This week I started intensive French lessons at the Alliance Française. The college is located in the 6th arrondissment not far from the Luxembourg Gardens. To get there I have two choices: take the nearest metro, Pont Marie, change at Châtelet, walk through endless underground tunnels to reach Line 4 (helpfully colour-coded deep pink), then take the train to St Placide; or, walk across Pont Louis Philippe to the Ile St Louis, across the Pont St Louis to the Ile de la Cité, past Notre Dame, along the square in front of the cathedral, past the hospital and the Police department, to the Metro station Cité, which is on Line 4 already. You can guess which route I prefer! It takes no longer, and, if I am up and organised, I can go to Mass on the way.
Coming up from the metro at St Placide, I am greeted each day by the sound of seagulls. This always surprises me – I haven’t seen them around our studio, or around the two islands in the Seine, where pigeons and sparrows seem to rule. The gulls in Europe are larger than your average Australian seagull, and their voices deeper, more resonant. When I hear them I am instantly transported to the south coast of England, to the modest home of an aunt we visited recently, which faces – across the railway and a bowling green – the Atlantic Ocean. “Next stop is the USA”, my aunt says with pride. She moved here from London on retirement, with her husband, now deceased. You can imagine them, in the first days after “the big move”, standing, facing the sea, listening in wonder to the sound of the gulls tossed high on the salty air: “How lucky are we!”
The sounds of a new place are both a source of wonder and a sign of difference, change, even, sometimes, disorientation. “How lucky are we!” were our first words as we danced around the studio, our home for the next six months, and the sounds of our first days were all new: the sirens (Ambulance? Police? Which?); the daily garbage collection; the watery swish of the street sweeper corralling endless cigarette butts, to be flushed down the drain (there is an automated flushing system along the curb); the buzz and clank of the security grill below; a distant piano, reminding us that we are living among artists; the “un, deux, trois . . . 1, 2, 3” of the dance studio across the lane; in the evening and early morning, when the volume of Paris is turned down, the low rumble of the metro, beneath us; and, of course, voices, inflections, a language that is not ours. Wonderful! On the third day, I open the windows to the street and discover that they are still speaking French – or, more accurately, not English. It is a strange and slightly weighty realisation. Another week on and our ears are better tuned. At dusk yesterday, as we are leaning on a wall inside a park at the eastern end of the Ile de Cité, we hear a series of sharp whistles, the sort your teacher blew in exasperation during a PE class. When we turn around, we see a young man walking towards us: “C’est la fermeture du square!” It is the closing of the square! (So they really do close and lock the gardens and squares at night.) We can hear and understand every word! A rare, but significant moment.
Among all the sounds that surround us, though, it is the ringing of church bells that is being woven into our day most deeply. It is surprising, in a way, to be so surrounded by churches and bells in a city also marked by the Enlightenment and by successive waves of anti-religious zeal. But the centre of Paris, and indeed the centre of France, is Notre Dame: point zero, from which all distances are measured. And Notre Dame is just the beginning. If you climb her towers, you can see church spires and domes as far as the eye can see. And you can hear them. With no effort at all we hear the bells of Notre Dame from our apartment, as well as those of St Gervais, which is just around the corner, and St Paul, near where we shop. They are all wondrously slightly out of sync: Notre Dame signals the hour just before St Gervais, and is always first with the Angelus. I spent the first few days here trying to work out the pattern of ringing. The hours are chimed only between 8 am and 10 pm, the bells remaining silent while we sleep. The angelus is rung at 8 am, 12 noon and 8 pm (At 8 to correlate with sunset I think. Does it change in winter? We shall see). And there are bells to signal that services are soon to commence: if the bells are ringing for Vespers at Notre Dame as we cross the Ile Saint Louis we will still get there on time.
What does the average Parisian think of the bells? What part do they play in the soundscape? Have they simply become wall paper? I have an awkward relationship with them. For a start I keep thinking I should be in church! When we lived next to St John’s in the centre of Canberra, the bells were, for me, mostly a call to work. There was a sort of bliss when the bells rang at 7 am on a Sunday morning and I didn’t have to appear until the 9.30 service. But there is also, for me, the deeper call to prayer. The bell that calls us to attention – that is, attention to the Divine, to that something deeper and more expansive in time and space, than the things that mostly consume our minds and our days.
There is a very beautiful painting by a nineteenth century French painter, Jean-François Millet, in the collection of the Museé D’Orsay, that was recently shown in the Australian National Gallery. Called, The Angelus, it depicts a couple of young peasants bowed in prayer in the middle of a field, newly harvested potatoes at their feet. The Museé D’Orsay website is quick to say that the painting was inspired by a childhood memory (Millet’s grandmother pausing to say the Angelus when working in the fields) and not “to glorify some religious feeling” and, after all, Millet wasn’t a churchgoer. Inexplicable this, the idea of stopping to pray!
Well, inexplicable or not, I have found myself, not reciting the Angelus, but opening the windows at 8 in the morning, as the bells clang away, and greeting the new day: “Bonjour, Le Seigneur! Bonjour!”
Coming up from the metro at St Placide, I am greeted each day by the sound of seagulls. This always surprises me – I haven’t seen them around our studio, or around the two islands in the Seine, where pigeons and sparrows seem to rule. The gulls in Europe are larger than your average Australian seagull, and their voices deeper, more resonant. When I hear them I am instantly transported to the south coast of England, to the modest home of an aunt we visited recently, which faces – across the railway and a bowling green – the Atlantic Ocean. “Next stop is the USA”, my aunt says with pride. She moved here from London on retirement, with her husband, now deceased. You can imagine them, in the first days after “the big move”, standing, facing the sea, listening in wonder to the sound of the gulls tossed high on the salty air: “How lucky are we!”
The sounds of a new place are both a source of wonder and a sign of difference, change, even, sometimes, disorientation. “How lucky are we!” were our first words as we danced around the studio, our home for the next six months, and the sounds of our first days were all new: the sirens (Ambulance? Police? Which?); the daily garbage collection; the watery swish of the street sweeper corralling endless cigarette butts, to be flushed down the drain (there is an automated flushing system along the curb); the buzz and clank of the security grill below; a distant piano, reminding us that we are living among artists; the “un, deux, trois . . . 1, 2, 3” of the dance studio across the lane; in the evening and early morning, when the volume of Paris is turned down, the low rumble of the metro, beneath us; and, of course, voices, inflections, a language that is not ours. Wonderful! On the third day, I open the windows to the street and discover that they are still speaking French – or, more accurately, not English. It is a strange and slightly weighty realisation. Another week on and our ears are better tuned. At dusk yesterday, as we are leaning on a wall inside a park at the eastern end of the Ile de Cité, we hear a series of sharp whistles, the sort your teacher blew in exasperation during a PE class. When we turn around, we see a young man walking towards us: “C’est la fermeture du square!” It is the closing of the square! (So they really do close and lock the gardens and squares at night.) We can hear and understand every word! A rare, but significant moment.
Among all the sounds that surround us, though, it is the ringing of church bells that is being woven into our day most deeply. It is surprising, in a way, to be so surrounded by churches and bells in a city also marked by the Enlightenment and by successive waves of anti-religious zeal. But the centre of Paris, and indeed the centre of France, is Notre Dame: point zero, from which all distances are measured. And Notre Dame is just the beginning. If you climb her towers, you can see church spires and domes as far as the eye can see. And you can hear them. With no effort at all we hear the bells of Notre Dame from our apartment, as well as those of St Gervais, which is just around the corner, and St Paul, near where we shop. They are all wondrously slightly out of sync: Notre Dame signals the hour just before St Gervais, and is always first with the Angelus. I spent the first few days here trying to work out the pattern of ringing. The hours are chimed only between 8 am and 10 pm, the bells remaining silent while we sleep. The angelus is rung at 8 am, 12 noon and 8 pm (At 8 to correlate with sunset I think. Does it change in winter? We shall see). And there are bells to signal that services are soon to commence: if the bells are ringing for Vespers at Notre Dame as we cross the Ile Saint Louis we will still get there on time.
What does the average Parisian think of the bells? What part do they play in the soundscape? Have they simply become wall paper? I have an awkward relationship with them. For a start I keep thinking I should be in church! When we lived next to St John’s in the centre of Canberra, the bells were, for me, mostly a call to work. There was a sort of bliss when the bells rang at 7 am on a Sunday morning and I didn’t have to appear until the 9.30 service. But there is also, for me, the deeper call to prayer. The bell that calls us to attention – that is, attention to the Divine, to that something deeper and more expansive in time and space, than the things that mostly consume our minds and our days.
There is a very beautiful painting by a nineteenth century French painter, Jean-François Millet, in the collection of the Museé D’Orsay, that was recently shown in the Australian National Gallery. Called, The Angelus, it depicts a couple of young peasants bowed in prayer in the middle of a field, newly harvested potatoes at their feet. The Museé D’Orsay website is quick to say that the painting was inspired by a childhood memory (Millet’s grandmother pausing to say the Angelus when working in the fields) and not “to glorify some religious feeling” and, after all, Millet wasn’t a churchgoer. Inexplicable this, the idea of stopping to pray!
Well, inexplicable or not, I have found myself, not reciting the Angelus, but opening the windows at 8 in the morning, as the bells clang away, and greeting the new day: “Bonjour, Le Seigneur! Bonjour!”
