Sue Chenette: Crossroads

Marianne, the national emblem of France, presides over Place de la République. She stands—as she has since the late 19th century when Baron Haussmann redrew the map of Paris—above the five streets, four boulevards, one avenue, one passage, five métro lines and four bus lines that converge around the square A crossroads, where you can find a cross section of everyday Parisian life—the good, the bad, and the ugly, and also the beautiful, all part of the mix.

 On a Saturday in late October, street performers demanding more funding for their public art gathered a lively crowd in the centre of the square.

Off to one side, a few onlookers paused to listen to a woman protesting France’s treatment of the Palestinians.

A stand catering to gourmands offered crepes and cotton candy, a man in a trench coat unhooked a Vélib from its stall after testing the tires, and groups of friends sipped afternoon coffee at Café République.

In the upscale Habitat store, a boy following his mom on a scooter paused at a display of furry ear muffs, while outside, a man huddling in a doorway with his small dog sold painted tin ash trays.

In Tati, with its crowded bright shelves, a woman carried her dog through the store in a shopping basket. A couple embraced on a street corner. Back on the square, black-suited jugglers tossed fluffy white balls into the air.

Marianne—her olive branch in one hand, and in the other, a tablet inscribed “Droits de l’Homme,” Liberty and Equality seated to her left and right—looked down on it all.

Sue Chenette: Excursion

Sometimes, for all of its beauty and wonders, the crowded bustle of Paris can make you long for the countryside. We boarded the TGV at 7:45 a.m., picked up our rental car in Poitiers at 9:30, and by noon reached Parthenay, in La France profonde—the France of villages and fields and small provincial towns.

From the ancient citadel we looked west over the 13th century walls, to where a hiker passed on the road below and the arches of Pont Saint-Paul made circular reflections in the River Thouet.

To the east, we could trace, in the curved line of space between the red tiled roofs, the Vau Saint-Jacques, the winding street along which medieval pilgrims walked toward Saint-Jacques de Compostela. In the tower itself, an old prison door slept, mouldering on its hinges.

Leaving Parthenay, the main roads are shown on the map in red and yellow. If you turn off onto the white roads—or those that don’t show at all—you find yourself among rolling fields, hedgerows, old wooden gates, pollarded trees. At a curve in the road, a village, or a hamlet.

We parked and walked along a grassy track, accompanied by a cat who adopted us for the afternoon, rubbing up against our legs, rolling at our feet for attention. The local cows—Parthenaise—approached a fence to watch us pass. We walked slowly, eased by the long green views and the quiet, pausing to look at marguerites in the roadside grass.

And in the countryside on a still day, it’s possible to catch the past off-guard—more vulnerable than in a museum display case, or in monuments replete with informational placards, guards, and tourists.

In the hamlet La Bouillacrère, a low house had been stuccoed and painted along its façade, but on the end wall, old stones whispered of when it had been a stable, animals kept close by the living quarters, sharing warmth.

Across the lawn, roses mingled with reflections in a pond, and poplars lobed with mistletoe reached into a timeless sky.

Sue Chenette: Looking up

“My son told me always to look up when I was in Paris,” our friend’s mother said as we strolled along rue Mouffetard. Good advice. Just around a corner, we came to St. Etienne du Mont with its pediments, high gable, and cupola against blue sky. And later, along Boulevard St Germain, the face of a bewigged aristocrat peered out from between corbels, beneath wrought iron and geraniums.

What is it about looking up? I’m often surprised. Maybe because what I see around me, down at ground level as I walk along, threads its way through my thoughts, making an unnoticed continuity with them. Interrupted when I happen to look up. At the geometry of chimneys and antennas, at graffiti that complements a pattern of ladder rungs and shadow, or sun in the high branches of an old plane tree. In his novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut has a painter describe his single stripe of orange on a green background as “a picture of the awareness in every animal.” For a long time I mis-remembered this passage, having rearranged it into a moment when someone is startled into awareness looking at the painting. It’s that kind of startling into sharper seeing that can happen when I look up.

There’s bound to be something interesting. George Clooney’s over-sized image in an advertisement for watches that masks scaffolding on the Louvre. (I don’t like this—the way it reduces public space to commercial space—but I wasn’t consulted.) A bucket of boards swinging its way down from a top-floor renovation. The gilded dome of Invalides. A “shoe tree” in the Jardin des Plantes. The mystery of high windows against a night sky.

That’s the other thing about looking up in Paris. There’s always that breadth of sky, clouds blown in from elsewhere, connecting you, like the Seine flowing through the city, to the wider world.

Sue Chenette: Underground

According to my very unofficial survey, most expats have a love-hate relationship with the Paris métro. (I suspect Parisians do too.) I remember a cold, grey February conversation with a young American woman who had ras le bol, which is to say, she had had it. “That awful, dirty hole in the ground,” she called it. Sometimes I feel that way too.

That said, descending into the métro, greeted by a particular, cinder-y smell (which John Lichfield, The Independent’s long-serving correspondent in France, has described as “something between burnt air and rotting bananas”), the screech and whoosh and whine of a train entering the station, the chook of the levers that open the doors—this can make me unaccountably happy. (Maybe it's simply that it means, “Paris.”) 

Life underground is a microcosm of Parisian life above ground. Passengers read, converse, busk a living with a trumpet or an accordion, check text messages, embrace, and sleep, in a crowded car that mirrors the space in cafés with their close-packed tables, or the narrow sidewalks where you lift your umbrella over that of the person coming toward you in the rain.

The French are conscious, above or below ground, of what’s required to live together in shared space. They say “Pardon,” and “Excusez-moi,” and make room for your knees when you sit down across from them. And if they forget, they are reminded. This fall, it was impossible to miss the series of posters with a sloth sprawling in a subway seat at rush hour, a chicken in a pink trench coat talking loudly on her cell, a frog jumping a turnstile.

When you take the métro late at night—the crowds gone, maybe two or three other passengers encountered as you transfer from one line to another, following the correspondance signs—the tiled walls, the long corridors with their varied gradients and odd-angled corners, the flights of steps which you climb only to reach a short hallway, turn a corner and descend again: all come into clearer relief, making their claim as structure, the way mountains do at dusk. If I had a cat’s nine lives I might devote one to making a model of the Paris métro, every distance and elevation and angle replicated on a match-stick scale.

When I finished, I would add the stairs that lead to trees and sky.