I found a twist of ribbon-like streets, lined by rows of closed doors during the hottest hours of the day, when the villagers bury themselves inside under the pretext of a long lunch. The boulangerie, the charcuterie and the local corner shop owners had also retreated, and nothing remained of the morning’s flurry for fresh bread.
Montmartre de Paris
Paris is the world’s most photographed, most written about, most visited city. More than 30 million people arrive on the banks of the Seine each year, only 45% of them French. “Paris,” according to my literary guide to the city, “comes to us second-hand. Our imagination has been there first, worked upon by the imagination of others. It is through the filter of their memories, desires, dreams, descriptions, lies, gossip that we experience the city. What we respond to is an imagined place.”
Claire and I did the things so obvious that guidebooks needn’t bother to mention them. We dangled our feet in the fountains outside the Louvre, before entering through glass pyramids to see people seeing the Mona Lisa. We sat in the Parc du Champ de Mars, below the Eiffel Tower, and sketched swaying oak trees against the building’s complicated network of steel. We got rude service at a Parisian café when I was moved, still in my chair, from the edge of the pavement.
We went to the Musee D’Orsay and I watched Claire dance between her favourite paintings before a picnic on the banks of the Seine. At Notre Dame we joined the thick, fast moving queue, and once inside were pushed forward, past altars and scattered stalls, selling paraphernalia. At Père Lachaise we joined a hunt through foreign names for the graves of the famous. We laughed at a packet of rolling paper and a lighter placed considerately below Jim Morrison’s modest headstone and read Oscar Wilde’s name below his mock Egyptian tomb, through the lipstick marks of thousands.
In my fondest Paris imaginings, I sat sipping cold beer at a Montmartre café, absorbing an atmosphere relished by generations of artists. Renoir, Degas, Hemingway, Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso, all spent time here, and remembered the many cobbled streets that wind slowly uphill to the Basilique du Sacré Coeur in their work. Continue reading Montmartre de Paris>>
