"At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, her coming-of-age autobiography of her early life up to the age of 21, her childhood and intellectual awakening, a struggle to reconcile, culminating in her meeting Jean-Paul Sartre. I think about her climbing up to the Basilica of Sacré Cœur de Montmartre, looking down at the city. Made from the rubble of the Paris Commune uprising of March 18 to May 28, 1871, the majestic basilica came to be a symbol of penitence to foster national unity, Christian martyrdom, a city of God and a city of people. You walk further down the hill and find an earthy Quartier Pigalle, with neon-lit red lights and eclectic nightlife, a raunchy, boisterous, violent, desperate, longing Paris. “I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space,” wrote Simone. “I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless." Between conviction and desolation, de Beauvoir wrote, "I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity." She saw the city as a “futile oasis" a place to make choices about living. Her philosophy grew from this.
Yet, it was never just her. She made sure we understood her life was a larger panorama, of history and philosophy, letters and a city, overlapping among cups of coffee, cigarettes, whisky, a story connecting countless lives. I think of Sartre writing about Genet and ‘68, meeting Simone in 1929, Simone getting love advice, crying her eyes out with Albert Camus, of Becket being difficult with Deidre, his biographer, before she turned to Simone, of Proust's writing bed, and the Beat Hotel at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter. There Allen Ginsberg and William B conspired, Allen drafted "Kaddish." Madame Rachou, the landlady at the Beat Hotel allowed her lovable tenants to pay rent with artwork or manuscripts when cash was tight. And Herald's experimental novel disappeared, as the fleas begot more fleas of the children of the revolution, Paul drinking German wine on a cafe on the West Bank, Orwell drafting his notes on being down and out, and Benjamin getting lost in the arcades, the ladies working, and climate protests, and Foucault theorizing, the remnants of the revolution unearthed in Cluny, memoirs drafted of Montparnasse.
And Jean Genet looked at the city, its streets, their depths and despairs, places of beauty, violence, the human comedy Balzac saw, a criminal underworld
"saturated with presence."
And Honoré de Balzac saw an "eternal monstrous marvel... the city of a hundred-thousand novels…" … "Half of Paris sleeps amidst the putrid exhalations of courts and streets and sewers,” wrote the master, who taught Marx to see and understand the city.
My brothers and I walked for hours and hours there, as the many, among the many as the sun came up.
And Madeline and her friends grew up,
"In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines"
In Paris, you wanna get in, get a good cup of coffee and get the hell out, said Isaak Masrahi.
It is a city of philosophy.
“je pense donc je suis.”
As well as irony and revolt, where even the protest signs are marked with a cool detachment:
“je fais du shopping donc je suis.”
We had not been here for eight, seven or eight years. A decade ago for the COP.
Walking out of the metro in the Tenth, the Paris contact high hits me, the metro signs, gorgeous cafes. We stopped for lunch at Valmy Ville, at 56 Rue de Lancry. The sound of jazz, a man playing a piano along the waterfront. Walk past the Canal. Look at the graffiti, kids hanging out on the water. Stop by a gallery. We walk to Musée des Moulages, a museum of the anatomy of illness inside an old hospital complex advertising 'sans tobac', patients walking about with breathing tubes and doctors walking smoking cigarettes, soon to be patients. This is very much the city of Foucault, where he drafted his history of asylums. You feel the history of insanity in the streets here.
‘No you can’t see it today,’ says the woman behind the glass. No, it's not possible, not here, not today, not at the public hospital, with the cuts and the attack on the public sector, that Mitterand could not prevent. While Mitterrand favored socialism, Thatcher suggested there is no society, just a market. Yet, something of the “Social Europe” remains.
So does legendary Paris, abundant Paris, and its tragedies. The gaps and absences, liberty, equality, fraternity, in name, like our all men created equal.
As James says, ‘It's _non pareil_sui generis.
Completely unique .’
Wow...I forget till I see it..exquisite light along the waterfront.
Aug 8th
We spend the day moving, starting with a quick espresso at Valmy Ville, from one corner of Paris to the next, from the belle epoche palace the Musée Jacquemart- André, a private museum located at 158 Boulevard Haussmann in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The museum was created from the private home of Édouard André and Nélie Jacquemart. Its collection is dizzying.
Stop at a cafe, people watching, discussing street photography, people strolling about, imagining their lives, as portraits, as stories.
Wolfgang Tillman's photos and photomontages fill the space at the Pompidou Centre.
“Nothing prepared us for it - Everything prepared us for it...The retrospective exhibition explores more than thirty-five years of artistic practices…” It feels like a scrap book of images of clubs and people, photomontages, ads, pictures and record jackets, images of clubs and conflicts, fashion and political strife, glossy magazines and drugs, highs and possibilities, clashes and contrasts of our time… Says the catalogue: “By bringing together early works from his archive with most recent works from his exhibition, he echoes the dialectic that has characterized the world since 1989: social progress and freedoms that were hard-won and that seemed secure are once again put into question….”
Heat and light, summer moving, out into the sunny afternoon, we stroll past L'hôtel de Ville and off to view the repairs of Notre Dame, and back to the 10th, to the Canal where everyone is out sitting, taking in the evening, glass of wine in hand, before we made our way back home.
Aug 9th
More people, more stories, more art, more food, more dive bars, each day we see more here. I start out early, strolling past bistros and the Museum of the Paris, where I'll spend the afternoon looking at belle epoch paintings, a 1971 video of a man critiquing urban renewal like it's today, the upscale buildings and deportations that follow, a copy of Gertrude Stein's desk, even Proust's bed.
I'm on my way to 10 Rue des Nonnains d'Hyères, for a tour of the city's Medieval past, its revolutionary fervour and terror, re embrace of the Monarchy, on and on through our tour of Marais, though the Musee of Paris, past the Bibliotech National, Place des Vosges, Jewish Paris, Victor Hugo's house, l'as du falafel etc, hidden gardens, old city walls, revolutionary relics, manors and mansions, galleries, history, culture, and life of Le Marais.
Baby C is meeting me. Back to the 10th, my feet take me to Valmy Ville for a snack. And we’re off to Musee Bourse du Commerce, exploring images of bodies in motion, dancing in the rain, love for sale, people listening to jazz. That's right, American jazz sounds special here, like Guinness in Dublin, or techno in Berlin, it's a unique feeling here in this city of Josephine Baker.
Enough museums, we aim our feet toward Chez Janette, a campy dive off rue st dennis. I’ve been here before, I think walking to 47 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, recalling the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, playing cards, watching the people, a cocktail waitress in a mini skirt, apron, black calf high stockings, pouring drinks as her colleague, in jeans, a wife beater white t shirt, looks at crossword puzzles, bored.
A few rounds of beer and a pernod and we're off, back to the 10th.
Stop at Hotel Nord for a snack, music in the air, the smell of pot. A few discuss it, watching the people begin their evenings, a few drinks or a snack here, delicious.
I’m thinking about J'Accuse...! the book by Émile Zola and Dreyfus Affair and the tour earlier in the afternoon. Walking through the Marais, we talked about Vichy France deportation day July 16 1942, Jews were deported from Paris....According to The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, "The Vélodrome d'Hiver (Vél d'Hiv) Roundup was the largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust. It took place in Paris on July 16–17, 1942. To preserve the fiction of a French police force independent of the German occupiers, French policemen carried out the mass arrest of some 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children.
In order to avoid a public outcry on Bastille Day, a French national holiday, the roundup was moved from July 13–15 to July 16–17.. The majority of those arrested were deported to Auschwitz...German authorities continued the deportations of Jews from French soil until August 1944. In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished in concentration camps and killing centers.
August 10th
On the way to Paris, I read Orwell, who begins his memoir of Paris,
“It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of it." These are some of the first lines of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933. He paints a picture of a long road, lost. We feel the same way, on our last day in Paris after six weeks away in Berlin, Helsinki, Brussels, Berlin and Croatia. I walked through the early morning, past the closed bakeries and bistros, past our favourite spots, from the 10th to the Musee Picasso through revolutionary Paris, thinking about Simone and Albert, Sartre and Picasso, Napoleon's monuments, off to the Grand Mosque Paris to meet Baby C for lunch,thinking about the French razorblades, the guillotines which set things straight. You were either for Robespierre or you were for chaos, until he met his fate under it.
As Robespierre stated: "We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror." On the other hand, "The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant."
Aug 11th
We wake up in Brooklyn.
"Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my days—to travel home and see the dawn of my return..." No one was saying Brooklyn was Ithaca. And our six weeks of dancing in Berlin,
swimming in Finland, romping about Brussels, exploring the bluest waters and magical coasts, working on ours tans in Croatia, or strolling the 10th in Paris, enjoying the bistros were close to twenty years away, still we were glad to be back to our crazy people's republic, where Grandpa was still talking about Arnold Schoenberg 12 tone scales and the absence of resonance and Mom was able to sit out on the back, feeling the sunshine on her beloved patio.
Back to Princeton, the tree outside, cheese and crackers and spritzers, frisbees in hand, back to the spot where the teenager came when she was born, 19 years prior.
And mom’s lived all these years.
After a few days of reading and thinking, digging around the old books in Moms library, in between accounts of travels in Afghanistan and the Islamic art section mom taught, the teenager picks up a copy of Archaeologists at Work, a book Dad signed in 1965, presumably still in Cambridge. Reading through it, out pours a typed itinerary for Mom and Dad's trip across Europe to Afghanistan, Iran and India, a night-by-night itinerary written by Fred. Starting in Vienna. Next stop Zagreb, one night. One, Two or three nights here or three, across the world. Wow. Mom and I chat about the find. "Fred went to the map room at Harvard and researched it all, making us copies, bringing up maps. Dad and Tad were more than happy to let Fred take up the routes," said Mom, laughing about Tad sitting instead of journeying into Persepolis. Wondering why Dad never wrote about the trip. I guess the answer is in the other book I picked up, by Peter Breugal the Elder. We are all dancing with our shadows and inner voices, the stories we carry, some that liberate, others that hold us back, or horrify. All these books on the shelf, stories, of long ago lives....
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