Walking in Paris, February 2015

Paris is just about my favorite place in the world to walk.   I am sure a lot of people would agree with me.  While part of the pleasure is in the streetscapes and vistas near and far, another part can be memories.  These can be both personal, connected to one's own experiences in Paris, and historical.   Whenever I walk into Notre Dame, I think of the number of people in the last 700 or 800 years who have walked through those doors.      For me, my memories are usually associated with particular places and times, and they are primarily visual (though quite a few are of sounds).   At the same time, Paris likes to tell us its own memories, with the various plaques on buildings, etc.

Walking, we saw this one day:

And, in addition, anyone who has seen (and heard) a lot of French films that are set in Paris has their own memories from those films.   Whenever I sit in a cafe and hear all the sounds of the cafe, I always think back to the Godard films of the 60's, when Godard  made a point of capturing the actual sounds of the cafes; but unfortunately one rarely sees the old fashioned pinball machines that often dominated the soundtrack (and which I spent a lot of time playing in my youth).

My memories, for example.   I was walking on Rue Linné when I suddenly remembered that my favorite French writer Georges Perec had once lived on the street.  Looking in his biography on my iPhone, I found the street number and went to look.   Then, looking at the building, I realized that many years ago, we had stayed in a hotel a few buildings down, and had taken our young jet-lagged daughter to dinner at "Pizza Roma" which is in the same building that Perec had lived in, without knowing that he had lived there.

 Perec's building, with Pizza Roma:

My first encounter with Paris was in the early 1960's.   It was the tail end of a epic family vacation through the Mediterranean, with stops in Cairo, Damascus, Athens, Rome. etc.   We arrived in mid January, checked into the Hotel France et Choiseul on Rue St. Honore, and went out into the Tuileries gardens, and it was snowing and very magical.   I remember the sloping floors and low ceilings in the hotel, and everything being dark and red.  I was hooked.  Then, many years later, I remember being with Ada and her friend Elise in Louvre in January, and looking out the window and seeing the snow coming down hard.  The paintings could not compete, and soon we were out building a snowman in the Tuileries.  This time, Vera and I walked through the Tuileries on a very grey and blustery February day.

My maternal grandmother was brought by her mother to Paris in 1912 at the age of 16 to be "educated".  (My great grandfather had just died.) I don't know what prompted my great grandmother to do such a thing, but, courtesy of the internet, I have a copy of her consular registration form, which shows that they lived at 1 Rue Boularde in Montparnasse and specifies the purpose of their stay (to educate her daughter).   So naturally I went to see the building, which was new at the time my grandmother lived there, and has recently been restored so that it looks very much like it did back then.   It is almost Gaudiesque in its sinuous curves.   So here I am, looking at the door, and thinking that my grandmother some one hundred years ago was walking in and out that door.

In addition, we know that she served as a model for the American impressionist painter Richard Miller, whose studio was a few blocks away at 16 Rue Boissinade.  Here it is, probably looking not much different than it did back then:

And here she is as painted; I guess this was part of her education.

The painting is entitled "Girl with a Chinese Statuette".   I found the image on the internet, but I have no idea where the painting is.

And, speaking of memories; here is bed of the high priest of memory, Marcel Proust:

I found Proust's bed along with his other furnishings in the Musee de Carnevalet, Paris's own museum of history (and memory).   And they have Marie Antiontette's hair, too.

I remember going to the Musee Carnavalet when Ada was in a French school, learning about the French Revolution.  We were looking for a guillotine, and had to settle for a model of one.

In another walk I found an interesting church,  St. Pierre de Chaillot, that I had never seen before.  It was built in the 1930's in a Neo-Byzantine style, which also seemed to have elements of Art Deco.

In a very high end auction house on the Champs Elysee, I saw an exhibit of airplane stuff, about to be auctioned:

We stayed in an apartment on the edge of the Marais this time; with this view of pipes out our window:

We also did something we haven't done for a long time; we took a walk through Montmartre.  Normally I would avoid the tourist-encrusted Montmartre area, but if you go outside the few main areas where the tourists congregate, its actually quite interesting, especially when you think of it as a place where sheep were grazing until the 20th century.
And it's very colorful:

Speaking of colorful, some windows from that very large apartment building in Montparnasse:

And a shop window in the Palais Royale:

I also went on a long walk on the Canal St. Martin, which still has functioning locks, and which also brings forth memories of French movies of the 1930's (Hotel du Nord, etc.)