Paris is a Moveable Feast: Selection #5

'What are those people doing?' she asked. ⁠

'They're going to the flea market', said the chap, 'or rather that's the flea market that's going to them, because⁠ it starts there. ⁠

'Ah, the flea market,' said Zazie, looking like people do when they're determined not to be impressed, 'that's where you discover rembrants going cheap, then afterwards you sell them to a Yank and you haven't wasted your time.'

Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the metro, 1959 

They went back up rue d’Amsterdam. Louis carried the bags and let Brossier lead the way. He decided on a café whose glass surfaces, at the intersection of two streets, jutted out like the prow of a ship. Harsh light inside. Someone playing a game of pinball. They sat down at the counter.

“Two beers,” Brossier ordered, without asking Louis. “Belgian, if you have any.”

He took off his Tyrolean hat and put it on a stool next to him. Louis watched the people sliding past the windows like underwater shadows along the surfaces of a bathyscaphe, and looked at the gridlocked traffic at the intersection.

“To your health, Louis!” Brossier said, raising his glass. “Are you glad to be in Paris?”

'And that! over there!! look!!! The Panthéon!!!!'⁠

'Tisn't the Panthéon,' said Charles, 'it's the Invalides.'⁠

'You're not going to start all over again,' said Zazie.⁠

'Maybe it isn't the Pantheon?' asks Gabriel.

'No, it's the Invalides', answers Charles. 

Gabriel turned in his direction and looked him in the cornea of the eyes: 'Are you sure about that,' he asks him, 'are you really so sure as all that?'

Charles didn't answer.

'What is there that you're absolutely sure about?' Gabriel insisted. 

'I've got it,' Charles then roars, 'that thing there, tisn't the Invalides it's the Sacré-Cœur.'

'And you I suppose,' says Gabriel jovially, 'wouldn't by any chance be the sacred cow?'

Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the métro, 1959 

Towards midnight we reach the Tuileries, where she wants to sit down for a moment. We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. "Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it's still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there's that broken. spurt again, that fall... and so on indefinitely." I exclaim: "But Nadja,  how strange! Where did you get such an image — it's expressed in almost the same form in a work you can't have seen and which I've just finished reading?"

André Breton, Nadja, 1928

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and love. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. 

I take a last walk up the Rue de Seine, or is it down? I don't know, I just walk. There is the odd familiarity that keeps tugging at me. A long-ago sense of things. Yes. I have been on this same path with my sister. I stop and look at the narrow lane of Rue Visconti. I had so thrilled at my first sight of it that I ran the length and jumped in the air. My sister took a picture and in it I see myself, forever frozen in air full of joy.  It seems a small miracle to reconnect with all that adrenaline, all the will. 

O night! O refreshing darkness! to me you are the signal for an inner feast, my deliverer from anguish! In the solitude of the plain, in the stony labyrinths of the metropolis, scintillation of stars, bright bursts of city lights, you are the fireworks of my goddess Liberty!

For the first time, he was seeing Paris at night. They did not walk down rue Fontaine, that street he was accustomed to taking when he walked about on his own in the daytime. She led him along the central reservation. Fifteen years later, he was walking along the same central reservation, in winter, behind the fairground stalls that had been put up for Christmas and he could not take his eyes off these brightly lit neon signs that called out to him and the increasingly faint Morse code signals. It was as though they were gleaming for the last time and still belonged to the summer when he had found himself in the neighborhood with Annie. How long had they been there? For months, for years, like those dreams that have seemed so long to you and which you realize, on waking up suddenly, have only lasted. a few seconds?

Patrick Modiano, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, 2014

I am made to please 
And can not change anything 
My lips are too red 
My teeth too tidy 
My complexion is much too bright 
My hair too dark 
And then after? 
What can it do to you? 
I am what I am 
I like who I like 
I am what I am 
I'm made like this