Paris bulletin 4 2008

 

Paris was drenched with hail yesterday afternoon but the underlying trend is towards the light and warmth of April. The chestnuts are in leaf and the jasmine, magnolias and quinces are full of flower.

We have been down twice to the Tuillerie Gardens at the Place de la Concorde. There is a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois on at the Centre Pompidou but her giant bronze spider, which she calls ‘Mother’, is too big to fit into that space so it’s been parked outside under a mature elm at the far end of the Tuilleries, near the Arc de Triomphe de la Carousel. I saw ‘Mother’ a couple of years ago when it was on show in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern. The sky and the grandeur of the surrounding space dwarfs it here but it’s still a wonderful location for it, brooding under the tree with its great egg sack hanging ponderously below.

At the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), where I now go twice a week for my Arabic class – gratuit and of a very high standard  - there is an endless provision of lectures and colloques on every imaginable subject, all open to the public ‘dans la limite des places disponibles’ – i.e. space is the only constraint. The cost of living has soared in France but fortunately some things are still free and generously shared.

So I went along today to listen to a young woman talk about the development of the short story in the Yemen; plenty of Arabic being spoken as each contribution was translated either into or out of Arabic. I’m getting the hang of the structure of the language at last, but boy do I need some more vocabulary!

I pass the Pantheon to get to the rue d’Ulm where the ENS is. Beautiful soft drapes of green and yellow were in the process of being hung between the pillars of that monument to France’s ‘grands hommes’. A hour and a half later those were twisting about in the cold March wind, there were a dozen bright yellow benches parked on the parvis and, on the flat space behind the wrought-iron fence, turf had been laid. On the turf and all up the steps were hundreds of pots full of jonquils and primulae set out in neat rows. The Marie Curie Institute is just opposite the ENS and France is justifiably proud of its position as a world leader in the treatment of cancers. The jonquils etc are on sale from now on until the end of the Easter weekend.

Easter’s not Easter without a chocolate bunny or two and France seems to do chocolate bunnies like they do baguettes these days. Maybe it’s Sarkozy taking a leaf out of Marie Antoinette’s book: not ‘let them eat cake!’ but ‘que ces pauvres cons mangent du chocolat!’