You stumble into history anywhere, but here it feels more pronounced. I think it’s a mixture of how old the city is, plus a good few centuries of cultural hegemony all aligning with my own interests. Everywhere there’s just something. When I walk where the Bastille once stood, for example, following the curve of the road, I wonder how much space the prison took up, and pointlessly imagine that perhaps somewhere in the next few steps, in the weeks before the walls came down, the Marquis de Sade scrawled out 120 Days of Sodom. I live ten minutes down the road. My friend told me recently that back in the 80s his dad came to Paris with the sole intention of seeing the Bastille, completely unaware that it had been torn down two centuries before. So now whenever I’m about I also try and imagine where it was he was standing when he first realised it no longer existed.
From the 12th I veer into the 3rd and end up at Place des Vosges, where Victor Hugo lived, and where de la Rochefoucauld wrote his maxims at the Marquise de Souvré’s salon. Right there, somewhere. It’s all just there. It’s all everywhere. I think this is why it’s better to just wander about and happen upon these places, or discover after the fact that something or someone significant’s attached to its past; this way your walks are punctuated by surprise instead of being goal driven. The best walks have no checklist, they’re dictated by chance and compulsion.
This part of Paris is properly old, pre-Haussmann, with winding streets and some of the last vestiges of the medieval city. Go one way and you’re in the ancient Jewish quarter, another and you’re back to Bastille, another leads to Île Saint-Louis, etc. I followed each exit from the square and looped back around, through cobbled streets and under archways built only with horse and carriage in mind. Passing under one, at the eastern exit, I walked past a drain and the stench of shit filled the air, perhaps how this street smelt a few hundred years ago. Smell, I think, is the hardest sense to align with history, despite its attachment to our own histories; how one waft of something seemingly insignificant can send you back through your own life. But history has no sense memory. So it’s in moments like this when imagining somewhere hundreds of years ago is made a little easier, even if it is completely wrong.
Back in the square, through the gardens and out again, I stop daydreaming and the balance is restored: I’ve ended up in front of one of the countless art galleries selling some of the most hideous art known to man. Nowhere is safe from bad taste and Paris has it by the boatload. For every old master there’s ten ‘fine art’ galleries hawking crap that makes Jeff Koons look transcendent, or at the very least capable of expressing a semblance of emotional depth.
I like this about Paris. There’s always something to bring you back down to earth. It would be so easy to get ahead of yourself, surrounded by some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, thinking about whose walked the same street you’re currently on, but then you turn a corner and see a Brewdog.
It’s starting to get colder, the air fresh; I’m worried I’m getting sick. On my way home I stop in front of a camera shop, standing before the window and looking at things I’ll never buy. Since I’ve moved here I’ve found myself doing this quite a lot. I’ve never really taken much interest in photography before, and I have no plans to get into it here (plus, I hate carrying things about with me, and cameras are especially cumbersome, nor do I ever feel much compulsion to take photos) but every time I pass a camera shop now I stop and look in the window. I think I just like how busy they are, the mix of old and new technology shoved in together. In this one, all the prices are listed on folded receipts attached to the top of everything, so all the black gear looks like they’re wearing little white hats.
The next morning I’m on a train to the airport, back to Glasgow for a week. As I sit there, reading, the smell of the man beside me’s aftershave overwhelming, an old man with a violin enters the carriage. Quietly he starts to play, the instrument creaking out its soft wails, a quiet dirge, building slowly into a bouncing klezmer as he taps his foot. Usually I hate buskers, and I’m returning to a city that I maintain has the worst I’ve ever encountered, but this was nice. When he finished and walked up the carriage with his cup extended I had no coins to give. Then the pre-recorded voice announced our arrival at Charles de Gaulle, where apparently it’s already Christmas. The balance, once more, is restored. On the plane back I looked at all the photos on my phone.