Coming home tonight from a concert of Senegalese sacred music (a last minute proposition by Klari, merci encore une fois!) at the Cité de la Musique, I encountered a large crowd blocking boulevard Saint Germain, outside Les Deux Magots. There were police and ambulances, flashing lights and plenty of angry motorists sounding their horns.
Uh oh, I thought, the lycéens are back on the street and the 6th arrondissement is going to be cut off for the rest of the evening… however the truth was soon revealed, as a squadron of police motorcycles set off down the boulevard, stopping traffic and letting the crowd of hundreds zoom off down one of Paris’ most elegant streets… on rollerblades.
This is one of the reasons I love this city. Earlier in the week, the region was paralysed through lack of petrol and there was rioting in some of the suburbs. And yet tonight, a hundred police turned out so that Parisians could rollerblade through central Paris…
As a follow up to the previous post, and by popular demand, here is the engraving of St Etienne de Caen and the photo I took of it – almost 200 years and 5 generations separate these two images!
If posts have been few and far between, it’s because work has been very busy… I did however manage to spend some time in Normandy with my sister and her boyfriend a couple of weekends back. While they explored the D-Day beaches, I caught a train from Bayeux into Caen, to chase down a church that was sketched by an ancestor of mine in the 19th Century.
John Sell Cotman (who, I am told, is my great-great-great-uncle, or something like that), undertook three tours of Normandy from 1817 to 1820, sketching many of the notable ancient buildings of the region. It was quite a significant journey for a provincial English artist in the 19th Century – he travelled by ship from the south coast of England, and made his tour of Normandy by postal coach. The results of his tours were published in a book of engravings in 1822.
Chateau de Lillebonne (Seine-Maritime) by J.S. Cotman
I have one of the engravings, and it turns out my engraving is a depiction of the church of St Etienne de Caen, which is the abbey church founded by William the Conqueror in the 11th Century, and it also houses his tomb. During the Battle of Normandy, when Caen was almost completely flattened during weeks of bitter fighting between German and British forces in July 1944, many of the townspeople sheltered in the church for days at a time, and the building survived the battle largely unscathed.
On my way back to the train station, I bumped into the local Caennais, taking to the street to protest the Sarkozy government’s retirement reform plan. It was a Saturday march, so there were many families marching, alongside the usual union members. Despite the rain, the protestors seemed determined to send a message to Paris that they value their acquis sociaux…
It is a rare and exciting day when you hear a musician of the calibre of Eddie Palmieri in concert. One of the founding fathers of New York salsa and a great innovator in the Latin jazz of the 1970s, Palmieri brought his Afro-Carribean All-Stars to New Morning in Paris last Friday, and they blew the roof off.
Eddie Palmieri, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph
Two hours of music stretched out over a pair of sets, suffused with humour and generosity. It was hard to suppress a giggle when Palmieri threw a quote from Salt Peanuts into one of his famously overblown solo passages. The grinning complicity between Palmieri and his bass player, Luques “Salsa” Curtis was evident throughout the gig.
Brian Lynch, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph
The presence of trumpeter Brian Lynch in the touring band was a particular pleasure – an incredibly technically accomplished player, Lynch has been a regular collaborator with Palmieri since 1987, and directed the Grammy-winning album Simpàtico in 2006.
The music traversed Palmieri’s jazz catalogue (including tunes from Simpàtico and 1990′s Palmas) and included a steaming Latin version of Monk’s In Walked Bud, a nod to one of Palmieri’s own stylistic influences on the piano.
Palmieri apologised that the band wouldn’t be playing his salsa hits (Vamonos pa l’Monte, Cuidate Compay…), because of a lack of vocalists in the group. But with the energy on show last Friday, nobody went home disappointed. This is a gig I’ll remember for a long time.
I wrote last year about my chance meeting with Leanna Mills and her family in Montpellier. I was particularly moved by their story and have kept in touch with the family since.
With more surgery upcoming for Leanna and her sister Bethany, the family arrived back in France this week. They passed through Paris briefly on their way to Montpellier.
On Thursday evening I caught up with the girls and their father Nic for dinner. Afterwards we went down to the Eiffel Tower for some sightseeing. I’m still not much good at driving a wheelchair, and the evening crowds didn’t make it easier! Their little sister Olivia came with us, and had a lot of fun with the souvenir sellers…
Bethany, Nic, Leanna and Olivia in Paris
Bethany’s surgery is routine but still dramatic – she is getting the batteries replaced for the brain stimulator device that keeps her alive. The technology is slowly improving, and doctors hope that her new batteries will last longer than two years. Bethany uses a wheelchair, but thanks to continuing surgery she remains fairly mobile and independent.
On the other hand, Leanna is facing a much grimmer challenge. In addition to her primary dystonia, she has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease – terrible news for a 15 year-old girl. Leanna now requires significant care, and the outlook does not look good for much improvement.
Mills Sisters Registered Charity
The Mills family currently need help raising funds to buy a block of land in Newcastle, Australia and to construct a disability-friendly home for the girls. They have a registered charity, and donations are accepted online at their MyCause page. These donations are tax-deductible in Australia.
In other developments, the sisters now have their own website. With permission of the family, I also have set up a Facebook page – so you can follow them if you’re on Facebook, and I hope to post regular updates there as I hear news…
The 14th of July (which NOBODY in France calls “Bastille Day”, by the way) dawned bright, promising a hot day with sun shining benignly down on the amassed weaponry parading down the Champs-Elysées. Shorts, sunglasses, sunscreen and digital cameras seemed the essential equipment to enjoy the day.
How wrong we were. As we took up our position in the roof garden of an office building just a block back from the Arc de Triomphe (friends with high places, naturally), and while snipers from the Gendarmerie stared at us through binoculars, clouds started moving in from the east, looming darkly over the Eiffel Tower.
The storm held off long enough for us to watch the French Air Force roar down the length of the Voie Triomphale, from La Défense to the Louvre. It was an impressive sight.
New Zealand’s airforce consists of a handful of Vietnam-era helicopters, a few transport planes that occasionally drop boxes of aid to cyclone-stricken Pacific islands and a part-time brass band. France has, er, a few more planes than we do:
And then, as soon as the jets got out of the way, the heavens opened. Paris was hit by a month’s worth of rain in three hours. We unsuccessfully dodged the showers and – strangely – found ourselves in a bar in time for lunch. We were wet, but seemed to be doing something right.
L’Ecluse specialise in the wines of Bordeaux. We ignored the bottle of 1979 St Pétrus on their wine list at €1227 and opted for a €25 Château Margaux instead. After drying out over a few glasses and an “Assortiment de cochonnailles” (a plate containing variations on pig), I sensed that the rain was easing and that I should make a dash for the métro.
My expectation of improving weather proved of course to be hilariously and liquidly wrong. As I reached the bottom of Avenue Georges V, another torrential downpour hit. By the time I took this video of a Leclerc tank rumbling onto the Pont de l’Alma, I was soaked to the skin.
The rest of the day was spent drying off, wandering around the Marais in the newly resurgent sunshine, and then heading up the tower of the American Cathedral (yes, more friends with high places) for a few drinks and to watch the fireworks over Trocadéro at 11pm. But that is another episode…
To complement our previous journey from south to north, yesterday we achieved the obvious second objective – to cross Paris from west to east, on foot. From Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes. It took us 6 hours, and we covered 14.2 kilometres.
We ignored the warnings of heatwave, and were surprised by lower-than-predicted temperatures. A light rainstorm in the afternoon helped keep things manageable. The City of Paris, however, were taking no chances: heatwave warnings were displayed everywhere on the public information screens.
The journey was documented in real-time via Twitter, but here are a few highlights in images:
Parc de Monceau, a welcome patch of greenery in the 8th arrondissement
Jeanne d’Arc defying the English outside Saint-Augustin (Paris 8e)
This was the view yesterday morning from the Pont des Arts, looking east to the Ile de la Cité. There were train strikes and I decided to walk to Châtelet RER instead of braving the Métro. The reward was this sight of the Seine, almost completely motionless beneath a clear summer sky.
Say the words “Forest of Chantilly” and you might immediately imagine one of those cutaway gags in The Simpsons where Homer says to himself “Mmmmm….Forest of Chantilly“, and he daydreams of prancing through groves of swirly cream trees, grabbing mouthfuls of marscarpone squirrel while blizzards of cherries tumble from the sky.
However, the Forest of Chantilly is a real place: 6,000 hectares of woodland lying 40 kilometres north of Paris on the RER D line, and the trees are not made of the eponymous cream. I went for a walk through the forest on Friday, from Orry-la-Ville to the Château de Chantilly.
The Parc Astérix is situated nearby, and one could almost imagine Obélix hunting wild boar in these woods. But there is little sense of wilderness: the forest is a working source of sustainable timber and is still used as a hunting park as it was in the time of the French monarchy.
In the middle of the forest are the Etangs de Commelles – a series of large artificial lakes built by Cistercian monks in the 13th Century as fishing ponds. Chateaubriand wrote about the lakes in the 19th Century, and today they harbour a remarkable range of birdlife and a large population of water-rats, some of whom sat on the bank, watching me eat my lunch.
Chantilly is a major horse racing centre. On a nearby estate, the Aga Khan keeps half the bloodstock of France. The forest is criss-crossed by long, straight galloping tracks laid down in soft sand, dedicated to training racehorses. Walkers must take care because these tracks are restricted to horses and their jockeys from 6am to 1pm.
If you follow the GR11 path towards Chantilly, you emerge from the forest at the “service entrance” to the Château.
The Château itself, once home to the Condé and the Montmorency families, is popular with tourists and school groups. The well-groomed parkland is a startling contrast to the solitude of the forest.
From the Château, you can walk around the edge of the racecourse, past the most impressive set of stables you’ll see anywhere, back to the Chantilly-Gouvieux railway station. From there, you can be back in Paris in 40 minutes.
The excellent maps produced by the Institut Géographique National (IGN) make it very easy to put on a good pair of walking shoes and launch into the French countryside. It’s one of my favourite activities: at walking pace, you can better understand a landscape, you can avoid the crowds and make unexpected discoveries.
When I lived in Alsace, IGN maps of the southern Vosges were pinned across my apartment walls. And everywhere I’ve lived since my collection of maps (and walking experiences) has expanded.
These few weeks of rest between jobs end on Monday, so this week has been a last chance to enjoy some parts of the Paris region I hadn’t yet seen. Yesterday I caught a train from Gare Montparnasse to Rambouillet and set off on a circuit through the Forêt de Rambouillet, one of the largest forests near Paris, 200 square kilometres in size. As usual, I took some pictures.
The Château de Rambouillet was a royal hunting lodge from the 1500s onwards, today it’s a summer home for French presidents. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing reinaugurated “presidential hunts” in the 1970s, and the goddess Diana with her attendant dogs and stags still watch over the park.
Walking out of Rambouillet towards the village of Gazeran, fields of wheat bend in the wind.
Once inside the forest, Rambouillet’s oaks stretch for miles and miles…
This is a forest where Scouts and ramblers make mysterious magic circles of unknown purpose,
A forest where witches might lurk in hidden cottages,
A forest which is empty during the week, save for a few deer and the lone walker.
