August Night in Paris

August Night in Paris

I have just walked for half an hour from rue Beauregard in the Sentier to my home, if I can call it that, or that place where I keep my possessions and may sleep, bathe, eat, work.

I walked through streets untouched by Baron Haussmann’s regular eye, through

alleys where the buildings curve and bulge against the force of gravity, where windows open onto the night without concern for architectural conformity.

Is this where, alone and aware of no sound other than that of my shoes against the paving stones I fall in love again with a city that has long since lost my affection?

Yes, from the window of a friend’s apartment high among the roofs I saw a girl lying on a couch, alone, while another, several windows away puffed her cigarette into the silent street.

I passed among the empty arcades of a long lost city where dreams draw breath but only sleeping vagabonds breath the scent of roses. Under the night sky or under the shadowed arches of a hidden world I found again the beauty that eludes one in the day.

The city remains an enigma. Far more beautiful and wonderful than the one where people surge in daytime, I love this night-time city that is almost empty of humanity. I feel its history, know its suffering and its joys. I am part of its beauty in the silent night.

I long for nothing, for no one. This is the time of being. The empty streets of Paris in August at night. Sudden gusts of scents that live only at night. The scent of flowers from balconies or hidden gardens, the light from windows where the late night’s leisure preludes a sweeter sleep. This is the city in her reality. I love no other city save this one.

Yet, I can only catch glimpses of this secret city that exists like a ghost haunting the urban daytime, peopled by the colonized beings of another culture. Why do I say that? The Parisian, perhaps the French, mind is no longer itself. It has been taken over by the pulp products of Internet and TV news. That is why the city, with only its sprinkling of souls, the ones left behind by the rush to the beaches, can emerge and reveal its hidden self. The girl alone on the couch dreaming of her lover, the woman puffing her cigarette into the scented night, I, as I walk through the winding old streets of the Sentier and through the poised arches of the galleries of the Palais Royal into the Place Andre Malraux, whose fountains are the most Parisian in all Paris. Now sparkling with red and blue underwater lights put there by some freak of a city administrator, they splash over the cherubim of an earlier fantasie in this most Parisian of all open spaces.

The hidden city has revealed itself to me a few times in the past. A moment in winter at the bottom of the rue Moufftard where a staircase climbs and the iron balustrade curves upwards; a moment in the Place Marche St Honore at 1 am during a strike, where the café terraces were devoid of their usual chattering yuppie crowd. I walked in there on a warm autumn night, having tottered some way on three inch heels: a waiter was sweeping the leaves and cigarette ends away from the now bare terrace of his café. The little trees, the straw backed chairs piled high, the shuttered windows of apartments, his greeting and his smile seemed to pull me back into an old movie, perhaps Irma La Douce.

I’ve puzzled about this strange connection with an older, perhaps also fictional, Paris and now the explanation leaps into my mind. The absence of cars is one glorious wonder. The absence of the people is the other: and it is the people and their minds chock full of global media messages that destroy the soul of this city and send it back into its secret hiding place.

When the people leave, the city becomes itself again: the hidden city, to be discovered only at night when the chatterers, the yuppies, the bewildered, yes they are bewildered young things whose world has been supplanted by another, colonized by the leap in hyper space and cyber space, are gone to the trendy resorts, taking with them their concerns about the body beautiful, l’amour and la mode.

But I know now what I am searching for in this city…passing backward through time into a present devoid of people, whose head-space is the blockage to the discovery of the hidden city.

Secret city, I have the key to your soul. August night opens the door.