Paris: City of Light and Literary Luminaires
by David Yeadon
Quite frankly, I'm absolutely "gobsmacked," which is, for those not
fortunate enough to be born in the wilds of northern England, the Yorkshire
dialect for I am totally, outrageously amazed, maxed-out, that the hasty
scribblings in my notebook are actually mine. Looking through these notes
from my last visit to Paris, the world-beloved City of Light, I find the
following, a mere fragment of my many pages:
There's a strangely mystic moment here when dusk finally releases its
last amber glow and velvet night eases in over the city. The lights suddenly
explode on and in an instant, the rather gray, inert, monolithic buildings
become feasts of fabulous colors and forms, a fantasy-world unmatched
by any other world city, challenging the heavens in their brilliance.
You can almost imagine long-gone architects leaping from their rather
cramped subterranean quarters and crying out "Yes, yes this is what our
buildings are supposed to look like this is how we saw them in our minds
and hearts when we first conceived them!"
And the romance too. Night brings romance as only the French can conceive
it when the snarl, splutter and belch of the thrombosised traffic of the
boulevards mellows to a soothing hum; when lovers dally expectantly and
eager-eyed at sidewalk cafés, wondering about the wonders of the night
ahead; when Michelin-starred chefs and their coteries rub their hands
in anticipatory glee at the bounteous delights of their culinary creations,
and when all the mercurial moods of this unique city, from glitzy masquerade
to the grace notes of high culture and true Francophile excellence in
the theaters, opera houses and those beloved and bawdy music halls when
all this bounteous panoply of hedonistic pleasures suddenly reveals itself
for a population ravenously appreciative of sensuality in all its guises
then the night truly begins and all the illuminated city becomes bathed
in magnificent spectra of lights that luster the sky for scores of miles
in every direction . . . .
Let me first emphasize that all this gushing hyperbole can be a little
misleading. Some days, to be honest, I'm sick of Paris, primarily because
of what it can do to perfectly respectable even adulated writers. (I'm
not exactly adulated myself but it happens to me anyway.) Something very
strange occurs to literary minds here. It brings out the worst in them,
particularly those curmudgeonly, cuss-mongering, cantankerous characters
who normally delight in blasting away with verbal vitriol at any (and
sometimes every) tourist destination that gets a little uppity in hype
and attitude. They delight in downgrading trite, clichéd, bland,
and over-ballyhooed attractions and "destinations."
But not in Paris oh no, not here. Not in what many admirers insist is
"the world's most beautiful city" and "the city that has so much," in
fact everything!"
Here, where tourists flock like ravenous summer mosquitoes to bare flesh;
here where attitude is all (try speaking your schoolboy French to a Parisian
and you'll find out, lickety split). Here, where you must find your way
among crazed drivers and rococoed everything and hideously overpriced
sybaritic delights here, these titans of tendentious verbiage melt to
mush (as I apparently did) and go all gooey and gushy as the charms and
enticements of this place lasso their hearts and what's left of their
minds and set them scribbling reams of purple-prosed paeans of praise
to Paris this insidiously, seductively enticing City by the Seine.
Even the stoic-like Henry James, the legendary and loquacious luminary
of 19th century letters, wrote some very un-James-like lines here. Rejoicing
in the sunlit hours of the city (apparently he was not a night-man) he
oozed: "Day after day the air is filled with golden light and even those
chalkish vistas of the Parisian beaux quariters assume the innocent tints
of autumn."
(And, can you believe it even old Mark Twain succumbed too (he was a
night-man): "As nightfall approached, excited, delighted, and half-persuaded
that we were only the sport of a beautiful dream, lo, we stood in magnificent
Paris . . . All the surroundings were gay and enlivening and after dinner
we sauntered through the brilliant streets and looked at all the dainty
trifles in the beautiful and lavish shops . . . ."
(And this is the man who relished the title of "America's Supreme Satirist"!
You'd think he was drafting a two-bit tourist brochure.)
Even Sinclair Lewis, rarely a man to enthuse unnecessarily, has one
of the female characters in his novel, Dodsworth, gabble: "Oh look look!
Isn't it adorable. Isn't it just too exciting. Oh, the darling funny little
zincs (bars)! And the Cointreau ads, instead of chewing gum. Everybody
so noisy and yet so gay! Oh, I adore it!"
For a moment the rambunctious wit of America's greatest living humorist,
P.J. O'Rourke, brings relief from all the gush: "A lot of people get all
moist and runny at the very mention of Paris. I don't get it. It's just
a big city, no dirtier than most. The French women here, whether pretty
or not, all walk around with their noses in the air (and pretty big noses
they usually are). And Parisians never deign to understand a word you
say in their own language, no matter how loud or how often you pronounce
it."
But alas I surrender when the great British acerbic man's-man, Sir Fitzroy
MacLean, gets all sloppy: "Ah — and then all the different lights
and colors and smells and noises of Paris at night! The best-dressed women,
the best food, the best wine, the best brandy in the world . . .the rattle
and bang of the cancan; the plump thighs of the dancers in their long
black silk stockings . . .it's a most agreeable existence here in the
city . . . ."
The problem, basically, is that too many of the 20th century's revered
literati settled themselves here in delight like prankish school kids
and implanted I LOVE PARIS stickers on the hearts of all who read their
works. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce,
Henry Miller et al all became de facto ex-pat Parisians.
So who the heck am I to tank the trend. Maybe there's something to be
said for the remarks of a guidebook writer: "Paris deserves a much better
break than seven or eight out of ten transatlantic visitors can offer
it . . .the city unravels only for the tourist who unwinds . . . ." And
even Sinclair Lewis, in more sober mood, recognized the strange allure
and magic of the city: "There is another Paris, stately, aloof, gray with
history, eternally quiet at its heart for all the superficial clamor."
Unwinding is fine here, I can do that, but I take issue with the "grayness"
of Parisian history. Admittedly the city's origins were a bit down at
heel when Julius Caesar easily conquered the Parissi tribe, a bunch of
ne'er do well layabouts living a very swampy existence on an island in
the middle of the Seine. But from that moment on when the Romans started
building temples, forums, and all those other urban accouterments, the
city has rarely, if ever, looked back. The cathedral of Notre-Dame arrived
the end of 10th century, then the Louvre and other fabulous museums, followed
by the Palace of Versailles, a binge of boulevardism and the Arc de Triomphe
under the Napoleons, the 1889 Eiffel Tower, and more recently the genius
of the Pompidou Center, The Forum des Halles, and I.M. Pei's glass pyramid
addition to the Louvre, plus dozens of other post-moderne curiosities.
Anyway back to those Parisian nights . . .back to the glorious theaters,
restaurants, operas, concerts, gaudy girly shows at the old favorites
The Crazy Horse, Moulin Rouge, Folies-Bergére and The Lido, ever-changing
discotheques, the Piaf and Brel-wannabe hangouts, and a myriad jazz and
rock clubs. But it's not so much the abundance of nightlife that first
entrances you if you're a neophyte here (you expect that) it's the night-lights,
those fabulously brazen yet subtle and enticing illumination displays
extending across the whole city as far as the eye can believe. Here I
am again in this bedazzling (yes I guess I do mean it) city, panting like
a pampered poodle at all the night-places to walk, the vistas to ogle
at, and the myriad primped and polished glories of a city that looks pretty
impressive by day but become a downright fantasyland in the dark hours.
And let's face it, the Parisians know exactly what they're doing when
they turn their city into this vast son et lumiére show (yes, they
invented that too) that leaves you gasping at the audacity and extravagance
of it all the magnificent extravagance of billions of lights that transform
all the familiar landmarks the Louvre, Notre-Dame, La Place de la Concorde,
the Bastille, Eiffel Tower, the Pont-Neuf, the Seine itself . . .into
brilliant technicolor tumults of shapes and colors. And as you zoom in
closer you see superb statues, clusters of cute cherubs, ornate cupolas,
richly-carved Corinthian columns, elegantly-sculpted doorways, and exquisite
bas-relief friezes that, during the push-rush day, you never even notice.
It makes you want to stay out all night, to wander (preferably with someone
you love) in the Bois de Bologne, the Tuilleries Gardens, along the serpentining
Seine, down the grand Champs-Elysées, the Rue de Rivoli, into the
Place Vendome, and on to the 1861 Opéra which boasts the largest
stage on earth.
And then comes the intimate bohemia of the Left Bank and Latin Quarter
neighborhoods around the Sorbonne, the magnificent Panthéon, and
the Musée d'Orsay, and further out to the beloved basilica of Sacre-Coeur
in Monmartre, whose elegantly-illuminated cupolas provide an ornate foil
for the elongated white dome (oh-so popular subject with Impressionists)
and 260' high bell tower containing the Savoyarde, one of the most massive
bells in the world. From here the whole city lies before you sparkling
like vast sprinklings of tiaras against a backcloth of black velvet. Night
is indeed magic in this most magical of all cities and despite my writer-reservations
about not allowing any object or destination to seduce me into uncharacteristically
ebullient prose I can't think of any other place I'd rather be right now
than sitting in this street café in the gorgeous Place de Vosges (one
of the most perfect plazas in the city and of course superbly illuminated
too), sipping a sweet aperitif, wondering where to dine this evening,
smiling at a charming girl at an adjoining table (no, her nose is not
raised), and leaning back to admire the lights the lights in this oh-so
rightly named City of Light. And if I listen carefully, really carefully,
I can hear, as Sinclair Lewis described, the "eternally quiet heartbeat"
of Paris beneath all the gorgeous dazzle and dizziness of its myriad distractions
and oh-so marvelous miasma of mesmerizing magic . . . ." (Oh boy here
I go again . . . .)
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