Travelers' Tales Paris (24 page)

—Baudelaire

DONALD W. GEORGE

N
OTRE
D
AME FROM THE OUTSIDE IS MAGNIFICENT, MONUMENTAL
, solidly of the Earth and yet soaringly not. But for all its monumental permanence, its context is clearly the present: visitors pose, focus, click; portable stalls sell sandwiches and postcards; tourist groups shuffle by in ragtag formation.

Walk through those massive, humbling doors, though, and suddenly you breathe the air of antiquity. Let your mind and eyes adjust to the inner light, and you begin to realize that there is much more to Paris than the life of its streets, and a small sense of its magnificent and moving past comes back to you.

When I entered Notre Dame on my most recent trip, I was overwhelmed by the solid, soaring arches and columns I had forgotten, by the depth and texture of the stained-glass windows with their luminous blues and reds and greens. I thought of how many people had worked to build this magnificence, and of how many people since then had stood, perhaps on the very same stones as I, and marveled at it. I thought of all the faith and hope and sacrifice it manifests. I walked through the fervent space, awed by the art and the hush that seemed to resonate with the whispers of centuries,
and just when I was beginning to feel too small and insignificant and was getting ready to leave, I saw a simple sign over a tiny stone basin of water, on a column near the doors.

The sign said, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” in seven languages, with pictures that showed a hand dipping into the water, then touching a forehead.

I touched my hand to the cool, still water, then brought it to my head, and as I did so, chills ran through my body and tears streamed into my eyes.

Somehow that simple act had forged a palpable contact with ages past, had put everything into startling focus: the ceaseless flow of pilgrims to this special place, the ceaseless procession of hands to water and fingers to forehead, all sharing this basin, this gesture.

I felt a new sense of the history that flows with us and around us and beyond us all—of the plodding, tireless path of humankind and of the sluggish, often violent spread of Christianity through Europe and the rest of the world—and a new sense of the flow of my own history, too: my Protestant upbringing, a pastor whose notions of Christian love have had a deep and abiding influence on my life, the old and still inconceivable idea of God.

For a few moments I lost all sense of place and time—then a door opened and a tourist group entered, looking up and around in wonder, and I walked into the world of sunlight and spire again.

I stopped, blinked at the sandwich stalls and postcard vendors, then turned back toward that stony symmetry and thought: sometimes you feel so small and insignificant in the crush of history that you lose all sense of purpose and self. Then something will happen to make you realize that every act and every encounter has its own precious meaning and lesson, and that history is simply the sum of all these.

Sometimes it comes together, as it did for me that moment in Notre Dame; sometimes the world is reduced to a simple sign, a stone basin, the touch of water to head—and the vast pageant of the past and the living parade of the present take on a new, and renewing, symmetry and sense.

A bench at the entrance to the Métro, Champs-Elysée:

As I sit in Paris in the rain I try to imagine each passerby in 16th- or 15th-century dress. The images are quite vivid, as I've soaked up enough Tintorettos, Titians, and Lottos to last till the next millennium.

Ever bright in my mind are the twisted, tortured torsos of slaves, the brilliant detail of saintly robe, the cool, smooth feel of carved stone limbs, and the myriad of churches and museums. Such passion, such epiphany, such intensive labor and detail in every craftsman-trade, from glass and mosaic to stone work, wood carving, and masonry.

Paris now feels like a weathered and paved-over metropolis of modernity and bustling tourists. Looking deeper and deeper though I can see vividly Paris as it once was: a glorious daunting fountain of song.

Paris's soul is still here, as solid as the faded marble façades and cobblestone walkways. I'm awed that we've regressed so far. What men 600 years ago erected, carved, created without use of modern amenities puts us to shame. In each detail, archway, window I see a masterpiece taking a man's entire lifetime to create. Perhaps that's why the city has such soul—from every artisan and slave buried, celebrated within it.

No wonder modern man is lost, living in a wasteland of convenience—only 200 souls per building, only 2 days of ethereal spontaneity per painting. Sainte-Chapelle must be at least 50,000 souls—200 mosaic artists, 10 architects over 200 years, 100 masons, 2,000 slaves—the
Assumption
at least 2 years. And imagine, making paint for each pigment, etching each chip of stone. No wonder they did it right—such effort, such time required—every stroke counts.

—Gina Granados, “Dear Patrick”

TARAS GRESCOE

T
HERE ARE PARTS OF
P
ARIS THAT NEVER MAKE IT INTO THE
guidebooks, and the Fragonard Museum is one of them. Its home, the little bedroom community of Maisons-Alfort, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne just south of the Bois de Vincennes, is only twenty minutes upstream from the Louvre by even the slowest
péniche
, but a skein of TGV tracks, elevated Métro lines, and Périphérique off-ramps has lately transformed this nondescript suburb into a commuter belt no man's land.

Since the 18th century, in fact, Maisons-Alfort has been noted for only two things. The first is its proximity to a grim enclave in Charenton, the mental hospital whose walls are visible across the water. The second is the presence of one of the world's oldest veterinary schools. The sprawling École Vétérinaire d'Alfort, with its spike-topped stone walls and slit-windowed turrets, looks as intimidating and inescapable as the most Zolaesque lunatic asylum. On this overcast afternoon, however, the knowledge that it also houses a museum filled with the grotesque work of an anatomist—one declared mad by his contemporaries—makes it downright terrifying.

Honoré Fragonard, the first director of the school, spent his life
in the
terrain vague
between science and art, using bodies rather than clay for raw material, and Paris's least-known museum is filled with some of the most disturbing sculptures ever created. The school still treats animals large and small; however, if the young woman carrying her poodle across a courtyard knew what was hidden away in the museum's collections, she might turn and run.

The few rusty signs that point to the museum's entrance aren't likely to excite much suspicion. The name Fragonard has long since been associated with the refined pursuits of the upper echelons of French culture: the paintings of Honoré's cousin Jean-Honoré Fragonard hang in the Louvre, and there are two Fragonard Museums of Perfume in the city. But Fragonard the anatomist had other interests.

Born in the Provençal town of Grasse, he trained to be a surgeon and was named director of the world's first veterinary school in Lyons. In 1776, at the age of 33, Fragonard came to what was then the newly-opened École Royale Vétérinaire. (Today the full name is École Nationale Vétérinaire d'Alfort.)

The sickly-sweet smell of formaldehyde is the first thing to greet a visitor at the entrance to the three-room museum. The second is the hand-lettered sign on a desk in front of the skeleton of a rhinoceros: “Unfortunately, we have too few visitors. If you enjoy the museum, why not send us your friends—if not your enemies.”

After buying my ticket from a man who immediately returns to the dissection room below, I'm alone for the afternoon. Apart from the cracking of the herringbone parquet underfoot, and the occasional sounds of horse's hooves striking gravel in the courtyard below, a sepulchral silence reigns over the rows of tall exhibition cases.

As I roam from cabinet to
cabinet in the first of three linked rooms, it's hard to say whether the items in the collection, most of which date from the 19th and early 20th centuries, were chosen because they were instructive, bizarre, or simply beautiful. There's a jewel box of iridescent, perfect pearls—formed in the kidneys of cows. A piglet displayed in the cross-section has undergone “diaphanisation”—its organs have been treated with a chemical that makes them transparent—so that it resembles some kind of ghostly deep-sea fish. The pale blue fetus of a horse, injected with mercury to highlight the vessels in its outer membranes, floats in a jar, surrounded by a tracery of quick-silver. Ostensibly, all the works are meant to illustrate some principle of anatomy; at some point, however, their anonymous creators must have yielded to a stronger impulse.

The cabinets devoted to teratology, the study of monstrosities, are a journey through Greek and Roman mythology. There is the head of a Cyclops—a colt with a malformed facial bone that caused it to develop one huge eye. A siren floats in a cracked jar of liquid—in reality a baby, born in Maisons-Alfort, whose joined legs make it look like a mermaid. There are monsters whose birth would have augured the outbreak of a dozen Athenian Plagues: Siamese twin lambs, locked chest-to-chest in a permanent waltz; chicken skulls the size of basketballs; a ten-legged sheep, floating in a tank of formaldehyde. It makes a show by the British artist Damien Hirst look like a trip to the petting zoo.