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Paris, the tourist destination par excellence, has shopping, breathtaking architecture and the occasional lunatic. With a beret on your head, a baguette in your hand and a “Bonsoir” on your tongue, the city opens up as a native frere.
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If you’ve never been to Paris, there’s no point pretending to be the slightest bit sophisticated. Ever since the Enlightenment, the days of Voltaire and the intellectual salons of Madame de Pompadour, Paris has been regarded as the cultural capital of the Western world. This reputation persist to this day, although it is upheld not so much by the inhabitants of Paris, renowned for being conceited and generally uptight, but by the city itself, which embodies all the virtues of high culture — elegance, harmony and arrogance. For the visitor, Paris is not a city that can be reduced to a series of isolated tourist attractions: if you just visit the sites you will have missed the point. Paris is a city that rewards the pedestrian, and it is not by chance that here was born the idea of the flaneur. This exquisite wanderer roams the city with the sole aim of receiving pleasure from his surroundings, and is at once a part of the crowd and a detached observer. So your first move, in your new incarnation as flaneur, should be to stroll in whichever direction takes your fancy. Don’t worry about getting lost, you are never far from the nearest Metro station, which are like bus stops in Moscow, set at a distance of about 400 meters from each other. Indeed, the Metro makes Paris the most easily navigable of all the great capitals. As loath as I am to chop up this city into digestible bite-sized chunks, there are still a few places especially worth seeing. The Musee Rodin is just down the road from the Eiffel Tower, which I know you’re going to see whatever I say, and is one of the lesser-known gems of Paris. Situated in the Hotel Biron, which is more of a palace really, this museum houses all the sculptor’s most recognizable works, including “The Thinker,” all set within an enormous walled garden with lawns and duck ponds. Less appealing as a building but perhaps more interesting artistically is the Picasso museum in the Marais, which is Paris’ oldest area, a labyrinth of winding medieval lanes. Devoted entirely to the great man’s works, this museum will give you an idea of Picasso’s vast stylistic range over his sixty year career, beginning with paintings reminiscent of Raphael and ending with paintings like the ones my five year-old brother does at day care. After the Picasso museum, you may as well pop round the corner to the superb Place Des Vosges, a 1612 architectural ensemble which was the precursor to the Palais Royal and a prototype of the European residential square altogether. The elegant stone archways prop up a series of grand apartments, which you can actually buy if you have a spare two million Euros, which most Russian tourists do nowadays. The Place Des Vosges’ most famous inhabitant was Victor Hugo, while Cardinal Richelieu, best-known as the Machiavellian villain of Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers,” lived there two centuries before Hugo’s day. It was also home to poet Theophile Gautier, author of “The Third Sex,” and one of history’s first gay theoreticians. The chap evidently set a trend, as the area of the Marais is now the center of the gay scene, apart from being Paris’ Jewish Quarter. The ethnic influence can be felt in the abundance of rag traders, kosher restaurants and elegant bearded gentlemen in tzitzits and kippahs. Paris is still a shopping Mecca, and most Parisians shop at Les Halles, which is a notoriously ugly underground shopping mall, like a gargantuan version of Okhotny Ryad, also built on the site of an ancient market. Les Halles is also a favorite haunt of the racaille, the French-Arab gangs who burn cars and riot. If you’ve got money to burn, The Champs-Elysees sports all the luxury brands and is now a famous oligarch haunt. Here, friendly Russian-speaking staff will gift-wrap your latest Mercedes for you, or show you how to fly back to Rublevka on your new Louis Vuitton helicopter. Tourists longing for a taste for the “real Paris” flock to the Latin Quarter, the left bank of the Seine, which was once the stomping ground of Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian and just about any other French intellectual you can think of. The Left Bank is also home to the Sorbonne, which is disappointing from the outside — an enormous, uninspiring stone wall, usually being blockaded by mobs of hirsute French students. The Left Bank is fairly barren of intellectual life these days, but it does have a lot of lunatics, for which Paris is especially renowned. These disheveled men with unbuttoned flies and uncombed hair sway along the street muttering to themselves and glaring feverishly at some chimera hovering in the middle-distance. One likes to think that they are the victims of too much thought, stuck in a dead-end of existential philosophy — that bleakest of all theories of the human condition, providing no respite from suffering nor any consolation. Paris is a city which is run for the benefit of its inhabitants rather than its visitors, and is far less touristy than Rome, Venice or even Prague. So, despite the Paris’ overwhelming aesthetic charm, you never get that awkward feeling of being in an open-air museum. |
