Catch the 7:46am train departing from platform L, Gare de Lyon
Paris, rewound
September – October 2019
8th October:
Just Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, and a feat of hydraulic engineering. Like six geese a-laying, four bronze dogs a-peeing.
* * *
At last! In the place where previously I’d placed a school of varied fish in the boudoir of Marie Antoinette, an opossum rolling back the carpet, perhaps in readiness for dancing, a lion looking for his tail in the Salon de Musique, a sure-footed gorilla in the Salon des Fastes, and a kangaroo given over to contemplation, overlooking the gardens. Following the soft percussion of your tread (2015), my artists’ book, twenty-six pages in length, is in the collection of the State Library of Queensland (@statelibraryqld), and it was a joy to join the two, the original in colour with the collaged memory. Well worth leaving our apartment in the dark to catch the 7:46am train departing from platform L, Gare de Lyon.
8th October:
Just as I did at Malmaison, I looked for collage sets at the Château de Fontainebleau.
In 2009, I made a seventeen-page artists’ book, At the Château de la Malmaison tigers roam, and in 2018, I looked for the following collages within its pages:
‘At the principal entry, all hoped the northern fur seal knew what they were doing’
‘Passing from one to the other was proving tiresome’
‘A snow leopard pads about unseen in the vestibule’
‘Patience was sure to deliver results for the Blue-faced parrot finch’
‘The council were not in attendance and had not been for a great while’
‘Poised upon tabletop in the library, the red muntjac hoped to remain unseen by the studious’
‘A drawing room unlike home, he thought. Most unlike home.’
‘Hoping to make no sound in the music room lest it be the wrong sort’
‘The Spotted seal felt most at home in the salle de bains’
‘Walking a fine line through the empress's bedroom chamber’
‘The Leopard proved a natural where balance was concerned’
‘Slow and steady does it’
‘I keep them safe, the pair of them’
‘Looking for things others may have overlooked’
‘A Stella’s sea lion seeks a little illumination’
‘They have taken flight already, it seems’
A book of single-colour, postcard images filled with new inhabitants, in the collection of the State Library of Victoria (@library_vic).
* * *
In the quiet charm of Fontainebleau, we discussed ‘Sidewalks’, an essay by Ayesegül Savas (published as ‘On the Struggle to Become a Flaneur’ on Literary Hub), and how one walks through a city, before catching the 5:03 back to Gare de Lyon.
“The flaneur is also usually a man—young, aloof, casually registering the details of his surroundings. He is as imperceptible as a ghost as he floats through the city, noticing his surroundings without judging them, sensitive to the slightest details. What Wood calls both “a reporter and a poet manqué.” On my walks, I tried to don this very character, whose voice I’d so internalized that I heard him narrating my path. But I knew that I did not share the same urban experience. Walking home, I had a double consciousness: the first one recording the sights befitting a flaneur, and the other one myself, walking as I always did, alert in rough or crowded neighborhoods, aware of catcalls and stares, of my purse, my shoulder strap falling, my skirt riding up my leg or alighting if I passed the ventilated grills of the metro.
I discarded this second consciousness—of walking the city as a woman—when I wrote. I took my narrator all the way to the abandoned train tracks that had circumscribed Paris until the 1930s. I had her follow a group of teenagers spraying graffiti on walls, and past them into a tunnel, where she sat at its darkest depths. I’d been in this tunnel myself, with my husband and with friends, each time frightened of who or what might emerge from the other end. I’d never think of walking it on my own, though I was pleased that my narrator was braver than me. But what I couldn’t ignore, even as my narrator walked the city from north to south, in and out of strange pockets, is that a woman does not walk the city as a shadow. Her walk is often jarred by apprehension, and a different sort of alertness—not just to architecture, history, and cultures, but to the city around her who notices her presence and may cause her harm. (Teju Cole similarly remarks that one can’t be a black flaneur in a white terrain. Blacks, he says, practice “psychogeography,” wandering the streets alert.)”
9th October:
“I can wait hours in the rain.…”
— Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
Paris in the rain, washed anew, makes more sense to me. Or rather makes me feel more at home. Perhaps it was just today. Perhaps it is all to do with finding your feet, feeling as though you are moving from being a tourist to someone not from here. Is there a distinction between the two?
As our umbrellas dry in readiness for tomorrow’s adventures, we say oui.
* * *
A little spectacle at the BNF Richelieu (Rotonde des Arts du Spectacle, @labnf), including a colour beam of Sonia Delaunay and a photo of Nina Vyroubova in classic Le Lac des cygnes (1949) pose held within a pull-me draw, and a video excerpt of how Nijinsky as a Faun fashioned a flute with his fingers (Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun / Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune). All dried off by the time we reach manuscripts to peep through the glass.
9th October:
Panel from the Lacquer Room in the Hôtel Du Châtelet; Moderne Maharajah through he gaps; armchairs with integrated lighting; Barometer-thermometer in the form of a Chinese pagoda; “Honesty” banister railing; Baby grand piano; Second Rhinoceros brass writing desk, with a fake rhinoceros horn; Jeanne Lanvin’s blue daisy bedroom. At the Musée des Arts Décoratifs the list of what we saw is long. (None of which is pictured here.) We purchased a postcard of Jeanne Lanvin’s bathroom because the taps are shaped like pheasants, daisies and pine cones. And we wove our way home in the beautiful drizzle.
* * *
A lightness of jellyfish. A hover of jellyfish. From the Château de Fontainebleau to Palais Garnier by way of Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Galeries Lafayette. The collective noun for actual jellyfish is a smack or a school or a fluther, and sometimes the group is called a bloom or a swarm. I think I’ll stick to a lightness suspended.
Image credit: Drawing, Design for the Wall Decoration for Marie-Antoinette’s Apartment at Fontainebleau Palace, circa 1780; Previously owned by Jean Léon Decloux (French, 1840–1929); France; pen and black ink, brush and watercolor, white gouache on off-white paper; 45.8 x 57.8 cm (18 1/16 x 22 3/4 in.); Purchased for the Museum by the Advisory Council; 1911-28-155
