The city and the city

There is a speculative fiction novel by China Miéville called The City and the City. Its basic premise is that two cities coexist in time and space, yet each chooses to be invisible to the other. I haven’t read it (John has) but I like the title and the metaphor: the reminder that the spaces we inhabit hold multiple stories, layers which coexist, and that what we see involves choice. For example, when I wrote about the procession fluviale in my last blog I was also aware of a darker story of priests and Paris. On 2 September 1792 just a short way from the Ile de la Cite, at the Carms, a Carmelite monastery in the Latin Quarter which had been converted into a prison, 150 priests were killed for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the new republican constitution. The Revolution was radically anti-Christian, but the September Massacres mark a turning point in the Revolution. The Terror was not far away. The Seine, during the Terror and in much of France’s history, was a dumping place for bodies. The procession fluviale is a minor miracle. France still does not greatly love its priests.

The city and the city. Many of the historical layers are bookmarked with plaques. And many of these are within living reach. In late August bunches of flowers began to appear next to the memorial plaques to the patriots who were killed in the Battle for Paris in 1944: “. . . fell here for the liberation of Paris.” One is in our street. On 26th August 1944, less than twenty four hours after the German surrender, General de Gaulle walked from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame, and all the bells of Paris rang. On its anniversary the vieux, the older citizens of Paris, gathered at the town hall to remember and honour the dead.

The city and the city. The Marais, where we are living, has had a Jewish quarter since the 13th century. Last weekend was the Jewish New Year, Roch Hachana. On Sunday morning, as the first act of this new year the Mémorial de la Shoah, next door to us, held a ceremony to remember the victims of the Holocaust who have no graves. More than 76,000 Jews were deported from France to the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 2500 survived. There were around 300,000 citizens of Jewish descent in France on the eve of World War II, less than 1% of the population. Around a third had been French for many generations, a second wave of immigrants escaping anti-Semitism in Russia, Poland and central Europe began in the 19th century. In the Shoah museum you can see the cards, boxes and boxes of them, carefully filed, containing the details of French families of Jewish descent: the bureaucracy that supported the hunt, capture, deportation and ultimately the elimination of citizens. A history which involved the Vichy government in a way that even post-war France had difficulty acknowledging.

Opposite the Mémorial de la Shoah is a school, the Lycée Couperin (yes after the composer, who, of course, played the organ at St Gervais a few metres away). On the wall there is a plaque:

Arrested by the Police of the Vichy government, complicit with the occupation, more than 11000 children were deported from France between 1942 and 1944 and asassinated at Auschwitz because they had been born Jewish.
More than 500 of these children lived in the 4th Arrondissement.
Among them pupils of this school.
Ne les oublions jamais. Never forget them.

There are similar plaques outside many schools in Paris.

What remains scandalous is the failure of so much of the Church to stand against Nazism. It is a huge relief, therefore, to find on the opposite wall, the Mur des Justes, a smattering of priests among the roll of “the Righteous (les justes) among the Nations”, the honour roll of those who helped save Jewish people during World War II. Since this roll was begun in 1963 the names of 2693 people who helped French Jews have been included: their stories, of everyday risks and quiet heroism, are a note of hope in a dark chapter of human history.

The lane between the Mémorial de la Shoah and the Lycée Couperin has been renamed the Allée des Justes and I walk up here whenever I go to pray with the monks and nuns of St Gervais. As I struggled through the French renditions of the Psalms this week two lines of Psalm 1 leapt off the page:

Le Seigneur connaît le chemin des justes,
mais le chemin des méchants se perdra.
The Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

Where would we have stood? One fears one’s own lack of courage. What do we choose to see, what do we choose not to see? The city or the city?

http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/

The bass note

One of our early, habitual delights after our arrival at the beginning of August was to wander, each evening, along the Paris Plages just over the road from our studio. Since 2002 temporary “beaches” have been installed along the right bank of the Seine for a month beginning in late July. (No you are not meant to bathe in the Seine, though I have seen a group of Parisian police swim, carefully suited, around the islands each morning). I wonder if Paris Plages is a consolation prize for the handful of Parisians who do not escape to the real beach or to rural France during the annual August shutdown. It has certainly been embraced enthusiastically by locals – and, indeed, was, more or less, a tourist-free zone. Tourists don’t normally go to Paris for the beach!

Along with the installation of sand there were umbrellas, beach huts, palm trees, sun lounges, ice creams, dancers, jugglers, free books to read. There was even a temporary swimming pool, though I didn’t try it out. Below the Pont Louis Philippe, our nearest bridge, there was a temporary bar and a series of courts for playing boules or pêtanque, traditionally the preserve of old men, but here played by all, young and old, men and women. Twice a week a honky-tonk piano and drum kit materialised and, along with the musicians, a group of ordinary folk hungry for a sing-a-long: no audition necessary, songbooks provided. This gathering flushed up some other talent too: a couple of tap dancing young women, and an older man singing scat harmoniously against the crowd (he even donated 10 euros for the privilege). There was a regular concession to les touristes (those of us who had strayed on to the beach) – a song which included several verses of “la-las”. We were very appreciative. A stone’s throw away at the town hall (L’Hôtel de Ville) there was a series of free concerts, including a lively evening of Breton (Celtic) inspired music which we loved, even though it rained.

For me, though, the experience of Paris Plages, already “a memory”, will forever be joined with the Feast of the Assumption. This feast, celebrated on 15th August, is still, in modern, secular France, a public holiday. And in Paris, whose cathedral is dedicated to Mary, Our Lady, this is a big day for the church.

The Feast of the Assumption is, of course, a challenging one for Protestants who already struggle with Mary. Pope Pius XII didn’t help by declaring Mary’s “bodily assumption” to be an infallible doctrine of the church. This is not the place to enter into the theological niceties of Marian doctrine (or the meaning of Pius’ statement), but I would say that I like much more the Orthodox Dormition of Theotokis, or at least the icon, which shows Mary’s dead body being reverenced on earth whilst simultaneously in heaven Christ nurses her soul as though she were his child. It is such a beautiful image of our own hope of resurrection.

So, with all our ambiguities about Mary, John and I set out on the Eve of the Feast of Assumption in search of the procession fluviale. There are to be two processions, where a much venerated statue of Our Lady would be taken out of the cathedral on a mini pilgrimage around her town – the first on the river (fluviale) on the Eve of the Feast and the second by foot on the following afternoon. It is a beautiful evening. It is also Saturday, so that le weekend is in full swing. A techno concert at the Hôtel de Ville is a magnet for the young. At the Pont Louis Philippe the honky tonk choir is in good voice, the boules are rolling, the beer flowing. Along the river banks (think stone, not grass here) picnics are underway. Food, wine, conversation, music. Cafés are bursting onto the streets and queues for Berthillon ice creams, the best in Paris, weave along the pavement.

Earlier in the day, the police had cleared us, and the other weekend-languid Parisians, out of a park along the Quai Saint Bernard in preparation for “an event”. We decided, later, that the procession fluviale must be starting there. So, at the advertised time, we head for the bridge nearest to it, Pont de Sully, at the southern end of the Ile Saint Louis. Here it is quieter. Just St Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, guarding the entrance to its heart. We watch some ducks flying home for the night, the slender moon rising over the Panthéon, a birthday celebration on a roof top terrace, and two musicians tossing jazz into the evening light. No sign of Mary, but no matter, we think, this is paradise. So we trace our steps back across the island. Perhaps we got it wrong. Perhaps we blinked and missed it. Perhaps she’d stowed away on a batteau mouche with the tourists. The city is positively buzzing, but no one, absolutely no one, seems to be expecting a procession. When we reach the Pont Louis Phillipe we stop for a final wistful look down the river. And there it is: the procession fluviale. A tug throwing out search light fountains and a small thread of song weaving its way up the river; and then there is Mary, dazzling, at the front of a boat full of white-robed priests. They are carrying lantern shaded candles and the song grows into a melodious chant as they pass, smiling and waving, below our feet. And incense, the fragance of incense drifts up and around us. Another barge follows, again full of candle carrying pilgrims. And another, and another, making their way toward the Ile de la Cité, circling the island home of Notre Dame. In the air the song rises from the river as though it were the bass note of the entire symphony of the city. And just two words float through the language barrier, straight to the heart: “chez nous, chez nous” . . . at home, at home.

In the scheme of the world this bass note, the umbilical chord that connects us to the source of all being, is mostly unnoticed. A week later, as we crossed Pont Louis Phillipe en route to a Saturday morning market on the Left Bank, the bulldozers were scooping up the sand. The palms and the beach huts were being loaded onto trucks. And by the end of the week Paris Plages was, once again, a road, hurling commuters along the Seine. The rentreé, as the September return of work and school and politics is called, had begun.

I’ve never much felt an affinity to the notion of the eternal city, perhaps because I am such a lover of solitude and the bush. But here in Paris, in August, it didn’t seem such a bad idea. In the heavenly Jerusalem everyone will have an apartment on the Ile Saint Louis (with a view of the river and the cathedral). Berthillon ice cream will be free. And everyone can sing around an out-of-tune piano and tap dance. There will be eternal Paris Plages, and even the Seine, fed by the crystal fountain, will invite a swim.