The Haunt of Ultime Fauchelevant

This post is admittedly ill-conceived. First, it is late in coming, since it's been nearly two weeks since I first arrived in France. Secondly, Chris has already written about what we did, so this will be derivative at best. Still, since I was there for some time after Chris left, I still think it will be worthwhile to talk about what happened then. Also, as some of you may know, I ran into some adventure on my way to Istanbul, and in the spirit of a good action novel, I'm not going to tell you about it in this post, since I have enough to say about the old home of Fauchelvant and Pontmercy.

Paris, I found after a few days of touring it, is very similar to London. This realization did not hit me all at once; it came upon me slowly as Chris and I saw the various highlights Paris has to offer. I found I kept comparing them to places in London, and as I have a certain affinity for that city, I usually found myself arguing for London's superiority. The metro is nice, I would think, but the Tube is far better; cleaner, more efficient, and more navigable. The Louvre is incomparable, yes, but really, it shouldn't be compared to any one of London's museums; the way it was conceived, it should really be matched by both the National Gallery and the British Museum. So I thought, until I realized London could take care of itself. If the Notre Dame is more grand than St. Paul's Cathedral, so be it; and if the Arc de Triomphe is superior to Nelson's column, well, look who won in the end!

On my first day without Chris, I began by walking from the hostel to Notre Dame. To say I was blown away was an understatement. I knew going in that Gothic architecture was designed to draw one's eyes to the ceiling, the better to draw one's mind to God, but I had no idea that anyone had pulled it off so effectively. Besides, there is a grand difference between knowing that and actually feeling your eyes drawn higher, until your gaze rests upon a magnificent stained glass window, and while your body is cold you find that your mind has just become frozen, and you can only catch your breath and gaze in wonder. Everything about the cathedral, the size, the architecture, inspired to me to be quiet and be still in the same way St Paul's inspired me to want to sing. It was, to be grossly literal, impressive.

From Notre Dame, I wandered. I noticed something interesting, if not fairly obvious: the farther I got from the Notre Dame and the other attractions the shabbier the shops and houses became. I was still in a commercial district, but I thought it showed how reliant Paris is on tourism. I haven't really noticed whether or not this is true in London.

Eventually, my wanderings led me to the Jewish quarter and the Latin quarter, the latter being mainly comprised of students. The surprise I got was not that these two areas so close to each other were so different but that both places could be so intricate and self-absorbed. The fact that I could see three ancient rabbis discussing (I think) Leviticus in Hebrew and not ten minutes later see some students sitting in front of the Pantheon talking about a date one of them had had made me realize that these two groups probably had no need to interact with each other at any moment in their lives.

I considered this at some length while I walked back to my hostel from the quartier latin. On the way, I realized that this was the real similarity between London and Paris; their eclectic giganticism. One cannot really think of either London or Paris as being a single city, but only as a set of unconnected districts within spitting distance of each other. I would grow tired of this quickly, I thought as I passed a random and tourist filled department store. It would be the worst of both worlds: of being in a self-involved small town and being in an anonymous big city filled with tourists that would me feel like an animal in a zoo.

Past the department store, my surroundings gradually changed. I passed out of the (very) commercial district and came into a more residential area. Mothers shepherding children replaced people struggling with shopping bags. It was getting dark, but I could see children walking home in groups of twos and threes. Everyone around me was speaking French rather than German or Japanese or English. I stopped in a grocery store, and I realized that there is something a little strange with speaking a foreign language in such a place. If I had heard someone speak English in that grocery store I would have noticed; I would have raised my head to look at the speaker and we probably would have shared a connection: we don't belong here. Where I was walking, there was none of this.

Turning the corner after the grocery store, I found a main street lit up with Christmas decorations. As I looked at a giant snowflake, I thought to myself, I could live here. This is the true heart of Paris. This place, where children walked at night without fear, with grocery stores and real Christmas decorations twenty minutes and a lifetime outside the Paris of tourists, this could be a place to live. I felt like, if not for me, then for someone, this place could be a home.