MikePadgett.com

Paris

— On a cold, rainy February morning, I returned to the French capital for the first time since I was twelve years old.”

I haven’t been here since I was twelve on a school exchange. The Meunier family from Arras looked after me as a shy, terrified kid from Yorkshire for a week or so.

During that time, I actually came to Paris twice: once with the family in their planet-sized Citroën CX to visit the Palais de la découverte and the other with my class to see the sights, many of which I would repeat this weekend!

L’arrivée

Impenetrable fog over the flat plains of the great Nord. Watery greens and browns and somewhere beyond that fog, the old coalpits and battlegrounds, criss-crossed by a web of shaky cobbled roads.

Arrow straight like the Romans down to the banlieues stewing in shades of grey on this early Saturday morning, the colours of Le Corbusier and the Fourth Republic. Block on block passing us by until we reach the Paris we think we want to see.

Le matin de Paris

Now the Métro, wider than London and older than Brussels. Still early but the people are starting to appear albeit underground. Les Halles will stay a ghost town for an hour or so yet. Rain falling steadily until then, while empty streets come to terms with the previous night and a freezing wind off the Seine, only a block away now.

Gutters full of dirty water, soggy flyers and clumps of shredded tobacco. Trees embarassed and naked as if caught out by an empty cab rank in the early hours. The terrasses of bars struggle on without their neon make-up and a chic black backdrop, stacks of stained chairs out front like bad teeth.

Lurking behind massed ranks of mixed-use buildings and set in ample space is the Centre Pompidou, an edifice of eccentric gauche on the rive droite, looking like a practical joke that works. Opening at the fashionably late hour of eleven, for now it stands mute and slightly preposterous until finally justified by long queues.

We take shelter in a café while the streets cough into life. The café interior makes vague provincial references and when not serving customers, the owner does the accounts with strong coffee and a biro. Other shopkeepers pick up their coffees, sometimes making furtive, with or without milk phone calls to colleagues elsewhere. Their own customers will have to wait until this caffeine conspiracy unravels and the new day is finally stamped, validated and worth living.

We’re the aliens here, the only sitters in a steady tide of takeaways. A hapless break from the norm. A coloured moment in a rail crash of Saturday mornings.

Comme chez soi

Later lost in St Germain with the rain mocking our feeble scarves and hats until our hotel comes along and scoops us off the street with a smirk. Checking in with a nervous hotel manager who calls the lift and the lift doesn’t come. We take the stairs and he follows on behind to seek out his lost lift, which has absconded to the top floor.

Then the access card for our room doesn’t work. We collar the manager moments later. He’s recovered the lift but, quite inexplicably, he’s taking the stairs back down to reception. He eyes the useless card doubtfully. He sympathises. He’s as confused about his hotel as we are. This is what makes him successful.

The delay had me noticing things we’re not supposed to notice in hotels. On the wall outside our room, there’s a Mutual Security Agency Pictorial Map of North America Showing Principal Resources, Features and Products.

Synthetic rubber, Charleston and the home of Booker T. Washington. Sugar beets in Sheridan. Molybdenum in Grand Mesa. Lava beds, Pocatillo and the Shoeshone Falls.

Nice room with a bureau for writing. However, the toiletries are white-label and the little bottles of Evian are three euros a go. The hotel information folder contains hotel stationery and a couple of postcards featuring classic views of Paris and an inset photo of a better hotel room than ours.

Help us to Save the Earth. Our common areas are equipped with low energy bulb. Our staff are sensitised to reduce energy loss. Being a part of it is easy if you act for eco-friendly. Thank you.

No, thank you.

Our room is decorated with prints of illustrative engravings whose original context was long since lost. And Sleeper in the Valley, a poem by Rimbaud printed in a nice font, doubtless chosen for its frequent references to lush grass, babbling streams and other reposeful themes. The “sleeper” in question is a soldier who, rather than asleep, actually turns out to be dead with “two red holes in his side”.

Le Panthéon

Then from the rain emerged Paris. We passed Saint Sulpice, famous for its miraculous namesake and a mention in the Da Vinci Code, then on through the Jardins du Luxembourg with their fantastic tennis courts. We headed for the Panthéon, a French equivalent of Agrippa’s extraordinary Roman edifice, where the grateful nation honours its most distinguished men. And Marie Curie.

J’s here on a pilgrimmage to visit the final resting place of Résistance hero Jean Moulin. Moulin’s ashes are interred in a chamber that also includes the remains of Jean Monnet, a forefather of the European Union.

I imagine a sort of intermingling among the great spirits in the crypt here. Braille reading quietly while Zola, Hugo, Voltaire and Rousseau argue over literary ideals. Soufflot takes time – an eternity indeed – to examine his own handiwork that in life he never saw finished. Sadi Carnot, Jaurès and Moulin all now at peace. Everything to the gentle beat of Gambetta’s heart. The heart of a nation, with many empty chambers waiting patiently to embrace the future greatness of France.

La proménade

Downhill on Rue Saint Jacques, the grand old Sorbonne and then the banks of the Seine, where the river parts around the Ile de la Cité and Notre-Dame de Paris, whose nave is almost dark even in daytime.

Alongside the Seine as far as the Tuileries, dodging the heavy Sunday traffic of runners and rollerbladers. Exercise, like everything else in their lives, taken at speed.

At Trocadéro, a severe, staring man stands in traffic minding a fancy car outside Le Wilson. His stance that of a footballer facing down a freekick or a simply a man awaiting fruition astride a urinal. Opposite Le Wilson, they’re chanting for democracy in the Middle East.

More or less like they do in Brussels, except instead of demanding an end to European ambivalence, today they’re demanding an stop to European interference. All is a confusion of voices, flags and camera phones.

Democracy translated into repeated slogans. Democracy represented as touchpad gestures.

Non-plussed Africans hawk their little plastic tours Eiffel against the backdrop of the big iron one, silently demanding an end to Arab protesters intruding on their patch.

But this is Paris and Paris decides what goes.