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Published: March 21st 2006
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Outdoors & Indoors
The Louvre with Pei's modern architecture against the grains of the ages. You love travel. You love the senses of your adventure to lose their bounds amidst the revelations of new things. You love to bask in minority, in the ages of time passed. You love to hear everything, yet understand as little as possible, finding yourself alone, but surrounded by culture. You love to feel a part of it, yet somehow divided from it. You love to travel, yet you seek that isolated experience distinct from the connotations drawn upon like a child’s coloring book of the common tourist. So how do you do it? How do you travel and find your cultural crevasse of invisibility? One way is to go winter.
Go winter. That’s what we did. We checked the local temperature. We checked the temp abroad—a Parisian temp registering a similar 40 degrees Fahrenheit—and so, in the midst of a Pacific Northwest winter we packed up and headed to France. We found what we loved.
The Seine churned brown as a northeasterly wind swept across the Latin arrondissement. It carried low-hanging gray clouds, turmoiled with shots of hail. Thundering with the nature of the season, it was Paris in winter, and by the fortune of recognizing the
High Standards
Reaching into the ceiling of the Louvre patterns in the sky, we rested in our shelter above the omnipresent Rue de Huchette. But this was our winter, like home, and as the sparse cloisters of locals draped in their jackets, scarves, gloves and béret, we wandered blue-stone alleys and cobbled streets beneath the immortalized arts of some of civilization's finest. It was Paris, and as it felt to us, we had it to ourselves.
Despite our division, lacing winter weather with the choice of Parisian culture, not all was silent. In the days, the city highlights reflected a foreign tongue off their cold walls. The Louvre, d’Orsay, the Eiffel Tower—they bore the brunt of indoor traffic with whispers upon Van Gogh, Mona Lisa and the views, each incorporated with flash-less cameras canvassing the halls.
Outside, a shelter of umbrellas kept the terraces of the Arc de Triomphe and the patios of the Notre Dame and Saint Chapelle in a sea of movement. And by night, the bars of Huchette reverberated our second-story apartment; time ticking—ten, eleven, twelve, one o’clock, two. But when settled in a café, Le Petite Pont across the Seine River from Notre Dame or Saint Severin beside Place St. Michel, tours
The Seine by night
The Seine by night, Notre Dame by day. were unseen as locals stepped over puddles to gather with friends. Dogs, bags of baguettes, paninis and crepes abound, it was Paris, the Paris in the eyes of the Romantics.
With cigarettes and a
café au lait between a social with friends, it was hard not to indulge in the mid-nineteenth century French writer Gustave Flaubert. The author’s transient personality, a nature of madness fluxing between white and black and back, birthed the controversial
Madame Bovary, entitling him as the father of modern literature. Her character was Paris; a classic yet sexy, illustrious passage into the heart of creation. Madame Bovary laid herself bare, unfurling hair to the backs of her knees as the winterized branches revealed the artistry of man and stone. Flaubert had this to say about Paris:
No longer being able to love Paris is a sign of decadence; no longer being able to do without it is a sign of stupidity. Could he have also had the Madame Bovary on mind?
Whether the character of French woman or man, or Paris itself, it was the nakedness surrounding us. In the gray blue-stone cold, each artist’s square with blue pen, each measurement and
subsequent mason’s progress could be seen as tall, spidery shadows stretched a web of play across the city’s storied walls. With winter, Paris was unveiled and its traces of dress swept clean months prior. Boulevards were lined with skeletons making the classic decadence of Parisian architecture outline a soft light. And it was not just one district with its stunning designs and structures, but down each street the horizons were masked with the simplicity yet sophistication of a true artisan’s era. The lines were sharp, clean as a butcher’s pacifist knife, and the angles exemplified the windows’ stone relief. Romanesque, gothic—rayonnant or flamboyant—they carried a like elegance, possibly with more antiquity. And those highest upon the suites were framed in an ogee feature and wrapped with an ochre rust of rod-iron. They bent and swept in bodily curvature, curtailing the artist’s vision, while pilasters and pinnacles bordered one’s imagination.
On one afternoon, after a morning of similar Pacific Northwest mist with a trailing bank of like gray, the Louvre extended to our right, the Seine to our left. Streets were calm in the cool. As we strolled the riverside, the structure of the museum caught the eye. Above the
Circles of victory
View from the Eiffel of the Arc de Triomphe windows tucked into the facades were figures, detailed in sculpture. They were stylishly adorned during a period of class, yet today weathered from these passing ages. Frozen, each glaring with a cold stare, they overviewed the city; they made the city.
Indeed, from our perspective they stood tall, stoned at six-plus feet. But what we couldn’t believe was the immensity of each statue; designed, chipped and chiseled for its appropriate niche, which was then fit to combine the whole architecture of the museum, and not just
a museum, but one host to other artistic immensities within. By themselves, dissected from the Louvre’s walls, the individual statues mimicked a promising pomp of any aged Rodin, suitable for a square’s centerpiece, or a park’s monument. But here we were in Paris—another wall another building. Here we were in winter with its bare trees and bare foliage and a stormy Seine to intensify the richness of her character.
Quiet beside your smiles and the chill of your breath, you enter the building through a crowd-less line and fall back to an immortalized age of the arts among Gustave Flaubert and beyond. Intimately alone, stirred with a romance of nakedness, you
And then they cried
Arc de Triomphe with Napolean's victories set in stone converse in the silent whispers of few foreign tongues beneath a winter isolation. You love traveling. You love Paris in winter.
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