Saturday, December 8, 2007
Le Bateau Lavoir
Le Bateau Lavoir
Thursday in September, the fourth full day. Musee d’Orsay by a little after ten a.m. Walk the galleries till about 1:30 or so. Then take metro #2 to the Blanche exit across the street from the Moulin Rouge. Walk the route described in the Lonely Planet guidebook along the rue Lepic, past Theo van Gogh’s apartment, all the way up the hill on a winding path to the cathedral. Walk around on the inside, and then around on the outside, before heading over to the place de Tertre where street artists are drawing portraits. The clouds hint at a possible rainfall. Sit under a red tent and have a cup of café noir, large, American style, and a ham and cheese sandwich, and then a medium sized beer, rather refreshing, and watch an artist draw a young woman’s portrait. The rain never really comes down beyond the hint of a mist. Walk down some steps of the rue du Calvaire, and over to the doorway of Le Bateau Lavoir, once a home to famous dead artists when they were young. That is my last photo from the digital camera. Walk on down to the rue des Abbesses. Sit a while. Finally take the metro back to my home neighborhood, getting home around 8 p.m. Two more full days left for this little holiday. What is yet to come?
Friday morning begins with a visit to the Montparnasse cemetery and the remains of Charles Baudelaire, including the gravestone and the memorial site. Then there is the metro to the Pompidou centre for modern art. The Fauves and Kandinsky are interesting. After that, the show goes by very quickly for me. Then it’s the metro to the Louvre for the Rubens room, and the northern European galleries on the second etage of the Richelieu wing.
Today is cloudy and an evening boat ride up and down the river around the Ile de la Cite and Ile St.-Louis is pleasant. Then walk on over past the Eiffel Tower, looking for my place to eat and finally find the Taj Mahal in my neighborhood. Chicken Tandoor with two glasses of beer. Excellent spot, suits me just fine.
Saturday morning. Write up and drop off my post cards. Buy a beret at Monoprix. Walk the streets to under the Eiffel Tower and cross the bridge to the Trocadero metro, and catch the train, actually three in all, to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. Walk the rue Clavel and back and then get to know the Parc. Head on out around 3:30 to the metro to the Musee Rodin on rue Varenne. After this, walk the rue de Granelle to the Champs de Mars Parc and watch the people play as the sun sets behind the Eiffel Tower. Then walk on over to my favorite Indian restaurant. Complete dinner and 3 beers, and I’m ready to go in the morning.
Where we start is I’m looking for money. This is my first question out of the hotel, addressed to the young East Indian receptionist with long black hair hanging loosely in a pony tail down to the middle of her back, always thoughtfully busy at her station in her alcove, keeping track of the endless stream of passers-by from week to week to week. All with their little concerns that she intelligently and sympathetically addresses and here is this new one and he wants to know where he can change money. Over at the Champs-Elysses although it’s a long walk but you can use the metro, except that he has not the slightest idea about how the metro works or where it goes, because he still doesn’t know where anything is anyway, above ground or below, and this is what he has to first learn.
So in the 15th southwest of the Eiffel Tower, going by the military academy at the far end of the Eiffel Tower garden of grass and trimmed bushes to across the bridge of golden angels to the celebrated avenue. Looking for a place to change my unspendable money into some spendable money. Not that I’m lookin’ to be spendin’ a lot of money, but I’d like something enough to buy some little thing to eat or drink, maybe have a few extra to spend on whatever something else that comes along that feels right for what I am looking for to get out of this little trip.
The first day is all about looking around. Stretching the legs and seeing what’s out there. From the hotel to down to the corner to across the street, having already passed by a few streetside shops, including an open air fresh fish market. Turn right first and walk for a couple of blocks to a wide street crossing which takes me to a wide quiet street which leads to the far end of the mall extending from the Eiffel Tower. There are some young teenagers kicking a soccer ball around, a couple of women sitting on park benches reading their books. I’ve got my map and I’m looking for the Champs-Elysses and a money changer. Cross the river and find my way. Just like Michigan avenue in Chicago. Lots of people going in both directions looking for entertainment. Thread my way to the eye of the needle. Cross every intersection around the Arc de Triomphe, sitting on benches from time to time. Public expressions of affection between young couples here and there along the way further brighten this already blue sky day. Around the great monument, some little military parade is remembering something or other this afternoon. Begin the walk down the broad busy avenue to the Place de Concorde.
Then it’s through the gardens of the Tuileries, and finally to the courtyards of the Louvre. Not going in today. Just looking around the terrain. On the busy little street next to the river, find a shop where I can get a double hot dog and fromage on a thick quality bun. That with a Fanta at a street side table-ette. Before heading across the Pont Neuf to explore the perimeter and wind up in the Notre Dame courtyard. This has been a long walk so far today, and the walk back will be almost just as long. Complete the crossing of the Pont Neuf to the left bank, and follow the street along the river all the way over to the Tour Eiffel, where I can wind my way through the maze of streets, some wide, some narrow, some busy, some not, back to my hotel. From two in the afternoon to ten at night, out walking the streets of Paris for the first time.
Monday morning starts off with petit dejeuner at the hotel at seven. Our tour guide Catherine comes by for a meeting with our very small tour group at 8:20 and gives us some basic information about how to get around this city. Specifically for me, how to get a weekly pass for the metro, and some basic instructions for how it works.
After negotiating a weekly pass with the ticket man at the metro station, with a little translation assistance from the young woman just behind me in line, I’m off for my first train ride through the city. Now I have time to stroll through the Louvre, and Notre Dame, and walk around the Ile St.-Louis, and finally cross along and through some streets on the right bank, to another cathedral, and its park. Choose a quiet simple restaurant to sit awhile and have a bite to eat. On the inside, a friendly, blonde, middle aged waitress takes my order for a ham and cheese sandwich and bottled water. This is good.
It’s night now. I’m game for trying the bus. Miss a couple of what may have been right for me, and wind up on one that is taking me to I don’t know where. It is impossible for me to figure out where I should be getting off. The streets are so winding, and the night lights so confusing, and the bus is cruising through this confusion at an unimaginable pace. Finally, I just get off to see if I can get some bearings. At the bus stop, I ask for directions, starting with Je ne parle pas francais. One tall young man thinks this is a bit funny, telling them I don’t speak it in that very language. One young lady knows enough English words to get me on the right path. We get on a bus together, and a little bit down the line, as she is getting off, she tells me to go for 3 more stops, get off, cross the street in a certain direction, find the metro station, and go to the Trocadero stop. That will get me back in my neighborhood. And it does. Only it’s my neighborhood plus another good mile of walking to the vicinity of my hotel. Compared to where I was at that far away bus stop, Trocadero is definitely my neighborhood.
Tuesday is the trip to Versailles and the perfume museum. In the evening, after we return, I go to the Monoprix clothing and grocery store to look for camera batteries, and find tomatoes and bread and cheese and canned coffee drinks that I can take up to my room.
Wednesday is Auvers and Giverny, and after getting dropped off at the end of the trip near the Place de Concord, don’t walk around a whole lot more down there. Take the metro back to Trocadero. No place special to go; just hanging out.
Thursday is one beer at the outdoor café in Montmarte. The clouds are threatening rain. There are even a few little drops come down. I have already been walking a good piece of the day. First to and then through the Musee d’Orsay. Then to the metro stop near the Moulin Rouge to begin the walk along the winding streets going up the hill. By Vincent and Theo’s apartment at Number 54. On up to the Moulin Galette, following the recommended directions. Finally up to the artists’ square near the neighborhood of the big cathedral. Ham and cheese and a beer, watching a sketcher draw out the fine lines of expression from his model, a very pleasant featured young woman. Sitting time before beginning the long walk back home. Bottom of the stairwell, round another corner, to a little triangle intersection, busy enough, trees and pedestrians, and shops all mixed up together and a lost folding chair for me to rest and survey the movements. Sidewalk drawing, the face of a ghost. Musicians on the sidewalk above the entrance to the metro. Young boys trying their stuff. Old man showing them how. Thursday evening, I don’t know where to go; Trocadero is a place to get off for a final walkover to my hotel. From the overview across the river to the walk down another hill and across the river to a leisurely stroll.
It is one long subway ride on Saturday morning from my neighborhood to Rue Cluney where Elizabeth’s sister lives. This is the train where I have a visual exchange with a woman whom to me is the personification of France. Someone from out of the Marsellaise, someone from out of the genetic roots of the French population, a face that has been there every step of the way along the road of French history from every medieval era to every event of the twentieth century. Here she is. Maybe in her later thirties. There she is sitting across from me and over one chair. I can’t just stare at her, and I can’t keep my eyes away from glancing in every possible direction all around her face, framing her forever, and she is not in the least bothered by my attention, and shares a few glances of her own with me. She knows that I see something special in her. She might even know what it is. No words are possible. It comes time for her to disappear into the city. I continue my ride to the park. Take the steps up from the underground tunnels, walk around a few quiet streets near the park. I’ll have a peach from a street vendor.
What am I looking for here in this city? First of all, the layout. From where I am at, where is everything else? How many steps does it take to get from here to some other place? Are we measuring space through time or the other way around? From the fifteenth just southwest of the Eiffel Tower, looking for the streets that will take me to the bridge across the river, and then on over to the Champs Elysses. The Pont des Invalides with the golden winged horses and angels with their trumpets suspending the bridge over the water. Faces along the way, and a look of recognition or two. Who indeed, shall I be recognizing, and who shall I be speaking with, in this city as old as the time when some people started living on those islands in the river? Remember the time when the Ile de la Cite and the Isle St-Louis were forested, and the only way to get there was by boat. How many bridges have there been over how many centuries connecting the islands to one shore or another? When did the city become bigger than these two islands? Who are the French from the time when they were the only ones here?
I’m crossing a bridge from one bank to another, and following streets that will take me to a shop where I can change money, so I will be able to buy food and other necessities and frivolities as my mood sees fit. Discovering then the Champs Elysses about midafternoon along its length, it is only natural to walk up one side of the avenue towards the arc, to circle the arc around its outer perimeter, and to walk back down the avenue all of its way on the other side. Sitting down every block or two on some convenient vacant bench in the public domain. Finally, the whole thing turns into a tree-lined garden, and the street goes on to the obelisk at the Place de Concorde. All of this is just the beginning of getting to know where things are at.
Wednesday evening, having returned from the day long excursion to Auvers-sur-Oise and Giverny. Take a little stroll through the garden before heading down the metro for a ride to Trocadero. Around the corner is a great monumental statue that looks over the Eiffel Tower from across the river. Evening crowds of leisurely couples and small groups animate the mall from one side of the river to the other and beyond. I’ve got a leisurely evening stroll through the pathways and sidewalks that wind their ways to my room on the third etage of a small hotel around the convenient corner from a street of little shops – bakery, cheese, wine, fish, vegetables, sidewalk café, book shop, to the corner where the cross street requires some electronic signals to regulate traffic. Here is a street full of all kinds of more kinds of stores, and right here at the crossroads is the overground metro. Here’s my home corner, where I’ve been around ‘em a few times at different times of day and night. Stand outside and find the north star, and tell me which way the clock is going.
In the hotel room with an overview that would be a cubist’s delight, vertical geometrical slabs of sides of buildings in middle, near, and far ground views which are not that far away, always this to my view every morning, the mosaic of possibilities that unfold when I put my shoe to the pavement.
Friday is the cemetery first thing in the morning for a visit to the memory of Charles Baudelaire. Wrote all his stuff down by the time he was forty-six and then he was gone. There is a tombstone where he is buried with his mother and his step-father. On the other side of the cemetery up against the tall stone wall that encloses this park, is a tall narrow carving. On the one hand repose with the extended figure on the ground, while on the other hand, from the vertical column and extending from it, an eagle-eyed visionary. Not many people strolling the cemetery today. Here is a place at the end of the path extending from the main driveway towards the wall, the end of its line. Here is a memorial to a long dead poet and I am visiting my memory of having read his words, in various English translations, although I did have a significant amount of experience with French vocabulary, grammar and usage to be able to get some feel for the original. I thought him very insightful, getting to some essence of understanding for the reality underlying the illusion, the truth underlying all of the frills and nonsense of life, which, not to be disdained, are essential aspects of our overall experience. Correspondences. Who am I meeting and getting to know for the first time in a very long time?
I’m mostly doing art museums and art related visits, so after visiting the poet, it’s through the underground this cloudy day to the Pompidou museum of modern art. I like the Fauves and the Cubists and color and shape experimenters of the first third of the 20th century, but after that, it all deteriorates for me. It doesn’t take me long to go through a quick wrap-up of the deconstructed ultra-moderns, and I then am motivated to head on over to the Louvre for a visit to the whole wing of northern European painting I had not seen on Monday. This includes the gallery of Rubens’ twenty-four painting sequence for the story of the great and beautiful queen, whoever she was. Quite a remarkable piece of work. Some Rembrandts up in that wing, and quite a few others I recognize from art history books once avidly paged through. Here they are, big as life, certainly bigger than an illustration on a page in a book. Visit the collection of old Greek sculptures, including Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Musta been really nice when they were in mint condition. Outside is still cloudy. I can walk more or less along the right bank along the river. I’ve got my map to keep me clear on which street is connected to which other street which is going in which direction.
Hop the metro for a stop or two, and head to the tour boat for which I have a free ticket. It’s a long old double-decker and the crowd is very small on this late cloudy afternoon, so it’s up the river to around the two islands, and back down the river to past the Eiffel Tower, and back to the Invalides where we started. Then it’s walk on back, across the Eiffel Tower park to the winding narrow streets leading to my hotel, and along the way is a little Indian Pakistani restaurant. Looks very nice, and the prices are nice, it’s quiet tonight, the waiter is great, the tandoori chicken is great, and a couple of beers taste good. Then it’s just the last few blocks to home. Did you meet somebody today? A few passing glances on the metro. My waiter at the Indian restaurant. The memory of a poet I once knew.
Saturday is the last walkaround. I’ve been through my basic round of museums and art-related journeys and I know there are many, many museums around town, but now is time for something else. The morning is leisurely. After petit-dejeuner, sit on my bed in my room facing the open window with my city map unfolded before me. I was told by Elizabeth in the States to visit the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the nineteenth. So it’s into the metro map to figure out which lines connect with which other lines to get me there. The Buttes Chaumont station is on the short line 7bis. There is clearly more than one way to go from my home at Dupliex, and I choose to take number six to Charles de Gaulle Etoile and catch the number two going to Nation. Number six also goes to Nation and I could have made the connection there, but I choose the northern route. And as swift and efficient as all these trains are, it still takes more than just a few minutes to traverse that distance. Less than an hour, more than half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, including that walking between trains, with some step climbing to boot.
And here is a relatively quiet street on the side of the park. Reading my street map carefully, I walk up the rue Fessart to the Rue Clavel and turn right. There on the corner of Rue Bolivar is a small quiet Portuguese restaurant with a couple of tables and chairs outside, and one couple is far into some conversation at one of those tables. Walk on down Rue Clavel past Elizabeth’s sister’s apartment to the busy Rue de Belleville. Stand on that corner for a couple of minutes getting a feel for the sound and sight of pedestrian movement of this moderately active neighborhood. Walk back up to Bolivar and turn left and walk down to the busier street that will lead me back to the park entrance. It looks big, the gate is open, and it is early Saturday afternoon. The entire park is a network of rises and falls from one hill to another surrounding a lake, and in the center of this lake is an island rising steeply out of the water, a pinnacle of jagged rock and tree laced greenery culminating in a domed circular Greek inspired temple with space enough for about six persons at a time to survey the horizon of the city from this precipitous high point in the middle of this haven of grassy slopes where leisure is the word for the day. The park itself is an island in the city, and there is an island in the middle of the island. Walking along the pathways and along the sides of grassy slopes leads to places far away from the streets on the other side of the park’s perimeter fence. Get to the place where I take off my shoes and walk through the lush grass from one slope to another.
It’s getting on in the afternoon, and there’s one other thing I’ve been told to do and that is to visit the Rodin Museum. So it’s back to planning, and the path is to the Rue Varenne near the Varenne station on number thirteen, and thirteen connects quite conveniently with number two at Place de Clichy. Wrapping up an afternoon in the Park with a visit to Rodin’s gardens. Trainride is getting to be as much a part of the landscape as the city itself, maybe even a little more so, for everyone down here has something in common with every other one of us. We are down here for only one reason, to get to someplace else. Except for the musicians and their classical, jazz, or other inspired improvisational creations that resonate through the walkway tunnels. There is even a young African fellow singing Let It Be on a train as it rattles along the tracks of the elevated railway.
Nobody comes down here to just stroll around and look at the scenery. But one thing we do have to look at is each other on our ways. There is a lot of courtesy played out in this entire process of waiting, getting on, getting off, finding a seat, deciding where to stand, balancing yourself in relation to everyone around you as the train hurtles through a turn, and finding your way through the labyrinth of tunnels connecting one train to another. All of this is the world we metro riders share, and there is, at least for me, newcomer as I am, a little curiosity about what kind of conversation I might have with certain ones, especially if I knew their language and if we had some time, short or long, to explore each other’s worlds.
After the museum, it's walking time again and it's really just a short stroll over to the southern edge of the Esplanade des Invalides. From there it’s another easy walk over to sit with the evening visitors to the Parc du Champ de Mars between the Tour Eiffel and the Ecole Militaire. A loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and You. As dusk settles into darkness, walk the narrow winding streets over to Rue Humboldt and the Taj Mahal for another East Indian dinner, and three beers to settle it on down into where I want to keep it all. Tomorrow morning, I’ll finish off my roll of film in the neighborhood, have my last petit dejeuner at the hotel, and put everything I brought with me back into my bags, and include a few magazines, and a French language art history book of pictures and thoughts about Salvador Dali. I found this book at a street side bookshop on Rue Cler just off of Rue de Grenelle on my way to the Park du Champs de Mars. I had a few extra Euros I needed to spend and this book fits the ticket. This section of Rue Cler is a wonderful pedestrian mall in the old fashioned French marketing tradition. A few fresh memories of a few days spent in a very special place.
Wednesday morning is the out-of-town bus tour and I have to be on my way early so I can be at the meeting place just off the Rue de Rivoli next to the Tuileries by eight. So it’s a quick and early petit dejeuner and a brisk walk to the Dupliex station for the number six Charles de Gaulle Etoile for a switch to the number one Chateau de Vincennes and the exit at the Tuileries station on Rue de Rivoli just a block down and across the street around the golden statue of St. Joan of Arc triumphant, riding her horse and holding her long staff with its flag of victory. When there are ten of us ready to go, the driver and the tour guide take their places and we are on our way winding the narrow streets of the city on our way to the larger streets on our way to the highway for the less a than one hour ride to the streets of Auvers-sur-Oise. The driver drops the guide and her followers at the bottom of the hill leading to Daubigny’s bust on a pillar in a garden on a triangle of Earth, with a stone wall background, the artist in his setting, ready with his palette and brushes in hand, wearing his beret, surveying all of us who see him looking towards the horizon while we are walking up the hill. Just behind him is the church, a mini-cathedral, where we can explore the inside as well as the outside. A very graceful image of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. Standing on the crescent of moon entwined with white clouds, dressed in a long blue and white gown, figure gently curving towards the left, the face of a young girl with brown hair hanging loose to her shoulders, no glaring halo, just the simple peasant girl in all of her holy reverence for where she is going, where she is looking to, the sky. This painting hangs against the grey stone wall, in a corner on the right side of the front of the church. Votive candles for two Euros each. A long white tapir. This is for my mother, Matilda. Her favorite of Van Gogh’s paintings was composed and made real by the artist in this town. Two women going towards and two women coming from a winding stairway, curving its way up from left to right. An old man is descending the stairway. A set of buildings lines the background on the level that the stairway leads to. Leafy vegetation on the perimeter. She and I went to a van Gogh exhibition at the St. Louis art museum a few years ago when she was walking and seeing well and that’s where she decided which was her favorite. I wasn’t exactly sure about my favorite but she was quite sure of hers, so I have adopted her favorite as mine.
This guide is very good at pointing things out to us about where things are and what they are. We walk on up the long gentle slope to the top of this hill to the cemetery and the land where van Gogh painted his wheatfields. The gravesites look just like they do in the photographs, except now all of the other tombstones of the cemetery are around under the sunlight and the steeple of the church is quite visible above the treetops just below. Like there’s a connection between the steeple emerging through the treetops and the tombstones in this field on top of the hill. Walk back down the gentle slope of the rural hill from the cemetery to the twisting byways of the town and the break up for individual exploration and coffee time. A friendly young man from California and I stop in at a Tabac to get an expresso for the tables outside on the quiet sidewalk. His childhood was in France for a while a long time ago, and he has since lived the rest of his life in New York or Los Angeles and now he is taking a couple of weeks to visit his homeland to see if he can reconnect, with no specific objective in mind, except for some maybe dormant art that might rekindle. Sound familiar? I didn’t visit the room where Vincent passed his last breath. There has to be some mystery I leave behind here, something that I didn’t see or do that is of some significance. I’ve seen where van Gogh walked and I’ve walked those paths. I’ve seen where he painted that whole last series that he did here. I’ve seen the café where he sat and drank bottles of wine alone or with others. I was told I could see the room where he died but I passed that one by. All of this is by around noon, and the bus pulls up for we all to begin the ride to Giverny.
Along the highway through the sunlit rural landscape to Giverny is close to an hour. From the busses’ parking lot, we walk through a tunnel under the highway to the village pathways that lead to the home and gardens of Claude Monet. From the entrance, turning left, and going down a few old wooden steps into a large space one might call a family room, a drawing room, or a living room. Plenty of sofas and chairs about to leisure upon, and other little nooks and crannies that are a little more studious in nature. The family gathering room. Lots of facsimiles of Monet’s famous paintings are hanging high on the walls. We can walk around the upstairs bedrooms, and look out the large windows to the extensive gardens below. The dining room is bright yellow, with one wall of windows, and plenty of floor space, and intricate little wooden chairs for twelve people to sit around the large wooden table. Cheerfulness throughout. The kitchen is mostly a sky blue. Outside, the gardens are abundant, and through another tunnel under the main road are the water Lilly ponds and Japanese bridges. One can walk around the ponds and over the bridges. Lots of Serenity out here.
There is a salmon quiche lunch all ready for the travelers when we get to the museum and visitors welcome center in the walking vicinity of Monet’s gardens. A nice little round table get together under the roof on the inside of a day-lit window partition to an outside patio. The young man from Los Angeles is very talkative with everyone around the table and galvanizes a sense of interaction for the rest of us who are more reserved. The museum part of this facility has two exhibits, one of southwest photography from the 1800’s, as in southwestern United States. Lots of sepia prints of dramatic rock formations and an occasional native from Arizona or New Mexico. The other half of the gallery has an exhibit of lesser known impressionists who painted some wonderful scenes from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s. There are people picnicking under a canopy of tree limbs and little girls playing, sisters, a two year old and a four year old laughing in the sunlight near the beach and the sea and the horizon and the sky. Mary Cassatt, Summertime, 1894. Edmund Charles Tarbell, In the Orchard, 1891. Frank Weston Benson, The Sisters, 1899. Winslow Homer, Girls in Landscape, 1873. I retrieve postcard images of these from the gift shop. And so there it is: the house, the gardens and ponds, the museum and the gift shop. Time to be getting back to the bus, if we can find our way, for the directive is that we are all on our own, and we need to meet back at the bus which means we have to find the right side street that leads to the tunnel under the road to the busses’ parking lot. And those of us who are lost or unsure help each other to find our ways, with what I remember and what you remember working together. Half the fun of a tour can be getting to know your tour partners. In the sea of faces roaming about the premises, we have a point of recognition. Familiarity develops, especially after having been up and down the hill in Auvers-sur-Oise. So this is the final walk down a path that we will share. On the bus, we’ll be back in our accustomed seats, and at the end, we will all go back to where we came from. For this little morning and afternoon, ten strangers and their guide got together for the very specific purpose of visiting the homes and neighborhoods and scenery enjoyed by two of their favorite artists.
When our friend from Los Angeles started his conversation with me back in Auvers, he asked me if I was enjoying myself. I answered yes, in a friendly reply, and he then said, “You look like you’re enjoying yourself.” So I look like what I’m feeling. Whatever kinds of thoughts and associations and memories are going on in my mind, he is not asking me what I think, he is telling me that I look like I’m enjoying myself. Thank you, my friend. That’s what it all boils down to. I’m having a good time, seeing places and things that have always been scattered around on pages of books, on television or movie screens, or internet screens. Now it’s in surround sound and three hundred and sixty degree total immersion, and I am totally abstracted out of and away from some of my worlds in the United States. There is nothing to think about that. I am in the French countryside, watching the French landscape go by through the windows of my bus. The rural landscape becomes more suburban and the highways becomes more congested, and before long we are winding our way back through the city streets to the office behind the golden statue of St. Joan of Arc. Now I wind up in the late afternoon in the Tuileries gardens, letting where I have been settle in, and thinking about where to go from here.
Walk through the Louvre courtyards and on over to the Pont Neuf for an evening visit to the courtyards of Notre Dame. In search of another photograph or two. From here then, in the evening coming off of the Pont Neuf, it’s a long walk all the way back, and I’m getting to know the metro now, so I’ll ride a little ways and walk the rest. It’s been kind of a full day for going places and seeing stuff. Get over to the Eiffel Tower area when it’s doing its sparkly light thing on the hour in the darkness. From here, I’m getting to know the pathways through the narrow streets to my home.
Thursday morning to the Orsay by around ten in the morning. Planning the morning metro connection, from Dupliex number six Nation to the Pasteur connection to number twelve Porte de la Chapelle to the Solferino station where I can emerge some several blocks from the museum and walk through some unknown streets with map in hand to guide me through the twists and turns of the pathways. I am not the only one at the doorway at opening time on this partly cloudy to overcast morning in the city.
The layout of rooms and hallways and pathways from gallery to gallery is amazing in itself. The whole idea of this whole building having once been a train station! Train engines here and there with their long chains of passenger cars, bustling travelers, carrying and pushing and lifting their baggage, walking up and down the loading dock platforms. Now, wall to wall nineteenth century paintings, and sculptures enough to make this place feel like a Greek garden. Lots of different things passed by in nineteenth century painting. It’s like walking through an art history book and having all those pictures come to life. Have I said that before? In and out through all of those strangely interconnected galleries.
Thursday afternoon is to Montmarte. The Lonely Planet guidebook has a recommended walking tour beginning at the Blanche metro station. That’s on the number two line which I can transfer to from number twelve at Pigale. The walk will take me past the apartment building at number 54 rue Lepic where Theo and Vincent van Gogh lived for two years from 1886. Winding here, winding there, climbing all the time, sitting down from time to time along the way at some convenient spot. Catching the scene. Catch a slightly deeper breath. Skies are pretty well overcast, but it doesn’t smell like rain just yet, maybe latter. All of a sudden, getting near the top, there’s a cluster of shops, open air shops, and clusters of tourists here and there moving through the maze. Of course. Now we must be getting close to the focal point. Right around a corner or two and around some other large building is the white marbled dome of the Sacred Heart of Montmarte. Lots of visitors strolling up and down the steps and through the church. A quiet park for a leisurely vista of the city. Back down through the streets of the artists’ square. Take a table under the awning of a casual open air restaurant next to the line of portraitists at their easels, waiting for a subject, or drawing one. And I am in a position to watch, over the shoulder from a respectable distance where I am sitting eating my sandwich and drinking my beer, the complete development of a young woman’s portrait, from first scratch on the paper, to final finishing detail. That artist knows exactly what he is doing, every stroke of the way. What a pleasure to watch. It’s like a musical performance to watch someone begin from a vague and simple outline, and then step-by-step focus into a deeper level of detail, all the way down to the last eyelash. All within something like half an hour, although I am not looking at my watch on this, and simply watching the drawing emerge is like passing through a moment of suspended animation. Once I have seen the beginning, how can I not see it through to the end? This is a live performance, open to the public for viewing. The lady is having her picture drawn in the open air at the center of the square with its trees and shops all around at the top of Montmarte. She has to sit still for that entire time with her expression unchanging. Really a rather straightforward look with the hint of neither a smile nor a frown. Full lips, light tan complexion, oval face, dark reddish brown hair arranged fashionably around her skull. He gets her down on paper, just like she is. She likes it and she wants it, and he rolls it up and puts it in a tube for her to carry to wherever in the world she is going.
Time to be on our ways. Narrow grey stone steps descend on the first leg of the descent. Winding residential streets to an intersection with a business street. A little triangle of a park with a folding chair under a couple of large copious trees, as occasional pedestrians go by on their ways. Sidewalk art. Ghostly faces that will be erased with the coming and going of the next rainfall or two or three. Down the street towards the metro entrance. My camera gives out after the Le Bateau Lavoir picture. At least I got that, and a good one it is, and what a good place to stop. Park bench in the little neighborhood park next to the metro station. One of those little extra wide sections of public sidewalk with benches around here and there, a place for passers-by to sit for a little while; teenagers picking their way through some chords on an acoustic guitar; an older man coming by, striking up some talking with them, the young man handing the old man the guitar, and the old man finding his key and rolling and strumming like lightning. Music happens. Place des Abbesses, at the Abbesses metro station.
On this Thursday early evening, after the Orsay, Montmarte, and walking through metro stations, I’ve been on my feet most of the day. Going back is kinda like how I came up this morning, only in reverse. Take the number twelve Mairie d’Issy to Pasteur and transfer to my number six Charles De Gaulle Etoile to my home station at Dupliex. Walk around the neighborhood. Visit the park next to the local church with its towering slender conical yellow brick steeple. Benches all around the interior perimeter of the fenced in park. Kids playground in the middle on one side and trees all around. A place to sit and read or meditate on nothing. Wander up the street from the church and find a quite extensive magazine shop. All kinds of titles on all kinds of subjects and I wind up buying an Arts magazine with pictures from the museum I visited at Giverny yesterday. The little girls playing; the friends in the park. I can come back here later and perhaps get a few more things. Side streets lead to busy streets and where one neighborhood ends and the next begins is a matter of personal choice. The afternoon is getting later. Dusk is approaching. Perhaps another visit to Monoprix to get a couple more cans of those coffee drinks, another piece of cheese, and packet of cherry tomatoes. I’ve still got some rye bread, and I can get a couple of Fantas at the shop next to the hotel. Rather like eating my own simple store bought food in the room at night. Paging through touring books and looking at street maps, scanning through my new magazine, thinking about what tomorrow might be about.
Friday morning starts with a slower pace. Take my neighborhood number six at Dupliex towards Nation and exit Denfert Rochereau. Walk along Rue Froidevaux towards the entrance of the Cimitiere Montparnasse. Wide empty street with a quiet and calm walking space between the car lanes gong this way and that. An art supply store is open and I can’t resist stopping in to see those familiar racks of all kinds of pencils and crayons and tubes of paint and brushes. And all those papers! Is there an artist in the crowd? Gotta take something outa here. A little brown box of four conte crayons. Black and white, bistre and sanguine. What shall I use them for?
The morning is calm and bright on this un-busy street leading to the gate of the quiet cemetery park. Not too many other people around at all. The gatekeeper provides a little map indicating the locations of gravesites of famous people whose remains are here, where our memories and thoughts of who they were can connect. Here I am, looking for the grave of Charles Baudelaire. It’s been twenty years since I thought very much about this man and his poetry and other writings. There was a time ten years ago also. Those were the times when I had convenient access to a University library, where I scoured the shelves to find someone to sit with. Pathway down a line of words, take me to an image I have never seen before, and send me a thought I have never traveled. I met Charles a longer time than before twenty years ago. He visits for a while from time to time and now I reach back into my memory and visit the place where someone placed his remains. Here is a reminder of where you are going. Somewhere down there underneath a big rock. The driveways and pathways are narrow and quiet and a lot of creativity emerges through these tombstones. Thank you Charles. I’ll have to get ahold of a copy of your works again. Gotta get closer to the French. I am familiar with various English translations; I should think that I am entitled to my own. There are many good writers whom I don’t know and haven’t read, and there are some others whom I can always revisit with that same sense of discovery that I had when I first met them. The last decades of my life are before me and I really don’t know how much time I have left before the darkness, or the light, depending on how you look at it. Keep the light burning and it will stay longer. I’m just here to be lookin’ for a little piece of my old self whom I haven’t had a conversation with in a very long time.
Over here in the late morning at the Baudelaire memorial at the Cimitiere, time to read the metro map to see which train or trains I need to take. From Denfert Rochereau take number four to Porte de Clignancourt and get off at Chatelet just across the river. Take the underground walkway to number eleven Mairie des Lilas to the Rambuteau exit. Big buildings and busy streets and half a square block of bricked over open space in front of the Pompidou museum. The gift of space is a part of the place. Strolling, hanging out, sitting and eating a sandwich, playing a musical instrument, outdoor cafes across the street around the perimeter. Puppet shows for donations after the performance. Up to the top floor of the Pompidou and survey the cityscape of rooftops unfolding towards the Basilique du Sacre Coeur of Montmarte. The historical unfolding begins with the Fauves, and the Cubists, and Kandinsky in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. All of these things I can respond to. As the decades unfold after that, I begin to become lost. Things to respond to in so-called modern art are few and far between. It’s become like a mind game, and it becomes rather annoying. Whatever happened to the search for beauty? It doesn’t take me very long to walk through the rest of it all, and by the time I get to the closing decades of our recently departed century, I am feeling a little thirsty for something more substantial. Sit a while around the rectangular pool off to one side of the Pompidou square. Plan the way to walk over to the Louvre. There is a whole ‘nother wing of galleries that I want to get over to, the Richelieu wing of northern European. I had spent my first day in the Louvre on Monday in the Sully wing of 17th, 18th, and 19th century French paintings. That was plenty enough to keep my head turning for one day. Now I’m coming off of the Pompidou where the concept of painting has been recently erased. The slate is clean. Time for another stroll through the pages of another art history book. The Rubens room, with its twenty-four panels with stories from the life of a queen, is outstandingly awesome. I really never had any idea that those little images I saw in those art history books were such diminutive understatements. Visit the winged Victory of Samothrace and a Botticelli fresco of young women walking, wearing long colorful silken dresses, turning their heads towards one another in conversation, telling stories.
Getting to be somewhere between late afternoon and early evening. Skies are cloudy. Get out the maps. This is a good time to use my free boat ride ticket. I can take the number seven La Courneuve 8 Mai 1945 from Palais Royal Musee du Louvre station to Chaussee d’Antin where I can transfer to the number nine Pont de Sevres and exit at Alma Marceau. From here I can walk down to the Pont d’Alina where the tour boat docks between its goings and its comings. I’m there just ten minutes before next departure and there’s not a whole lot of people on this ride. I am upstairs under the open sky. Air is cool without being cold. We go upriver first, under bridge, under bridge, under bridge until we’re going under Pont Neuf to around the south side of the Isle de la Cite and the Ile St.-Louis. The big boat does a big youie in the middle of this wide section of the river. Returning downriver along the north sides of the islands, bridge under, bridge under, bridge under until we’re going past the dock, past the Tour Eiffel and then all the way around the Alee des Cygnes and the Statue de la Liberte to another turnaround, and return past the Tour Eiffel to the dock. All in about one hour. Getting into the early evening now. I could walk but I could also take the number nine over two stops and be at Trocadero where I can catch an overview of the Eiffel Tower from the Palais de Chaillot. On the far end of one of the wide steps, a young woman sits by nearby, untying and retying her shoelaces. Spending some time on her own, getting to know the city the way she wants to get to know it. After a few days of walking around, a few things start becoming familiar. How the metro works. The neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower and my own neighborhood right across the Avenue de Suffren and the boulevard de Grenelle. I’ve been through the Louvre twice and around both of the islands. How crossing lights work and how great those double sided green benches along various streets can be, to rest my leg and just plain stop, in a spot in a place to listen to the neighborhood. From the overview, I can walk down through the jardins du Trocadero, to the Pont d’Lena to under the Tour Eiffel to the Parc du Champs de Mars where this evening’s couples and small groups and individuals like myself can sit on the grass and forget and remember whatever feels right. Time for the final stroll through the neighborhood as twilight turns to darkness, somehow run into a totally charming small elegant friendly East Indian restaurant all but hiding amongst the shadowed wall of rue Humboldt, surely one of the shortest side streets in Paris. The tandoori chicken and rice is very nicely done and this is a truly refreshing way to end a day of Parisian explorations.
Sunday morning and its getting time to go. The taxi will be here to pick me up at nine. The plane doesn’t leave till one. Last petit dejeuner at the hotel at seven. I’ve got ten pictures left on my Kodak instamatic. These are for the neighborhood early on at a time when traffic is non-existent and pedestrians are few and far between. Right out the front door of this hotel, look right and just a few steps along that way is the corner of the street of shops. Restaurant, bakery, and fish-man on the corner. Open on the weekdays at this time, closed this morning. Turn right at the corner. The street of shops leads to a bigger street with the overhead metro running above on a framework of steel atop the great concrete pillars holding the whole thing up. Buildings several stories high line both sides of this otherwise busy street. Parked cars are up and down both sides of this street and the side streets where it is permitted. Don’t particularly want pictures of parked cars. I’m going for some unique little items of architecture or juxtaposition of relationships between shape, size, color, and shadow. Up one side street I haven’t been on yet, and come to a secluded park I haven’t been to, yet. Little gravel pathways and lush vegetation under a gray morning sky. The other side of the playground across the street from the little park across the street from the church. Fill in the blanks between the streets and blocks of the neighborhood. Sure could have fun if my digital camera was here, and even if I had another Kodak, but I’ve only got ten pix. I’ve got to pick and choose along the way, and I don’t know what lies ahead or around the corner. Haven’t exactly got all morning either to stroll around at my leisure. My bag is packed and I’m ready to go except for a couple of minor things. Nevertheless, a one hour jaunt through the intricacies of the neighborhood with only ten pictures in hand to take during the quietest hour of the week is where I say my goodbyes to these seven days in Paris, from one Sunday to the next.
Friday is dawning.
I’ve done my museums and I’m using the metro.
There are a lot of places here I will never go.
There’s a cemetery in another part of town from here.
There is a very large cemetery across the street
From where I grew up in my hometown neighborhood.
One mile long and a half mile wide.
Our house was near the corner of a vast expanse
Of gently rolling, wild and grassy hills;
A few isolated trees and small groups of large trees
From one small rise and dip in the terrain to another,
And in one corner, a deeply forested couple of acres.
Black metal picket fence, Arrows pointing to the sky,
But not everywhere rooted in the earth.
There were places we could crawl under
to get to this wild terrain
surrounded by the residential and commercial city.
A railway track runs along the far side from our house.
On the other side of our street lights is a vast empty darkness,
And the whistles of the distant night line carries across.
The rolling ground of the field leads to depressions
Where the horizon of grass brushes the sky line
And all of the houses are disappeared.
Early morning metro to Cimitiere Montparnasse,
densely populated from grey stone wall to grey stone wall
with carved rocks of many shapes and designs
marking the resting places of the deceased.
There is a poet beneath one of these rocks.
I should know him a lot better than I do.
I remember reading his poetry in translation,
And some of his reviews and prose essays,
And read about how he lived his forty-six years,
And who was important to him.
My thoughts have not been with him for a very long time.
Then like out of nowhere he appears again
As I am planning my one week visit to Paris.
An art museum, and a palace, and the countryside with Vincent and Claude,
And more art Museums, and learning the metro,
And riding with the metro population: all of these are behind me.
Now is time for a quiet morning in the cemetery.
The gravesite is on one side of the cimetiere
And the sculpture memorial is built up against the grey
Stone wall on the other side.
Walk the sunlit and shaded pathways through the fields of large carved stones.
Here is an angel carrying a soul up from out of the decaying flesh into a new light.
Here is a head looking out towards the horizon,
Resting his chin on his clenched hands,
Rising from the gray slab of rock on the ground bearing the lifeless corpse.
Here are some words to help us see better.
Seven days and two hours from the morning glide of the descending approach over the villages and countryside to Paris. Eleven a.m. in the Charles de Gaulle terminal in search of the door where I am to meet the taxi-driver who will take me through the streets directly around the Tour Eiffel to the narrow side street of my hotel.
One week later, departing the hotel at nine in the morning for the drop off and wait for the one o’clock departure. From wheels down, to wheels up, seven days and two hours. It doesn’t take long after finding my room and checking out the mosaic of courtyard walls rising from three floors below to sometimes two above. Like an origami of folded rectangular shapes and textures extending in three dimensional space. So now it’s down the narrow curving stairwell, greeting the young cheerful East Indian receptionist and asking her for basic directions. I venture forth with my map in my side pocket, leaving the camera behind. I haven’t the slightest idea about where to be going except for the Champs Elysses where I am told the money changers are. Until I talk with that fellow, I have not a single Euro cent to spend on anything. So it’s a piece of a walk for openers, passing the Tour Eiffel from the far end of the Parc du Champs de Mars over to the streets leading to the Pont des Invalides, my first crossing of the Seine. I find my money changer, and take what I figure is a low exchange rate because I need some cash, for whatever, just in case I want to use some, and I didn’t know how many of these little holes in the wall there are around here, and this being the heavily traveled tourist area that it is, I’ve got to expect a certain amount of fleecing. By the time the sixth day rolls around, I have found a changer on another less traveled street on the right bank on the network of streets beyond the Louvre, where I got a substantially better rate. I’ve got his card and that’s where I’ll go when I return to this city.
Meanwhile, it’s time to be walking up the street towards the Arc de Triomphe. I don’t walk over to the monument on the island on the other side of the big circular street.
I rather cross, from corner to corner, from red light to green light to green light to red light, all of the streets entering the circle. Sitting on benches in shady open spaces along the way, watching the light clouds drift across the bright blue sky, and this young couple and that sharing their affections. Looking at the map, it seems there’s only one way to go and that’s back on down that wide busy street with all of its people coming and going. One thing I like doing in this city, saturated as it is with history from one end to the other, is the walking through steps that others have walked before, through whatever era one might wish to imagine, from one block to another. What is the sense of space that I can understand of this place? I know this best when I walk slowly, stopping often at benches along the way, and steering clear of the busier lanes. Skirt the island of the obelisk on the Place de Concorde, and go on to the Jardin de Tuilieres, and the courtyards of the Louvre.
Now is not the time to visit the interior of the museum. Rather to linger through the courtyards and emerging from the other side, find my way over to a line of little street side restaurants. I want to sit down and take a rest but not take in a meal. Something light. And here it is, just what I need. Two hot dogs end to end in a long rich thick bread bun smothered in a couple of kinds of melted white cheese. A light warm sandwich to quench my palette, along with an orange soda. Just a few wooden chairs and small tables jumbled together in front of the store extending towards the sidewalk. Kind of a quiet spot, facing the busy street, across from which is the stone wall alongside the river on the way to Pont Neuf. Now getting time to cross the bridge and see if I can walk around a piece of the island and visit Notre Dame. It is early evening by the time I get over to the courtyard of the cathedral. Sit on the stone ledge at the far end of the courtyard in front of the cathedral and watch the sky changing behind the towers. Here is the turnaround point for today.
I’ve been out all day since two in the afternoon, walking the streets of Paris for the first time. Looking for a sense of the layout and where my home fits in. Lines on the map become buildings and concrete, pedestrians and shopkeepers and sidewalk cafes, gardens arranged in bouquets alongside avenues for motorcycles and cars. The line from the arc de Triomphe through the place de Concorde, through the Jardin Tuileries and through the ancient cobblestone courtyards of the Louvre is magical. The heartline of the city.
Through the streets once again of the island to turn to the second part of the Pont Neuf crossing. Afternoon walk is the straight line from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite. Evening walk is along the curve of the other side of the river, as sunset falls into dusk falls into darkness. The river on my right, going with the flow, the busy street on the left. The lights of buildings and the lights of passing cars and busses and motorcycles are background, and every now and then there is a place to sit, a little bit apart from the din, where one can soak up some of the night air drifting up from the water below, as it always has.
The evening return is just as much a part of finding where things are at as the afternoon exploration. The hotel is just off of the Boulevard de Grenelle near the number six Dupleix metro station. Those last few blocks over from the Eiffel Tower parc are a fascinating web of quiet places and passing strangers to wonder about. The Champs Elysses is entertaining, but here in the neighborhood is where folks are at home. Here is where everyday life returns to, and where we go with our best friends. Strangers are not as strange, and the tourist is just another passer-by under the streetlights over the sidewalks along the way.
Seven days and two hours, wheels down to wheels up, touching down on the runway to lifting off for the return. Ten hours on the plane each way, graced with a window seat each way; flying through the night into the morning on the way in, flying into a very long day on the way back. A half a day gained, and a half a day lost. A week to get acquainted with French culture on the ground through the tunnels of the metro, changing lines, on the overground platforms on the escalators to the overhead railway, on the steps leading down into levels of depths below the pavement. A very complex network of tunnels for we passengers walking between one train and another at all of those various intersections of one line with another. Looking at things, Looking at others. Paying attention without being intrusive. There are various courtesies that are easily learned about where we like to sit and how we stand close when the car fills up. Generally go with the prevailing pace during a transition through a set of tunnels between one platform and another. Usually a place to sit along the wall of the cavern when the traffic is light. A couple of minutes or so is the usual waiting time. I wonder how many trains are on the tracks of any one line at any given moment. I wonder what numbers of people have taken a ride on the metro today on all of the various lines. My hotel is right around the corner and over one block to the overhead metro at Dupliex. That’s my home station. Right around here are the blocks that I walk, that I have walked, by day and by night. Network of narrow streets going off in all directions from one another. My detailed, easy-to-read city street map guides me through this impossible maze, playfully inviting an inquiry into its mystery. Early morning, Sunday morning, the shops are closed, and nobody is around. Golden rivers of sunlight flow down the streets between buildings that cast long shadows. Last walk through the neighborhood, and it’s virtually all to myself. Everything is closed. If something is open, I don’t know what it is. Find an enclosed park I had not found before. Hidden islands of beauty right around one of those obscure corners and along an isolated, seemingly dead end walkway. But the dead-end walkway opens into a garden, lush with vegetation and ordered with rectangular pathways. Surrounded by tall buildings, a community courtyard, open to the public, those who could find it. A few old-style park benches, with the curving backs. Cool, September morning air. Just want to say goodbye to the neighborhood with one last walkaround. This is where all of my daily excursions into the far reaches of the city return to every evening, sometimes late into the darkness. These have been the streets and the shops that I began with every morning. Here are the shops that I went to for the cheese and bread for my room. With the cherry tomatoes and the cans of prepared coffee drinks. Those pastries from the corner shop were really quite nice after the visit to Versailles on Tuesday. Every day is here, regardless of wherever else any day goes, every day is here.
Petit dejeuner begins at seven. Coffee and croissant and fruit filled rolls, and cups of yogurt and an orange juice. It’s serve yourself on a small buffet table, set out by the young woman who is intermittently walking back and forth between her kitchen and this enclosure, with its half a dozen small dining tables along two sides of the wall, and a narrow side room with additional dining tables lined up alongside one wall with large clean windows through which morning sunlight falls. The young woman is quietly keeping the table replenished. I’m the first one down this Wednesday morning. I want to eat and be down to the metro station without delay. By now, I’ve got my metro pass, and I’ve used it a few times these last two days. I have some good directions from Catherine my agent representative translator guide. She’s told me where to get off, which way to walk, and what to look for. She told me to go to Monoprix to look for batteries for my camera, and there I found, much to my surprise, a clothing store on the rez-de-chaussee and a grocery store on the premiere etage. Walked up and down all of the aisles looking for whatever might inspire me. Quite a few other shoppers this evening, pleasantly crowded, each of us going about our shopping. I find a little plastic container full of cherry tomatoes, a narrow eight ounce block of packaged Swiss cheese, a loaf of sliced brown bread, and three tins of prepared and ready to drink flavored coffee. The line for a few items is short and fast and in our greeting, I tell the woman in French that I am an American and I don’t speak French, which elicits a smile and genuinely congenial feelings for my predicament. I really cannot communicate with anybody around here for even the most elementary kinds of information. Certainly not as bad as blindness or deafness, but I feel like one of my senses has been cut off. I have the smallest handful of words available to me. Other than that, it’s all glances and gestures.
Catherine, my translator and guide, has given me directions to the office near the Tuileries gardens in the Joan-of-Arc square where bus tours to Auvers-sur-Oise and Giverny are arranged. This morning is scheduled for eight. The metro ride is direct from my home in Dupliex to the Joan-of-Arc square. The walk across the avenue to the office is a visual panoramic of architectural grace. The office is not crowded and I’ve got my ticket in plenty of time. As it turns out, we are a group of ten tourists on a huge modern touring bus with the young woman who will be our tour guide for today and the driver. Through the maze of city streets he takes us, a master of negotiating tight turns and managing his way through busy intersections. Towards the highways leading through the suburbs into the morning countryside. To the drive through this village to the drop off point where our guide and we tourists are left with our feet on the ground to get familiar with the terrain. The path leads upward to a quiet crossroads. A tall white stone pedestal in a garden of flowers and bushes, holds aloft a bust of Daubigny, wearing his beret, holding his palette and brush, looking out at the world, his subject, and getting ready to put it down on canvas. Having once been an artist, having once practiced painting, on even not so flat surfaces, with any number of color creating media, and line making instruments that I might have had at hand at any given time, here I am now visiting someone whom I once was. There was a time when I was reading art history books on a regular basis as a primary form of entertainment. I didn’t know Daubigny was here. I came here to visit Vincent. I know Daubigny’s images, and that he was from the earlier part of that century. Ever since my first visit to the Louvre on Monday, my entire visit becomes more and more like a walk through the pages of an art history book. Here are the paths that van Gogh walked and here is the church that he painted. One can look around and guess about where exactly he set up his materials for this composition. Another long walk up a gentle slope to a large wide open agricultural field, newly turned over, either just planted or about to be planted. Off in the distance a couple of hundred yards is a raised plaque marking the place where he painted his crows in the wheatfield. And here is the cemetery in the open sunlight. All different kinds of stones marking many different people’s memories. Over against one stone wall are the stones for Vincent van Gogh and Theo van Gogh. The plots are covered in thick green ivy, a continuous bed of ivy without separation between one brother and the other. From here on top of the hill, looking across the stones of the cemetery, to across the fields and over the distant treetops, the square stone spire of the cathedral reaches like a brush into the sky.
John Ashbaugh
November, 2007
Thursday in September, the fourth full day. Musee d’Orsay by a little after ten a.m. Walk the galleries till about 1:30 or so. Then take metro #2 to the Blanche exit across the street from the Moulin Rouge. Walk the route described in the Lonely Planet guidebook along the rue Lepic, past Theo van Gogh’s apartment, all the way up the hill on a winding path to the cathedral. Walk around on the inside, and then around on the outside, before heading over to the place de Tertre where street artists are drawing portraits. The clouds hint at a possible rainfall. Sit under a red tent and have a cup of café noir, large, American style, and a ham and cheese sandwich, and then a medium sized beer, rather refreshing, and watch an artist draw a young woman’s portrait. The rain never really comes down beyond the hint of a mist. Walk down some steps of the rue du Calvaire, and over to the doorway of Le Bateau Lavoir, once a home to famous dead artists when they were young. That is my last photo from the digital camera. Walk on down to the rue des Abbesses. Sit a while. Finally take the metro back to my home neighborhood, getting home around 8 p.m. Two more full days left for this little holiday. What is yet to come?
Friday morning begins with a visit to the Montparnasse cemetery and the remains of Charles Baudelaire, including the gravestone and the memorial site. Then there is the metro to the Pompidou centre for modern art. The Fauves and Kandinsky are interesting. After that, the show goes by very quickly for me. Then it’s the metro to the Louvre for the Rubens room, and the northern European galleries on the second etage of the Richelieu wing.
Today is cloudy and an evening boat ride up and down the river around the Ile de la Cite and Ile St.-Louis is pleasant. Then walk on over past the Eiffel Tower, looking for my place to eat and finally find the Taj Mahal in my neighborhood. Chicken Tandoor with two glasses of beer. Excellent spot, suits me just fine.
Saturday morning. Write up and drop off my post cards. Buy a beret at Monoprix. Walk the streets to under the Eiffel Tower and cross the bridge to the Trocadero metro, and catch the train, actually three in all, to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. Walk the rue Clavel and back and then get to know the Parc. Head on out around 3:30 to the metro to the Musee Rodin on rue Varenne. After this, walk the rue de Granelle to the Champs de Mars Parc and watch the people play as the sun sets behind the Eiffel Tower. Then walk on over to my favorite Indian restaurant. Complete dinner and 3 beers, and I’m ready to go in the morning.
Where we start is I’m looking for money. This is my first question out of the hotel, addressed to the young East Indian receptionist with long black hair hanging loosely in a pony tail down to the middle of her back, always thoughtfully busy at her station in her alcove, keeping track of the endless stream of passers-by from week to week to week. All with their little concerns that she intelligently and sympathetically addresses and here is this new one and he wants to know where he can change money. Over at the Champs-Elysses although it’s a long walk but you can use the metro, except that he has not the slightest idea about how the metro works or where it goes, because he still doesn’t know where anything is anyway, above ground or below, and this is what he has to first learn.
So in the 15th southwest of the Eiffel Tower, going by the military academy at the far end of the Eiffel Tower garden of grass and trimmed bushes to across the bridge of golden angels to the celebrated avenue. Looking for a place to change my unspendable money into some spendable money. Not that I’m lookin’ to be spendin’ a lot of money, but I’d like something enough to buy some little thing to eat or drink, maybe have a few extra to spend on whatever something else that comes along that feels right for what I am looking for to get out of this little trip.
The first day is all about looking around. Stretching the legs and seeing what’s out there. From the hotel to down to the corner to across the street, having already passed by a few streetside shops, including an open air fresh fish market. Turn right first and walk for a couple of blocks to a wide street crossing which takes me to a wide quiet street which leads to the far end of the mall extending from the Eiffel Tower. There are some young teenagers kicking a soccer ball around, a couple of women sitting on park benches reading their books. I’ve got my map and I’m looking for the Champs-Elysses and a money changer. Cross the river and find my way. Just like Michigan avenue in Chicago. Lots of people going in both directions looking for entertainment. Thread my way to the eye of the needle. Cross every intersection around the Arc de Triomphe, sitting on benches from time to time. Public expressions of affection between young couples here and there along the way further brighten this already blue sky day. Around the great monument, some little military parade is remembering something or other this afternoon. Begin the walk down the broad busy avenue to the Place de Concorde.
Then it’s through the gardens of the Tuileries, and finally to the courtyards of the Louvre. Not going in today. Just looking around the terrain. On the busy little street next to the river, find a shop where I can get a double hot dog and fromage on a thick quality bun. That with a Fanta at a street side table-ette. Before heading across the Pont Neuf to explore the perimeter and wind up in the Notre Dame courtyard. This has been a long walk so far today, and the walk back will be almost just as long. Complete the crossing of the Pont Neuf to the left bank, and follow the street along the river all the way over to the Tour Eiffel, where I can wind my way through the maze of streets, some wide, some narrow, some busy, some not, back to my hotel. From two in the afternoon to ten at night, out walking the streets of Paris for the first time.
Monday morning starts off with petit dejeuner at the hotel at seven. Our tour guide Catherine comes by for a meeting with our very small tour group at 8:20 and gives us some basic information about how to get around this city. Specifically for me, how to get a weekly pass for the metro, and some basic instructions for how it works.
After negotiating a weekly pass with the ticket man at the metro station, with a little translation assistance from the young woman just behind me in line, I’m off for my first train ride through the city. Now I have time to stroll through the Louvre, and Notre Dame, and walk around the Ile St.-Louis, and finally cross along and through some streets on the right bank, to another cathedral, and its park. Choose a quiet simple restaurant to sit awhile and have a bite to eat. On the inside, a friendly, blonde, middle aged waitress takes my order for a ham and cheese sandwich and bottled water. This is good.
It’s night now. I’m game for trying the bus. Miss a couple of what may have been right for me, and wind up on one that is taking me to I don’t know where. It is impossible for me to figure out where I should be getting off. The streets are so winding, and the night lights so confusing, and the bus is cruising through this confusion at an unimaginable pace. Finally, I just get off to see if I can get some bearings. At the bus stop, I ask for directions, starting with Je ne parle pas francais. One tall young man thinks this is a bit funny, telling them I don’t speak it in that very language. One young lady knows enough English words to get me on the right path. We get on a bus together, and a little bit down the line, as she is getting off, she tells me to go for 3 more stops, get off, cross the street in a certain direction, find the metro station, and go to the Trocadero stop. That will get me back in my neighborhood. And it does. Only it’s my neighborhood plus another good mile of walking to the vicinity of my hotel. Compared to where I was at that far away bus stop, Trocadero is definitely my neighborhood.
Tuesday is the trip to Versailles and the perfume museum. In the evening, after we return, I go to the Monoprix clothing and grocery store to look for camera batteries, and find tomatoes and bread and cheese and canned coffee drinks that I can take up to my room.
Wednesday is Auvers and Giverny, and after getting dropped off at the end of the trip near the Place de Concord, don’t walk around a whole lot more down there. Take the metro back to Trocadero. No place special to go; just hanging out.
Thursday is one beer at the outdoor café in Montmarte. The clouds are threatening rain. There are even a few little drops come down. I have already been walking a good piece of the day. First to and then through the Musee d’Orsay. Then to the metro stop near the Moulin Rouge to begin the walk along the winding streets going up the hill. By Vincent and Theo’s apartment at Number 54. On up to the Moulin Galette, following the recommended directions. Finally up to the artists’ square near the neighborhood of the big cathedral. Ham and cheese and a beer, watching a sketcher draw out the fine lines of expression from his model, a very pleasant featured young woman. Sitting time before beginning the long walk back home. Bottom of the stairwell, round another corner, to a little triangle intersection, busy enough, trees and pedestrians, and shops all mixed up together and a lost folding chair for me to rest and survey the movements. Sidewalk drawing, the face of a ghost. Musicians on the sidewalk above the entrance to the metro. Young boys trying their stuff. Old man showing them how. Thursday evening, I don’t know where to go; Trocadero is a place to get off for a final walkover to my hotel. From the overview across the river to the walk down another hill and across the river to a leisurely stroll.
It is one long subway ride on Saturday morning from my neighborhood to Rue Cluney where Elizabeth’s sister lives. This is the train where I have a visual exchange with a woman whom to me is the personification of France. Someone from out of the Marsellaise, someone from out of the genetic roots of the French population, a face that has been there every step of the way along the road of French history from every medieval era to every event of the twentieth century. Here she is. Maybe in her later thirties. There she is sitting across from me and over one chair. I can’t just stare at her, and I can’t keep my eyes away from glancing in every possible direction all around her face, framing her forever, and she is not in the least bothered by my attention, and shares a few glances of her own with me. She knows that I see something special in her. She might even know what it is. No words are possible. It comes time for her to disappear into the city. I continue my ride to the park. Take the steps up from the underground tunnels, walk around a few quiet streets near the park. I’ll have a peach from a street vendor.
What am I looking for here in this city? First of all, the layout. From where I am at, where is everything else? How many steps does it take to get from here to some other place? Are we measuring space through time or the other way around? From the fifteenth just southwest of the Eiffel Tower, looking for the streets that will take me to the bridge across the river, and then on over to the Champs Elysses. The Pont des Invalides with the golden winged horses and angels with their trumpets suspending the bridge over the water. Faces along the way, and a look of recognition or two. Who indeed, shall I be recognizing, and who shall I be speaking with, in this city as old as the time when some people started living on those islands in the river? Remember the time when the Ile de la Cite and the Isle St-Louis were forested, and the only way to get there was by boat. How many bridges have there been over how many centuries connecting the islands to one shore or another? When did the city become bigger than these two islands? Who are the French from the time when they were the only ones here?
I’m crossing a bridge from one bank to another, and following streets that will take me to a shop where I can change money, so I will be able to buy food and other necessities and frivolities as my mood sees fit. Discovering then the Champs Elysses about midafternoon along its length, it is only natural to walk up one side of the avenue towards the arc, to circle the arc around its outer perimeter, and to walk back down the avenue all of its way on the other side. Sitting down every block or two on some convenient vacant bench in the public domain. Finally, the whole thing turns into a tree-lined garden, and the street goes on to the obelisk at the Place de Concorde. All of this is just the beginning of getting to know where things are at.
Wednesday evening, having returned from the day long excursion to Auvers-sur-Oise and Giverny. Take a little stroll through the garden before heading down the metro for a ride to Trocadero. Around the corner is a great monumental statue that looks over the Eiffel Tower from across the river. Evening crowds of leisurely couples and small groups animate the mall from one side of the river to the other and beyond. I’ve got a leisurely evening stroll through the pathways and sidewalks that wind their ways to my room on the third etage of a small hotel around the convenient corner from a street of little shops – bakery, cheese, wine, fish, vegetables, sidewalk café, book shop, to the corner where the cross street requires some electronic signals to regulate traffic. Here is a street full of all kinds of more kinds of stores, and right here at the crossroads is the overground metro. Here’s my home corner, where I’ve been around ‘em a few times at different times of day and night. Stand outside and find the north star, and tell me which way the clock is going.
In the hotel room with an overview that would be a cubist’s delight, vertical geometrical slabs of sides of buildings in middle, near, and far ground views which are not that far away, always this to my view every morning, the mosaic of possibilities that unfold when I put my shoe to the pavement.
Friday is the cemetery first thing in the morning for a visit to the memory of Charles Baudelaire. Wrote all his stuff down by the time he was forty-six and then he was gone. There is a tombstone where he is buried with his mother and his step-father. On the other side of the cemetery up against the tall stone wall that encloses this park, is a tall narrow carving. On the one hand repose with the extended figure on the ground, while on the other hand, from the vertical column and extending from it, an eagle-eyed visionary. Not many people strolling the cemetery today. Here is a place at the end of the path extending from the main driveway towards the wall, the end of its line. Here is a memorial to a long dead poet and I am visiting my memory of having read his words, in various English translations, although I did have a significant amount of experience with French vocabulary, grammar and usage to be able to get some feel for the original. I thought him very insightful, getting to some essence of understanding for the reality underlying the illusion, the truth underlying all of the frills and nonsense of life, which, not to be disdained, are essential aspects of our overall experience. Correspondences. Who am I meeting and getting to know for the first time in a very long time?
I’m mostly doing art museums and art related visits, so after visiting the poet, it’s through the underground this cloudy day to the Pompidou museum of modern art. I like the Fauves and the Cubists and color and shape experimenters of the first third of the 20th century, but after that, it all deteriorates for me. It doesn’t take me long to go through a quick wrap-up of the deconstructed ultra-moderns, and I then am motivated to head on over to the Louvre for a visit to the whole wing of northern European painting I had not seen on Monday. This includes the gallery of Rubens’ twenty-four painting sequence for the story of the great and beautiful queen, whoever she was. Quite a remarkable piece of work. Some Rembrandts up in that wing, and quite a few others I recognize from art history books once avidly paged through. Here they are, big as life, certainly bigger than an illustration on a page in a book. Visit the collection of old Greek sculptures, including Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Musta been really nice when they were in mint condition. Outside is still cloudy. I can walk more or less along the right bank along the river. I’ve got my map to keep me clear on which street is connected to which other street which is going in which direction.
Hop the metro for a stop or two, and head to the tour boat for which I have a free ticket. It’s a long old double-decker and the crowd is very small on this late cloudy afternoon, so it’s up the river to around the two islands, and back down the river to past the Eiffel Tower, and back to the Invalides where we started. Then it’s walk on back, across the Eiffel Tower park to the winding narrow streets leading to my hotel, and along the way is a little Indian Pakistani restaurant. Looks very nice, and the prices are nice, it’s quiet tonight, the waiter is great, the tandoori chicken is great, and a couple of beers taste good. Then it’s just the last few blocks to home. Did you meet somebody today? A few passing glances on the metro. My waiter at the Indian restaurant. The memory of a poet I once knew.
Saturday is the last walkaround. I’ve been through my basic round of museums and art-related journeys and I know there are many, many museums around town, but now is time for something else. The morning is leisurely. After petit-dejeuner, sit on my bed in my room facing the open window with my city map unfolded before me. I was told by Elizabeth in the States to visit the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the nineteenth. So it’s into the metro map to figure out which lines connect with which other lines to get me there. The Buttes Chaumont station is on the short line 7bis. There is clearly more than one way to go from my home at Dupliex, and I choose to take number six to Charles de Gaulle Etoile and catch the number two going to Nation. Number six also goes to Nation and I could have made the connection there, but I choose the northern route. And as swift and efficient as all these trains are, it still takes more than just a few minutes to traverse that distance. Less than an hour, more than half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, including that walking between trains, with some step climbing to boot.
And here is a relatively quiet street on the side of the park. Reading my street map carefully, I walk up the rue Fessart to the Rue Clavel and turn right. There on the corner of Rue Bolivar is a small quiet Portuguese restaurant with a couple of tables and chairs outside, and one couple is far into some conversation at one of those tables. Walk on down Rue Clavel past Elizabeth’s sister’s apartment to the busy Rue de Belleville. Stand on that corner for a couple of minutes getting a feel for the sound and sight of pedestrian movement of this moderately active neighborhood. Walk back up to Bolivar and turn left and walk down to the busier street that will lead me back to the park entrance. It looks big, the gate is open, and it is early Saturday afternoon. The entire park is a network of rises and falls from one hill to another surrounding a lake, and in the center of this lake is an island rising steeply out of the water, a pinnacle of jagged rock and tree laced greenery culminating in a domed circular Greek inspired temple with space enough for about six persons at a time to survey the horizon of the city from this precipitous high point in the middle of this haven of grassy slopes where leisure is the word for the day. The park itself is an island in the city, and there is an island in the middle of the island. Walking along the pathways and along the sides of grassy slopes leads to places far away from the streets on the other side of the park’s perimeter fence. Get to the place where I take off my shoes and walk through the lush grass from one slope to another.
It’s getting on in the afternoon, and there’s one other thing I’ve been told to do and that is to visit the Rodin Museum. So it’s back to planning, and the path is to the Rue Varenne near the Varenne station on number thirteen, and thirteen connects quite conveniently with number two at Place de Clichy. Wrapping up an afternoon in the Park with a visit to Rodin’s gardens. Trainride is getting to be as much a part of the landscape as the city itself, maybe even a little more so, for everyone down here has something in common with every other one of us. We are down here for only one reason, to get to someplace else. Except for the musicians and their classical, jazz, or other inspired improvisational creations that resonate through the walkway tunnels. There is even a young African fellow singing Let It Be on a train as it rattles along the tracks of the elevated railway.
Nobody comes down here to just stroll around and look at the scenery. But one thing we do have to look at is each other on our ways. There is a lot of courtesy played out in this entire process of waiting, getting on, getting off, finding a seat, deciding where to stand, balancing yourself in relation to everyone around you as the train hurtles through a turn, and finding your way through the labyrinth of tunnels connecting one train to another. All of this is the world we metro riders share, and there is, at least for me, newcomer as I am, a little curiosity about what kind of conversation I might have with certain ones, especially if I knew their language and if we had some time, short or long, to explore each other’s worlds.
After the museum, it's walking time again and it's really just a short stroll over to the southern edge of the Esplanade des Invalides. From there it’s another easy walk over to sit with the evening visitors to the Parc du Champ de Mars between the Tour Eiffel and the Ecole Militaire. A loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and You. As dusk settles into darkness, walk the narrow winding streets over to Rue Humboldt and the Taj Mahal for another East Indian dinner, and three beers to settle it on down into where I want to keep it all. Tomorrow morning, I’ll finish off my roll of film in the neighborhood, have my last petit dejeuner at the hotel, and put everything I brought with me back into my bags, and include a few magazines, and a French language art history book of pictures and thoughts about Salvador Dali. I found this book at a street side bookshop on Rue Cler just off of Rue de Grenelle on my way to the Park du Champs de Mars. I had a few extra Euros I needed to spend and this book fits the ticket. This section of Rue Cler is a wonderful pedestrian mall in the old fashioned French marketing tradition. A few fresh memories of a few days spent in a very special place.
Wednesday morning is the out-of-town bus tour and I have to be on my way early so I can be at the meeting place just off the Rue de Rivoli next to the Tuileries by eight. So it’s a quick and early petit dejeuner and a brisk walk to the Dupliex station for the number six Charles de Gaulle Etoile for a switch to the number one Chateau de Vincennes and the exit at the Tuileries station on Rue de Rivoli just a block down and across the street around the golden statue of St. Joan of Arc triumphant, riding her horse and holding her long staff with its flag of victory. When there are ten of us ready to go, the driver and the tour guide take their places and we are on our way winding the narrow streets of the city on our way to the larger streets on our way to the highway for the less a than one hour ride to the streets of Auvers-sur-Oise. The driver drops the guide and her followers at the bottom of the hill leading to Daubigny’s bust on a pillar in a garden on a triangle of Earth, with a stone wall background, the artist in his setting, ready with his palette and brushes in hand, wearing his beret, surveying all of us who see him looking towards the horizon while we are walking up the hill. Just behind him is the church, a mini-cathedral, where we can explore the inside as well as the outside. A very graceful image of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. Standing on the crescent of moon entwined with white clouds, dressed in a long blue and white gown, figure gently curving towards the left, the face of a young girl with brown hair hanging loose to her shoulders, no glaring halo, just the simple peasant girl in all of her holy reverence for where she is going, where she is looking to, the sky. This painting hangs against the grey stone wall, in a corner on the right side of the front of the church. Votive candles for two Euros each. A long white tapir. This is for my mother, Matilda. Her favorite of Van Gogh’s paintings was composed and made real by the artist in this town. Two women going towards and two women coming from a winding stairway, curving its way up from left to right. An old man is descending the stairway. A set of buildings lines the background on the level that the stairway leads to. Leafy vegetation on the perimeter. She and I went to a van Gogh exhibition at the St. Louis art museum a few years ago when she was walking and seeing well and that’s where she decided which was her favorite. I wasn’t exactly sure about my favorite but she was quite sure of hers, so I have adopted her favorite as mine.
This guide is very good at pointing things out to us about where things are and what they are. We walk on up the long gentle slope to the top of this hill to the cemetery and the land where van Gogh painted his wheatfields. The gravesites look just like they do in the photographs, except now all of the other tombstones of the cemetery are around under the sunlight and the steeple of the church is quite visible above the treetops just below. Like there’s a connection between the steeple emerging through the treetops and the tombstones in this field on top of the hill. Walk back down the gentle slope of the rural hill from the cemetery to the twisting byways of the town and the break up for individual exploration and coffee time. A friendly young man from California and I stop in at a Tabac to get an expresso for the tables outside on the quiet sidewalk. His childhood was in France for a while a long time ago, and he has since lived the rest of his life in New York or Los Angeles and now he is taking a couple of weeks to visit his homeland to see if he can reconnect, with no specific objective in mind, except for some maybe dormant art that might rekindle. Sound familiar? I didn’t visit the room where Vincent passed his last breath. There has to be some mystery I leave behind here, something that I didn’t see or do that is of some significance. I’ve seen where van Gogh walked and I’ve walked those paths. I’ve seen where he painted that whole last series that he did here. I’ve seen the café where he sat and drank bottles of wine alone or with others. I was told I could see the room where he died but I passed that one by. All of this is by around noon, and the bus pulls up for we all to begin the ride to Giverny.
Along the highway through the sunlit rural landscape to Giverny is close to an hour. From the busses’ parking lot, we walk through a tunnel under the highway to the village pathways that lead to the home and gardens of Claude Monet. From the entrance, turning left, and going down a few old wooden steps into a large space one might call a family room, a drawing room, or a living room. Plenty of sofas and chairs about to leisure upon, and other little nooks and crannies that are a little more studious in nature. The family gathering room. Lots of facsimiles of Monet’s famous paintings are hanging high on the walls. We can walk around the upstairs bedrooms, and look out the large windows to the extensive gardens below. The dining room is bright yellow, with one wall of windows, and plenty of floor space, and intricate little wooden chairs for twelve people to sit around the large wooden table. Cheerfulness throughout. The kitchen is mostly a sky blue. Outside, the gardens are abundant, and through another tunnel under the main road are the water Lilly ponds and Japanese bridges. One can walk around the ponds and over the bridges. Lots of Serenity out here.
There is a salmon quiche lunch all ready for the travelers when we get to the museum and visitors welcome center in the walking vicinity of Monet’s gardens. A nice little round table get together under the roof on the inside of a day-lit window partition to an outside patio. The young man from Los Angeles is very talkative with everyone around the table and galvanizes a sense of interaction for the rest of us who are more reserved. The museum part of this facility has two exhibits, one of southwest photography from the 1800’s, as in southwestern United States. Lots of sepia prints of dramatic rock formations and an occasional native from Arizona or New Mexico. The other half of the gallery has an exhibit of lesser known impressionists who painted some wonderful scenes from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s. There are people picnicking under a canopy of tree limbs and little girls playing, sisters, a two year old and a four year old laughing in the sunlight near the beach and the sea and the horizon and the sky. Mary Cassatt, Summertime, 1894. Edmund Charles Tarbell, In the Orchard, 1891. Frank Weston Benson, The Sisters, 1899. Winslow Homer, Girls in Landscape, 1873. I retrieve postcard images of these from the gift shop. And so there it is: the house, the gardens and ponds, the museum and the gift shop. Time to be getting back to the bus, if we can find our way, for the directive is that we are all on our own, and we need to meet back at the bus which means we have to find the right side street that leads to the tunnel under the road to the busses’ parking lot. And those of us who are lost or unsure help each other to find our ways, with what I remember and what you remember working together. Half the fun of a tour can be getting to know your tour partners. In the sea of faces roaming about the premises, we have a point of recognition. Familiarity develops, especially after having been up and down the hill in Auvers-sur-Oise. So this is the final walk down a path that we will share. On the bus, we’ll be back in our accustomed seats, and at the end, we will all go back to where we came from. For this little morning and afternoon, ten strangers and their guide got together for the very specific purpose of visiting the homes and neighborhoods and scenery enjoyed by two of their favorite artists.
When our friend from Los Angeles started his conversation with me back in Auvers, he asked me if I was enjoying myself. I answered yes, in a friendly reply, and he then said, “You look like you’re enjoying yourself.” So I look like what I’m feeling. Whatever kinds of thoughts and associations and memories are going on in my mind, he is not asking me what I think, he is telling me that I look like I’m enjoying myself. Thank you, my friend. That’s what it all boils down to. I’m having a good time, seeing places and things that have always been scattered around on pages of books, on television or movie screens, or internet screens. Now it’s in surround sound and three hundred and sixty degree total immersion, and I am totally abstracted out of and away from some of my worlds in the United States. There is nothing to think about that. I am in the French countryside, watching the French landscape go by through the windows of my bus. The rural landscape becomes more suburban and the highways becomes more congested, and before long we are winding our way back through the city streets to the office behind the golden statue of St. Joan of Arc. Now I wind up in the late afternoon in the Tuileries gardens, letting where I have been settle in, and thinking about where to go from here.
Walk through the Louvre courtyards and on over to the Pont Neuf for an evening visit to the courtyards of Notre Dame. In search of another photograph or two. From here then, in the evening coming off of the Pont Neuf, it’s a long walk all the way back, and I’m getting to know the metro now, so I’ll ride a little ways and walk the rest. It’s been kind of a full day for going places and seeing stuff. Get over to the Eiffel Tower area when it’s doing its sparkly light thing on the hour in the darkness. From here, I’m getting to know the pathways through the narrow streets to my home.
Thursday morning to the Orsay by around ten in the morning. Planning the morning metro connection, from Dupliex number six Nation to the Pasteur connection to number twelve Porte de la Chapelle to the Solferino station where I can emerge some several blocks from the museum and walk through some unknown streets with map in hand to guide me through the twists and turns of the pathways. I am not the only one at the doorway at opening time on this partly cloudy to overcast morning in the city.
The layout of rooms and hallways and pathways from gallery to gallery is amazing in itself. The whole idea of this whole building having once been a train station! Train engines here and there with their long chains of passenger cars, bustling travelers, carrying and pushing and lifting their baggage, walking up and down the loading dock platforms. Now, wall to wall nineteenth century paintings, and sculptures enough to make this place feel like a Greek garden. Lots of different things passed by in nineteenth century painting. It’s like walking through an art history book and having all those pictures come to life. Have I said that before? In and out through all of those strangely interconnected galleries.
Thursday afternoon is to Montmarte. The Lonely Planet guidebook has a recommended walking tour beginning at the Blanche metro station. That’s on the number two line which I can transfer to from number twelve at Pigale. The walk will take me past the apartment building at number 54 rue Lepic where Theo and Vincent van Gogh lived for two years from 1886. Winding here, winding there, climbing all the time, sitting down from time to time along the way at some convenient spot. Catching the scene. Catch a slightly deeper breath. Skies are pretty well overcast, but it doesn’t smell like rain just yet, maybe latter. All of a sudden, getting near the top, there’s a cluster of shops, open air shops, and clusters of tourists here and there moving through the maze. Of course. Now we must be getting close to the focal point. Right around a corner or two and around some other large building is the white marbled dome of the Sacred Heart of Montmarte. Lots of visitors strolling up and down the steps and through the church. A quiet park for a leisurely vista of the city. Back down through the streets of the artists’ square. Take a table under the awning of a casual open air restaurant next to the line of portraitists at their easels, waiting for a subject, or drawing one. And I am in a position to watch, over the shoulder from a respectable distance where I am sitting eating my sandwich and drinking my beer, the complete development of a young woman’s portrait, from first scratch on the paper, to final finishing detail. That artist knows exactly what he is doing, every stroke of the way. What a pleasure to watch. It’s like a musical performance to watch someone begin from a vague and simple outline, and then step-by-step focus into a deeper level of detail, all the way down to the last eyelash. All within something like half an hour, although I am not looking at my watch on this, and simply watching the drawing emerge is like passing through a moment of suspended animation. Once I have seen the beginning, how can I not see it through to the end? This is a live performance, open to the public for viewing. The lady is having her picture drawn in the open air at the center of the square with its trees and shops all around at the top of Montmarte. She has to sit still for that entire time with her expression unchanging. Really a rather straightforward look with the hint of neither a smile nor a frown. Full lips, light tan complexion, oval face, dark reddish brown hair arranged fashionably around her skull. He gets her down on paper, just like she is. She likes it and she wants it, and he rolls it up and puts it in a tube for her to carry to wherever in the world she is going.
Time to be on our ways. Narrow grey stone steps descend on the first leg of the descent. Winding residential streets to an intersection with a business street. A little triangle of a park with a folding chair under a couple of large copious trees, as occasional pedestrians go by on their ways. Sidewalk art. Ghostly faces that will be erased with the coming and going of the next rainfall or two or three. Down the street towards the metro entrance. My camera gives out after the Le Bateau Lavoir picture. At least I got that, and a good one it is, and what a good place to stop. Park bench in the little neighborhood park next to the metro station. One of those little extra wide sections of public sidewalk with benches around here and there, a place for passers-by to sit for a little while; teenagers picking their way through some chords on an acoustic guitar; an older man coming by, striking up some talking with them, the young man handing the old man the guitar, and the old man finding his key and rolling and strumming like lightning. Music happens. Place des Abbesses, at the Abbesses metro station.
On this Thursday early evening, after the Orsay, Montmarte, and walking through metro stations, I’ve been on my feet most of the day. Going back is kinda like how I came up this morning, only in reverse. Take the number twelve Mairie d’Issy to Pasteur and transfer to my number six Charles De Gaulle Etoile to my home station at Dupliex. Walk around the neighborhood. Visit the park next to the local church with its towering slender conical yellow brick steeple. Benches all around the interior perimeter of the fenced in park. Kids playground in the middle on one side and trees all around. A place to sit and read or meditate on nothing. Wander up the street from the church and find a quite extensive magazine shop. All kinds of titles on all kinds of subjects and I wind up buying an Arts magazine with pictures from the museum I visited at Giverny yesterday. The little girls playing; the friends in the park. I can come back here later and perhaps get a few more things. Side streets lead to busy streets and where one neighborhood ends and the next begins is a matter of personal choice. The afternoon is getting later. Dusk is approaching. Perhaps another visit to Monoprix to get a couple more cans of those coffee drinks, another piece of cheese, and packet of cherry tomatoes. I’ve still got some rye bread, and I can get a couple of Fantas at the shop next to the hotel. Rather like eating my own simple store bought food in the room at night. Paging through touring books and looking at street maps, scanning through my new magazine, thinking about what tomorrow might be about.
Friday morning starts with a slower pace. Take my neighborhood number six at Dupliex towards Nation and exit Denfert Rochereau. Walk along Rue Froidevaux towards the entrance of the Cimitiere Montparnasse. Wide empty street with a quiet and calm walking space between the car lanes gong this way and that. An art supply store is open and I can’t resist stopping in to see those familiar racks of all kinds of pencils and crayons and tubes of paint and brushes. And all those papers! Is there an artist in the crowd? Gotta take something outa here. A little brown box of four conte crayons. Black and white, bistre and sanguine. What shall I use them for?
The morning is calm and bright on this un-busy street leading to the gate of the quiet cemetery park. Not too many other people around at all. The gatekeeper provides a little map indicating the locations of gravesites of famous people whose remains are here, where our memories and thoughts of who they were can connect. Here I am, looking for the grave of Charles Baudelaire. It’s been twenty years since I thought very much about this man and his poetry and other writings. There was a time ten years ago also. Those were the times when I had convenient access to a University library, where I scoured the shelves to find someone to sit with. Pathway down a line of words, take me to an image I have never seen before, and send me a thought I have never traveled. I met Charles a longer time than before twenty years ago. He visits for a while from time to time and now I reach back into my memory and visit the place where someone placed his remains. Here is a reminder of where you are going. Somewhere down there underneath a big rock. The driveways and pathways are narrow and quiet and a lot of creativity emerges through these tombstones. Thank you Charles. I’ll have to get ahold of a copy of your works again. Gotta get closer to the French. I am familiar with various English translations; I should think that I am entitled to my own. There are many good writers whom I don’t know and haven’t read, and there are some others whom I can always revisit with that same sense of discovery that I had when I first met them. The last decades of my life are before me and I really don’t know how much time I have left before the darkness, or the light, depending on how you look at it. Keep the light burning and it will stay longer. I’m just here to be lookin’ for a little piece of my old self whom I haven’t had a conversation with in a very long time.
Over here in the late morning at the Baudelaire memorial at the Cimitiere, time to read the metro map to see which train or trains I need to take. From Denfert Rochereau take number four to Porte de Clignancourt and get off at Chatelet just across the river. Take the underground walkway to number eleven Mairie des Lilas to the Rambuteau exit. Big buildings and busy streets and half a square block of bricked over open space in front of the Pompidou museum. The gift of space is a part of the place. Strolling, hanging out, sitting and eating a sandwich, playing a musical instrument, outdoor cafes across the street around the perimeter. Puppet shows for donations after the performance. Up to the top floor of the Pompidou and survey the cityscape of rooftops unfolding towards the Basilique du Sacre Coeur of Montmarte. The historical unfolding begins with the Fauves, and the Cubists, and Kandinsky in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. All of these things I can respond to. As the decades unfold after that, I begin to become lost. Things to respond to in so-called modern art are few and far between. It’s become like a mind game, and it becomes rather annoying. Whatever happened to the search for beauty? It doesn’t take me very long to walk through the rest of it all, and by the time I get to the closing decades of our recently departed century, I am feeling a little thirsty for something more substantial. Sit a while around the rectangular pool off to one side of the Pompidou square. Plan the way to walk over to the Louvre. There is a whole ‘nother wing of galleries that I want to get over to, the Richelieu wing of northern European. I had spent my first day in the Louvre on Monday in the Sully wing of 17th, 18th, and 19th century French paintings. That was plenty enough to keep my head turning for one day. Now I’m coming off of the Pompidou where the concept of painting has been recently erased. The slate is clean. Time for another stroll through the pages of another art history book. The Rubens room, with its twenty-four panels with stories from the life of a queen, is outstandingly awesome. I really never had any idea that those little images I saw in those art history books were such diminutive understatements. Visit the winged Victory of Samothrace and a Botticelli fresco of young women walking, wearing long colorful silken dresses, turning their heads towards one another in conversation, telling stories.
Getting to be somewhere between late afternoon and early evening. Skies are cloudy. Get out the maps. This is a good time to use my free boat ride ticket. I can take the number seven La Courneuve 8 Mai 1945 from Palais Royal Musee du Louvre station to Chaussee d’Antin where I can transfer to the number nine Pont de Sevres and exit at Alma Marceau. From here I can walk down to the Pont d’Alina where the tour boat docks between its goings and its comings. I’m there just ten minutes before next departure and there’s not a whole lot of people on this ride. I am upstairs under the open sky. Air is cool without being cold. We go upriver first, under bridge, under bridge, under bridge until we’re going under Pont Neuf to around the south side of the Isle de la Cite and the Ile St.-Louis. The big boat does a big youie in the middle of this wide section of the river. Returning downriver along the north sides of the islands, bridge under, bridge under, bridge under until we’re going past the dock, past the Tour Eiffel and then all the way around the Alee des Cygnes and the Statue de la Liberte to another turnaround, and return past the Tour Eiffel to the dock. All in about one hour. Getting into the early evening now. I could walk but I could also take the number nine over two stops and be at Trocadero where I can catch an overview of the Eiffel Tower from the Palais de Chaillot. On the far end of one of the wide steps, a young woman sits by nearby, untying and retying her shoelaces. Spending some time on her own, getting to know the city the way she wants to get to know it. After a few days of walking around, a few things start becoming familiar. How the metro works. The neighborhood of the Eiffel Tower and my own neighborhood right across the Avenue de Suffren and the boulevard de Grenelle. I’ve been through the Louvre twice and around both of the islands. How crossing lights work and how great those double sided green benches along various streets can be, to rest my leg and just plain stop, in a spot in a place to listen to the neighborhood. From the overview, I can walk down through the jardins du Trocadero, to the Pont d’Lena to under the Tour Eiffel to the Parc du Champs de Mars where this evening’s couples and small groups and individuals like myself can sit on the grass and forget and remember whatever feels right. Time for the final stroll through the neighborhood as twilight turns to darkness, somehow run into a totally charming small elegant friendly East Indian restaurant all but hiding amongst the shadowed wall of rue Humboldt, surely one of the shortest side streets in Paris. The tandoori chicken and rice is very nicely done and this is a truly refreshing way to end a day of Parisian explorations.
Sunday morning and its getting time to go. The taxi will be here to pick me up at nine. The plane doesn’t leave till one. Last petit dejeuner at the hotel at seven. I’ve got ten pictures left on my Kodak instamatic. These are for the neighborhood early on at a time when traffic is non-existent and pedestrians are few and far between. Right out the front door of this hotel, look right and just a few steps along that way is the corner of the street of shops. Restaurant, bakery, and fish-man on the corner. Open on the weekdays at this time, closed this morning. Turn right at the corner. The street of shops leads to a bigger street with the overhead metro running above on a framework of steel atop the great concrete pillars holding the whole thing up. Buildings several stories high line both sides of this otherwise busy street. Parked cars are up and down both sides of this street and the side streets where it is permitted. Don’t particularly want pictures of parked cars. I’m going for some unique little items of architecture or juxtaposition of relationships between shape, size, color, and shadow. Up one side street I haven’t been on yet, and come to a secluded park I haven’t been to, yet. Little gravel pathways and lush vegetation under a gray morning sky. The other side of the playground across the street from the little park across the street from the church. Fill in the blanks between the streets and blocks of the neighborhood. Sure could have fun if my digital camera was here, and even if I had another Kodak, but I’ve only got ten pix. I’ve got to pick and choose along the way, and I don’t know what lies ahead or around the corner. Haven’t exactly got all morning either to stroll around at my leisure. My bag is packed and I’m ready to go except for a couple of minor things. Nevertheless, a one hour jaunt through the intricacies of the neighborhood with only ten pictures in hand to take during the quietest hour of the week is where I say my goodbyes to these seven days in Paris, from one Sunday to the next.
Friday is dawning.
I’ve done my museums and I’m using the metro.
There are a lot of places here I will never go.
There’s a cemetery in another part of town from here.
There is a very large cemetery across the street
From where I grew up in my hometown neighborhood.
One mile long and a half mile wide.
Our house was near the corner of a vast expanse
Of gently rolling, wild and grassy hills;
A few isolated trees and small groups of large trees
From one small rise and dip in the terrain to another,
And in one corner, a deeply forested couple of acres.
Black metal picket fence, Arrows pointing to the sky,
But not everywhere rooted in the earth.
There were places we could crawl under
to get to this wild terrain
surrounded by the residential and commercial city.
A railway track runs along the far side from our house.
On the other side of our street lights is a vast empty darkness,
And the whistles of the distant night line carries across.
The rolling ground of the field leads to depressions
Where the horizon of grass brushes the sky line
And all of the houses are disappeared.
Early morning metro to Cimitiere Montparnasse,
densely populated from grey stone wall to grey stone wall
with carved rocks of many shapes and designs
marking the resting places of the deceased.
There is a poet beneath one of these rocks.
I should know him a lot better than I do.
I remember reading his poetry in translation,
And some of his reviews and prose essays,
And read about how he lived his forty-six years,
And who was important to him.
My thoughts have not been with him for a very long time.
Then like out of nowhere he appears again
As I am planning my one week visit to Paris.
An art museum, and a palace, and the countryside with Vincent and Claude,
And more art Museums, and learning the metro,
And riding with the metro population: all of these are behind me.
Now is time for a quiet morning in the cemetery.
The gravesite is on one side of the cimetiere
And the sculpture memorial is built up against the grey
Stone wall on the other side.
Walk the sunlit and shaded pathways through the fields of large carved stones.
Here is an angel carrying a soul up from out of the decaying flesh into a new light.
Here is a head looking out towards the horizon,
Resting his chin on his clenched hands,
Rising from the gray slab of rock on the ground bearing the lifeless corpse.
Here are some words to help us see better.
Seven days and two hours from the morning glide of the descending approach over the villages and countryside to Paris. Eleven a.m. in the Charles de Gaulle terminal in search of the door where I am to meet the taxi-driver who will take me through the streets directly around the Tour Eiffel to the narrow side street of my hotel.
One week later, departing the hotel at nine in the morning for the drop off and wait for the one o’clock departure. From wheels down, to wheels up, seven days and two hours. It doesn’t take long after finding my room and checking out the mosaic of courtyard walls rising from three floors below to sometimes two above. Like an origami of folded rectangular shapes and textures extending in three dimensional space. So now it’s down the narrow curving stairwell, greeting the young cheerful East Indian receptionist and asking her for basic directions. I venture forth with my map in my side pocket, leaving the camera behind. I haven’t the slightest idea about where to be going except for the Champs Elysses where I am told the money changers are. Until I talk with that fellow, I have not a single Euro cent to spend on anything. So it’s a piece of a walk for openers, passing the Tour Eiffel from the far end of the Parc du Champs de Mars over to the streets leading to the Pont des Invalides, my first crossing of the Seine. I find my money changer, and take what I figure is a low exchange rate because I need some cash, for whatever, just in case I want to use some, and I didn’t know how many of these little holes in the wall there are around here, and this being the heavily traveled tourist area that it is, I’ve got to expect a certain amount of fleecing. By the time the sixth day rolls around, I have found a changer on another less traveled street on the right bank on the network of streets beyond the Louvre, where I got a substantially better rate. I’ve got his card and that’s where I’ll go when I return to this city.
Meanwhile, it’s time to be walking up the street towards the Arc de Triomphe. I don’t walk over to the monument on the island on the other side of the big circular street.
I rather cross, from corner to corner, from red light to green light to green light to red light, all of the streets entering the circle. Sitting on benches in shady open spaces along the way, watching the light clouds drift across the bright blue sky, and this young couple and that sharing their affections. Looking at the map, it seems there’s only one way to go and that’s back on down that wide busy street with all of its people coming and going. One thing I like doing in this city, saturated as it is with history from one end to the other, is the walking through steps that others have walked before, through whatever era one might wish to imagine, from one block to another. What is the sense of space that I can understand of this place? I know this best when I walk slowly, stopping often at benches along the way, and steering clear of the busier lanes. Skirt the island of the obelisk on the Place de Concorde, and go on to the Jardin de Tuilieres, and the courtyards of the Louvre.
Now is not the time to visit the interior of the museum. Rather to linger through the courtyards and emerging from the other side, find my way over to a line of little street side restaurants. I want to sit down and take a rest but not take in a meal. Something light. And here it is, just what I need. Two hot dogs end to end in a long rich thick bread bun smothered in a couple of kinds of melted white cheese. A light warm sandwich to quench my palette, along with an orange soda. Just a few wooden chairs and small tables jumbled together in front of the store extending towards the sidewalk. Kind of a quiet spot, facing the busy street, across from which is the stone wall alongside the river on the way to Pont Neuf. Now getting time to cross the bridge and see if I can walk around a piece of the island and visit Notre Dame. It is early evening by the time I get over to the courtyard of the cathedral. Sit on the stone ledge at the far end of the courtyard in front of the cathedral and watch the sky changing behind the towers. Here is the turnaround point for today.
I’ve been out all day since two in the afternoon, walking the streets of Paris for the first time. Looking for a sense of the layout and where my home fits in. Lines on the map become buildings and concrete, pedestrians and shopkeepers and sidewalk cafes, gardens arranged in bouquets alongside avenues for motorcycles and cars. The line from the arc de Triomphe through the place de Concorde, through the Jardin Tuileries and through the ancient cobblestone courtyards of the Louvre is magical. The heartline of the city.
Through the streets once again of the island to turn to the second part of the Pont Neuf crossing. Afternoon walk is the straight line from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite. Evening walk is along the curve of the other side of the river, as sunset falls into dusk falls into darkness. The river on my right, going with the flow, the busy street on the left. The lights of buildings and the lights of passing cars and busses and motorcycles are background, and every now and then there is a place to sit, a little bit apart from the din, where one can soak up some of the night air drifting up from the water below, as it always has.
The evening return is just as much a part of finding where things are at as the afternoon exploration. The hotel is just off of the Boulevard de Grenelle near the number six Dupleix metro station. Those last few blocks over from the Eiffel Tower parc are a fascinating web of quiet places and passing strangers to wonder about. The Champs Elysses is entertaining, but here in the neighborhood is where folks are at home. Here is where everyday life returns to, and where we go with our best friends. Strangers are not as strange, and the tourist is just another passer-by under the streetlights over the sidewalks along the way.
Seven days and two hours, wheels down to wheels up, touching down on the runway to lifting off for the return. Ten hours on the plane each way, graced with a window seat each way; flying through the night into the morning on the way in, flying into a very long day on the way back. A half a day gained, and a half a day lost. A week to get acquainted with French culture on the ground through the tunnels of the metro, changing lines, on the overground platforms on the escalators to the overhead railway, on the steps leading down into levels of depths below the pavement. A very complex network of tunnels for we passengers walking between one train and another at all of those various intersections of one line with another. Looking at things, Looking at others. Paying attention without being intrusive. There are various courtesies that are easily learned about where we like to sit and how we stand close when the car fills up. Generally go with the prevailing pace during a transition through a set of tunnels between one platform and another. Usually a place to sit along the wall of the cavern when the traffic is light. A couple of minutes or so is the usual waiting time. I wonder how many trains are on the tracks of any one line at any given moment. I wonder what numbers of people have taken a ride on the metro today on all of the various lines. My hotel is right around the corner and over one block to the overhead metro at Dupliex. That’s my home station. Right around here are the blocks that I walk, that I have walked, by day and by night. Network of narrow streets going off in all directions from one another. My detailed, easy-to-read city street map guides me through this impossible maze, playfully inviting an inquiry into its mystery. Early morning, Sunday morning, the shops are closed, and nobody is around. Golden rivers of sunlight flow down the streets between buildings that cast long shadows. Last walk through the neighborhood, and it’s virtually all to myself. Everything is closed. If something is open, I don’t know what it is. Find an enclosed park I had not found before. Hidden islands of beauty right around one of those obscure corners and along an isolated, seemingly dead end walkway. But the dead-end walkway opens into a garden, lush with vegetation and ordered with rectangular pathways. Surrounded by tall buildings, a community courtyard, open to the public, those who could find it. A few old-style park benches, with the curving backs. Cool, September morning air. Just want to say goodbye to the neighborhood with one last walkaround. This is where all of my daily excursions into the far reaches of the city return to every evening, sometimes late into the darkness. These have been the streets and the shops that I began with every morning. Here are the shops that I went to for the cheese and bread for my room. With the cherry tomatoes and the cans of prepared coffee drinks. Those pastries from the corner shop were really quite nice after the visit to Versailles on Tuesday. Every day is here, regardless of wherever else any day goes, every day is here.
Petit dejeuner begins at seven. Coffee and croissant and fruit filled rolls, and cups of yogurt and an orange juice. It’s serve yourself on a small buffet table, set out by the young woman who is intermittently walking back and forth between her kitchen and this enclosure, with its half a dozen small dining tables along two sides of the wall, and a narrow side room with additional dining tables lined up alongside one wall with large clean windows through which morning sunlight falls. The young woman is quietly keeping the table replenished. I’m the first one down this Wednesday morning. I want to eat and be down to the metro station without delay. By now, I’ve got my metro pass, and I’ve used it a few times these last two days. I have some good directions from Catherine my agent representative translator guide. She’s told me where to get off, which way to walk, and what to look for. She told me to go to Monoprix to look for batteries for my camera, and there I found, much to my surprise, a clothing store on the rez-de-chaussee and a grocery store on the premiere etage. Walked up and down all of the aisles looking for whatever might inspire me. Quite a few other shoppers this evening, pleasantly crowded, each of us going about our shopping. I find a little plastic container full of cherry tomatoes, a narrow eight ounce block of packaged Swiss cheese, a loaf of sliced brown bread, and three tins of prepared and ready to drink flavored coffee. The line for a few items is short and fast and in our greeting, I tell the woman in French that I am an American and I don’t speak French, which elicits a smile and genuinely congenial feelings for my predicament. I really cannot communicate with anybody around here for even the most elementary kinds of information. Certainly not as bad as blindness or deafness, but I feel like one of my senses has been cut off. I have the smallest handful of words available to me. Other than that, it’s all glances and gestures.
Catherine, my translator and guide, has given me directions to the office near the Tuileries gardens in the Joan-of-Arc square where bus tours to Auvers-sur-Oise and Giverny are arranged. This morning is scheduled for eight. The metro ride is direct from my home in Dupliex to the Joan-of-Arc square. The walk across the avenue to the office is a visual panoramic of architectural grace. The office is not crowded and I’ve got my ticket in plenty of time. As it turns out, we are a group of ten tourists on a huge modern touring bus with the young woman who will be our tour guide for today and the driver. Through the maze of city streets he takes us, a master of negotiating tight turns and managing his way through busy intersections. Towards the highways leading through the suburbs into the morning countryside. To the drive through this village to the drop off point where our guide and we tourists are left with our feet on the ground to get familiar with the terrain. The path leads upward to a quiet crossroads. A tall white stone pedestal in a garden of flowers and bushes, holds aloft a bust of Daubigny, wearing his beret, holding his palette and brush, looking out at the world, his subject, and getting ready to put it down on canvas. Having once been an artist, having once practiced painting, on even not so flat surfaces, with any number of color creating media, and line making instruments that I might have had at hand at any given time, here I am now visiting someone whom I once was. There was a time when I was reading art history books on a regular basis as a primary form of entertainment. I didn’t know Daubigny was here. I came here to visit Vincent. I know Daubigny’s images, and that he was from the earlier part of that century. Ever since my first visit to the Louvre on Monday, my entire visit becomes more and more like a walk through the pages of an art history book. Here are the paths that van Gogh walked and here is the church that he painted. One can look around and guess about where exactly he set up his materials for this composition. Another long walk up a gentle slope to a large wide open agricultural field, newly turned over, either just planted or about to be planted. Off in the distance a couple of hundred yards is a raised plaque marking the place where he painted his crows in the wheatfield. And here is the cemetery in the open sunlight. All different kinds of stones marking many different people’s memories. Over against one stone wall are the stones for Vincent van Gogh and Theo van Gogh. The plots are covered in thick green ivy, a continuous bed of ivy without separation between one brother and the other. From here on top of the hill, looking across the stones of the cemetery, to across the fields and over the distant treetops, the square stone spire of the cathedral reaches like a brush into the sky.
John Ashbaugh
November, 2007
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