Paris bulletin 7 2013

There can be few nicer walks in the centre of Paris than the one that takes you along the right bank of the Seine, opposite the île St Louis. If you do it in the morning, say before 11 o’clock, you’ll probably have the pavements and walkways entirely to yourself - just the occasional old lady with her toutou and a sac à caca at the ready–these days Parisians are much better at cleaning up after their dogs.

The Seine on an autumn morning is a greenish-grey with oily highlights. What combination of paints, you might wonder, would convey that colour, that aqueous energy? The steady swirl of water is chopped up from time to time by bateaux mouches and small craft driven by men in uniform. The trees on both sides are a blend of gold and green. The air is soft, the colours are soft, even the smells are soft. It is good to be out.

I’ve started the day by visiting the exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville. It’s showing the artwork of over 160 ‘mentally ill and psychotic’ individuals. The exhibition’s title is l’Art Excentrique, a reference not so much to eccentricity in the way it’s normally understood but to the fact that, no matter how good these paintings, drawings, ceramics are, no matter how exuberant, original and strong, they are ‘ex-centre’ – i.e. they are outside the exclusive sphere of ‘art by real artists’. If you’re in Paris before the 9^th November this is one not to miss.

I’ve not come down at the Seine just for art and autumn colours. I’m also hoping to get some information from Batostar (‘we run the only electrically-powered leisure craft on the Seine’), about a boat booking but their office is shut so I retrace my steps and cross the river at the pont d’Arcole.  The bridge is jammed with tourists listening to the Buddy D band. Beyond it the hôpital Hôtel Dieu rears up, festooned with banners: ‘NON A LA FERMETURE DES URGENCES’ and similar messages. The senior management of AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris), is forging ahead with its plans to change how emergency healthcare services are delivered in central Paris. There have been sit-ins and petitions of course, but the beds are being emptied regardless. The man on the reception desk in the hospital tells me there are rumours that the building – a magnificent piece of 19^th century architecture with a vast inner courtyard, fine flower beds and colonnades which, by the way, anyone can visit – has already been eyed covetously by ‘some rich Qataris’. True or not, that’s what people believe these days.

                                                    
                                                            inner courtyard Hotel Dieu

A day or two ago I went  to see Agelastos Petra, la Pierre Triste, a film made by Filippos Koutsaftis who spent 12 years documenting the changes in the town of Eleusis  and recording the reminiscences of some of its older inhabitants. Eleusis used to be known for the Eleusisian Mysteries, dating back thousands of years. It was where Demeter, mother of Persephone, bade farewell to her daughter each year, Persephone’s descent into Hades coinciding with the onset of the dark, cold months of the year. Beneath the town lies layer upon layer of ancient history – graves, walls, whole streets, urns containing the bones of unidentified men and women, babies and soldiers. The bulldozers are indifferent to all that. They thrust through the earth, break apart walls built more than two thousand years ago, fill in wells that have watered orchards and olive groves for countless generations, smash sarcophagi that have lain quietly for centuries. The ancient ruins of Eleusis are being crushed and reburied, to make space for the god oil and its derivatives. Over the town hangs a pall of refinery smoke and dust and the sunsets are blood-red and lowering.

I know what is happening in Eleusis isn’t like what will happen at the Hôtel Dieu. No-one’s going to demolish the hospital any more than they’re going to demolish the église de Notre Dame. But there are other ways of destroying the past and if the Hôtel Dieu hospital does close it will be the first time since 652 that there is nothing of its kind in this part of Paris. A hospital is not a sacred space like a church, even though more lives have been saved by the people working in it than were ever saved by the intervention of the Virgin Mary in her cathedral across the way. What’s at issue here is not a dispute about the need for change in medical care but the suspicion that behind this change, as behind the raging diggers of Eleusis, is that other great god of the 21^st century: private profit, Mammon – call it what you like.

But there is a possibility of something better. L’exception française isn’t an empty figure. I think of how the city facilitated the change in use of the building at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers in my quartier, turning the HQ of the municipal pompes funèbres into one of the most exciting, effervescing art centres Paris has ever had. What they must do, I think as I make my way to the no. 38 bus, is turn all or part of the building into a ‘musée de la science médicale’. There it would be, right in the heart of tourist Paris, an ever-changing testimony to France’s role in the development of that science and a fitting counterpoint to another kind of tradition embodied in the great church only yards from its door.