Sunday 4 February 2007
Family ..../.... Generations
By David Pitt, Sunday 4 February 2007 - 20:02 :: Best
The best of the best. The French family, as a unit, is superb. It does my heart good to watch a thousand kindnesses as a matter of course. Walking grandma. A little smile. Pride. Help. Respect. Laughter. We are talking extended family. In a park on Sunday – five generations is a frequent sight, even sometimes six, and four is as common as grains of sand. Interacting, really truly interacting. We have lost a little of that in our mobile society at home. The French still honor family. It is a beautiful tapestry, writ large. In every village and even in Paris. I salute them, and, in this case, respect and pay tribute to their values and priorities.
Original appearance May 07, 2005, © 2005 / CIP 074, OO 13, RD 04, YP 30/6-4
He’s complex, and I don’t mean that kind of complex, because he’s a giant. Whether for good or ill may depend on whether you’re English, Austrian, Russian, or French, but that Napoleon bestrode the world is uncontestable. France’s greatest victories ever (Austerlitz, Friedland) and also it’s worst defeats (Trafalger, Waterloo) all came under him, and it is perhaps instructive that his biggest battle (Boorodino) was a Pyrrhic Victory at best. Still, he gave France it’s Code Napoleon and it’s Departments (something of a cross between a state and a county). He also brought order out of chaos before he plunged it back into turmoil. He once said “the most dangerous moment comes with victory” and he proved prescient. For sure he’s taller than his recorded stature. For years he was listed as 5’ 2” but it turns out that those were French feet which equals a bit over 5’ 6” and was absolutely average for a Frenchman of his time. Another Pyrrhic Victory? I don’t know – he was complex and a giant*.
My personal favorite Frenchman ever: Jean Moulin. After the war nobody in France ever claimed they were a collaborator, and a large number of people, especially entertainment people with press agents, claimed they fought with the Resistance. My hunch is a very small minority of people were real collaborators, and an equally small minority of people really fought in the Resistance. One who did was Jean Moulin and it is un-debatable because he died doing it. What is arguable is how far on the political left he started (my view, not far), and weather or not he came close to abandoning De Gaulle before his arrest (my view, not likely – though for America it would probably have been a very good thing). Those who rise to mythic stature always have factual grey areas that allow everyone’s perceptions to seem realized. What is uncontestable is that he was arrested June 21, 1943 by Klaus Barbie. That he died on July 8, 1943 with most of the bones in his body broken. That, other than his bones, he did not break in between. That is a really resistant hero.
La Closerie des Lilas was a literary restaurant whose name translates ‘Small Enclosed Lilac Garden’. The restaurant is still there though the appellation literary may no longer apply. Ernest Hemingway’s special barstool with his name plate exists, and it is said that that is where he wrote the first draft of ‘The Sun also Rises’. For sure he mentions the restaurant at length in ‘A Moveable Feast’ and says it was the nearest good café to his flat over the sawmill. Other clients and their barstools include Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Long before them Paul Fort presided over poetry night on Tuesdays, and they say Trotsky and Lenin plotted at that table right over there. Now the trade leans more towards the ‘could have been’ and the ‘want to be’ variety. Still, the warm red leather and burnished brass interior is inviting, and one can always dream or scribble.
The shining white ovoid dome is distinctive and visible from near and far. After the Eiffel Tower it’s the tallest point in Paris and, including the butte of Montmartre upon which it stands has a spectacular view. Built above the gypsum quarries and started in 1877 it took 40 years to complete. Its initial impetus was the Siege of Paris, 1870 (two French Catholic businessmen promised if Paris survived they would build it) and, though completed in 1914, it wasn’t consecrated till 1919 due to another German invasion. The Roman-Byzantine design is breathtaking, as are the bronze doors, the crypt vaults, and the bell towers, one containing the over 18 ton bell the Savoyarde. Magnificent mosaics are a major feature for the many pilgrims who journey here as is the continuous 24 hour a day religious service that started in 1885!
Should you ever have a hankering to see the ultimate crossroads of the world sashay on over to the Concorde. A double axis here of magnificent proportions. On one line the Rue Royale, anchored by the Assemblé Nationale and the Madeleine. It is sublime, but it is the minor axis. Look now down the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe and back to the Louvre through the Tuileries. Now, that is a crossroads, and as an exclamation point the Luxor obelisk is smack dab in the center. A bloody place though! Before there was the Luxor, there was the guillotine. Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Danton, Robespierre and about 1,100 other souls lost their heads right there. An architectural triumph washed in blood.