Thursday 19 November 2015

Paris bulletin 9 2015


I’ve been thinking a lot about words since last Friday, about the words in the communiqué by Daesh to begin with, and thereafter, all the words spoken and written since by politicians, journalists, witnesses, bystanders... It is not my purpose here to comment on Hollande’s use of the word ‘guerre’ or the debates in the media about ‘la déradicalisation des jeunes’. It seems to me it is as much in how we act in the aftermath of an atrocity as in how we speak that we show ourselves in our true colours.
If so I would say that Parisians so far have disproved all the usual things that are said about Parisians: they are rude, pushy, arrogant. I have seen so much warmth, so much willingness to talk, and a complete rejection – at least among the people who have spoken to me and I include complete strangers on buses and sitting next to me in the metro – of the simplistic rhetoric of ‘send them back where they came from’ – of refugees; ‘bomb them all to kingdom come’ - of Daesh. There has been a restraint and a thoughtfulness in those conversations that makes you hope that other, better ways of tackling the splits and inequalities in the fabric of French society may yet be found. I wish I could say the same for the horrible web of geo-political challenges in the Middle East, (some of those relics of last century’s wars and colonialist adventures, others a direct result of our present alliances with some of the most unsavoury regimes on the planet, Saudi Arabia, to mention only one) – or the people we’ve mandated to deal with those on our behalf.
I have been to a concert, to an exhibition and to my drawing class at the Louvre since Friday. The concert was in the Bouffes du Nord, our local theatre, on Monday. The nation was still in mourning but the decision was taken by its ‘gérant,  Olivier Poubelle, who is also gérant of le Bataclan, to let it go ahead. An act of defiance which was warmly welcomed, judging by the crowded rows of the auditorium.
Two pianos, four pieces, the third, ‘Tourbillon’, a startling, whirlwind of a piece - the word is apt - written by Bruno Mantovani and played with extraordinary passion by Jean-Francois Heisser and Jean-Frederic Neuburger, to whom it is dedicated. Lots of small children in the audience, lots of emotion. ‘Un grand partage’ which did us all good.
And last night I went to my weekly drawing class at the Louvre. Caroline, one of our two teachers, took us to the cour Marly to draw ‘l’amour’ since, as she said, that felt like the right thing to do after last Friday.
So we spent a little over two hours drawing and painting three croquis of those putti-like figures in marble. Here is the one I like most: l’Amour et l’Amitié by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle

                                                    

And afterwards, crossing the empty hall beneath the pyramid, out into a dark, warm night. The beam from the Eiffel Tower swung round, the half moon rode high in a clear sky and under the arcade leading to the rue de Rivoli, a trumpet sang out like a clarion.  

Wednesday 11 November 2015

Paris bulletin 8 2015

Paris is enjoying an exceptionally warm, dry autumn and the spikes in air pollution resulting from this have finally forced Minister of Ecology and the Environment, Ségolène Royal, to cede some of her powers to the Mairie de Paris and the Conseil Régional de l’Ile de France. Next time there should be a quicker application of transport and speed limit restrictions, although, as always seems to be the case with climate change and pollution, it’s a pathetically small step. Asthma beats obesity in France, in the health concerns league tables. Meanwhile François Hollande has been jetting round the world trailing clouds of CO2 in his wake, chatting up the unwilling and the sceptical before COP21, the global conference on climate change which takes place here from 30 November – 11 December. If that’s not depressing evidence of the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ approach, I don’t know what is.

I walked back from Ménilmontant in the dark on Sunday, along the boulevard de Belleville and de la Villette and across to the canal St Martin, the latter gleaming oily black, smooth as glass under the street lights. The leaves of the plane trees were lying in rusty drifts on the central allées. The benches were full of old people. Children were racing around on their trottinettes. The café terrasses were packed out. No one wanted to go indoors. If it wasn’t for the fallen leaves you’d have thought it was an evening in late spring.
It was about 7 o’clock so the prostitutes, mostly Asian in that arrondissement, had just come out. They were standing around in pairs, chatting and smoking. Our local working girls hang around at the carrefour of rue Marx Dormoy from midday on and they all seem to be black, very young and overweight. I doubt if they earn in a week what the ones in the 16th make in an evening. The women I passed on the avenue Kléber last week wouldn’t look out of place on a fashion catwalk: slim, shapely, glossy-haired, scantily but elegantly dressed.
There has been endless debate in France over the past two decades on the rights and wrongs of prostitution, on whether the ‘maisons closes’, or ‘maisons de tolérance’ as they used to be called – the officially regulated brothels – should be reopened (they were shut down in 1946).
There was a brief flurry of activity around a bill, brought in by the Socialists in 2011, to penalise the clients of prostitutes but it never made it into law. Similarly, despite occasional new calls for them, there are still no registered brothels. There are lots of vans however and a new type of maison close, brothels masquerading as massage parlours, hundreds of them in Paris alone. The vans are partly a result of Sarkozy’s infamous 2003 law (Loi pour la sécurité intérieure) which made ‘passive soliciting’ a criminal offence and forced a lot of the woman to work in the late hours of the night and in the back streets where they have less chance of being arrested but more of being attacked.
Sarkozy played his usual populist card, straightforwardly drawing a distinction between those he called France’s traditional ‘women of the night’, whom he described as ‘part of France’s cultural heritage’, and the women from eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, many of them illegally-trafficked migrants, who were out there earning for their pimps and their families. He wanted 'ces malheureuses filles étrangères’ (his exact words), picked up and sent back to where they’d come from, regardless of the circumstances that had led them to flee in the first place. You can still see sex vans parked up in the Bois and along some city side streets, grim, insanitary testimonies to the impact of the measures he introduced more than ten years ago.

                                 sex vans parked near the bois de Vincennes


Prostitution, libertinage, voyeurism – Paris has the lot. I don’t know if there are statistics showing the value to the city’s economy of the sex trade in all its multiple forms but it must be in the millions, probably only an infinitesimally small part of it ever reaching the taxman.
‘Splendeurs et misères, images de la prostitution, 1850 – 1910’ is the title of this autumn’s main exhibition at the musée d’Orsay. It ‘celebrates’ that nostalgic image of the Parisian prostitute, as painted, drawn and modelled by various, mainly nineteenth century, artists.
 

                                             Parisian prostitutes by Toulouse Lautrec

The city also has its musée de l’Erotisme on the boulevard de Clichy, as well as all the other clubs and entertainments Paris is known for: peep shows, high-end cabarets, like les Folies Bergères and Crazy Horse, strip-tease clubs like Pink Paradise and The Penthouse Club Paris. And then there are the swingers’ clubs, the most pretentious of which is probably Les Chandelles, (‘l’esprit glamour invite toujours aux charmes frivoles’ according to its website). Dress code there forbids flat shoes for women, short-sleeved shirts and white socks for men. A rival establishment, Le Mask, requires its clients to wear one but there doesn’t seem to be a prohibition on white socks.
 
Hotel

                                                             Hotel de la Paiva

 
statue
 
salle de bains
 
If your interests in libertinage are more historic and aesthetic than actual and practical, you can head to the l’Hôtel de la Païva, 25 Avenue des Champs Elysées, once the opulent residence of Thérèse Lachmann, alias la marquise de Païva, mid-nineteenth century Paris’s most (in)famous courtesan. (Check the website www.paris-capitale-historique.fr for available dates).
The hotel is a near-perfect illustration of Oscar Wilde’s bon mot: ‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’