Today was the first properly cold day of winter. Biting and fresh. I took the train to Arcueil early in the morning and the light of the sun streaked across the blue like a halo’s beams. Later in the day I was aimlessly riding the metro. All I knew was that I’d change at Montparnasse and get the 12, or the 13, and see where it took me. Waiting for my connection I bumped into a friend. She was on her way to see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at Musée Rodin, where she was meeting another friend of ours, Laura. She asked if I wanted to join and I said yes.
We spoke our broken French and looked at the sculptures. Some women asked me to take a photo of them and I backed into one of Gormley’s hunched figures, the cast iron a shock to my legs, the women making shocked sounds while remaining poised for their shots. They turned out alright and we carried on mooching.
Truth be told I didn’t think much of Gormley’s work. I find him to be one of the more boring YBAs, and he was utterly outclassed by Rodin, whose work his stood alongside. Some of his abstractions of the human form were nice, but then you’d see one of Rodin’s tortured grotesques, or get up close to a pulsing vein or taught muscle cast in bronze or plaster, and you were reminded of just whose museum you were in. More than any of Gormley’s sculptures, I was most affected by the wobbling reflections of sunlight bouncing off various marble bodies onto the walls.
In the garden we stood by the pond and looked at Les Invalides’ golden dome. ‘You see more clearly when it’s cold,’ Laura said. I agreed. Emma wasn’t having it, she wouldn’t hear a good thing about the cold, having just come back from Naples, where she could still go to the shops in her shorts and pick fruit from the trees. We went back and forth, comparing the seasons, ideal temperatures, climates. The early sunsets are a drag, but when Spring comes in even the longest winter feels worth it. On this we all agreed.
After we drank hot chocolates in a nearby café. I walked home beneath the Beaver moon, the sky cloudless, the Seine all lit up and the stones illuminated.