomes filled with ghosts and demons, and funereal voices, moans, and sighs are heard. Then the tombs open a crack, skeletons with earth still clinging to their bones cast off their shrouds. They stand up, walk, and dance. Let the dead begin dancing! Leave your tombs, now that the hour has struck. Listen to the droning ring of the bells as they murmur, “Don’t stop!” Dance, now that you’re dead, now that life and misfortune have left your flesh! Have at it! There will be no tomorrow to your celebrations, for they will be as eternal as death, so dance! Rejoice in your oblivion. You’ll have no more cares or labors, since you no longer exist. No more misery for you in your nonbeing. Ah, my dead ones, dance!
—Gustave Flaubert, Early Writings, translated by Robert Griffin
The origins of the word catacomb are uncertain. Linguists suggest it comes from the Greek kata kumbas, which means near the low place. It’s unclear why this Greek phrase became attached to a district in Rome where, in the 2nd century A.D., Christians buried their dead. Now the word is applied to any underground burial place.
The catacombs of Paris began as a network of quarries beneath the city. They provided stone to rebuild Paris according to Baron Haussmann’s plan. After they’d been mined, the tunnels stood empty and unused.
Concurrent with the reconstruction of Paris in the 1780s, a movement gained momentum to clean out the old churchyards. The Revolution had loosened the grip of the Catholic Church in France. With Reason as the new philosophy, people questioned the Church’s system of mass graves.
Accounts of the period speak of pestilential hellholes, jammed with liquefying cadavers. One report claimed that the notorious Cimetière des Innocents broke through an adjoining wall to spill corpses into an apartment building. Fearing epidemics, the city fathers voted to excavate the Parisian graveyards.
Beginning at dusk, charnel pits around Paris were emptied out by bonfire light. It was impossible even to consider individualizing the remains. The bones, loaded respectfully onto carts, were followed to the underground quarry by priests chanting the funeral service.
In 1786, once the ossuary was full, the Archbishop of Paris consecrated the residues of approximately five million people. Among the now-anonymous dead were Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry; Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s girlfriend; alchemist, spy, and reputed immortal Saint Germain; the philosopher of the Enlightenment, Montessqieu; Mirabeau, who advocated constitutional monarchy and whose corpse was ejected from the Panthéon; Danton, who participated in storming the Bastille and was guillotined during the Reign of Terror; Robespierre, who engineered the Reign of Terror and became its prey; and numberless victims of the guillotine.
In 1874, the Municipal Ossuary opened to viewers, including Bismarck and Napoleon III.
Venez, gens du monde, venez dans ces demeures silencieuses, et votre âme alors tranquille sera frappée de la voix qui s’éleve de leur intérieur: “C’est ici le plus grand des maîtres, le Tombeau.”
(Come, people of the world, come into the silent resting places
and your tranquil soul will be struck by the voice that rises inside them: “This here is the greatest of masters, the tomb.”)
“Come, people of the world!” I imagined a barker calling. “Step right up. Here is the Greatest of Masters!” Who wouldn’t be tempted to pay the admission and take a look? The more I considered the exploration before me, the more my curiosity increased. What could possibly be down there?
A spiral staircase of stone wound down and down and down until it reached a path paved with dressed stone and edged with pebbles. The stone was a buttery yellow, warmed by bare light bulbs on the arcing ceiling. I couldn’t touch the sides of the tunnel when I stretched out my hands, but I didn’t reach up to measure the short distance overhead. A sign said we were twenty meters below the streets of Paris, deeper than the Métro. Thank goodness Paris isn’t prone to earthquakes.
My guidebook recommended keeping close to a tour group, as the tunnels stretch for miles. It related a cautionary tale about a Parisian who went downstairs to check his wine cellar and took a wrong turn. Seven years later, he was discovered, mummified.
Permanent Parisians, a guide to the dead in Paris, said there were no catacomb tours and you were on your own. It suggested you take a flashlight. I wondered if a ball of string was in order, too.
As we discussed the discrepancy, my husband turned a corner to find a large tour group blocking the tunnel ahead of us. The guide talked interminably in French about the composition of the rock, the excavation of the tunnels, the quarriers themselves. While the quarry is historically significant, in terms of the architecture of modern Paris, that wasn’t nearly so interesting as death.
Travelers' Tales Paris Page 10
