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.
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