We’re supposed to be going to Paris again in April. Work related and for an entire week’s worth of meetings. It’s like any other week of uninspiring meetings and yet, it’s Paris so it won’t be like any other meeting week. Going back to Paris is a chance to revisit old memories, search out the traces of old friends and maybe even to explore beyond the Périférique, that 35 km of noisy and chaotic ring road that mostly seems to get you to where you need to be. That’s part of the beauty of Paris though, at least for me: it somehow always delivers, always gets you someplace unexpected, but where it turns out you want to be. It’s a city you know you will always return to and if you don’t manage the return, you know you always will want to. Unless there is something profoundly wrong with you. Paris is like a lover from years gone by, full of promise and shot through with the tantalising scent of maybe, the enticing edginess of the unknown. Images of lovers known in Paris are obscured by images of the city. They get lost in the city stink, a blend of burnt cheese from the streetside crêpe sellers, the fading fumes of cars and lorries and the unexpected wafts of human scents, some lovely and some not so much.
Top of the list of my fave places is the Gare du Nord immense with memories of arrivals and departures, loaded with the possibility of the improbable. Right down to not being able to get the metro you want because they’ve closed some station or another. You raise your eyes in disbelief to an open vault of fake, glazed sky. The Gare du Nord’s roof shines light and bright and so far up that even tall people are impressed. The metro isn’t my favourite place to be, not in London and not in Paris. The noise has always been faint inducing, and the sudden gusts of train driven breezes always make me feel as if I am somehow on a path to somewhere otherworldly. But what gives the Paris metro the edge over the world’s other metros is the thrill of getting a train with the little handle you have to lift to open the doors. It requires a slightly silly little movement and for people with small hands the handles are the perfect size. For people with normal sized hands the little handles are probably annoying. I hope there are still trains like that when we go.
The metro is an easy way to reach the Père-Lachaise cemetery located in a scruffy bit of Paris where the traffic runs around the cemetery in what feels like a constant state of screaming hysteria. Hardly restful for the resident corpses. It’s where, along with other notables, Oscar Wilde rests. His friend and executor Robbie Ross moved Oscar’s remains to Père-Lachaise from Bagneux some fourteen kilometres away, in 1909. Myth has it that after nine years at Bagneux he was basically intact and that he had grown a beard. Hardly likely since he had been covered in quicklime as an aid to decomposition. Apparently it preserved him instead. It’s hard to think of what bodily remains of Oscar’s lie there under all that deco limestone. It’s sculpted into a flying angel by Jacob Epstein who said it’s “a vast, winged figure … the conception of poet as messenger”. It’s wonderful entertainment to watch the parade of tourists coming to visit Oscar, most of them because he is on a list of some sort. Box tickers. Or maybe it’s just about the selfies and they know only that Oscar is infamous and nothing of his work or his infamy. He’d love that, that unqualified, nonjudgemental homage, those marvellous pointless vanities.
Last time I was in Paris, en route to visit friends somewhere near Le Mans, I went to the studio of an artist I had come across. Frédéric Belaubre has a working and living space in Montmartre that is smaller than our kitchen (granted it is a biggish kitchen). Canvasses stacked above and at the foot of a double bed and alongside the walls where there was a small kitchen set up, or an intimate dining space. Guitars and violins hanging in the spaces between his canvasses on the walls. A violin on the wall with broken strings looks a little horsefaced, like him. He only has a few horsey pictures and those have limited movement. But they are lovely, sometimes hostile, violent, especially the ones with people in. The people are usually being bucked off. Does he take commissions? Only if he’s inspired. Oh dear. I like the horse pictures, but no one else seems to. Maybe they aren’t all that good.
After the artistic interlude, smug and clutching my new pictures, I went to the nearest place I could find for something to eat. This is the other thing about Paris, rarely is a place disappointing although it can happen. Maybe that rarity is another reason to always want to go back. Onion soup and cheese and thick bread and water and quiet in the noise of Montmartre. And of people smiling, polite, local.
If you’ve been going to a city for decades it is tempting to think it has nothing much more to show you. You’ve been there, done it all before and you know how to get about. So much blah blah. But that is how old people think and behave, so do not fall into that laziness, don’t think old. Just like Paris, everywhere is constantly changing, fomenting some new concoction of something unforeseeable and intriguing. And that’s why I am excited to be going back to Paris, again.
