This time last
year I was in southern California, under skies about as blue and soft as those
we have been enjoying in Paris this last while. I recall marvelling at the expenditure of effort and money on all things
Hallowe’en – front steps lined with pumpkin lanterns, cauldrons, black cats;
witches and skeletons hanging off garage doors and basketball hoops; yards and
yards of petro-chemical spider webbery wrapped shroudlike round bushes and hedges. And all those Hallowe’en pop-up
shops selling tat, some of it, like the life-size programmable Cerberus dogs I
saw in one, costing in the hundreds of dollars.
There is stuff of that kind to
buy in Paris too but the world does not turn orange and black as I felt last
year and whenever I am back in the UK in late October. Le Jour des Morts, All
Souls’ Day, 1st November is an important day in the calendar
though, the one day of the year when even the least inclined will visit cemeteries to pull weeds from a grave, fill a pot with flowers, leave some
chrysanthemums.
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| a typical front yard in a southern Californian home, week of 23 October 2016 |
Since my last
bulletin the Paris Nuit Blanche has been and gone, new exhibitions have opened
and one or two have closed again. Gaugin, l’Alchimiste opened at the Grand Palais on
11 October and will run right through almost to the end of January. Anders Zorn
is on at the Petit Palais and if you get your skates on you can still just
catch the Derain, Balthus and Giacometti, une amitié artistique at the Musée
d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris (ends 29 October).
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| Giacometti |
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| Derain |
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| Balthus |
Seeing how fine
the weather has been and that these days of golden leaves and pink sunsets will
not last much longer I have been making it my business to get out of Paris at
least one day a week, to explore the further reaches of the Ile de France on
the transilien network. So far I have only done two of my planned routes. The
first was to Meaux, better known to many for its cheese (brie de Meaux), than
for its church. But the cathedral is very fine and so is the bishop’s palace
adjacent to it. You take a train from the Gare de l’Est and before too long you
follow the meanders of the river Marne. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627 – 1704)
was bishop there for 23 years, Bossuet who believed in the divine right of
kings and the wrongness of Protestantism and devoted much of his career to
writing and preaching on those topics. He has a gi-normous statue inside the
church and he’s buried there.
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| One of two huge Bossuet statues in the Cathédrale St-Etienne, Meaux |
My second outing
was to Dourdan, at the far end of the line D of the RER, a longer and less
interesting train-ride, although you do run along side the Orge, another
tributary of the Seine, for a short while. The town is quaint, tidy and has an
ancient château fort, a free-standing donjon which you can’t visit at present
and another very large medieval church with a couple of non-matching spires,
slightly reminiscent of Chartres in that respect.
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| partial view of the church through the inner keep of the château, Dourdan |
October saw me
make a start in a painting class run by the Mairie de Paris in the primary
school on the rue Littré. To begin with it didn’t look promising. Our teacher had
extraordinary difficulty with the registration process, leaving us to do 20-minute pencil
sketches of a modèle as best we might. That phase is now past. The main
external threat is the concierge who must be handled with extreme care. This means we don't leave the building until everyone’s bags are packed, we line up like school
children in the yard and wait prayerfully for her to unlock the gate to the
street.
Even closer to
home the refugee numbers rise and fall like the tide, although this is a tide that
never goes out completely. We are still serving food and drink every day to
between 100 and 200 hungry men, most of whom have slept outside on the cold
earth. There continue to be regular rafles (raids) by the police and far too
many reports of their violent (and illegal) removal of people’s covers and
other possessions. At that level things don’t look good at all.
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| Quartiers Solidaires brings up the rear of the demo, Saturday afternoon 21st October |
But at the
micro-level of our small efforts it’s not so awful We get to know faces, names,
and stories. Every day strangers hand over money, clothes and food. I want
to celebrate the gratitude and helpfulness of the refugees and their friendliness, the good-humoured vibe of those doing the serving and the staunch support of a number of local shops and cafes that provide us with bread, hot water, unsold produce and storage space. Serving breakfasts mean you end up with les doigts
poisseux and a pile of jam pots for recycling but you have a better day for
having done it. You want more good news? Someone is building us a
state-of-the-art, custom-made caddie, which judging by the description should
be magnificent affair, with an awning. I hope to
have a photo of it by the next bulletin.
After the wailing had already begun
along the walls, their ruin certain,
the Trojans fidgeted with bits of wood
in the three-ply doors, itsy-bitsy
pieces of wood, fussing with them.
And began to get their nerve back and feel hopeful.
Bertold Brecht
