Paris, rewound

September – October 2019

5th October:
On my tourist’s camera roll, there are many photos of building lined streets providing a backdrop as familiar as they are unfamiliar. Sometimes we catch the metro a couple of stops or press ourselves onto a bus, but mostly we walk, from museum to café, repeating until time to draw or sleep calls. Mum practices her French with the locals, and with Louise discovered that the N before a bus route means the bus runs at night; in the priority seating stakes, age trumps mobility (as an 88-year-old woman claimed a seat from a 76-year-old man with a sore leg); and “c'est assez loin d'ici”, “je suis d'accord”, “bonne journée”.

* * *

There are many photos of my Mum on her first visit to Paris. And on Louise’s phone, the wider scene, photos of me taking photos of my Mum (@pasadenamansions). A pattern has quickly formed. The three of us, in the moment. Joie de vivre.

6th October:
Moving through the 20th arrondissement into the 11th, keeping one eye out for Marcel, Iggy, and Opale; immersing ourselves in Vincent’s palette of olive trees and cypresses, and the cherry blossoms of the floating world (Van Gogh: Starry Night and Dreamed Japan: Images of The Floating World, Atelier des Lumières); and feasting at a Senegalese restaurant. True to Asai Ryoi (1612–1691), “living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves .... refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along the river current: this is what we call the floating world”.
(Tails crossed for you, Marcel, Iggy, and Opale. May you find your way to your homes tout de suite.)

* * *

Fallen leaves and chestnuts underfoot, at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, and an agreement: “an expectation of the future” (as Patrick Modiano wrote in In the Café of Lost Youth). Near to Oscar Wilde’s tomb and the Jardin du Souvenir, a black cat and her two small kittens plays.
“For me the autumn has never been a sad season. The dead leaves and the increasingly shorter days have never suggested the end of anything, but rather an expectation of the future. In Paris, there is an electricity in the air in October evenings at nightfall. Even when it is raining. I do not feel low at that hour of the day, nor do I have the sense of time flying by. I have the impression that everything is possible. The year begins in the month of October.”

* * *

Perhaps it was the spirit of Isadora. Louise, dancing in response to a line in Père-Lachaise. Oui! Oui! Oui!
Isadora Duncan
‘École du Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris’
BIRTH 27th May, 1877
San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, USA
DEATH 14th September, 1927 (aged 50)
Nice, Departement des Alpes-Maritimes, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
BURIAL
Cimetière du Père Lachaise
Paris, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France
PLOT Division 87 (columbarium), urn 6796

7th October:
Looking forward by looking back. “Borges, Sebald. The world seems to be full of messages written in some secret code. We look—I look—for something we can’t identify but that we have lost” (Enrique Vila-Matas on Never Any End to Paris, and walking in Paris). Today, the Marché Vernaison, to backwards forwards, by way of the oldest church in Paris. Parts of St-Germain-des-Prés date to the 6th century, when it was a Benedictine abbey. Now, a man sits by the the side gate with a small rabbit and all of their belongings.

* * *

Every leaf rendered. Many bird calls heard. Inside a Louis Vivin (1861–1936) painting, up steps and down again. Vivin’s “urban landscapes are divided into several series: churches, stations, the gates of Paris... and each time, the monument is represented from several contradictory viewpoints, in a cubist approach and with a childlike appearance. The sense of detail makes the scene almost unreal: each stone and each flowerbed is carefully defined, with a clarity that has little to do with everyday experiences and more to do with dreams. Here, the same figure appears to be climbing the steps to Sacré-Cœur in different places at the same time” (@museemaillol).

* * *

“We call her Upstairs; she calls us Downstairs.
From our ground-floor apartment in Paris, my husband and I can look across the courtyard to her apartment on the top floor, with its large, curved windows.
‘Downstairs,’ she writes, ‘before drawing the curtain for the night, stepped out on the balcony, and saw your light on; which was good news.’
Each message from her is a treasure: ‘When next we meet, we’ll salute each other like two lamp-posts, lighting up at the same time. Have a lovely day without rain.’
She tells us often that we live in a village. She says that’s a lucky thing. She has a way of molding the mundane into harmony, of living in music.”
(The opening lines of ‘The Poet Upstairs’ by Aysegul Savas, published 22nd January, 2018, in The Paris Review. ‘When next we meet, we’ll salute each other like two lamp-posts, lighting up at the same time’ seemed too lovely an idea not to share; may you put it into action somehow.)
(Incidentally, we called in on Theo, but he wasn’t taking visitors (Apartment de Théo Van Gogh, blue door, no. 54, second slide along).)

* * *

In Suzanne Valadon’s (1865–1938) studio appartment, within the Musée de Montmartre, we look out the window at a small pocket of The Old Wood of 8 rue Cortot, an “ecological reserve of the city of Paris, planted with maple trees, sycamores, white chestnut trees and locust trees [which now] only cats have access”. We might not have seen any cats, but we did see a small dog in a nearby park break away from his owner and, with success, beg for food from two men eating their lunch. With their two front legs on the table, and their tail spinning like a propeller, who could have refused them a morsel?
(Atelier-appartment de Suzanne Valadon: In 1912 Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo et André Utter settled into their atelier-apartment and left a symbolic trace at 12 Cortot. Sadly, not much was left of their original workplace, but thanks to its refurbishment, the spirit of the infernal trio has been restored: the frying pan can be found in its place, the mezzanine was rebuilt in the studio, and the walls of Utrillo’s bedroom still have their original panelling and barbed wire on the windows. @museemontmartre)

Image credit: Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo, and André Utter in their studio, 1926.