Getting Real in Paris

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.