Paris bulletin 6 2021

Where I live in Paris is the cheapest area for housing in the city. It’s not difficult to see why. Only between the hours of two and five at night does the street take a rest - no traffic except for the occasional taxi, no life except the rats scuttling round the empty bins, no noise except the far-off wail of an ambulance heading for the hospital on the boulevard. The bin lorries have cleared the daily mounds of rubbish and for a few hours the street is clean. 

                    morning sun and evening light over the église St Bernard

But by the time the sky begins to lighten again the first shop blinds are already up and the delivery vans are unloading. Sheets of cardboard and upturned boxes are laid out on the pavements near the crossroads, to be filled with belts, wallets, shoes and jeans for sale. By midday the cigarette sellers are back on their pitches alongside the men selling lentils, dumplings and pancakes in foil trays, roasted corn or peanuts, herbs and fresh fruit. By early evening the crowds are so dense that if you’re in a hurry it’s simpler to step off the pavement and walk along the street itself. The wide boulevards and stone monuments, the parks and the further-out havens of bourgeois tranquillity seem as remote and unreal as the Pacific islands. 

Cherry and apple tarts in a patisserie and Alexander Calder's blazing dragon (exhibit at the Festival International de l'Art Contemporain), all taken on the place Vendôme

On a map of the city the quartier is a narrow triangle, a tangle of railway lines, bridges, streets and squares squeezed between the gare de l’Est and the gare du Nord. It is home to some of the city’s poorest, most ethnically diverse populations. Poverty means beggars and we have plenty of those. Poverty is why so much business is done in a hustle on the street and why so many have to find a space to eat their only hot meal of the day out of a foil tray. Poverty doesn’t have to mean an oppressive police presence but here it usually does. On the plus sides, and there are several, like most poor districts in a rich city, there’s a vitality that you never find in the quartiers huppés like the 7^th or 16^th arrondissements: tiny jardins ephémères, hens clucking behind a fence on a patch of waste ground by the boulevard Barbès, piles of ginger, plantain, okra, renewed every day in steep pyramids outside the food shops, bolts of bright fabric stacked to the roof in the sweatshops along the back streets. But you see the strain too:  the worn grass in the too few parks, the graffiti and the general shabbiness, the tired faces and broken bodies. 

hat and gloves lying on the pavement outside the Gare de l'Est

I have often written about the refugees and migrants who continue to congregate in this part of town and what some of the more fortunate, or the less precarious, do to help them, with food, shelter and advice. Against at times enormous odds the volunteers in the p’tits dejs solidaires have continued to keep the breakfasts going without a break. For months this year, while I was in Scotland, the collectif was forced to abandon its established site in the cour du Maroc and go back to serving the breakfasts on the street. The reason for this? A punitive and misguided campaign against the down-and-outs and drug addicts which resulted in the mairie of the 18^th arrondissement keeping the gates into the park locked until 10 a.m. Try spending a night in a sleeping bag on the street and then stand in a queue to get a sandwich and a warm drink on a stretch of narrow pavement… 

It takes real determination, real conviction, to keep going in the face of the indifference of the politicians and the casual hostility of the police but to manage to do more than simply ‘keep going’ is little short of miraculous. However, that is what happened this spring. The first issue of La Distrib, the magazine of the collectif, came out in May. 

Now issue no.2 is taking shape to be ready for distribution in early December. There are plans to put a link on the p’tits dejs Facebook site to make it available it to a wider readership. It brings together words and images by migrants and asylum-seekers, volunteers and local shop-keepers.

 

Which brings me by a round-about route to the huge exhibition currently running in the Musée d’Art Moderne on the work and thinking of artists and teachers, Anni and Josef Albers, who first met in the Bauhaus in the heyday of that institution. 

It is among the best exhibitions I have seen in a very long time - on until 9th January. 

 

'We investigate and worry and analyse and forget that the new comes about through exuberance not through a defined deficiency. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting...’  Anni Albers. 

 

La Distrib is both a record and a celebration of that spirit and a tool to broadcast it more widely.

 

Paris bulletin 5 2021

 Here I am again, back in Paris after an interval of 5 months in mostly sunny Scotland. I am told Paris has had un été pourri (a lousy summer) so I look back gratefully on the long hot days in the Dumfriesshire countryside, with short spells in Kilmartin and on the Mull of Kintyre.  

One thing is for sure – wet summer or not, Paris has thrown off its battened-down feel. The restaurants are full and cafes have spread well beyond their terrasses into other previously unclaimed pavement spaces. Masks and the regulation ‘passe sanitaire’ are constant reminders that covid hasn’t gone away but the talk is more about the climate crisis, the coming presidential election, the grim evidence of abuse within the Catholic Church and the on-going poster campaign by ‘les colleuses’ to draw attention to the deaths of women at the hands of their husbands and partners. 

 

It’s a lot to take in after such a long absence. To begin with all I can manage is to dash out to the shops and back in again. There is just too much going on right outside the door downstairs – and I don’t mean the one onto the street. I get back as Paris Fashion Week is underway. The immense hangar at the back of the courtyard is hosting Raf Simons. The music thuds out and the courtyard sprouts a gazebo which is full of young people speaking several different languages, drinking tiny cups of black coffee and hanging out. 

 

When I get through this phase and venture out properly I am struck first by the hectic swirl on the rue Marx Dormoy and then by the numbers of people squatting to sell servings of hot food, mostly rice, dumplings, lentils and crepes, from makeshift containers. There must be twice as many as when I left at the end of April and they aren’t short of customers. Add them to the women selling roasted corn out of shopping trolleys, the wobbly stalls of fresh fruit and herbs, the ever-present crowds of young cigarette-sellers and there’s not a lot of space left for the ordinary pedestrian to go about his or her business. By the mid-evening when the street is quiet again the pavement is littered with sheets of cardboard and upturned boxes where the selling went on.  

 

I sign up for a drawing class with Pierre-Louis who taught us remotely throughout the pandemic once the musée d’Orsay was closed, and for an atelier d’aquarelle with Olivier Figueroa from the same collectif, ‘d’un atelier à l’autre’. 

Arion assis sur le dauphin - Ernest Hiolle

The watercolour class takes place in a studio on the rue de l’Arc de Triomphe just off the Avenue Carnot at Etoile. That is how I happen to see the Christo-Jeanne-Claude wrapped Arc de Triomphe. When I climb out of the metro, there it is rearing up in the night, like a high-shouldered, white-shrouded spectre with the cars whizzing roundabout it like so many insects. 

 

By the time I go to the second class a week later the wrappings are off again, except in the archway itself. This in itself is remarkable – that such huge effort and expense should be expended for just a few days’ exhibition. The wrappings have gone and they won’t be back but the record is preserved in hundreds of thousands of videos and photos on peoples’ phones, mine included. 

 

There is too much of every type of cultural activity as the Festival d’Automne gets underway. To give you a flavour, here’s a tiny sample of the art exhibitions randomly chosen: Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine at the musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme (until 30/10); Botticelli artiste et designer in the musée Jacquemart-André (from 9/09); Chaim Soutine/Willem de Kooning, la peinture incarnée; David Hockney, a year in Normandie, both of those in the musée de l’Orangerie; Henri Cartier-Bresson ‘Revoir Paris’ in the restored and enlarged musée Carnavalet  (until 31/10). Not forgetting the Louvre of course: Paris – Athènes, the birth of modern Greece, on until mid-February next year, so plenty of time that for that one. 

 

In the midst of these cultural excesses, I find my thoughts going back to a 2018 exhibition, work by Sheila Hicks in the Centre Pompidou which I wrote about a long while back. 

It’s the material she uses that does it: wool, wrapped or knitted, woven or draped, in nets and webs; wool sheared off all kinds of animals, spun and dyed; wool for blankets, wool to wear for warmth, or simply to look at and admire. In early July I spent three perfect days working alongside Louise Oppenheimer in her studio in Kilmartin where she turns threads into woven landscapes of extraordinary complexity and beauty. 

                                          

That could be the link, or perhaps it’s simply because the temperature is gradually dropping in the evenings. Les tricoteuses solidaires, a far-flung group pf women, have begun knitting hats again for those who come to the p’tits dejs solidaires breakfasts. Woolly hats aren’t needed yet but they will be.  

Paris bulletin 4 2021

In the three weeks between my first and second covid vaccinations the chestnut trees have burst into leaf, followed in turn by the plane trees, dropping their dusty brown flowers on the pavements like confetti. Now if you could take the escalators up the outside of the Centre Pompidou – something none of us will be doing for some years to come – you would see the city laid out in patterns of grey and green: fresh, frothy April green breaking the lines of the zinc roofs and the stone walls.  

Sunny days bring everyone out, confinement or not. Grandparents are everywhere. The unsung carers of the first, second and now third lockdowns can be seen pushing buggies, keeping an eye on little people on scooters and skateboards, commiserating with each other from behind their masks and there is plenty to commiserate about. Young people cluster on the banks of the Seine and the canals like flocks of migrant birds; the bars and cafes are doing good takeaway business even though their terrasses remain closed. ‘New life’ is surging up and out everywhere, unstoppable and vigorous despite the restrictions. 

                                                      happy hammocking on the canal

I am vaccinated in one of the centres in the 6^th arrondissement so, once I have sat out the required 15 minutes post-jab, I head towards the jardin du Luxembourg. At the English end of the garden I step into a world of blossom and scent. 

                                                                        Paul Verlaine

                                                                     Frédéric Chopin

The tables by the tennis courts are full of old men playing chess and chequers and further in, at the very centre, children are leaning out over the water, wielding sticks to poke the toy boats backwards and forwards across the pond, the boats bobbing about above the fish and alongside the ducks.

 

Mobile phones are everywhere but there are books as well and people are stretched out on chairs, like cats soaking up the warmth. 

I am in no hurry to catch a bus back to the hurly-burly of my street so I make my way up the rue Soufflot towards the Panthéon. But my goal is not the Panthéon – it can’t be because like all public buildings, it is shut at present. I am paying a visit to another church, these being open to all comers although most of them lie empty. This time it is St Etienne du Mont, the church on the far corner of the place du Panthéon, a site which has been built on for worship since the early 6^th century. Nothing of those very early churches now remains, although you can see the medieval Tour Clovis sticking up on the right in the confines of the lycée Henri 1V.

 

The church is perhaps best known as the final resting place of Ste Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, despite the fact that nothing except one small piece of her ankle bone has been kept there for some time now. During the Revolution her bones were burnt on the place de Grève and thrown into the Seine - or maybe the sewers, no one’s quite sure. All that remains is the tombstone on which the saint is reputed to have lain. It is housed in an elaborate sarcophagus, surrounded by offerings, candles and prayers of gratitude and supplication. 

 

‘Ste Geneviève, nous vous confions notre fils. Qu’il retrouve le gout de travailler et la pratique de la foi.’ (Ste Genevieve, bless our son. Help him get a taste for hard work  and bring him back to God.)

 

‘Ste Geneviève, je viens te supplier. Aide-moi encore. Donne-moi la grâce de pouvoir jeuner et prié. S’il te plait bénis-moi pour que Madame Sophie touche son cheque.’ (Ste Genevieve, please help me once more. Give me the strength to fast and pray. Bless me and let Madame Sophie get her cheque).

 

‘Ste Geneviève, aide-moi à avoir mes papiers français.’ (Ste Genevieve, please help me get my French papers). 

 

The church is beautiful, and strange in its layout. Its most dramatic feature is the two intricately carved stone spiral staircases either side of the rood screen 

and if you turn your back on that, the oldest and most magnificent organ case in Paris, a chef d’oeuvre built in 1630 by Jean Buron. 

But for me for me nothing comes close to what is hidden away in the back of the church, if you follow the signs to the Sacristy. There you can see up close - in a way you never can, given the how high above your head most stained glass is in a church - some of the most beautiful stained glass of the 16th and early 17^th century.  A whole host of biblical stories right there at eye level, like an oversized child’s picture book done out in technicolour.

 

We are eleven days into Ramadan. By Eid al-Fitr on 13 May I should be in Scotland for a month or two but tonight the Paris sky is clear and above the empty streets the moon is a bright curve in the darkness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paris bulletin 3 2021

 On Friday 19^th March an email arrived from la Louve, the cooperative supermarket of which I am a member. In the afternoon of the same day I walked along to Rue des Poissonniers to do an hour and half on one of the cash desks until, at a little before 6 o’clock, the curfew hour, I shouldered my backpack and started for home. The email was to tell us that from Saturday morning, for the next 4 weeks the supermarket would once again rely in part on ‘la coopération spontanée’, which is to say people lending a hand when they do their shopping: ‘Replenish the shelves with products you see waiting to be transferred from trolleys, fold the cardboard boxes for recycling, removing the sticky tape as you do, clean the handles of baskets and trolleys with the gel provided….’ Such small contributions to the collective effort help to keep the supermarket in business.  

As you may know, the experience of shopping as a coopérateur/trice is very different from doing your bog-standard supermarket shop. For instance, although I am not yet confident on the checkout desk I don’t need to worry. If I hit a problem it is perfectly possible that the customer will come round to my side of the desk and show me how to sort things out. I think all shopping should be like that but in the covid era that sort of contact is more precious than ever.

 

I have been out and about as usual since my last bulletin, once to the south of the city as far as the 13^th arrondissement, twice to the Tuilleries gardens and other times, to the Marais. The 13th arrondissement of Paris is, along with Belleville, where most Chinese, Vietnamese and Laotians live: a quartier of high-rise buildings and huge Chinese supermarkets, busy even in the lockdown. My route from home took me to the gare de Lyon then, then on the driverless line 14 metro to the terminal at les Olympiades. I was not there to shop though but to draw hands which

I did with other students, in a distanced way, on the 9^th floor of a modern building looking out on flat roofs and the front of the Tang Frères supermarket. 

 

One of the trips to the Tuilleries was also about drawing hands. 

The other was to admire, from behind the temporary wire fencing, the 92 elms which the Paris parks department has planted down the main avenue leading from the Concorde towards the Louvre. The elm was one of the commonest trees in Paris parks until Dutch elm disease (la graphiose) destroyed most of them. The 92 new trees are a new disease-resistant variant ulmus minor Vada ‘Wanoux’. Their planting will narrow the avenue and make it shadier by pushing ‘le grand couvert’ created by the chestnut trees, out into the dusty open space of the avenue. 

This is all part of the plan to recreate the gardens as André Le Nôtre, landscape gardener to Louis XIV, originally envisaged them. 

If hot chocolate is your thing, you can nip across the road to Angélina’s, one of the cafes that is in every tourist guide to Paris - only open for takeaways at present of course. Carry your gobelet of extremely rich hot chocolate back over the road and drink it by the statues and the budding chestnuts. 

 

My trips into the Marais were mostly to visit private galleries. Unlike the public ones they remain open, because they are commercial spaces as well as cultural ones. (this is just one example of the inconsistencies and stupidities of some of the virus rules). Christian Boltanski should have had his exhibition, Après, at the Pompidou but that being shut, it transferred to one of the galleries run by Marion Goodman on the rue du Temple. It has now closed but until mid-March offered a timely reminder of what we are living through. He says the following:

 

“A very horrible but interesting thing has occurred since covid is here, which is that death is no longer hidden …because of this disease we are talking about death as something that is around us and that is present.’ 

 

The ground floor of that exhibition contained a number of randomly placed hospital trolleys, each piled high with bundles of white linen. 

On the walls transient images of faces flickered and faded – too fast almost to register consciously. 

In the basement huge screens projected images of nature and, as on the ground floor, other images of people rose briefly to the surface for the viewer, only to fade again. 

Boltanski was interviewed on Laure Adler’s’ Heure Bleue not so long ago (every Monday - Thursday, 8 pm France Inter). The pair of them conducted the whole interview in the dark, at his request. He is definitely the man for the moment we are living through. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paris bulletin 2 2021

Most Mondays I take a ride on the metro to a part of Paris I used to live in, long ago. I walk from Montparnasse-Bienvenue station down the boulevard, crossing both the very long rue de Vaugirard and the more interesting rue du Cherche-Midi. Later in the afternoon heading back to the north of the city I go on foot along the rue de Sèvres, across the boulevard Raspail by the Hotel Lutétia and the boulevard St Germain by the church and through the rue Bonaparte to the Seine, where I catch the 39 bus at the pont du Carrousel. 

The Lutétia was for a long while the only luxury hotel on the Left Bank and, as a result of its location right by St Germain, hosted all the big names of the day inside its Art Nouveau walls: Josephine Baker, Picasso, Peggy Guggenheim and many others. The Nazi Abwehr (counter-espionage) took it over during the Occupation, entertaining some of France’s more notorious collaborators, but after the war De Gaulle, who spent one night there on his way to London, turned it into a centre for displaced persons. At which point it redeemed its reputation to some extent by helping reunite thousands of ex-concentration camp prisoners with their families. It has changed hands several time since, had an extensive make-over in 2018 and is once again entertaining the cultural elite and the rich. Some of them maintain personal suites on the upper floors, decorated to their taste. I don’t think there’s a helipad on the roof but I could be wrong. 

 

I sometimes call in at the Grande Epicerie across from the hotel on the other side of the jardin Boucicaut. The last time I was there in late January the British shelves were empty apart from a line of Heinz baked beans and a few tins of Birds powered custard. It felt like we were back in the years immediately following the war, whereas the war has really only just begun, as Brexit takes down one UK business after another. (The empty shelves syndrome is manifest in the M&S food outlets too. For a while the one in Châtelet had packets of peanuts in the cold cabinets – a manager with a sense of humour? Last week  those had gone and there was only a forlorn emptiness and one lonely man on the checkouts).

 

The rue de Sèvres has gone by many names since it was first recorded as a thoroughfare in the 13^th century. Then it was the Chemin de la Maladrerie, named thus because there was a leper hospital on the site of the present-day jardin Boucicaut. From one end of the street to the other you can trace some of the great moments of French history. Catholic institutions and churches abound and the hôpital Laennec, now turned into private apartments and a student resident, reminds us of the role French doctors once played in advancing medical science. Laennec was the inventor of the stethoscope. No 17 housed Marc Bloch, the French historian and Resistance fighter for a while. He was shot by the Nazis in the closing months of the war.

The Congregation of the Mission is more fully described as ‘the Society of Apostolic Life of Pontifical Right (for Men)’. The clue is in the word apostolic. Converting the poor to Christianity - Evangelizare pauperibus misit me, (their motto), has been their mission since the society was founded by Saint Vincent de Paul in the early 17^th century. 

The chapel on the rue de Sèvres (at no. 97) is hidden behind a modest door onto the street. Step over the threshold though, let the padded door swing shut behind you and you find yourself inside something like an oversized jewellery box, a sumptuously gilded world, as remote as it is possible to be from the favelas and slums where the Lazaristes are most active. 

 

The congregation boasts at least two other saints beside Vincent himself – both of them have their niches in the chapel and their prayers of gratitude on the walls. Père Clet was strangled in China in the 18^th century, Jean-Gabriel Perboyre crucified in the same country a century later.

Once across the boulevard St Germain you are into the small streets leading back from the river. This small quartier, sometimes called ‘le carré des arts’, is all art galleries, fashion houses where entry is by appointment only and nothing in the window has a price tag, Russian dolls and one fine independent bookshop, with sheep in attendance  And on the left is l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, closed to the public during the pandemic. 

 

The nearly empty 39 bus comes rattling along the rue Bonaparte, swings round onto the quai, picks me and carries me back to my quartier. No Hermès outlet here, no silk pyjamas at 1500 euros a pop, no sequin-spangled tutus, but live music and dancing with the migrants, 

nesting boxes in the trees and home-made soup in the pot.