Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (30 page)

I actually like spring rain: when it stops and the puddles grow still, you see two cities at a glance, one reflected—and often framed serendipitously. I like to think of post-Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte’s
Paris Street; Rainy Day
, the umbrellas of the passersby held high like the masts of ships navigating the gleaming boulevards, with buildings, carriages, and people mirrored in them, plus much more of a commentary on bourgeois life than meets the eye at first glance.

W. Somerset Maugham’s hero in
The Razor’s Edge
reveled in the “light, transitory pleasure, sensual without grossness” of a Paris spring that filled him with the glow of youth. Émile Zola wrote of “the charm of awakening desire, the thrill of hope and expectation.” So just this once, leave the pseudo-sophisticates to fret about clichés, and don’t let them spoil your enjoyment. The season will always have a special significance to me: every year the magic of those first months I spent in Paris, months full of adventure and promise, returns fleetingly, flowering like the city’s horse-chestnut trees, the quintessential symbol of springtime in Paris.

Though the city is a year-round destination nowadays, the number of visitors still spikes at Easter and midsummer, the beginning and end of spring. In January, when April, May, and June seem a lifetime away, I start receiving postcards and, these days, e-mails, announcing friends’ spring itineraries. Will it be cold, they ask? They forget that Paris exists geographically (and not simply in their dreams) and is north of Saint John’s, Newfoundland, north of Montreal, Boston, Vienna, and Budapest. To be even-handed when I write back, I copy out statistics from encyclopedias and guidebooks. “The average temperature in March,” I say, “is 50.4 Fahrenheit, April 60.3 and May 61.9, while June hits 74.” And I leave it up to them to judge whether that’s warm or not. I often wonder whether these friends imagine, from where they write in sunny Rome or Los Angeles, the effect their messages have. In the dead of a leaden Paris winter, the mention of “spring” steels residents against the unremitting gray. In the mind’s eye the Champs-Elysées bursts into elapsed-time leaf, rowboats in the Bois de Boulogne nose along lazy lakes, and ten thousand sun umbrellas sprout like kaleidoscopic mushrooms at street-corner cafés.

Anticipation, the weathering of that seemingly interminable Paris fall and winter, is what makes the spring so special here. It’s as much a question of your state of mind as of meteorological phenomena. After a few false starts in February and early March, when picnickers are snatched off benches by icy claws, a sudden change occurs. The roasted-chestnut sellers stow their steel drums and shopping carts, reappearing with fresh-cut mimosa in hand. Lap dogs appear sans doggie jackets. Tulips and forget-me-nots pop up in the Luxembourg Gardens. Bright little sailboats skim across pools in the Tuileries. The bellwether youths of the Latin Quarter dress even more cavalierly than usual—a shirt and a loose-knit sweater, or a thin blazer with a scarf tossed defiantly around a ruddy neck. No-nonsense northern and eastern Europeans pour out of the tour buses behind Notre-Dame wearing warm, practical clothes, which they quickly shed when they find they are no longer in Helsinki, Warsaw, or other places with weather much harsher than Paris’s. They rush, camera in hand, from the flying buttresses behind the cathedral to the Seine-side garden to be photographed in front of the cherry blossoms. The Italians, hidden in fur and shearling coats, shiver happily no matter how hot it gets.

On either bank of the Seine, the first things to sprout are not crocuses and daffodils but sidewalk tables and faux-cane chairs. Locals eye them cautiously, hesitating because no one recognizably French has yet dared to sit outside. Clever café-keepers—notably on the Île Saint-Louis, in Place des Vosges, and around Saint-Germain-des-Prés—beat the elements early by investing in Plexiglas windscreens and glowing outdoor gas heaters. These are a surprisingly effective cross between a Second Empire lamppost and a Coleman stove, and they have caught on all over town. No wonder: “The café,” states my surprisingly up-to-date, 1912 Ward, Lock & Co.
Paris Guide
, “is the pre-eminently French institution.… Verlaine, the great French poet, never wrote a poem anywhere else!”

Indeed, the café still doubles as office and cozy living room in cold months, turning into a lively garden party the rest of the year. No true Parisian will be kept from his great spring communion for long. Once a fearless few have begun to brave the elements by sitting out of doors, the
terrasses
soon overflow. Waiters in their old-fashioned black-and-white penguin uniforms dash to and fro bearing beer, espressos, and steaming hot chocolate.

Another bellwether of spring is the city’s outdoor markets. If you arrive early enough you’ll see the greengrocers arranging their fruit and vegetables into color-coded pyramids, domes, or Cartesian rows. Flanking last winter’s cabbages and mud-spattered cauliflowers nestle tiny zucchini swaddled in protective wrappers and crisp sweet peas from the hothouses of Provence. New potatoes with skins as pale as a Parisian’s cry out to be eaten unpeeled in a single bite. Flanking the mounds of cold apples and still-hard pears are baskets of berries, anemic cherries and the first ruinously expensive melons coaxed from the fields of Cavaillon more than 350 miles to the south. So gorgeous is the display that you hesitate before buying, unwilling to deconstruct these succulent still lifes.
Bon melon!
shouts the grocer as you pass by, promising the first taste of honeyed sweetness, nectar, and joy. Seduced by his spiel, you buy an unripe melon, fully aware that you’ll be disappointed, but happy to be taken in, as you are each year.

Once spring is in the air, the plein-air painters appear in numbers: glimpsed through trees about to bud, monuments materialize on their easels. I find it difficult to visit museums or galleries in spring unless the works on show are divorced from nature. Instead I choose a vantage point on the edge of town, or an open spot within it, and settle in to watch the greatest exhibition of all—the spring sky and changing cityscape. There are no waiting lines and the show is free. The Pont Saint-Michel, or the Champs-de-Mars, the overlook at Père-Lachaise cemetery, the panoramic park at Belleville or even meretricious old Montmartre are my favorite spots. The shifting light seems to parade the masterpieces of the Louvre and d’Orsay across the heavens. There are swirling, puffy Tiepolo cloudscapes over the Italianate Institut de France and the lacey Pont des Arts. Billowing Renoirs clothe the ridiculous cupolas of Sacré-Coeur. Giddy Pissarros and Signacs float over the Grands Boulevards, the Seine, and the Tuileries. At dusk the mauve Monets and the flaming blues, pinks, and reds of Fauvists like Derain clamp down on this old gray city that is itself an artwork in progress.

The Lac Daumesnil in the Bois de Vincennes on the second, third, or fourth Sunday in April, depending on the calendar year, offers one of the oddest spring double-headers I know: the traditional Foire du Trône funfair, and the Buddhist New Year’s celebrations held next door at a municipal temple. At the funfair, bumper-cars bang and merry-go-rounds spin to the nostalgic wheezing of accordions, with the smell of French fries hanging thick enough to slice. Under the Pointillist clouds of horse-chestnut trees lovebirds peck, kids run wild clutching cotton candy, and anglers fish for muddy
goujon
they will never eat. Here are the celebrated rowboats of Paris, each with a name, and here, too, are the swans and ducks and sculpted flowerbeds splashed with primrose, narcissus, and daffodils. A few hundred yards down the lake the gongs and chants of Buddhists fill the air. The atmosphere is scented with spices, frying spring rolls, and roasting meats. The peaceful coexistence of these two fundamentally different festivities, the complete absence of fear or anxiety among the picnickers and pedestrians of every imaginable color and age, makes me think of e.e. cummings’s celebration of Paris as a spiritual place “continuously expressing the humanness of humanity.”

Sure, Paris is no paradise, though you might be excused for thinking so now and again, especially in the spring. The joyous, homespun rites of
le printemps
possess none of the primordial horror of Stravinsky’s music, which seems to suit so many modern megalopolises to a tee. Take, for example, the Parisian version of April first. Each year I receive an urgent telephone call offering me a lucrative book contract, a free trip to a nudist colony in Malta, or something similar, and I invariably fall for the gag. When I go down into the Marais street where we live, not far from the Lycée Charlemagne, a big high school, I inevitably wind up with a large paper fish plastered to my back, cleverly out of view.
Poisson d’Avril!
shout the mischievous but harmless teenagers. April Fool’s Day! Then I realize that the book contract and the titillating trip to Malta are bogus, and I console myself with an April Fool’s Day treat. The bakers of Paris vie with each other to make the most mouthwatering pastries, cakes, and breads in the shape of fish, and the day becomes yet another excuse to celebrate life and stuff yourself with food. This April Fool’s Day I might just spread the word that I’ll be running in the Paris Marathon, to work off the cakes, cookies, and winter fat, but somehow I don’t think anyone will believe me.

Perhaps the best spring fête of all is May Day. The museums and public buildings close in honor of the workingman and -woman, and not even the most skillful misanthrope or puritanical workaholic can avoid the day’s festivities.
Muguet
hawkers appear on every corner, their ingeniously packaged lilies-of-the-valley arrayed in water-filled phials, moss-stuffed pots, or elaborate baskets. Come rain or shine, several hundred thousand merrymakers, most of them leaning to the political left, converge on Place de la Bastille with their bullhorns, wearing sprigs of lovers’
muguet
in their lapels.
Il fait beau
, chant the schoolteachers and students, the factory workers, bus drivers, grocers, and nostalgic socialists with their banners of fallen idols.
C’est le printemps
.

La Ville Lumière: Paris, City of Light

Museum cities are like old
cocottes—
only fit to be seen in a soft light
.

—R
OBERT
D
OISNEAU
, 1989

ebster’s defines “cliché” as a “trite expression” and “trite” as “worn out by constant use.” Happily, the title Ville Lumière or City of Light is neither a cliché nor trite. Though it is constantly used in reference to Paris, it has become a nickname, a sobriquet, an endearment.

For me, the images it evokes are rooted in history yet very much alive. Say “Ville Lumière” and some will see old-fashioned street lamps spilling pools of light along the Seine where lovers stroll hand in hand. Others will think of the Champs-Elysées and Eiffel Tower ablaze. Still others will envision night-lit monuments perched on hills—the Panthéon, Sacré-Coeur, Trocadéro—and a cityscape bathed in an otherworldly glow.

Personally I’ve often imagined the expression had more to do with the welcoming lights of the city’s cafés, its bookshops, museums, and universities, where minds meet and tongues wag into the night.

Professors and philosophers like to say that the appellation Ville Lumière isn’t about physical sources of light at all. Rather it’s a metaphor for political, spiritual, cultural, and intellectual energy. Louis XIV, an enlightened despot, was known as the Sun King (though he abandoned luminous Paris for swampy Versailles). The eighteenth century’s Enlightenment found fertile ground here for its philosophical, social and political ideals: empiricism, skepticism, tolerance, and social responsibility. Voltaire, Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other proponents were called
les lumières
.

In his writings on the French Revolution, historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was probably the first to call Paris
la Lumière du Monde
—Light of the World, a beacon for humanity. During Michelet’s lifetime, Paris underwent radical change: its population more than doubled. By the second half of the nineteenth century (starting with the Second Empire in 1852), Paris had indeed become the most stimulating, the most modern and best-loved of European cities.