Autumn

It's autumn, my first European autumn since 1966. The best of my childhood memories include many from this season: apples and pears finally officially harvested (in contrast to the premature, clandestine, sour pickings of summer); then piles of golden leaves and a hedgehog caught up in the sweepings; the dark wooden shine of chestnuts bursting from their prickly shells; crisp days, soup for supper and the smell of bonfires. Here in Paris it has been damper than I recall and I have spent too many days inside at my books, but for the last two Sundays we have walked in beautiful autumn gardens, Versailles and the Tuileries. We’ve breathed in late flowering roses, feasted on the shifting tones of blue and purple blooms, watched for the turning of the leaves. Palace gardens set against the changing sky: a persistent steely grey last Sunday, and this week a changing drama of dark clouds and sunlight.

Autumn has brought many other delights. At the end of one fruitless work day last week we did a circuit of the islands and then secured a table in a café-bar that looks over the Seine to Notre Dame. With cooler days chaud vin had appeared on the black board, and so we basked in the last half hour of slanty sunshine sipping a warm brew of wine and spices. And on Saturday, an unexpected afternoon of pleasure: lunch and good conversation with friends of friends, here to celebrate a significant wedding anniversary. There have been wonderful concerts too, including Verdi’s Requiem performed by a bunch of medicos from Germany as a fundraiser for Medicins Sans Frontiers. Brilliant. The bass was, in his spare time, a professor of paediatrics. Europe is so cultured.

Autumn has always been my favourite season. But after autumn comes winter, its darkness, the cold. As children this sense of the closing in of life, the coming of winter, is less of a weight. Is it because we live then more in the moment? Or perhaps it is because, then, we were not burdened by so much experience so can live more lightly.

Walking home from St Eustache after Verdi we saw, as ever, the other Paris. Men and women dossed down in doorways for the night, layered with sleeping bags, blankets, plastic. And when it rains? And is colder?

I have been pondering the beggars, the street folk and the homeless ever since our arrival here, and have made little progress. There is a beggar at the door of every church. Never has the story Jesus tells of the rich man and poor Lazarus at the gate seemed so vivid. To give or not to give? And what? I try at least to give the dignity of a greeting in my stumbling French to those I see regularly, but the questions still nag.

Around the quartier of Saint Paul, were we shop, there is stable group of homeless, mostly men. In the mornings they are usually gathered around a corner near a supermarket, where in ones or twos they take turns in looking out for each others’ bags and bedding. At night they sleep near our apartment on a wide veranda underneath the Cité des Arts building on the Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, which runs parallel with the Seine. The veranda is a prized place of good shelter and at night it turns into a long dormitory. Is this a choice of sorts? There are government run shelters, but here, I’ve observed a sense of fraternity, care and community. Fragile though it might be, it’s something we all desire and call home. The roads to the street here, like everywhere are multiple; and the solutions?

One of the most loved figures of twentieth century France was Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), a tireless worker for the poor, for refugees, the homeless. In the cold winter of 1954, in the face of an increasing number of deaths among the homeless in Paris, he called for “An Uprising of Kindness” (insurrection de la bonté). A savy political operator he targeted the conservative rich and their wallets opened, helping the growth of the Emmaus communities, which provided shelter, food and hope for the homeless poor. The work of his foundation continues. When we first arrived in Paris we visited the Place des Vosges, an exquisite symmetrical Renaissance square that once housed the aristocracy, now simply the rich. Hanging from three of the windows (how did they get there?) were banners proclaiming the incidence of homelessness in present day France: “at least 100 000 live in the street”; “600 000 people have no personal housing”. Government statistics, like those on poverty, are contested. What can’t be contested though are “les morts dans la rue”, the deaths in the streets. There is a small collective based in Paris that since 2002 has collected information about the men and women who have died on the street or when living on the street. In 2009 they documented over 400 deaths. Their average age is 49.

I walked up to the Place des Vosges this afternoon to see if the Foundation Abbé Pierre banners were still there. They aren’t, but the homeless, in their various habitual spots, are. It is a bitterly cold afternoon and it is not even winter yet. And I wonder whether, living amongst them, there is still the Dominican brother that Timothy Radcliffe once spoke of – a true mendicant of Christ, returning to base just once a week for a meal and a hot shower.