Sue Chenette: Séduisant

Séduire. A verb in our Alliance française lesson. My Robert & Collins dictionary translates it as “to charm.” If you have charm, if you are attractive, enticing, alluring, the appropriate adjective is “séduisant.”

All September, in the last of summer’s warmth and sun, Paris has been particularly séduisant.

Despite understanding that life here can be as difficult as anywhere, that misery and violence are present, too, in their usual forms, it has been impossible not to be seduced by the sight of couples lounging on the grass in Place des Vosges in the late afternoon light, or the little boy holding his mom’s hand, swinging his green and orange stuffed turtle as they walked up rue de Turenne.

In front of the Pompidou Centre a man dipped a string threaded between two rods into soapy water and drew out giant bubbles, while a nearby violinist performed the Meditation from Thais.

On the Pont des Arts, the padlocks that lovers fasten to the fence to symbolize their commitment shone in the sun, and a man displayed a radio powered by the reaction between sunlight and the silicone in a hoisted CD.

At the exhibition Photo Quai, along the river, a mom carrying her toddler contemplated pictures of veiled women while a couple embraced behind the display walls.

I like a phrase—casual beauty—that I found in A Photographer’s Guide to Paris, published on the web by Philip Greenspun. “Paris,” he writes, “is...a city whose casual beauty makes for rich material to anyone willing to walk around slowly and observe carefully.” But even when we walk quickly and are not especially observant, the beauty informs our senses, lifts our spirits—seduces us.

Today the gilded figures atop Opéra Garnier gleamed in the sun on the street where we caught a bus, and where we got off, a group of school children waited among a scatter of the first fallen leaves for the light to change.

Sue Chenette: Wednesday in the park

Late Wednesday afternoon, when I went out to mail a letter and buy a baguette, it seemed the whole quartier was in the park next to the mairie (town hall) of the third arrondissement.

Actually, my prof at Alliance française might find fault with that sentence: the French classify their espaces verts, all those public places with grass and trees and flowers, in descending order of size: forêt, parc, jardin, square. Our neighbourhood  “park” only qualifies as a square, and is in fact called Square du Temple.

But whatever their size, the parks in Paris are lived in. People come to read, to gossip, to play—especially the primary school students, on Wednesdays, when they have no classes—or simply to sit in the company of others, taking in the warm afternoon, watching the mallards that waddle over the grass.

My Minnesota grandfather had a phrase—“going out among-em.” He meant rubbing shoulders with the world, in the stands at a football game, on a walk along the river, or eating Sunday dinner out. You knew from the way he said it that he saw this as a natural part of life, and a good part. If I had asked him, I think he would have said that being together in public places is essential to democracy; to a sense of being a citizenry with common needs and purposes. He would have loved the Square du Temple.

Sue Chenette: Thinking about pictures

I’ve been thinking about the pictures that get taken, and those that don’t even though my camera is in full-time residence in my purse.

At last night’s recital in the American Cathedral, a picture of the vault into which the trumpet sounds lifted. But not of the white-haired couple several pews in front of us, her hand on the back of his brown suit jacket, massaging when his head drooped forward, the gentlest wake-up touch.

And afterwards, on the Champs Elysées, the young man filming a rap group—song and dance, short skirts, music from a speaker. But not three Japanese girls smiling for a friend’s camera in front of the Yves Saint Laurent display window, their heads tilted toward the famous logo lettered in gilt on the glass. Nor the man seated next to them on the sidewalk with a small brown dog on his lap, a begging bowl and a cardboard sign.

In Paris, with a ready camera, a quick eye, chutzpah and enough time, you could capture a gesture, a stance, a facial expression, for every point on the scale of being.

Just down the Champs Elysées from the Arc de Triomphe, a young man stood near his glowing Eiffel towers, not getting any business. And going home on the métro, another slept through the jostle and laughter as we made our way across the city.