Posing in Paris, Part II

Into this world, have the 12 dollar coffee which is probably 13 what with the Euro and the exchange rate, make it a $2013 café au lait including the ticket, the hotel, the taxi to the plane, but who’s counting? And have it at the Louvre, sipped under the arcades of the Richelieu wing of the old fortress and Sun King palace only lately a museum, sip it at the charming café run by the Costes, Café Marly, on the side of the ancient edifice overstuffed with one of the world’s great art collections – a collection so large that it’s painful to enter, to be assaulted and forced to choose, a collection like a mugging and what you’ve lost is your self-respect, you surrender willingly, ashamed, it’s too much, all this beauty and pity, the history and the story of the history, I can’t win.

Which is why I recommend staying above ground at the Louvre—unless you have three days and a really good guide, in which case, by all means—by which I mean I recommend skipping the old Mona Lisa and having an au lait here where you can watch the crowds and think about the glass pyramid like an iceberg rising, implying, and argue 15 years later about whether it was a good decision or not, this strange modern glass pyramid plopped in the center of old masters. (What is old? What is mastered?) Though if it’s any good it cannot be mastered and definitely that’s why we keep coming back, which is another topic altogether. (Latest argument, just yesterday over tea, that there should have been just the one large pyramid, not the four other little guys scattered around. Fine.) Have the au lait, see them to and fro, know the art beneath you, the iceberg of it, in wait, unknowable, and around and, hell, have another au lait, another rectangle of frosty white sugar and breathing deep, deeply inhaling the air, the world, the hurry of it, the reasons they’re desperate. And then if you must, if you really must descend the escalator and buy and ticket and wamble your way to the da Vinci passed by dozens of da-Vinci-bound others, Americans especially asking directions to the da Vinci, and to a few other greatest hits, then getting to the da Vinci and accidentally delighting in the Virgin of the Rocks where the crowds are not so dense, at least you will be well fortified and no, you won’t regret it.

Either way you’re good.

Posing in Paris

Back to Paris, though it’s been a few months since I’ve actually been there. Because (I’m not alone here) we want to capture it, really grab it with palms and fingers, need to have something of it to bring home and keep with us always because it’s mine mine mine. From Hermes or the Monoprix.

Okay, that’s silly, but how to get a bite of it, a little taste? Maybe here, maybe with a cell phone picture. Maybe if I “capture” the girls staging photos of the Tour Eiffel, one thrusting her hand out and the other bending and moving so that in the photo the hand will appear to hold the spindly symbol of France, symbol of culture the world round. The hand is empty, natch. And there’s another gal watching, just taking the pose in. All of it working around a useless structure built in 1887 that shouldn’t really be the symbol it is and (maybe for that reason) absolutely carries the weight of meaning (culture, art, sexy Frenchness) for the world. If I haven’t taken my own posed pic in thirty years (now remembering the pix before the Tour as well as the boyfriend and I who posed in front of the leaning tower of Pisa as if we’d knocked it over—it was funny!) and if I snap these three tourist-girls now that I’m over 50—I am funny doubly removed, as I am capturing something no one else has captured.

Hmm. When I think of the Eiffel Tower, it’s impossible not to recall Roland Barthes’ smart essay, called “The Eiffel Tower,” which he begins by telling about Maupassant who frequently ate in the restaurant there despite not liking the food, saying it was the only place in Paris he could go where he didn’t have to see it. As if it were a relief. And it is a relief, surely. Even a tourist like me can see that.

“Then why do we visit the Eiffel Tower?” Barthes asks. “No doubt in order to participate in a dream of which it is (and this is its originality) much more the crystallizer than the true object.”

Aha. The dream of Paris, the world’s object-ness of it, and the endless crystal prism (a hall of mirrors, I suspect) is in itself a sort of achievement. (On another day I’ll write about my mother’s Francophilia.)

Which is pretty much where Barthes ends up in his essay, too. ‘Just as there is no Parisian glance which is not compelled to encounter it, there is no fantasy which fails, sooner or later, to acknowledge its form and to be nourished by it.’ – Roland Barthes

I shouldn’t have taken the picture, of course. It’s invasive, it’s rude, voyeuristic, hubristic. I took the picture. Of course. 

What I always say about Paris.

I always say that Paris is so capacious, so gorgeous, so generous, that it can be anyone’s town.

I like to say that Paris can be my Impressionism-loving and DeGaulle-leaning mother’s favorite place on earth and it can be wholly and properly beloved by the anarchist-squatter-Berliner I met there in the 80s. In Paris, there’s always room for actual great writers and for the smart-shopping college girls coming through semester after semester (some of whom are writers, by the bye) and for the art smugglers and the necessary hash dealers. What I mean is: there is enough in Paris for 27 million tourists every year to arrive and find some beauty, or rather to be found by beauty, to be electrocuted it, to let beauty do to them what beauty does to a human. Enough so that 27 million of them, of us, get Paris for ourselves, forever.

But secretly, I know and love the real Paris.

World’s coolest train station restaurant. Yes.

Le Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon, built in 1901, with 41 paintings, wood paneling with pounds and pounds of gilt, parquet floors, leather banquettes, white tablecloths and — no doubt — a little French food.

Needs no Instagramming. Medieval stained glass, baby.

Sainte Chapelle, Paris, France: And you know, in Paris, they had to wait (and wait) for the light, hoping for a wind to knock the clouds away, completely giving up in December and January, hanging in for plenty of miserable days in April, even May, but someone planned, expecting that the light would return, that there would be a sunny Sunday when it would gleam bright alchemy. Here is my oldest question: Is that religious faith or is it art? Is religious faith the same as the dream of sharing beauty? And where did it get them, the old craftsmen?

Alaia Show in Paris

More reverence here than at Sainte Chapelle, Notre Dame, and Sacre Coeur combined.