Waking up in Paris

The sun finally peered over the edge of the smoky horizon at about 9:00 this morning; we were headed out of the city to Orsay. The sky at the zenith was that classic alto-cumulus of every Monet poppy-field you’ve ever seen, lit gold from beneath and backed by the most limpid of pale blues; the lower bits were swathed in shreds of dirty-grey stratus, with hierarchical mists in the valleys: the hither irregular ranks of houses and apartments clearer and darker, the far fading into their backdrop of high, bare poplars. The rime of hoarfrost edges every fallen plane-leaf and crusts the grass in the fields along the Yvette, in Orsay. In suburban yards, the pollarded plane trees send up their bare bouquets of thin canes against the sky, and along the roads the Lombardy poplars punctuate the voyage outward like downbeats in a dance. Suddenly I’ve lost the environmentalist’s fury with the destructive hand of man and love the pollarding, the smoke, the poplars, all the mark of man, and high up, the blue streaks of contrails, racing across the upper air. We’ll be gone soon enough from the surface of the earth: long live the present moment! (Now there’s an oxymoron for you!)

It seems that Rue Daguerre runs right from our doorstep (or nearly) to where the entrance to the RER and Metro stations appeared to us, this morning, directly under the street crossing at Avenue General LeClerc. This is the sort of epiphany that happens the second or third time one explores routes in a new place, and really, the quieter, more direct route was better yesterday, laden as we were with big rolling suitcases. But Rue Daguerre is a treasure! Lit from end to end with festive swags of lights (watch for a photo to appear soon) and truly – we saw today, now that the holiday is really over and life’s patterns return to normal here – the pedestrian-only block at the far end is like a street market in Rome: the shops there spill out onto the pavement in booths of fresh ravioli, of oysters and mussels, of cheeses and rolled roasts. The fragrance of brioches and baguettes are wafted into the street on every side: there are Viennoiseries and Boucheries on either side of the street all the way from our end to LeClerc, and already we wonder how to manage a visit to each, should we be brave enough to go in. Last night I braved the chain bakery Brioches Doree and bought an apple-spice gallette… today perhaps one of the unique places? Oh, and there is a toy-shop with Tintin figures at our end of the street, as if I need any more! But everyone needs one, am I right?

But how silent and cool the Parisians are, of course! The young women stalk along in their skin-tight black jeans and black boots, their hair uncovered and their coat collars turned up high, the young men in their huge scarves and turtlenecks…and on the train this morning, not a person was talking, except for a trio of blithe Italian students headed back home via Orly Airport, chatting away happily, Maria laughing her musical laugh for all to hear, and all of them speaking a wonderfully gutteral dialect, perhaps Venetian? It made me smile and think of the cacophony on your average Roman busful of students. Yes, Parisians are awfully northern European. But so much feels familiar here: there is a fragrance used in European cleansers or laundry soap or something that I remember from a scruffy apartment near La Sapienza in Rome which I also smell here, and those built-in wardrobes in the apartment, with their drawers like the drawers in doll-cases of yore, and their taller spaces for coats and suits where the doll should go. Yet the streets of Rome are more fragrant even than Rue Daguerre: I don’t catch the espresso on the cold morning air, or the wonderful diesel fumes of the buses roaring by, or the smell of wet pavement from the sluicing down of sidewalks every morning by shop-keepers, using the water from eternally-flowing street fountains. That pearly beauty of the sky and trees and pale houses is only Parisian, however; nothing Roman about that.