Fontaine blue blue bleu bleau (ah!)

The gang did an outing to Fontainebleau yesterday.  It was a first for me--actually, for the whole crowd.   It's a natural for a day trip: just 35 miles southeast of Paris from the Gare de Lyon, which bears an eerie similarity to the trip into southeast England from Waterloo.  We had a hard rain in the morning but around noon the skies cleared and the gardens exploded  in spring green.   The 19-year-old begged for a few minutes just to romp around in the forest; I half expected him to rip off all his clothes.

As to the chateau itself--I'm delighted I went and half sorry I never went  before, but it's a mess: a stew of styles and eras, made more confusing by the habit of previous owners to move stuff around and reassemble.  There's a great deal of techne on offer; lots to admire, some even to inspire a gasp.  Still--correct me if I'm forgetting but I don't remember a single thing that you'd actually call beautiful. Pretty, maybe, but "pretty" in this context is a bit of a slur. Maybe an exception for the outside, stately and restrained, but the inside--my God, no wonder the peasants sharpened their pitchforks.

Zazie

The graffiti says:

Le papy de Zazie et le zizi de papa

 Per Google Translate, it doesn't mean much, although at least it has the decency to be a trifle indecent.  I suppose if nothing else it is a riff on Zazie dans Le Metro, Raymond Queneau's 1959 novel (anti-novel?) about the not-very-decent 12-year-old at large in the great city.  I chose it for jetlag diversion because (a) the sentences seemed short; and (b) it's about the Metro, and what's not to like about the Metro?  But that's the point, of course, Zazie never finds the Metro although she certainly finds a lot else.   As to short sentences--well, yes, but Queneau wrote deliberately in a kind of street argot that doesn't appear in my pocket French dictionary nor, I suspect, anyone else's, except perhaps a Dictionnaire de Queneau.

No matter; it's a ripping yarn, as good-natured romp through the city and the language.  I take it Queneau created something of a stir in his time because of his deliberately, almost perversely, non-standard French--this in a country that makes a big deal out of linguistic regularity (or did; the French really seem far more easy-going about matters linguistic than they did in Zazie's day).  My copy does contain a few helpful footnotes, as to tell me, for example, that "fior renvoie au nom d'un  célébré parfumeur, Christian Dior, mais aussi evoques le fion, en argot le derrière ...."  and that "'allors gy' can be read as 'Allons-y! (interjection d'argot).'"



Curious footnote.  I gather Queneau was a fairly big deal in France in his day.   But knocking around Parisian bookstores I find little but scraps, leftovers--this from a man whose biblo apparently contains 40 or more major items  And the same seems to go for any number of others whom we thought of (in my youth) as monuments of French culture--not much Genet, for example, even less Sartre.  A bit of Céline.  Indeed if you are really looking for monuments of (what we remember as) modern French culture, you might be better off prowling the English-language stacks at Shakespeare and Co.   

Paris Semi-Profonde

Okay, so here I'm reading Andrew Hussey on how Paris has been monumentalized and turned over to tourists as the locals are driven off to god knows where.  It's a powerful and not entirely implausible message, though ever since Dean MacCannell invented modern tourism, it's been pretty standard fare.

I suspect it is also mostly true, but I want to introduce a bit of nuance  Sunday afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Buce indulged themselves with a quiet stroll through the back streets a few blocks north of the Seine, like behind the Centre Pompideau.  One thing we noticed: somebody was going in and out of all those massive double doors opening into all those formidable old piles.  And they didn't look like jet setters, either:  more than in an undershirt, with close cropped hair and a cigarette dangling from his lips.  In the street, there were happy strollers in a holiday mood--but best we could tell, they were virtually all French, perhaps Parisians on their day out.  Finally, the Cafe Rambuteau, the brasserie just northeast of the Beaubourg: about mid afternoon, we popped in for a coffee.  I've been by that place  a number of times over the past few years.  I admit that often enough, you'll see tourists taking their ease at the sidewalk tables.  But Sunday, inside and outside, there wasn't a tourist to be seen (present company excepted).  These were all locals and from the look of the place, some of them have been coming here for years--maybe not since the resistance, but maybe since the great Spring of '68, and at least since before the Museum was there (from the look of the crowed, they might not have noticed that the Museum was there).  The menu confirms the intution: snails, tripe, cassoulet with duck confit.  About the only thing cosmopolitan in the whole venue was the lasagne.

I wouldn't make too much of this.  It certainly doesn't look like the rainbow diversity of the 10th Arrondissement just a mile up the hill.  And it'd not remotely like the soul-killing banlieuex where Nicolas Sarkozy liked to brandish his fire hose.  The real message may be that the patina of tourism, though vivid, is neither very deep not very extensive.   It's a corollary of  the point that, however dense the throngs may be around the Winged Victory, you can almost always find repose in the Cypriot collection.  No matter how long the queue at the Cathedral, Paris  semi-profonde continues close by.

Afterthought: Hussey may have a better point, however, when he argues that the French youth are deserting their country for England. That may be true--I believe it was The Economist that observed a while back that the French are now London's principal foreign cohort. But the French youths in London seem to come not just from Paris but from all over--Lyon, Bordeaux, the works. So I'd surmise their alienation has more to do with the top-heavy old guard French government than with anything specifically touristic.

Travel: A Culturally Broadening Experience

Admiring the towers of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the 17-year-old asked me if The Hunchback of Notre Dame had been a story before it was a Disney movie.

Had she ever heard of Victor Hugo, I asked?   No, she hadn't.  Nor Charles Laughton neither.  But I had never heard of the Disney movie, and so we educated each other.

Off Again, with a Note on Van Gogh

We're off to Paris and Barcelona with a couple of teenagers.  The auguries are favorable, but not everyone has a good time in Paris.   Here is Vincent van Gogh writing from Paris in the summer of 1887 to Theo, his brother and principal source of support, both emotional and financial.

Dear old boy


Thank you for your letter and what it contained. It depresses me to think that even when it's a success, painting never pays back what it costs.


I was touched by what you wrote about home--”They are fairly well but still it is sad to see them.” A dozen years ago one would have sworn that at any rate the family would always prosper and get on. It would give great pleasure to mother if your marriage come off, and for the sake of your health and your work you ought not to remain single.


As for me—I feel I am losing the desire for marrige and children, and now and then it saddens me that I should be feeling like that at thirty-five just when it should be the opposite. And sometimes I have a grudge against this rotten painting. It was Richepin who said somewhere:

“The love of art means the loss of real love.”

I think that is terribly true, but on the other hand real love makes you disgusted with art.


And at times I feel already old and broken, and yet still enough of a lover not to be a real enthusiast for painting. To succeed one must have ambition, and ambition seems to me absurd. What will come of it I don't know; I would like above all things to be less of a burden to you—and that is not impossible in the future—for I hope to make such progress that you will be able to show my stuff boldly without compromising yourself.


And then I will take myself somewhere down south, to get away from the sight of so many painters tht disgust me as men.

Vincent did leave Paris, for Arles in the south, at the beginning of 1888. In the summer of 1890, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Most of what we remember of van Gogh was done during those two and a half years in the south of France. Theo outlived him by just six months; he died of syphillis at the beginning of 1891.