ICI Paris
April in Paris by John Godber
Library Theatre, Manchester, 1996
A cynic once remarked that Paris is known as the romance capital of the world because it’s got a huge phallus stuck in the middle of it.
There are several things wrong with this statement. For one, the Eiffel Tower is actually slightly left of centre, a bit like the city’s politics over the last two hundred years. For another, Paris can offer plenty of other sites a lot more romantic-looking than a thousand-foot cobweb of wrought iron, and you can see most of them from its summit. In a city full of landmarks, it’s ironic that the most famous should also be one of the youngest. Erected in 1889 for the World Fair held to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Revolution, it proved so popular that the natives couldn’t bear to take it down again. Popular, that is, with everyone but the writer Guy de Maupassant, who disliked the thing so much that he would take lunch every day in its first-floor restaurant arguing that that was the only place in Paris from which you couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower…
Today many feel the same way about the Beaubourg, Pompidou’s modernistic art gallery that wears its plumbing on the outside, or Mitterand’s futuristic glass pyramid now dominating the courtyard of the Louvre. But that is the essence of Paris – the contrast of the old with the new, the spirit of freedom and the courage to experiment. Diaghilev knew that he and Stravinsky would get a fair hearing at the Opéra because Paris has always welcomed the avant-garde. And if Chagall could be invited inside the classically glamorous edifice to decorate the ceiling with its upside-down floating lovers, it’s no surprise that the city should also allow its presidents to impose their whims on posterity too.
But beyond that, the cosmopolitan nature of the place comes from the fact that Paris has always been a refuge for the artistic exiles of the world. You can invent yourself there – it is the spiritual home of existentialism after all – and you only have to visit the Place du Tertre in Montmartre in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur to see them all still at it. In Renoir’s time, barely a hundred years ago, Montmartre was a village to the north of the city. These days the city has climbed the hill linking the two, building as it went, and in the old village square the world’s would-be artists now paint shoulder to shoulder, their easels jostling in friendly rivalry.
The Sacré-Coeur itself, like the neo-Impressionist paintings constantly being churned out on the production line in its shadow, is a bit of a sham. Only completed in 1919 but built in Romanesque-Byzantine style, it might have been designed by a pastry cook. Yet if you turn your back on it (as Hitler did on his flying visit in June 1940) and stand on the dazzlingly white front steps, your eyes will be about on a level with the tip of the Eiffel Tower two miles away, and the view from here is equally terrific. It’s the physical beauty of the place that does it. The scale is grandiose but not oppressive. All those mansions, called hôtels, put up by the rich in the 17th and 18th centuries, are imposing but on a domestic scale – they were, after all, houses before they became museums. And in area, Paris is one of Europe’s smallest capitals, making it easy to get about on foot.
The distinctive street system was the invention of one man, Napoleon III’s architect Baron Haussmann. In the middle of the 19th century he cleared the slums, modernised the sewer system and laid the ground plan of the Grands Boulevards, giving the place its unique look of monumental perspectives and uniform façades. Although the reasons were pragmatic – to allow the army easy access to potential trouble spots in the peasant quarters – the effects are purely aesthetic, and the modern city has had the good sense to keep the ultra-modern business centre, La Défense, well out of the way to the west. You can still make out the huge hollow concrete square of the new Grande Arche rising on the horizon like a wraith, but it only serves to emphasise its own paucity of imagination when compared with the original Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Elysées with which it has been aligned.
Central Paris is now made up of twenty arrondissements, which spiral outwards clockwise from the central islands, and each one has its own distinctive character. The Marais is the oldest, largely saved from redevelopment, and the Place des Vosges is the handsomest part of it. Pigalle, on the other hand, could make Bangkok look homely. The Moulin Rouge once had showgirls lively enough to attract the restless eye of Toulouse-Lautrec. These days audiences go to see them more to pant than to paint…
Fortunately, there are plenty of other places more discreet, not least the parks. The largest is the Bois de Boulogne, said to have been modelled on Hyde Park. Once a notorious duelling ground it is now two thousand acres of peaceful green nestling in the western loop of the Siene and it contains not only the Musée national des Arts et Traditions populaires and Shakespeare Garden which grows all the flowers mentioned in the plays, but also two world-class race courses, Auteuil and Longchamp. Closer in, the Jardins du Luxembourg, attached to the palace of that name, built for Queen Maria de’ Medici in the 17th-century, are similarly graced with colourful vegetation and statuary, and also fountains and ponds which ionise the air to a tangible degree.
With senses heightened by the ambience, you are in the best condition to stroll and look, see and be seen. Paris is great for people-watching because the Parisians themselves seem to possess a distinctive self-confidence, a panache and élan in keeping with their city. There is no class system anymore just class. And what you lack in class you can make up for in style They even have a phrase for it: BCBG, which stands for bon chic bon genre: hard to translate but impossible to miss. Sitting at your table on the trottoir, or standing at the zinc counter in a bar-tabac with a tiny cup of pricey café next to your packet of Gauloises, you can view the passing show in comfort.
For sightseeing on the grand scale you need look no further than Versailles, Louis XIV’s monument to his own royal self-importance, half an hour by train to the southwest. An immense baroque palace developed from an early hunting lodge from the 1660s onwards, its scale is overwhelming and explains better than any words why the Revolution happened in France. The parks alone cover two and a half square miles and include fountains, follies, walkways, flower beds, and an immense ornamental pond that the king used to navigate at the helm of his own royal barge. It’s all preserved today just as it looked in the late 1780s when the peasant army finally overran the place, coming into a world of gaudy wealth and excess few of them could ever have dreamed existed. But even here there is a small sad corner that recalls a human tragedy. The Hameau is a custom-made little village built in the grounds for Marie-Antoinette, and she used to come here with her companions to play at being a milkmaid with gold buckets. Her ghost still dances in the neglected ruins of the little farmhouse by the mill.
The spectres of those seen off by the cataclysmic events of 1789 still stroll the boulevards too, but these days they are not alone. It’s said that when good Americans die they go to Paris: many have lived it up there first. Ernest Hemingway described it as a moveable feast. Gene Kelly fell for Leslie Caron beneath a Paris moon to the music of George Gershwin, and Cole Porter wrote out what he felt for the place in one of the world’s greatest love songs. Closer to our time, Jim Morrison of The Doors took his final psychedelic trip at his Paris flat in July 1971 and now lies buried in an Elvis-sized coffin among the great and the good in Père Lachaise cemetery.
At the Cimetière de Montmartre can be found monuments to Stendhal, Berlioz, Fragonard and Baudelaire, while in Père Lachaise itself the writers La Fontaine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Proust, Colette, composers Chopin and Bizet, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘little sparrow’ singer Edith Piaf have all found their final resting place. So too did our very own Oscar Wilde, who arrived broken in the city after two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol. In the last few months of his life he found an artists’ haven on earth, and if it was good enough for him, it should be good enough for the rest of us.
The same English person who so cynically dismissed the Eiffel Tower in the opening paragraph would probably claim that the French don’t deserve Paris either, but then who does? In the 1880s, the Parisians made a gift of the Statue of Liberty to America. Paris is the gift the French have given to the world. It’s there for all to enjoy So allez-y. Amusez-vous. Paris vous attend.
