Flâneurs à Paris

As part of our wanderings in Europe this summer, G. and I recently spent about 36 hours in Paris. Conveniently, The NY Times had recently published a piece (gift article link) suggesting some less tourist-y ways to spend that amount of time in the city.

The Times also recently published a piece convenient to us on The Art of Being a Flâneur (gift article), which leads with a nice quote from Henry James: “[Your] first care must be to ignore the very dream of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random.”

We do not always do what the Times says, but these two articles provided a template for our time in Paris, one of the few cities we’ve visited in these weeks where we weren’t there to visit with friends or relatives.

The last time we were in Paris was in 1993, when we visited our dear friend Ellen during a March break, and she enthusiastically led us through the Jardin de Luxembourg, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, L’Orangerie, Montmartre, Fontainebleau, Chartres, etc. We recalled our time with Ellen fondly, but this would be a much shorter and more freewheeling time.

We arrived at Paris’s Gare de L’Est from Strasbourg, and found our way on foot with our luggage to Hostel du Globe. G. asked me, do you think prostitution is legal in France? I don’t know, I answered, but, how many prostitutes have we passed so far? Three or four? Later we found out that Rue St. Denis, street of our lodgings, is (or at least was, according to wall copy in the Frank Horvat photo exhibit at Jeu de Paume) a famous red-light district.

The young woman in the NYU top behind the bar in Le Tipsy Pub found our name on the handwritten list of reservations, pushed apart a couple of café tables on the sidewalk to get to the front door of the hostel, and showed us to the strange (the door to the room opened directly on the toilette) but serviceable room.

We dropped off our luggage, and set out to wander. Ah, June in Paris. A crowded café every few feet on every street, seemingly. We walked through the courtyard of the Palais Royale.

We passed the I.M. Pei glass pyramid at the Louvre on our way to the Pont des Arts on the Seine. Thence along the Seine and past the Samaritaine and YSL, which had a fun display including a two- or three-story tall statue of the artist Yayoi Kusama:

The next day, after café and croissants near the hostel, we set out for Montmartre. I lost count of the steps, but there were many more there than from Broadway to Park Terrace East in upper Manhattan.

We walked through Sacré Coeur with throngs of tourists, and then, on the suggestion of the Times 36 hours piece, found our way to the Cimitière de Montmartre, where we found the grave of Edgar Degas among others. It was pleasant. I said to G., now that we are here, I would ALSO like to go to Père-Lachaise, the really big cemetery in Paris. This was a place on our list in 1993 that we regretfully never visited. I was surprised when G. replied, yes, let’s go!

We easily purchased Métro tickets and figured out which line to take to Père-Lachaise. Once there, we took some time to find the graves of two writers, one singer, and one poet/rockstar: Colette, Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, and Jim Morrison.

Visiting two cemeteries and Sacré Coeur all in one day — and having attended high Sunday mass in French a couple of days before at Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg — led to a discussion about legacy, memorials, and theology. We agreed that, in spite of the peaceful pleasantness of strolls through two cemeteries, we don’t attach importance to the idea of an eternal repose either for ourselves or for our descendants to visit us. And, perhaps sadly, we agreed that many of the things that our tradition of Christianity has insisted that we believe are not really believable and are not that important to us. Not to say that we’ve given up on the idea that God is Love. We agreed that holds.

We also agreed that the French cemeteries, the courtyard of the Palais Royale, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin are all oddly reminiscent of each other.

It’s nice to agree.

The following day, we left early to catch a train from Gare du Nord to Amsterdam.

This post was written without the help of AI.