Editor: this series of essays is a long read, but worthy of a reader's time and a way to pay tribute to the (mostly) young people who died.
After Attacks, the Soul of Paris Endures
Photo
People lighting candles at the Place de la République in Paris.
Credit
Laurent Cipriani/Associated Press
Paris
has for so long been America’s playground that it is difficult to
imagine it being anything else. It is a pretty, walkable movie set of a
place that elevates your own aesthetic sensibility before you return
westward across the Atlantic an enlightened soul.
It has been that
way since the 1830s, when steamers supplanted sailboats, and suddenly
travel for the sake of discovering the world was within reach. (Though
glamour on the way there would have to wait awhile.) American leisure
travelers of means and curiosity, ranging from Samuel Morse to Ralph
Waldo Emerson, decamped for a journey that was considered at the time
something like a postgraduate arts degree, around the same time De
Tocqueville was making sense of America. Paris was an intrepid
traveler’s milestone.
The cross-cultural exchange was occasionally
put on hiatus by wars and economic cataclysm. But by the beginning of
the 20th century, Paris’s thriving creative class had cemented its
international reputation as the capital of all things related to taste
and artistry. France now draws more tourists than any other country in the world. It is impossible not to feel its pull.
But
right now, at least, is the moment to reconsider what you are feeling
pulled toward. Perhaps Paris, which has survived sieges by the Vikings,
Henry of Navarre and the Prussians, is more than a beautiful, refined
theme park to which we escape from America and improve ourselves.
Perhaps Paris’s beauty lies in its capacity to shore itself up and
endure.
Below you will find essays by Americans — expats,
travelers and writers — trying to take the long view of Paris. They are
picking up the pieces after the Nov. 13 attacks. And they are looking at
the city, unfiltered, trying to reconnect with its soul.
Photo
The Basilica of St.-Denis, not far from the attacks, has a collection of royal tombs.
Credit
Getty Images
The Bones of Kings Hold a Lesson
By STEVEN ERLANGER
We all try to make our own Paris, of the flesh and of the mind, even
in these days of blood and sadness. As the Canadian Morley Callaghan
once wrote, Paris “was a lighted place where the imagination was free,”
but its freedom and secularism can seem to some like a blasphemy.
I have visited Paris many times as an adult, and was lucky enough to be The New York Times bureau chief there for five and a half years, and I’ve just returned to help with the coverage of the Nov. 13
attacks. Even now, I feel most free in the early morning, when I can
walk the streets and imagine them as they were a century ago, before the
touts come out, or at the “golden hour,” when the light is at its most
romantic, especially over the Seine. I love the walk over the pedestrian
bridge near the Iéna Metro, to stop in
the middle and watch the barges and the clouds, then climb the steep
stairs to the street, to have a coffee at the Musée Guimet and see some of the finest art of Southeast Asia. Or I walk the rest of the way across the river to the Musée du Quai Branly, France’s ambitious monument to anthropology, designed by one of its star architects, Jean Nouvel, with its wild garden.
Paris
is of itself, but it has always seen itself as a global city, open to
world civilizations, even if some of what is on show was plundered in
the name of colonialism or an arrogant universalism.
Homages to “the eternal Paris” that sells itself as the “city of love” are heartfelt; the food and the freedoms, the museums and the parks, the Metro
on rubber wheels, the cafes and the bread, the craze for “love locks”
on the poor Pont des Arts. This is the sweet, bourgeois Paris that the
late great André Glucksmann rightly mocked as a “musée doré,” a gilded
museum, that exists “entre les murs,” within the old walls effectively
marked by the Périphérique, the ring road, that acts like a moat.
But, of course,
there is another Paris, beyond the walls, in the “cités” and HLMs, or
housing projects, in the crowded, largely immigrant banlieues. And that
Paris is vital to me, too, toujours Paris, aussi. There is the future of
France, in a way, its great test. Can the country find a new and
meaningful inclusiveness for all its citizens, and manage a politics
already tainted by Islamophobia and ultranationalism?
But there is also fascination to be found, for example in the Basilica of St.-Denis, a short walk from the Stade de France, where the
terrorism began with suicide bombers. The church dates from the 12th
century, but my attraction is not to the architecture, but to the
collection of royal tombs. This is where nearly all the kings of France
and their families are buried, and where the headless corpses of Louis
XVI and Marie Antoinette also, finally, came to rest.
The tombs
and sarcophagi are beautiful, in their way, but also serve as a kind of
memento mori. These all-powerful individuals, who were thought to have
been invested by God, were in death treated worse than peasants. During
the revolution, the corpses were dug up, buried in mass graves and
covered with lime. Napoleon reopened the church but left the bones where
they were; only in 1817 were the pits opened and the bits of royal
skeletons, all jumbled together, moved to an ossuary in the church. And
only in 2004 was the mummified heart of the dauphin — who was to have
been Louis XVII, but was imprisoned from the age of 7 until his death at
10 — brought to rest in a crypt in the church.
During the
revolution, the tombs themselves were saved in the name of art, while
the bodies were desecrated in the name of equality, fraternity and
liberty. Worth a thought, these days, as one emerges to see a more
realistic contemporary Paris: poorer, more ethnically diverse, more
Muslim and in most ways more vivid than what one encounters entre les
murs.
Photo
“It has restored my spirits,” Eugène Delacroix wrote of his painting
“July 28: Liberty Leading the People.” The work was inspired by the
Paris uprisings in 1830, which the artist had witnessed.
Credit
Musée du Louvre, dist. RMN / Angèle Dequier
In Delacroix, Reassurance
By DOREEN CARVAJAL
When morning comes to the Louvre, there’s a fleeting moment of quiet in this ancient stronghold that offers a refuge from the sensations of a city on edge.
At
the opening hour, at 9 a.m., the vast halls are still inhabited mostly
by Greek gods. The hush is broken only by the footsteps of security
guards pacing below the gaze of Napoleon and a battling David and
Goliath.
Later the group tours will arrive in force with guides
offering explanations in Chinese, English and Japanese. But during the
first precious half-hour, I like to be alone with my neighbors — Eugène Delacroix’s drowning men in a storm-tossed boat or the artist’s version of Dante and Virgil in hell.
I
come here habitually to contemplate one painting depending on my mood,
counting on the calm and inspiration that come from what researchers
call the restorative effect of “slow art.” Some social scientists
contend that visiting a museum can have a positive effect on health and
happiness.
On the grim morning after the Paris terrorist attacks, there was only one work that beckoned in the Denon Wing of French art.
When
I looked at it, I fixed on a single point: the defiant and resolute
gaze of Liberty leading the people with a tattered French flag in her
hand. Plumes of smoke surround her. The towers of Notre Dame rise above
the haze. Below her feet lie fallen bodies, looted and stripped bare.
“I
have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade,” Delacroix explained in a
letter to his brother about the painting inspired by the Paris
uprisings of 1830. “And although I may not have fought for my country,
at least I shall have painted for her. It has restored my spirits.”
I spent an unreasonable amount
of time studying it and then stepped back to get a better look. I still
had time before the first guides arrived, directing tourists with
slender wands. The painting, the magic and vibrancy of it, eased my anxieties,
and my heart beat slower. In the stillness it seemed possible to know a
painting deeply, to almost inhabit the same scene and to draw on its
force.
In the past when I visited the Louvre, I noticed only Liberty,
and the light illuminating her face and form. But with a half-hour to
contemplate, a great painting works its way into your mind. In the
darkness of the corners, I examined the supporters forming behind
Liberty — enough to give me comfort that we will never be alone.
Onward.
Photo
Every customer at Huîtrerie Régis has to order at least a dozen oysters.
Credit
Richard Harbus for The New York Time
A Hunger for Normalcy Returns
By ALEXANDER LOBRANO
Returning to Paris, the city that made me the man I always wanted to become, I winced. We both winced, Bruno, my French partner, and I.
Away for two nights, and the contrast between the imperial opulence and
glittering holiday decorations of the European city that had once been
the capital of a vast empire, before it was shorn off by war, and our darkened, empty hometown was just too painful.
Arriving
at our chilly apartment, we answered phone messages from friends around
the world, and then we ate some canned soup and went to bed. We ate
soup the next night, too, and then plain omelets,
wilted salad and crackers, since there was no bread and neither of us
cared. The animal vitality and urgency of being hungry had registered
with both of us as being unseemly in a city, our city, that had just
been so badly harmed.
The next night, though, I was moved when I noticed the fragile silver crescent of a new moon as
I looked out the window of my home office, and on the fifth floor
opposite me across the street, the same once-a-week party of card
players — the lady with the cigarette holder, the man with the flowing
foulard with poppy polka dots, and the bosomy twin sisters, I think,
with steel gray chignons — were at the table covered with green felt.
So I texted Bruno in his car on the way home from work. “Oysters? Huîtrerie Régis?”
“Bonne idée. Je te cherche a Sèvres-Babylone dans 45 minutes, et nous y irons ensemble.” (“Good idea. I’ll pick you up at the Sèvres-Babylone Metro station in 45 minutes and we can go together.”)
Waiting for the Metro, I got a gust of the burned rubber and singed wool smell (brake shoes?) that
is for me a more potent scent of Paris than all of the fragrances in
fancy bottles in the city’s shop windows, and I realized I was hungry.
The tiny no-reservations, white-painted shop-front oyster bar in the heart of St.-Germain-des-Prés was nearly full when we arrived, and wry, theatrically grumpy Régis was deftly prying open the lids of the barnacle-encrusted bivalves he has
shipped in from the Marennes-Oléron in the Poitou-Charentes region on
France’s Atlantic coast and arranging them on individual beds of shaggy
brown seaweed.
The house rule is the only one I’ve found I’d never want to break: Every
customer has to order at least a dozen oysters, which is more or less
all they serve here. With nothing more than some really good bread and
butter and a flinty bottle of Loire Valley white wine, maybe a Montlouis
or a Menetou-Salon, this simple meal of ancient pleasures was
profoundly French and primally invigorating.
There was also the
reciprocal pleasure of the persiflage, that excellent Gallic emollient
of banter, flirtation and playful teasing, which often occurs between the staff members
and clients during any good meal in Paris. Slurping our way through the
iodine-rich, green-etched shellfish, we talked about the weekend, and
because we’re Parisians, this began with the subject of what we would
eat, since the weekends are for cooking.
Our casual wish list of
what we hoped to find at the market included more of the season’s very
last tomatoes if we got up early enough; cepes from Le Bar à Patates, the superb stall specializing in dozens of different types of potatoes and wild mushrooms in season; scallops in their shells; and a fresh ewe’s milk cheese from Sandy McKenna, the Irish farmer who comes into the city from his Norman farm.
Knowing that our favorite market, the long pageant of Gallic gastronomy that runs down the Avenue du Président Wilson in the 16th Arrondissement on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, had been closed the Saturday after the attacks, I had
worried about our favorite vendors, hard-working people for whom losing
a busy Saturday was a major blow. They feed us, and we feed them, in an
exchange of trust and easy conviviality that explains why the markets
of Paris still awe, tempt and delight me after all these years.
I
can’t wait for Saturday morning this week, since the market will be a
celebration of the city itself, unvanquished, animated and always
hungry, and to celebrate, we decided we would share another dozen oysters.
Photo
The Joan of Arc statue in the Place des Pyramides in Paris.
Credit
Alex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times
Joan of Arc Stands Alone
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
A statue of Joan of Arc anchors the Place des Pyramides, close to the site where the 15th century cross-dressing, teenage virgin-martyr-saint was wounded during her unsuccessful military campaign to take Paris.
The statue was commissioned by Napoleon III to help restore France’s confidence after its
humiliating defeat to the Prussian army in 1870. Joan is portrayed as a
grim-faced, straight-backed armored warrior on horseback, her upraised
right arm carrying a banner that flies in the wind. Clad in gaudy gilded
bronze, she stands out in dramatic defiance of the drab gray stone of
the nearby Rue de Rivoli.
Little is
known about Joan, and that has made her a real-life heroine cloaked in
myths. An illiterate peasant girl, she heard voices from heaven that
ordered her to remain virginal and restore the man-who-would-be-king to
his throne. She persuaded him to give her
money, horses, weapons and soldiers to rid France of its English
invaders. Physically strong and emotionally independent, she lifted the
siege of Orléans and paved the way for him to be crowned King Charles
VII. After a string of defeats on the battlefield, she was captured by
the Burgundians, sold to the English, tried by French churchmen,
convicted of heresy and burned alive at the stake in 1431. She was 19.
France has not always defended Joan. The kings were unwilling to lionize a woman who might also have been a witch. Then in the 19th century, the historian Jules Michelet praised
her for transforming France into a woman worthy of love. In World War I
French soldiers prayed to her. The United States gave her blue eyes,
auburn hair and red lips and put her on a fund-raising poster.
The Vatican waited until 1920 to make her a saint. In World War II,
both the Nazi-supporting Vichy regime and the anti-Nazi resistance
called her a source of inspiration.
Anglo-Saxon feminists saw in
Joan the liberation of women from the bonds of marriage and motherhood.
Asked during her heresy trial why she was commanding an army rather than
adhering to “womanly duties” like raising children, Joan replied,
“There are enough other women to do those things.”
France’s
National Library has more than 20,000 books about Joan. Shakespeare,
Mark Twain, Voltaire, Bertolt Brecht and George Bernard Shaw recreated
her in literature. Films, songs, operas, ballets and comic books have
told her story. Almost every French city and town has a statue or
painting or plaque of Joan. Her image has been put on labels for French
mineral water, liqueur and cheese. Replicas of the Place des Pyramides
statue grace cities like Lille and Nancy in France as well as Philadelphia and New Orleans in the United States.
Many
in contemporary France have rejected Joan because of her identification
with right-wing extremism. Since the 1980s, she has been the icon of
the far-right National Front party. Its leaders hold an open-air rally
in front of the gold statue every May Day
to celebrate her as the personification of Gallic pride and purity in
the face of the country’s modern-day invaders: immigrants.
During his unsuccessful campaign for re-election in 2012, the center-right
President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage to her, declaring, “Joan belongs
to no party, to no faction, to no clan.” He was using her image for
crass political ends, but his message rings true in the face of the
terrorist attacks in Paris.
The statue of Joan has not become a
place of pilgrimage for those who need to mourn. There are no flowers or
candles at her feet. She is visited only by the sea gulls and crows hovering above her. She bears witness to the tragedy alone.
But no one can take Joan away from all Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.
She feared nothing. Her gilded statue stands as a symbol of resilience,
courage and heroism. These days, France needs its heroes more than
ever.
Photo
Paris street markets endure as places to shop, and gossip, and connect over food.
Credit
Getty Images
Missing a Favorite Market, Mon Marché
By ANN MAH
At this time of year you’ll find piles of leeks and baskets of wild
mushrooms, giant pumpkins that could stand in for Cinderella’s carriage,
crates of bumpy-skinned pears and rosy-cheeked apples. At the fish
stall, the season’s first scallops, plucked from briny depths, pried
from pink shells as flirtatious as their French name: coquilles St.-Jacques.
At the cheese stall, the fromager will press each Camembert to find the
perfect one to serve tomorrow evening. The French know how to display
food with unstudied elegance, and every time I visit an open market in
Paris, I am astonished by their artistry.
Most neighborhoods have
at least one marché traditionnel, traditional market, unfurling on the
island of a busy avenue, or wrapping around a central square. When
Parisians find their favorite and frequent it, they claim it as their
own — mon marché — at least that’s what happened to me when I lived above the Marché Raspail,
one of the city’s loveliest. Three times a week, a double row of stalls
appeared beneath my living room windows, beckoning with the smell of
roasting chickens, the flash of bright fruit against stark winter skies,
the swooping calls of the vendors announcing their wares.
The
market is where I learned about those special French strawberries, the
ones called Gariguette, which diffuse an intoxicating perfume and are
available only for a couple of weeks in the spring. It’s where I
polished my French, eavesdropping on conversations that ended in
abbreviations: “A t’à l’heure,” (for “À tout à l’heure,” “See you soon”) or “Biz!” (“Bisous!” “Kisses!”). It’s
where I learned how to shuck an oyster, the fishmonger taking my hand
in his, showing me where to insert a knife and how much pressure to
exert against the shell. In the market, I received recipes, gardening
advice, grammar lessons and free lemons. It’s the place where I first
felt a connection to my adopted city, even though I never learned
anyone’s name.
Now that I no longer live in Paris, the market is one of the things I miss the most. Along with the produce — in particular, I long for French garlic, those generous bulbs of firm, fleshy cloves —
I loved the sense of ritual: the queues (not always orderly), the
handshakes (doled out to regulars), the little old lady with a halo of
white hair who always bought as little as possible (a handful of cherry tomatoes, a single scallop, three stalks of white asparagus).
In a country with few centers of community, the marché endures as a gathering spot — some streets have hosted markets for centuries —
a place to shop, and gossip, and connect over food, as the French know
how to do so well. It’s always the first place I go when I arrive in
Paris, to select the perfect slice of oozing cheese, revel in the
beauty, and feel as if I’m a part of the city once again.
In all the years that I’ve known France, I had never known the marché to be canceled — even the year it fell on Christmas Day, a hardy handful of vendors still appeared, and we all ate free oysters at 9 in the morning. But when three
days of official mourning shuttered the city’s markets, along with
museums and shops, it seemed an appropriate tribute to the victims of
the attacks. I imagined the market streets and squares empty — not from
fear, but from respect — just as now I
know they will be packed with people jostling for the meatiest girolle
mushrooms. I plan to join them again soon, straw basket slung over one
arm.
Photo
Café Oberkampf, a coffee shop and cafe, draws neighbors in the 11th Arrondissement.
Credit
Molly S. J. Lowe
Consolation in Community
By LINDSEY TRAMUTA
When they were cautioned to avoid public squares, they gathered. When they were asked to stay at home, they convened in cafes
and lined up in droves to donate blood. Ask Parisians to stop living
and supporting the city they love in the ways they know best, and they will fervently resist.
Their
resolve and abiding need to take to the streets to speak their minds in
defense of causes large and small are part of what I love most about
them. And when they raise their fists in
the air, joust for justice and campaign for the future, they do so most
often at the Place de la République, the entry into the 11thArrondissement, my home since I moved to Paris nine years ago.
The once industrial, working-class district is one of the city’s diverse cultural cradles, brimming with live music venues, lively bars, craft-driven stores,
art galleries, design workshops, independent bookstores, bakeries and
many of the city’s best restaurants. Its infectious energy and bohemian
spirit draw revelers from all corners of the city and curious travelers
from all corners of the world. If there is any neighborhood that embodies a quintessentially Parisian zest for life worth envying, it’s this one.
It’s
where I became an adult, fell in love, married and adopted my first
cat. It’s where I celebrate milestone birthdays, make friends, derive
inspiration, debate politics, gossip with shop owners, write stories and
bond with fellow Parisians as we huddle together in solidarity in times
of hardship. It’s where Le Fooding, the city’s leading guide to joie de vivre (drinking and dining) is based and started the Tous au Bistrot initiative the week after the attacks in support of local restaurateurs, encouraging Parisians to commemorate lives lost and invest in a meal at nearby cafes, restaurants, bistros or bars, themselves targeted for the joy and entertainment they provide. It’s
where my local bakers opened at dawn just hours after the last sirens
ceased wailing, not for fear of losing business but because they wanted
to offer a comforting ritual that also consoled them. The 11th Arrondissement is a neighborhood — no, a village — that lives for its people.
And yet, it wasn’t until my neighborhood, its values and its people were attacked this year
that I fully grasped how fortunate I am that my immersion into the city
began here; into the Paris not of twee, popular imagination but of
small (but special) quotidian life that plays out in the streets, on cafe terraces, at open-air markets, in bustling bistros, in dingy dive bars and cozy coffee shops.
When
I emerged from the emotional fog of my apartment 32 hours after the
attacks, there was little question of where I would go. I sought solace
in the close-knit community of regulars at Café Oberkampf, a local coffee shop and cafe. It’s here, among Parisians and foreigners embracing, sipping coffee and sharing stories, that I could breathe again.
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