City Habits
Place de Vosges (image source)
It’s crazy how a single piece of bad news can transform an entire street. It can turn the same clouds from flannel to steel, make the streetlights into daggers. Shuttered storefronts, a premonition. A hope is reversed and a light goes out of the world. Across an ocean, a tide changes and daylight flickers over the waves. But all the church bells and cascading springtimes in the world ring hollow to the one who has lost a friend.
The night before last, all night, sleep was interrupted by sirens. I thought, here they are. The middle-of-the-night emergencies of the Covid-infected. Those who caught the virus at Christmas and New Years. A few weeks to incubate, and another for symptoms to become serious. The dead of night to raise the alarm.
Until this month, I had never been to Place des Vosges. When walking through a city, I tend to be a creature of habit, and my habits had never taken me there. I’m like one of those prehistoric crustaceans, the organisms of the Ediacaran biota, tracing fossilized pathways into beach rock up in Newfoundland before the Cambrian explosion, always taking the same turns, the same side streets. My desire lines are repetitive. In a warrenous city like Paris, so full of discoveries, this is madness, and I try to make a point to correct myself.
When I was living in New York City, I tended to take the same routes, and would feel disoriented if I took a different one. Maybe it was the sheer size of the place, or the impersonality of the grid system; a desire to avoid treeless wind corridors where icy blasts funneled up from the seaport and blew garbage into little tornadoes.
When I was recovering from Covid last spring, I started walking every day, covering about five miles. For a while, it was always the same route, or a similar one with minor variations. I liked to see the same things again and again; the same stalls in the flower market, selling the same flowering orange trees in pots, and the same fragrant trellis roses. I liked to see the change of trees over the space of several weeks. To see the lindens come into honeyed bloom at the eastern edge of the Tuileries gardens, and how they dropped their golden pollen in the pale dust as their leaves turned a deeper green. All of the parks and gardens were still closed back then, and many left untended, so that the usually manicured flower beds ran riot with spent tulip stalks and scattered peonies all coming to pieces.
When I finally visited Place des Vosges, it was in that last half-hour before twilight, and the clouds were threatening snow. All of the manicured box-cut trees were bare, their branches dark with moisture. Three of four fountains were running, and children kicked balls across the soggy ground, running to hide from one another behind cones of topiary. The street lights had already come on.
As a child in Northern California, dropped at the bottom of my street and waiting for the carpool to come and take me to school on winter mornings, I would hover the sole of my shoe over the ice that formed on puddles, testing how much pressure was needed before it would crack. Here I don’t usually see any winter ice, although it snowed the other day, blanketing the park in a fine powder that melted by the evening.
In my research I’ve read about snows that came and muffled the boulevards, white and thick beneath the trailing hems of women’s dark wool dresses. In the winter of 1870 it was so cold that the Seine froze over for three weeks straight.
I tend to fall in love with the small things here, like the doors to the park near my building. They are set into an old stone wall that is smudged green near the bottom with moss. They are lovely in all seasons, but especially now, with the green gone from the trees and the branches just a brown-red blur from a distance in the winter mists. The doors are violet, but the paint is so old that its components are separating. They appear to have a pale bloom to them, the way plums do in the summer, giving them a depth of color and light. There is another door like this, with gorgeous, old, maturing, flaked plum-like paint, on the side of a church that is just behind the Pantheon, up the street from the place de la Contrescarpe. Even the first time I saw it, I could not believe how lovely it was.
I wonder if the fact that these doors have not been repainted in so long means that someone else has recognized the beauty in the old paint, too.