Lights in the City of Light

Paris is not called the City of Light just because it was the capital of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, though that certainly is one reason for the epithet.  In fact, the name is far more literal.  Paris never sleeps.  Its monuments are lit up every night, and it is therefore a great city to stroll once the sun goes down.  The bars and cafes are open, depending on the district, very late indeed.  Some stay open all night.  When the metro shuts down around 12:30 am, the city operates a special late night bus service called "Noctambus" which reaches most of its neighborhoods on strategically placed routes.  As long as you know more or less where you are, you can stay up pretty much forever, provided you don't need much sleep.

And some people obviously do.  This fellow was playing his soprano sax on the quai by the river when I strolled by.  Playing rather well, too, I thought.  Of course, one of the city's more legendary images is of jazz musicians playing by its rivers, under its bridges, or, just as often, in its metro stations, though there they hope for a little money.  New York is famous for this image too.  The great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins once dropped out of public performance to practice, arguing, against all the people, musicians and non-musicians alike, who had *ever* heard him, that he needed to practice more.  When he returned to the music after his little sabbatical, the first album he recorded was called "The Bridge" for RCA.  It's still one of his finest albums, so maybe he was right and everybody else was wrong.  Paris is a city of music as well as light, and there are concerts here all the time.  American jazz musicians have been coming for years, getting the kind of attention--and money--they couldn't make in their own country.  But the city's lights mostly fall

on its magnificent monuments.  Here, you can see the Institut de France, built by Cardinal Mazarin in the seventeenth century to house the new Academie de France, the Olympian summit of French intellectual life.  It's still there today, and in the same building.  In front of it, connecting it to the vast Louvre museum, is my (and just about everybody else's) favorite bridge, the beautiful Pont des Arts footbridge.  There's always somebody on the Pont des Arts, and I think more marriage proposals have been made on it than on just about any other bridge in the world.  People picnic on it, chat on it, run on it, and yes, make out on it.  Especially the last.  It's best in the summer when the soft winds of the river waft down upon the flaneur as he stands there.  Tonight it's a bit chilly, but that's ok.  It's still a great place.  From its center, one can see the spire of Notre

Dame in the distance down river and the spire of the Eiffel Tower up river.  I'll blog about the Tower later, but Notre Dame, probably the world's most photographed cathedral, is also beautifully lit at night, and in such a way as to show up its graceful flying buttresses.  The square in front of the cathedral is filled with tourists all day, and, it seems to me, all night too.  I find myself wondering when on earth some people sleep, then I remind myself that I wouldn't be wondering that if I weren't up too, contemplating them.  If one crosses the Pont des Arts toward the Louvre, and then passes beneath one of is many arches into the "Cour Carre" (or square court), one can begin to see just how vast this largest of all the world's art museums really is.  Mitterand made the Louvre the centerpiece of his "Grands Monuments," cleaning it up, reorganizing it, and moving a ministry out of one of its wings so that the entire mammoth structure could be given over to the art collection amassed by kings and nobles and the Church over the

centuries.  Lots of people go to the Louvre thinking they're going to see the Impressionists, but those are in a different museum.  Not to worry, there's always the Mona Lisa.  If you get into the museum and want to find that, just follow the tourists.  They'll take you right to it.  I haven't been yet on this trip.  I thought I'd go late in the afternoon last Sunday when it was free, and popped in to see if there was a line.  There was, about a mile long, so I decided to take in the great museum some other time.  At night, though, the Louvre is closed (well, except to Ron Howard and his cast from the Da Vinci Code flick, which was actually filmed there at night, the first film I know of ever to be allowed to do that), and the courtyard around the massive and still somewhat controversial crystal pyramid that the great architect I. M. Pei designed for a new entrance is fairly peaceful.  If you stand directly in front of it at its center, you can look straight through the Napoleonic Arc du Carrousel up to the Egyptian obelisk that Louis Philippe managed to sucker out of the Khedive of Egypt in the early nineteenth century all the way to the massive Arc the Triomphe.  It is one of the great urban vistas in the

world.  But, for the flaneur, all these monuments can get a little...heavy.  They tend to bear down on one, and one seeks a little more lively place, so I head for the Place de Bastille.  Yes, it was once home to the fortress prison made famous in the French Revolution, but it's a large and very lively space now, open *very* late, and I stop for a Nutella Crepe (one of my truly guilty pleasures in Paris--fresh made, slathered with Nutella, and so hot it's almost hard to hold) and stop to watch a collection of kids doing hip-hop street dancing for pocket change.  They're fun to watch, and I give them some money.  I generally give money to street performers.  I like to keep them in business.  I give money to the buskers who get on the Metro and play and sing for me too.  I think it might irritate some of my fellow riders a little--I am encouraging them after all--but where else but in Paris, will I hear an accordianist, a gypsy violinist, and a Chilean singer in the same train in the same week?  Paris at night is a magic place.  Of course, one can say that about any number of cities, but, as always, there is something special and almost indefinable about this one.  Maybe it's the crepe.

Fall colors come to the City of Light

Paris is a pretty city all year long, and every season has its attractions, but there are a lot of trees here, and when the fall colors arrive, there are places in the city that are spectacularly beautiful.  I strolled through two places that brought that home to me.  The first was the Parc des Buttes Chaumont up in the nineteenth arrondissement, and the second, just today, was the city's most famous cemetery, Pere Lachaise.  Both are not too far from where I live--lucky me--so I was able to walk to both of them from my apartment.  The Park des Buttes Chaumont was a gift to the city of the emperor Napoleon III and his ever-present prefect Haussmann, who formed it from an abandoned gypsum quarry.  As a result, it is very dramatic, with many steep hills, a beautiful lake, and views galore.  I wondered through it watching the Parisians at play--one can sit on the grass here--and took some photos.  Yellow was the color here--lots of hues on a sunny day.  This park also has a waterfall, which, considering it sits in the middle of a large city, is pretty cool.  Rather than babble too much about it, I think I'll let pictures do the work, then we'll go on a walk through Pere Lachaise.

The cupola sits at the top of the highest point in the park, and one can see a great deal from there, including, in the distance, the church of Sacre Coeur on the Montmartre hill, the subject of an earlier post.  But mostly, it's just a beautiful park where one can relax and catch the last rays of the late fall sun.  Parisians love their parks!

 Just today, I decided to visit Pere Lachaise.  The cemetery is only a few blocks from my apartment, and I've strolled through it many times.  Today, however, was November 1, All Saints Day, a very important holy day in the Catholic calendar, and also a public "holiday" in France, which has always had an interesting and somewhat complicated relationship with the Catholic Church.  At any rate, by tradition, Parisians visit the cemeteries on All Saints Day and place flowers on their family grave sites or just bring flowers to leave for others.  It's a very "flowery" holiday!  I'd hoped for lots of sunshine today, but I didn't get it.  Still, even though it was a bit gray, the late fall colors were rich, and I took a variety of photographs as I wondered through the cemetery.  It was crowded today with family members but also with quite a number of flaneurs, so I had more company in my strolling about than usual.

This is the "Mur des Federes," sacred ground to the Left in France.  In 1871, when the city was surrounded by German troops during France's first of three wars with that country, a proto-socialist government was formed which became known as the Paris Commune.  Marx hailed it as the first effort at a Communist Revolution, but it was a far more complicated affair than that and is well worth reading about.  Once the Prussian/German siege was lifted, the French Republic destroyed the Commune in a bloody repression, the last act of which was to take prominent members of the city government, line them up against this wall, and execute them.  Needless to say, once Socialists came to power in France, they made it a memorial, and the graves of prominent Socialists and Communists are nearby.  It's a fairly solemn place, and today, an extraordinarily beautiful one.

Interestingly, one of the most famous graves in the cemetery is also one of the most modest, but it is also the most visited.  I've never happened by it without seeing a crowd there.  For a while, the French had to post a police officer there to keep souvenir seekers from chipping off pieces of the grave stone--including the graves nearby, which infuriated families and motivated some to start a petition to get Jim Morrison transplanted out of the cemetery.  They failed, and he's still there--and still visited, all the time.

In fact, the most interesting thing about Morrison's grave is not the grave, which, as you can see, isn't much to look at, but the crowds of people who come to see it.  Today, of course, there was a larger than usual crowd milling around.  I do sometimes wonder what on earth the Lizard King would have made of it.  He was not notable for caring much about his fans.  Well, he's long past caring now.

One of my very favorite tombs in the cemetery is the cool art deco grave of Oscar Wilde.  Wilde died in relative poverty in Paris (quipping that he and poverty were not "well joined").  It is traditional when visiting his tomb to kiss it, preferably with a very strong lipstick on.  And women aren't the only ones who do it either!  Wilde was great fun, and I have no doubt he would have been pleased to be well visited.  He loved his public.

After my visit to Oscar, I wondered a bit, finding colors and taking photos.  It was getting late--Daylight Savings Time ended here this weekend--but I still managed to get what I thought were some lovely late fall pictures of one of the city's more...er...peaceful places!

Visitors often want me to take them to Pere Lachaise when they come, and I usually oblige.  It certainly is an impressive cemetery, but I confess that I generally prefer a live Paris to a dead one.  That said, Parisians do have great style, whether it's their fashions, their food, their art, their buildings, their literature...or their tombs!