Paris – sadness or ‘une fête’

Tags

bar, Beaujolais Nouveau, Ernest Hemingway, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Paris est une Fête

We arrived in Paris on a grey, rainy Friday one week after the terror attacks, with heavy hearts replacing the previous high anticipation.

Paris, my favorite city in the world since I first came here 30 years ago, was to be the icing on the cake as the last leg of our three months of travel through the UK, Italy and France before returning to Sydney after two and a half years away.

As we arrive on the TGV from Avignon I am angry that all the warmth, excitement and joy associated with Paris from my repeated trips here over the years now has a dark shadow of sadness and fear cast over it.
I am uncertain what the three days here will hold and how we will make the most of our time here.  

After checking the news and settling in to our hotel on the Quai which runs right along the beautiful Seine we venture out a short distance to a little bar in the same street which has half a dozen young men in good spirits enjoying absinthe and beer. I choose a Beaujolais Nouveau as it is that time of the year. (Beaujolais Nouveau Day was on Thursday night.)

A few more tables fill up, one with three young women drinking beer and fastidiously wrapping a present of a writing journal and pen for a friend.

A welcoming restaurant for a quiet dinner

After a couple of drinks we walk a little further along Quai des Grands Augustin and choose a small cheerfully decorated family run restaurant for dinner where we are the first diners for the night. In between serving the host sits with his wife and young son of around five years of age on the bar stools at the back. The boy is content to sit there talking with his parents as they have a glass of wine.

It is soon apparent we have Batman with us as the boy gets down from his chair nonchalantly, revealing his smart costume complete with bat wings and does a few batman-like dashes past the tables. The owners are joined by a couple of friends and open another bottle of wine. We enjoy a very good steak and a tarte à l’ananas.

Yesterday we awoke to a cold day. The temperature has dropped to 4 degrees with a maximum expected of 8. The sun is doing doing its best, but clouds are looming. We have breakfast a few streets up around the corner in Rue Dauphine where they are pleased to welcome us. Croissants, baguette with jam, omelette.

  

  

I am keen to be amongst what I most enjoy and associate with Paris – superlative art. We walk along the Seine headed for the Musée D’Orsay. Along the way we stop to look at the locks on the pont. There is a small line gradually building up outside the Musée as people go through security screening

     

Inside we go straight to the current exhibition Splendour and Misery. Pictures of Prostitution, 1850-1910. This is the first major show on the subject of prostitution, said by the Musée to review the way French and other artists, ‘fascinated by the people and places involved in prostitution, have constantly sought to find new pictorial resources for depicting the realities and fantasies it implied’.

This substantial exhibition looks at the role of this subject matter in the development of modern painting, sculpture, photography, and decorative arts as well as the social and cultural perspective. There are the well known Manet’s Olympia, Degas’s Absinthe, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Au Moulin Rouge and works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Munch and a host of other artists. Paintings of models, the fashionable demi-mondaine to the misery of the pierreuse (street walker), and also scenes inside the brothels. Consistent is the sadness and emptiness of the faces of the women portrayed, and the recurring motif of the glass of absinthe.

As much as we can admire the art there is a lasting impression of the tragedy of this life.

    

After lunch we soak up the Impressionist galleries. Half way through we receive a phone call from our friends in Brussels, who were due to meet us in Paris last night for dinner. While we were inside the Musée a state of high alert had been announced in Brussels, so they had to cancel their trip.

As we leave the Musée is now very busy as people have flocked as if to escape from the realities of current events into this beautiful environment. It is raining heavily as we get a taxi back to near our hotel and the bar we had been to the previous night. 

We talk with the young man serving us about the attacks, the drop in customers, and 70 per cent cancellation of tourists for the apartments above. He was in a bar 500 metres from the Batalan last Friday night. From the police sirens and social media he and the others learnt of the horror going on. They sheltered in an inner room of the bar for the duration.

He ducks outside to serve a man sitting there having a cigarette, and on his return tells us the man is a famous French actor, Claude Brasseur, and this is his local. There is a poster on the wall of his latest movie L’etudiant et Monsieur Henri. 

   

We go back to our room to tune into what is going on in Brussels, and also hear that sales are booming in Paris for Ernest Hemingway’s Paris est une Fête (English title – A Moveable Feast) which brings to life all that Paris represents – a centre of art, culture and joy. The book is being left as a tribute to those who died at the various attack sites, amongst the flowers and handwritten notes.

We have dinner at a small Savoyade restaurant off the Boulevard St Germaine. At the table nearby we can hear South Africans talking about the attacks and what they would do if they found themselves amidst one. Other conversations we over hear in French the word terreur regularly comes up.

We walk back smartly to the hotel glancing at the outline of the stately Notre Dame in the night sky but with no desire to linger. 

I look at a couple of sections of Hemingway’s book to see what captures the mood. In the first chapter: 

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife -second class -and the hotel where Verlaine had died, where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

However I prefer:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

The rain has stopped and the sun is shining this morning.