Paris bulletin 2 2014

As I have said in earlier bulletins, it is quite possible for anyone who’s  reasonably fit to walk all the way  from the 18th arrondissement in the north of Paris to the far end of the 6^th in less than a couple of hours, even allowing for the slow pace of the Parisian flâneur. On the second day of March, a mild afternoon with a real promise of spring in the air, that was the walk I took.

I’d set out thinking I would go and see the recently opened exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson which is on at the Pompidou – (from now till July, open every day, except Tuesdays, until 23.00 hours).  One look at the queue and I saw I’d be standing about for hours before I got in. So I listened for a bit to the young woman who plays the didgeridoo on the parvis and then set off again, across the rue de Rivoli and over the brimming Seine onto the île de la Cité, whose riverside walkways were half-submerged by the relentless grey-brown flow. France has been wet too, although not as wet as southern England.

It was Sunday so the marché aux fleurs on the place Louis Lépine was shut but the marché aux oiseaux was in full chirrup, birds of every hue and size fluttering about in their tiny cages, some of the plumage so bright I wondered if they’d been dipped in dye like they do flowers these days, turning them horrible electric blues and greens as if the colours they come in are no longer vivid enough. They weren’t the only oddities. There was one cage containing a freakish rabbit with a face and ears like a cat but hopping about as a rabbit would do.

From there I make my way up the boulevard St Michel, and into rue Champollion – more queues, this time outside the cinemas in that little street. Out onto the place de la Sorbonne where I see that the hotel I occasionally used, way back in the 70s when working on the Collins-Robert dictionary, has risen from modest 2-star to 4-star. The boulevard is very different too, from what it was in those days. Apart from Joseph Gibert, it’s mainly cheap and not so cheap clothing and phone shops. Still, if you get away from the boulevard itself you can still find plenty of curiosities in this quartier, plenty  to conjure up ‘le vieux Paris’. You can side-step the main street by going through the garden at the side of the musée de Cluny and out into place Paul Painlevé. The garden is laid out à la médiévale, in chequered beds and has information panels in French and English explaining the religious, alimentary, medicinal purpose and significance of the flowers, vegetables and herbs being grown.

 

I’m about to head back down the rue St Jacques from the rue Soufflot but I see the dome of the Panthéon is encased in a carapace of scaffolding, wrapped around with bandages. Evidently this monument to France’s great men is being given a face-lift.

The Panthéon is one of a number of public buildings I’ve never set foot inside, perhaps partly because of what it proclaims in capitals over the main door – ‘aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante’. With the sole exception of Marie Curie, no Frenchwoman has been judged worthy of a place in there.  There was the beginnings of a debate in 2008 when various woman’s names were displayed on banners outside – Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, George Sand among them – but there has been nothing since and no-one seems much exercised by the fact, which is disconcerting - not to say disappointing if you think such honours matter - in a country which has égalité as one of its core republican values.

Anyway, as you might expect on a Parisian Sunday at the end of the half-term holiday, what’s going on outside the building is much more interesting than any number of caskets of the illustrious dead inside. The place du Panthéon is alive with flapping yellow and blue flags. A very large crowd of Ukrainians has gathered to protest at what is happening in Kiev and the Crimea. There’s lots of chanting, lots of speeches and cheering and a rousing performance of Ukraine’s national anthem. I look around, wondering which of the faces is the face of a spy, the face even of an agent provocateur. In the light of Putin’s response there must be some of that going on.

 

A little later, I’m heading homewards on the no. 38 bus when I see that the Palais de Justice is also decked out in blue and yellow. But it’s no Ukrainian flag this time. A gigantic ad for Apple’s latest gadget is stretched right across the whole of the Seine side of the building and in small print at the bottom:  ‘This advert is helping to finance the restoration of this building’.

So there you have it - the Panthéon and what it stands for is history, the building itself an empty hulk, a pile of stones holding a few old bones. The technocratic age has given us French politicians and bureaucrats in thrall to Big Money, indifferent to the image of an IPhone looming huge and ugly over the Seine in the heart of the city, apparently unconcerned about the use of private finance to help restore the fabric of the courts of justice, and, perhaps most chillingly, apparently incapable of understanding that explaining why it’s there doesn’t ‘make it right’.