Paris bulletin 13 2009

Le Cirque d’Hiver is on the boulevard Beaumarchais,  about halfway between République and Bastille, a fine stone building, erected under Louis-Napoleon and even more fabulous – red and gold in abundance - inside than out. Since 1934 it has been run continuously by les quatre frères Bouglione and their various progeny.

It was there under that very roof that in 1859 one Jules Léotard, a Toulousain by birth, dazzled the audience with the first-ever display of the flying trapeze. The garment you put on to do your keep-fit or dance classes is named after him and was made to his specifications – in order to give the audience the best view possible of his ‘fine athletic musculature’. The song,

‘He flies through the air with the greatest of ease

That daring young man on the flying trapeze’

was also written for and about him, by an Englishman George Leybourne in 1867. If you think I’m making any of this up just have a look in that marvellous compendium of universal knowledge that is Wikipedia.  

I’d quite forgotten the particular magic of the circus, the combination of acts of extraordinary skill and agility where there is no tricherie at all, just a net (sometimes) and strength and endless practise, and on the other the tomfoolery of the clowns where nothing is ever as it seems to be, nothing ever quite works – until the end when they launch at last into music or dance or juggling as good as the best of them.

I’ve been stoking up on the culture in preparation for my departure from Paris for Christmas. There was the Soulages exhibition at the Pompidou (closed off and on recently like several other national musées because of strikes about planned reductions in staffing). There was ’11 and 12’ at the Bouffes du Nord, a Peter Brook-directed play using the work of Amadou Ampâté Bâ, a Malian ethnologist and writer and a follower of the Sufi sage Tierno Bokar, a couple of free lunch-time concerts at the Bastille (‘les jeudis de Bastille’). And mostly recently an evening in the company of Umberto Eco and sundry local poets out at Canal 93 in Bobigny.

This was the last event in a series run by the Louvre in partnership with Canal 93 on Eco’s chosen theme (also the subject of his latest book) ‘le vertige de la liste’. Reflecting on the sinister dimension of the modern list-making tendency (surveillance, disqualifying, elimination…) Eco had some interesting comments to make about the management of knowledge in a world where even something as anodyne as paying for a train ticket with a credit card can be added to the sum of what is known about you. If we can’t stop it happening maybe we can take some comfort from the ultimately self-defeating scale of it all – (cf. the Google search engine I used ten minutes ago to look up the Cirque d’Hiver – 266,000 results in 0.14 seconds…)

This last bulletin of the year can’t end without a mention of the glories of the Paris Christmas lights. Last Sunday in the late afternoon, as the light was fading out of a sky that had finally cleared of clouds and rain, I caught the 42 bus as far as Alma Marceau. You get the full works that way, along the boulevard Haussman, past Galeries Lafayette, round the Madeleine, down the rue Royale, and onto Concorde. Avenue Montaigne where I got off, leads along to the Champs Elysees. It’s not gone with the general trend for blue and white, instead the trees twinkle with fragile red points. This is a street where all the great names of la haute couture hang out: Chanel, Ungaro, Dior, Dolce et Gabana, Vuitton, Gucci, Rech.

 

 

 

Dior has a children’s outlet next door to the main shop. In one window two little mannequins turn endlessly on their plinths, the figure of a girl aged about four, dressed in a low-backed black silk chiffon party frock, with a fabulous frou-frou train, (a grey fur wrap draped over an adjacent chair). Next to her a little boy of about the same age, in a tuxedo and black patent shoes. In the other window, which looks into the baby department there’s an ours en peluche (fluffy bear) for 95 euros, a musical box for 100 and a pair of tiny red shoes with a glittering D on the front for the same price. The dress is what I think is called ‘a statement piece’. I tried but failed, to imagine a four year-old playing musical bumps or even pass the parcel in it.

 

Cheek by jowl with all this sort-of exclusivity is the main thoroughfare of the Champs Elysees, mud on the churned-up pavement, roast chestnuts, hot-dogs, crêpes, sucre cannelle, frites, the lights cascading like diamonds through the trees above your head, fairground rides for the kids and in the distance over the far side of Concorde, the grande roue (the Ferris wheel), swirling silver and blue. All that was missing was the fairy godmother.  She was not about but as I crossed Concorde I did see her baguette magique. The clock struck six and for five minutes the Eiffel Tower burst into sparkling life. Who needs Disneyland I thought, when you’ve got the whole of Paris laid out like a fairyland, all yours for the price of a bus ticket?

 

Joyeuses fêtes and best wishes for 2010.