February 7, 2014
People are always fussing about
Paris, about going there, and then hating other people for going there, for the
very good reason that it is at the very heart of the core of the center of the
culture of the West, with all that that means.
Because people also go there and are bitterly disappointed: tourists
from Japan experience this so frequently that it is a recognized category of
nervous breakdown, the opposite of Stendhal’s Syndrome. Paris has a large measure of humanity, both
literal and figurative, and we all know what humanity is capable of. Breathtaking vistas and grinding squalor
abide right across town from one another.
Even its recent history has been marked by bursts of mayhem on a large
scale, while providing endless series of small episodes giving delight. One weekend spent well there can nourish a
starved soul over long stretches of quotidian ugliness and thoughtlessness, but
it is what happens on the weekdays that really make you think.
There
was the weekend we arrived, when the last hurrah of Christmas was going up from
the Champs-Élysées, between Place de la Concorde and the Rond-Point: chalets full of choucroute and mulled wine or crêpes or gifts of all sorts,
roller-coasters, ever-changing lights up everywhere, from here to the Arc de
Triomphe. By the next weekend, most of
that was gone, but Friday night there was a gorgeous Vivaldi opera (who knew he
wrote so many, gathering dust in a dark library until now?), and on a Saturday
compounded of alternate sun and mist, a stroll along the Iles des Cygnes and
through a neighborhood marketplace, full of the fresh and fragrant makings for
many a Sunday-afternoon family feast.
There was also a visit to the first thing built in the International Style
– just a simple house – surrounded by other houses unique in their various
ways, and un-famous streets lined with liveable shops. Then a dash by Metro to the gritty Marché aux Puces to search for some
little ceramic favors baked into galettes
de rois. In the failing light we found our missing
kings and shepherd at last, while the keepers of the few shops still open
chatted together in the open air, arms crossed against the cold.
On
the next day, dull, cold, and dark, we found a genteel park where everyone not
cooking that Sunday feast had been sent to get an appetite and haul the family sapin to a monumental heap of Christmas
Trees Past. Scouts were trying out
wilderness maneuvers among the artificial ruins, or tracking down clues to a
scavenger hunt, and runners were circling, circling, circling the perimeter.
Next door in a private palais an
enormous bronze Buddha and lively figures of people and animals were pointed
out to eager children by fond parents.
Down the street, we sipped thé
Marco Polo in a corner café, watching the bundled-up families skip and
stroller by with their spent arbres de Noël,
the steam-punk cupola of Saint-Augustin church
looming behind them in the beige sky: heart-warming
and memorable, memorable, all memorable.
But
under the ground, in a vast and grimy transportation nexus, on a pedestrian
weekday, came the real lesson in humanity.
Every morning we descended into the Metro to catch the 1 line, that runs
like an arrow from La Défense to the Château de Vincennes. Every morning we changed at Châtelet - Les
Halles for the suburban RER-B line that would take us out to Orsay, and the Université-Paris-Sud. There is a long, long connection under the
ground between these two points, linked by a sloping, moving pedestrian walkway
and then a broad concourse edged in shops and interrupted by massive
cylindrical pylons. Suddenly we noticed
that while just the usual number of people were going our direction, the
walkway coming towards us was filled to capacity, people using even the
unsavory overflow walkway beside it.
As
we neared the end of our ramp we could see a wall of humanity into we would
debouch at any moment. There were
mercifully many fewer of us than of them;
we were one lane of traffic, sidling along the wall and into the little
shops to squeeze past an oncoming flood twenty abreast or more, all silent, all
moving grimly where we needed to go. It
was a long, long moment before we were rushing for the “B” train, and by then
we had deciphered the announcement on the intercom:
“Due to a fatal accident, the “A” line has
been closed between Nation and L’Etoile.”
Someone had chosen that morning to throw themselves in front of a
train, and the world’s largest funeral procession was moving in solemn, silent
order, to take the 1 line to work.
