Parisienne Walkways

In early January I took my inaugural trip to the City of Light. It was a slightly ironic name for that time of year since the sun did not rise until well past 8 a.m. But the late beginning of the day was little matter. Whether the diffused winter light came from the sun or not, in my little book, Paris didn’t just live up to its mythic status, it outshone it.

The delayed start to the mid-winter days just may be metaphoric for my visit. I finally went so much later than I had intended. During college I made plans to spend my junior year abroad at the Sorbonne, but…  As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans. Life happened to me instead of Paris. Circumstances and decisions changed and the Sorbonne, Paris, France – all of it -- just never occurred. Not then, not in the next decade or two. 

I feel a bit strange writing this overly enthusiastic piece now; I sound like an enamored schoolgirl. But I can’t help it. Paris really was everything I had ever thought it would be – and I had been thinking about it for a long time. Probably I was born believing that Paris was the place because I don’t remember ever deciding that I wanted to go. It just seemed inevitable, even before taking French in high school and before that from a French university student who lived with my family for a short while. Little did I know how many decades I would have to wait for it to occur.

What exactly it was about the idea of Paris that got a hold of me, I don’t know – why not Venice, St. Petersburg, London or Prague, for instance? If it was just art and history that I was after, I could have had that in many cities. And I did, having been a tourist in Vienna, Bratislava, Brussels, Prague and Brugge (the “Venice of the North” if not on most people’s top 10 EU cities). It wasn’t that. There was something else – the same intangible thing, I suppose, that got into all the American expats who lived there in the 1920’s (anyone heard of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein or F. Scott Fitzgerald?) writing their alcohol-infused literature that would become standard reading for high school and university students everywhere. Perhaps it was their writing that either was set in Paris (Papa Hemingway) or else was written while the author lived there (Fitzgerald). Ah, the writing thing -- another one of those inexplicable things that just gets into you, if you’re so inclined. Either you love the written word or you don’t: I used to read dictionaries for fun (ok, I must have been just a bit bored).

So I’m with Woody Allen and all the American expats he both portrayed and caricatured in his film from last summer, Midnight in Paris. As Allen elaborated, Paris does something to you. It has magic. I’ve heard the film described as his love letter to Paris, set in three different time frames: the present-day metropolis, Paris of the flamboyant 1920’s and finally in the even earlier days of the belle epoch. Time doesn’t matter in the end, it seems to conclude – the essence doesn’t change. In that film, the protagonist, the writer who had wanted to live in Paris years before, finally stays.

When I failed to go to Paris in my youth, I put it aside. I tried not to think about what I had missed. Yet I couldn’t help thinking of it every once in a while during the intervening decades, wondering what it would have been like had I gone as I had planned. Would I have become fluent in French? Would my fashion sense be different? Would I have seen every one of Luis Bunuel’s films (yes I realize Bunuel is Spanish)? Would I have visited many more European cities while spending a year on the continent? And what unimaginable other things might have occurred? Oh well, I’ll never know. But … at my definitely no longer collegiate age of 40-something (a bit scary even if ‘70 is the new 40’ – as if) I finally did what I should have done years ago – I went to find out. I spent a week in Paris. Just me and my mom, leavings kids young (mine) and grown (her two other ones) and husbands back home.

Now here’s the part that’s hard to believe. After waiting so long to go, and seeing so many films and reading so many books about the city or set in or around it, one would think that it would be nearly impossible to meet my expectations. I didn’t even try to manage them before I left, I just didn’t have the time to talk myself down from my incredible high. And yet … Paris turned out to be as everything I had ever imagined --and more. How often does it occur in life that the thing you wish for actually is not only as good as you thought it might be, but even better? Almost never? Well -- this was one rare exception.

January was a great time to go; my mom and I had crisp, cold but beautiful weather, no rain, no freezes, and clear blue skies most days. And no crowds. But it took me some time after the fact to try to pinpoint what else was so amazing about the experience. It wasn’t the famed French food because I ate mostly croissants, brie, macarons and drank coffee and decent but inexpensive wine (4 Euros a bottle from the local Metro convenience store) since my mother wasn’t too interested in going to restaurants. I think I ate five croissants one day, and not much else – except several café crèmes. Perhaps it was the walking for 4 or 5 hours every day. Maybe it was simply being in a different place, as close to being alone as I could get, not having to worry about my family for a week.

Perhaps it was finding some common ground with my mother. Much of that was expressed in the coffee we shared daily, beginning in the morning at our hotel. For her, I deferred my run until after breakfast (croissants, yogurt and coffee) so she could get her coffee first thing and not have to wait for me to return an hour and a half later. I noticed how our roles had changed; I spoke French (she knew none), and necessarily directed our itinerary. It was also in the music that filtered its way to us daily. An accordion player on the Metro seemed to be out of central casting strolling around in his black beret. A TV show on French chansons in the style of Edith Piaf and other singers who I wasn’t familiar with in the slightest held both our rapt attention in our hotel room one night. And we wandered into the Saint Sulpice church on our last night – the same church replete with symbols and oddities like a pentagram left over from pre-Christian pagan times in which Dan Brown set the beginning of his novel The Da Vinci Code – only to be surprised to hear the most beautiful chamber music concert. We had come to view the old eglise again, since I had seen it on our first day with major jet lag so it was the equivalent of 2:00 a.m. for us and I could remember almost none of it a few days later, except that something about it was luring me back. Guess that was Vivaldi and J.S. Bach.

I met none of the supposedly rude (or at least the rude-to-Americans) French. Everyone was polite and seemed more than willing to try to understand my unpracticed, clearly American accented French, and offer whatever assistance I needed.

Maybe it was all those things. Or maybe it was the city itself.

In those famed, left bank sections of Paris in St. Germain and Montparnasse, I found the other life I might have had had I not stayed in the U.S. Who knows, that other life might not have been anything like my lovely one in the Palisades. I found the art, the history, the wrought iron balconies seeming to hold up the windows on the buildings, the Seine flowing under all its bridges, the croissants that I already mentioned tasting, well, “like buttah”, the macarons in pastel rainbows and every imaginable flavor, the merry-go-arounds dispersed liberally around the city, the freezing cold of winter amidst bare trees and twinkling lights and odd oil paintings at the Louvre not only of the well-known masterpieces but also of strange deceased cats and frightened horses and a beguiling child (all by Theodore Gericault), as well as Mona Lisa’s male twin Bacchus, who was probably Da Vinci’s model also for the legendary painting, and in haunted-seeming churches, unexpected concerts by local conservatory students playing baroque music. That’s just a start. Along with some dug-up streets and much cigarette smoke, but even those inconveniences failed to mar my experience. It was unmitigated magic.

I also fell in Paris, doing one the things I like best – running. The people walking close to me when I suddenly landed on the sidewalk next to them during their lunch break looked on asking, “ça va?” (are you ok?) to which I replied, “ça va” (I’m ok).  It looked bad but I bounced back immediately, as if I had landed on something soft and pliant. I thought that the downy thing that broke my fall must have been my guardian angel. I skinned the heel of my right hand, got a small painless bruise on my right knee, and while I know I landed on my left hip, there was no mark there, not even the slightest discoloration. I just popped back up like a jack-in- the-box and kept running … I continued to the Eiffel Tower where I looked up at the huge arches above and then at the carousel near its base, not needing to ascend because all I needed was already below.

A few days later, back in the baroque church of Saint Sulpice on our last night during the unplanned Bach concert, I saw a painting of ‘Jacob Wrestling with the Angel’ by the artist Delacroix on a back wall in dark gothic colors. In the well-known biblical story, Jacob’s hip is injured as a result of his night-time struggle with an angel, but Jacob prevails, his name is changed to Israel, the angel is vanquished and blesses Jacob. In that painting, the explanations noted that only Jacob was struggling, while the angel remained serene. I wondered if maybe I too was struggling with something.

Indeed, Paris seemed to be a conspiracy of angels. They lived not only in the many churches I visited, but everywhere I looked I saw a winged creature with a human body. In the beautifully gothic Sainte Chappelle with its delicately narrow stained glass windows in two levels, a group of angels held musical instruments around the perimeter of a carved wood altar. A statue of an angel, also by Delacroix, appeared in the Luxembourg Gardens; more on the frescos and ceiling in the Louvre museum and in so many art works on display there that I stopped counting; on top of buildings I didn’t know; everywhere they were there, around, hovering. I could feel their presence. I almost heard the rush of their wings.

Then the last night sitting in Saint Sulpice listening to the final selection of the concert de musique de chambre, a Bach concerto for violin and oboe in D minor, I felt a deep stillness and some inner voice spoke to me. It said I was in the right place. I think it was my angel talking.

Now, my kids are taking French lessons. The first thing I did when I returned was to find a French teacher for my 8 and 6 year olds. So that one day they too can wander through the walkways of the City of Light and see if they find something that may or may not be their guardian angel.

I end on the same note as Midnight in Paris: it may be deferred, but better late than never.