The sun shone today! The sky was blue, verily, and clear as a bell. I hung around with Paul Swendsen, artist extraordinaire, who I met at Utopiales. He took me around Montmartre cemetery again - a much more enjoyable experience this time as the weather was so nice. He took some photos of me there. I actually look not bad in some of them, which is a rare thing for me. I’ll post a couple (when I get back to BKK and have my CD drive) just to prove I’m human after all.

More photos from tombland -
Shadow of a cross:

Coloured shadow:

The house of blue light:

Close-up of the window:

Paul (by the grave of the guy who invented the saxophone, & blurry - he was moving, as the living do):

Tombcat:

Then we walked up to one of the Paris fleamarkets. On the way we crossed over this now-disused railway line that encircles the city:

Then we got to the flea market, which is partly out in the street and part indoors. The first outside area along a street was like a flea market anywhere - stalls selling all kinds of old junk, books, clothes new and secondhand, etc. (For readers of The Etched City - there was an old honky-tonk piano amongst all of this.) Then Paul took me inside the art and antiques market, which was amazing. If you want an old ship’s binnacle, a Degas etching, a stuffed lion cheaper than the one near the Palais Royal, a pair of 7-ft tall gilded candelabrae to put on either side of your bed/desk/loo, this is the place to look. There were a handful of etchings by Felicien Rops, an artist I like, but none of these took my fancy. However, we’d been talking about the possible importance of paying attention to synchronicities, and just after telling Paul my complaint about not being able to buy my Venetians, I found a photo of masked and tricorned figures from a production of Don Giovanni, so I bought it. Out the other side was an alley of tacky garden statues, chandeliers and bird cages. I thought of crystal chandeliers hanging outdoors in a garden - down an alley of trees, amongst rhododendrons around a pond, or just in a shady nook, something like this. A chandelier in a garden shed. We didn’t see that, but we did see a fake Renoir in a grungy weapons shop, hanging above the tear gas. (There were also a couple of locked cabinets with small ‘Lalique’ pieces - might have been real, no idea; if they were fake the prices were pretty cheeky.) When we asked what the ‘Renoir’ was doing in those particular surroundings, the woman behind the counter said that as they had to spend their time surrounded by the props of violence and death, the painting helped to lift the mood.

In the evening we had Chinese - you can get dim sum at night here - and went to a pub with Paul’s girlfriend Joelle. We discussed travel, including possible trips to the Moon and Mars. Paul told us that female astronauts wear diapers under their spacesuits. I’d like to go to Mars, but not in a diaper, thank you. Another destination that appealed was Zanzibar. We agreed that just the name ‘Zanzibar’ has a magical sound that makes you want to go there - with or without a diaper, just as you like.

NASA’s nose

In the evening we wandered around Montmartre and took pictures of Sacre Coeur, which looks like a building on the moon:

I lay on the ground to take this one:

Went back to the Louvre to see the Watteaus. So glad I did. Not a beribonned sheep in sight, just delicate mastery of expression in face and gesture, superb draughtsmanship supporting every figure, and an infusion of the ineffable.

I walked through the rest of the 18th and 19th century French painting galleries. Again there was the sense of there being too many famous works, too much genius crowded together. I tended to look more at the paintings I hadn’t already seen in reproduction. I liked this trompe l’oeil by Louis-Leopold Boilly:

Detail of man in bottom right (I just love his face):

Wandering north up Rue Richelieu, I found a bakery claiming to be the oldest in Paris (as you might imagine there are several of those). I decided now was the time to try a fancy French cake. I chose one (can’t remember the name, argh), shaped like a canoe, enclosed in a two-toned chocolate shell on a sponge base and filled with what I thought was going to be chestnut cream - which it was, but it had a completely surprising flavour that was half chestnut, half blue cheese. I hated it. And then I took another bite. And couldn’t decide if I hated or liked it. It reminded me of the experience of eating durian - firm, incredibly creamy texture, and the weird mixture of delicate and pungent tastes. It isn’t often that you taste something unlike anything you’ve tasted before, but the mixture in this cake sure qualified as that for me. I ended up eating the whole thing and somehow wanting more.

Today I went to Printemps department store, an icon of Belle Epoque Paris, to have a drink at Cafe Flo on the 6th floor. Stepping out of the elevator into women’s wear, I was perplexed by the almost grungy surroundings. Were they renovating? At any rate, the cafe itself resides under an immense jugendstijl stained glass dome - definitely a thing of beauty and splendour:

However, the service was a bit odd. As I waited in line to enter, the hostess asked me if I was alone, and when I said yes, told me I could sit at the round bar in the middle. Her manner was strangely distracted. “It’s a new concept,” she said. I had no idea what she meant. The bar itself? Single people sitting there (to encourage circular cluster-fucking for the unattached or unaccompanied)? The big pink balloon, obviously a female relative of Rover from The Prisoner? Anyway, I sat there under the superintending presence of Roverette, waiting to be enveloped, and ordered a hot chocolate, resigning myself to the E5.50 price as the cost of viewing the dome. But no, said madame behind the counter, I couldn’t just have a drink, I had to have a meal if I wanted to sit there. In that case, why hadn’t mademoiselle at the door asked whether I was dining or not? Yes, it’s only a small thing, but when you charge that much for a cup of cocoa it seems rather poor form to inconvenience a customer even ever so slightly. Madame directed me to a bar at the side, where I came face to face with an unsmiling woman who indicated a spot at the counter and told me to stand there. I went to sit on a bar stool next to the spot, but she shook her head and said “Vous restez ici” in a direly disapproving tone that reminded me of the Mother Russias at train stations in Romania. What the hell? Or was it for my own safety - did Roverette float over from time to time and devour seated guests? I looked around. The restaurant was reasonably full, but far from packed, yet the staff were rushing around looking grim and harried. Becoming more and more suspicous that something sinister was going on, I drank my chocolate quickly, took my photographs and got out, with a final glance at the mysterious pink balloon.

Next door, Galerie Lafayette also has a magnificent giant stained glass dome, rising above the large perfume department on the ground floor:

I tried a lot of perfumes in both stores today, as well as some in smaller boutiques I happened across. I was tempted by Molinard’s Habanita; created in 1921, I’ve heard this one is being rediscovered by young folks, and no wonder. I’ve never smelled a perfume that so instantly makes me want to fuck. There’s a beast in this one (civet?), lying in a bed of flowers and spices. And it didn’t turn into eau de litterbox, either. I can’t imagine wearing this anywhere except in bed, though. I also liked Stéphanie de Saint-Aignan’s Un Thé Au Sahara - just as the name suggests, tea in a Bedouin tent, spices, desert dust, and a whiff of goats. Weighing this one against Dzongkha, though, I’d choose Dzongkha, especially as an everyday perfume. I also put on some Bulgari Black, just to remind myself how much I like it. At home it’s considered unisex, but here they were rather adamant that it’s for men. It has never seemed like a manly smell to me, but then, my idea of a manly smell is my husband’s flannel shirts, so what do I know?

Drenched in scents and headachey, I went out down Boulevard Haussmann to discover some of Paris’ famous arcades - Passage Jouffroy, Passage Verdeau and Passage des Panoramas. Great places for flaneuring. One rather interesting shop was Galerie Segas in Passage Jouffroy, a velvet-hung boutique specialising exclusively in antique canes. My favourite was a simple black one with a pale opalescent green glass top. There was also a display case containing whips and the kind of canes you use for caning, accompanied by a short text explaining the pleasure of suffering, and, just in case you thought a walking cane was just for walking with, on top of the case was an explicit antique photo of a happy looking woman who seemed about to be penetrated by the cane in the hands of her paramour. There were also erotically carved canes, and an explanation of the difference between erotica and pornography was posted at the back of the shop. No, it wasn’t any clearer in French than in English.
I also liked Cabinet des Curieux, where items on display included an old book on demonology, a pickled snake, and a Turkish yataghan. This is the kind of sword Gwynn carries. I have a yataghan-shaped bayonet/sword at home, and it feels very whippy and aerodynamic. However, this thing felt much heavier and not all that comfortable to hold - but I suppose a man (or a woman with big muscles) would have less difficulty with it. Anyway, it was interesting just to pick it up and wave it around a little (carefully!).

The Louvre is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but - ok, I’ll stop. It’s a vast, vast art museum, and unless you had several days and the constitution of several oxen, you couldn’t see all of it. Before plunging in, I went up to the Palais Royal and popped into Serge Lutens to try the second two perfumes. Just as I was feeling unreasonably depressed about not having found a piece of (affordable) art I definitely wanted to take away from Paris, I happened to glance at the window of an antiquarian book and print seller, and my eye fell on what appeared to be the unbound pages of an old book, all illustrated with scenes of Italian life. The topmost sheet was a drawing of two masked figures, a man in a bauta and a woman in a moretta, on the doorstep of a house, about to be admitted to a party, I supposed. I can see Stu smiling wryly as I type this. I have a bit of an obsession with Venetian masked figures, especially the sinister, unisex Bauta with its ghostly mask, black hood and tricorne. The shop wasn’t open yet, so, making a note to come back, I went back to the Louvre and entered via the controversial glass pyramid in the immense courtyard. I neither liked nor disliked the pyramid. It was just…there.

Waiting in the ticket queue, I heard a young American voice say loudly that she was only there to see the Mona Lisa. This reminded me of the Vatican Musuem, where Stu and I witnessed an exhausted tourist, gasping with fatigue, gaze around at the small room we were in, containing Raphael’s The School of Athens, and moan, “Is this the Sistine Chapel? Oh, no, we’re not there yet…” I wasn’t about to judge the Mona Lisa seeker too harshly, as my current crush on Watteau meant that my own heart was firmly set on 18th century French painting, and I marched rather quickly through the Baroque rooms to get there, only to find that that section is closed on Thursdays. So I’ll have to go back.

Of course, there was still plenty to ohh and ahh over. I did go and see the Mona Lisa, of course. Not surprisingly, she looks very much as she does in all the pictures, but it was still great to see the real painting. What struck me is that she’s really rather plain; it’s her expression alone that makes her face compelling. Despite the large sign saying no photography allowed, people were still snapping away - because, of course, it’s so terribly hard to find images of the Mona Lisa - while a harassed security guard tried to make them stop.

I was really delighted to find The Virgin of the Rocks (one of the two almost identical paintings) here. I knew there was one in London, but I always thought the other one was in Italy. The angel on the right (in both paintings) has a face I could look at all day.

It was no good viewing all those huge Gericaults and Delacroixs in the one big huge red room. I felt as if I was between caught a brass band and a heavy metal concert. I was very happy to discover Louise Moillon, who is considered by some critics to be the greatest French still life painter of the 17th century. Her works are calm, orderly, rich and luminous; the technique is extraordinarily fine, and the textures and colours of fruit, in particular, are rendered with acute observation and almost erotic voluptuousness. These pictures admit you to a world of sensuous and thoughtful repose - and make you think about all the women of talent whose gender prevented them from achieving their potential. I sometimes wonder what kind of art our galleries would be full of if women had participated in art-making to the same extent as men and had influenced male artists through the ages. Would these salons look very different, or not? We’ll never know.

I was also taken by this quirky painting, Les Funerailles des l’Amours, showing the funeral procession of a cupid with a rather jolly cortege:

I also liked this strange painting of snakes and butterflies by Otto Marseus van Schrieck (any relation to the Shrieks of Ambergris, I wonder?), who, according to his entry in the Louvre database, specialised in strange, disquieting studies of animals and insects in woodland undergrowth. Good on him.
Havin Venetians on my mind, I went looking for paintings of them, and found a handful, including Tiepolo’s The Charlatan, or The Puller of Teeth, depicting a fake dentist wowing the crowd, or at least mildly amusing them. Tiepolo painted this subject at least once again. A detail with a bauta:

I went back to the Palais Royal to see about the pictures in the bookshop. Although the shop was supposed to be open, the gnome-like elderly proprietor was sitting at a desk discussing something with a woman and told me to come back in an hour. Of course, monsieur; I’ve got nothing better to do than wait around in the cold for you to feel like selling me something. Looking for a warm place, I chose the Belle Epoque patessirie Au Panetier on the Place des Petits Peres:

With decor like that, I expected it to be expensive - but it wasn’t, and my hot chocolate came with a bite-sized chunk of delicious moist chocolate cake. I went to a supermarket, then back to the shop, which by then was open. The gnome greeted me with a somewhat guarded air. He claimed not to speak English. I did my best to communicate my interest in the illustrations. He told me they were 18th century, 60 in all, for E2400. Well, I only wanted one, not 60, which by my calculations would be E40 - or a bit more, given that I’d be buying it sans bulk discount. But no, he wouldn’t break up the collection, it had to be all of them or none. Suddenly revealing the ability to speak some English after all, he said they were rare and the price wasn’t expensive - which may have been true, but it was useless information to me. I hope he finds someone who wants the whole lot, and that he lets them into his shop.

In the evening I talked with Adri, who turns out to be from Morocco. He waxes lyrical about Marrakech, which we never got to when we went there. (Fed up with the whole country, we retreated to Gibraltar and then to England.) But I’d like to try the Moroccan adventure again. He gets me to deal with an English-speaking customer on the phone, and we chat a bit. He’s been very good to me, even giving me free breakfast one morning. He complains about the guy who mans the desk in the mornings (a stickler for rules who hates the guests using the microwave etc., as I found out a couple of days ago.) As ever, Joe is around:

I went looking for the four houses in Paris where Isidore Ducasse lived, all of them in the streets north of the Palais Royal. The old buildings are gone. In one of the new buildings there’s a toy shop where you can buy Hello Kitty suitcases and Barbapapa lamps. I could imagine the deathless Maldoror going around destroying all of his creator(?)’s former habitations, erasing further the already nebulous traces of his brief and virtually undocumented life.

Wandering around, I found this door knocker:

This udderly intriguing lamp:

Joan of Arc:

A giant golden snail:

A taxidermist’s (stuffed lions not shown here):

And the Michelin Man:

He was in a shop in the Galerie Vivienne, which is a very attractive old arcade, though not on the scale of the Passage Pommeray. It runs off Rue Vivienne just north of the Palais Royal, which has two fountains like this in its courtyard - they brought back nostalgic memories of playing with ray tracers:

The Serge Lutens boutique in the palace’s arcaded cloister is a hushed, intimate cave decorated in varying shades of dark, dusky purple, with astrological motifs around the cornices and an atmosphere that made me think of a night of genteel bondage under a wisteria bower. The staff stand behind small tables on which the seductive bell-shaped bottles of eau de parfum are arranged, with papers already saturated for you to sniff. No hint here of a sales pitch. I appreciated the way the woman who served me offered to paint some on my skin before I even asked, and actually suggested that I go outside and wear it around for a while. My only small quibble was that there were no coffee beans to sniff between samples.

After much deliberation, I decided to try out Fumerie Turque, Cuir Mauresque, Muscs de Khoublai Khan and Tuberose Criminelle. I tried them on two separate days, one on either wrist each time. Cuir Mauresque was suave and, while very leathery, we’re talking super-soft leather. I immediately loved it, but my initial thought was that although it’s a unisex perfume I’d probably rather smell it on someone male than wear it myself. It held its complexity well and was still going strong seven hours later. Fumerie Turque was gorgeous, romantic, decadent and smoky, so I was surprised when I didn’t completely fall for it, especially as its longest-lingering note was Peru balsam, one of my favourite scents. Too feminine? I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I like to smell a hint of the devil in a perfume, and what I smelled in this one was a hookah, a feather boa and a box of old photographs - intriguing things, but not exactly satanic (whereas Mephistopheles might wear Cuir Mauresque).

I’d read one review of Muscs de Khoublai Khan calling it ‘eau de unwashed horse-warrior of the steppes’, while someone else found it completely inoffensive. Amongst those noses that pick up strongly on the animal (or manimal) smell, some love it, some hate it. I was prepared to love it, but my nose had other ideas. Yes, there was a puff of zoo aroma when it went on, as well as a strong blast of floral musk. However, it soon settled down to something that makes me think of a home for retired schoolmistresses - cloying musk and a whiff of litter box. I didn’t actually mind it, but I don’t especially want to smell like this, either.

Tuberose Criminelle started off as a gothic Lolita on the run – the loveliest tuberose I’ve ever smelled, overlaid with burning motorbike tires and a whiff of gasoline. This one also settled down quickly. The bike departed, leaving the flower and a faint presence of latex. Tuberose is a fragrance I adore, but it always goes revolting on my skin. This one didn’t, and it certainly smelled divine, but I wanted the naughty girl from the beginning to stick around.

These are all beautiful perfumes, but none of them is for me. I’ll have to stick with Bulgari Black and Timbuktu - or try Dzongkha when my current bottle of Timbuktu runs out. I also want to try some scents from BPAL - Laurie’s word-pictures have made me hanker to sample a few of their wares, especially Golachab, the one named after the same Qlipoth as Gwynn’s sword.

Would someone brew up a Maldoror perfume please?

I ended up not going to the Louvre. I went looking for engravings by Francois Houtin, but didn’t have any luck. I know I could buy one online, but there’s no fun in that. I’m funny about buying art. I don’t just want the image, I want to find it in the right way, as I’ve mentioned before - I have to hunt something down, or be surprised by a sudden discovery, and I definitely want to see the object itself before I buy it. Even its location matters. I have to like the gallery or shop and its staff; I probably have to have had the right thing for breakfast and have the right tune going around in my head before I can think of buying art. I’m reduced to saying ridiculous things like this because I can’t explain it properly even to myself. It’s as if I either have to make a conquest or be conquered, and if the environment isn’t right I’ll back away from whichever of those might have happened. Which is a pity, because when I first came across Houtin’s work a few years ago in The Decadent Gardener I could have afforded it, but it’s more expensive now. But even if I found an engraving at the older price, I wouldn’t order it off the net. Maybe I’m just stupid.

I wandered through the Latin Quarter, back to the Jardin Luxembourg to visit Watteau again and take more pictures, and back again through the Latin Quarter, which looks like a good place to eat. However, I don’t much like dining out by myself in cities, where the presence of so many people can make even the nicest food seem unappetising without the prospect of company (whereas in off-season St Malo I felt completely different and happy enough on my own). Therefore, I’ve been making a lot of picnics out of Chinese takeaway or just fresh bread and tomatoes, eating anywhere duting the day and in my room at night. Today I bought cakes at a South Tunisian patisserie as well. The French cakes look scrumptious, but almost too rich, and as I think I can imagine what they’ll taste like they don’t tempt me that much. However, I’ve never had Tunisian cakes and couldn’t guess what they might be like. These ones are delicious, especially a kind of shortbread flavoured with pistachio butter - it has a lovely nutty, smooth fat taste, and isn’t too sweet. It makes a nice couple with the pear brandy, which is almost finished as of this post (gulp - or should that be ‘hic’?).

I’m rather partial to hotel room picnics, probably because I’m partial to hotel rooms. You’re warm and safe and snug in a hotel room, and you have no obligations whatsoever. Your ordinary life is on hiatus and someone else does the cleaning. The hotel room is a Wendy house, a secret hideout, and it’s an ideal place to eat unbalanced meals at irregular times - out of paper bags, in bed, or laid out as elegantly as you can manage on a console table; either way, the sense of your own hiddenness is enjoyable.

I checked the weather forecast this morning and saw that today might well be the last day of sunshine I have on this trip. It therefore seemed a good idea to go and see the Jardin Luxembourg - the garden of the Luxembourg Palace, originally built for Marie de Medicis, mother of Louis XIII. The French Senate sits there today. I went via the Jardin des Plantes (Botanical Gardens), where I found…well, if you ever played D&D, you probably remember gold dragons, silver dragons, copper dragons etc. Meet the amiable recycled aluminium (and other material) dragon:

I walked west, wondering if the sun would come out. It did, soon before I reached the Luxembourg Palace. The autumn foliage in the gardens was really lovely, and urns full of flowers added further colour. Some general pictures:

The figure seen from behind the view above is the ‘Marchand de Masques’, the ‘Merchant of Masks’. The masks belong to French writers, composers and artists, including Hugo, Corot, Berlioz, Dumas, Delacroix and Barbey D’Aurevilley:

The garden is known for its statuary and sculpture. Marble statues of French queens are spaced around the terrace above the formal lawn, there’s a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty, and there are numerous monuments, most of them to artists, writers and musicians rather than the usual round of generals and legislators. They’re all men, as far as I could see, with attendant muses and nymphettes. Here’s Charles Leconte de Lisle with a companion from Mt Parnassus:

And here, Antoine Watteau:

I’m partial to Watteau’s paintings, and somehow I guessed this might be him before I deciphered the weather-worn name. The lady is very much a Watteau woman, perhaps a visitor to Cythera - who has lived on, as art does, and has now come to visit a memorial to the long-dead artist who created her. She lays a flower under his image, the statue of a statue, and looks at him with gentle inquiry and a subtle expectancy, as if she were thinking that he might not be past coming back to life. The sculptor, Henri Gauquie, has given her a natural, mobile presence, so that she really looks as if she has just come walking through the garden and perched herself beside the memorial bust. It looks, of course, like a scene from one of Watteau’s many paintings where silken figures loll and play around ancient statuary. Concerning this momument, sculptor and critic Lorado Taft wrote: “Gauquie, in his memorial to Watteau, has a better excuse for his playful treatment of the theme. The master of beribboned sheep and charmingly impossible shepherdesses could not be more fitly honored than by a monument of Sevres or Dresden ware. One would imagine this little lady right off from a mantelpiece.” It’s a playful treatment, to be sure, but the witty allusion has rather a dark heart. That there is only a bust, without a body, reminds us that the dead fade in memory. The dark stone for the dead man is only appropriate; he has gone out of sight, forever separated from his white marble admirer. His clothes are in a state of casual disarray, his expression intently fixed on something, somewhere - as if he’d been out walking on a windy day, his powers of thought concentrated, when death stopped mind and body in their tracks. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Watteau’s later work often smiles rather sadly (see Les Deux Cousines on this page). Chronically ill (he succumbed to tuberculosis in his late thirties), he was certainly no stranger to the presence of death hovering over life. I’m not sure I agree that his mature paintings convey a sense of life’s ultimate futility, as the Wikipedia article suggests; I do think some of them convey the sense of life’s bittersweetness and an interior, modern sort of conflict - a heroic conflict, even, if heroes can wear silk slippers - between the soul of pleasure and the reality of finite time, loss and death, when afternoon shadows lengthen across the playground: a pastel Gotterdammerung where one by one the gods die lazing, chatting, and looking for love. Reading up on Watteau later, I learned that he worked in the studio of Claude Audran, then keeper of the collections in the Luxembourg Palace, and found inspiration in these gardens and their statuary for his own paintings.
As you can probably tell, I rather fell in love with this sculpture - not least, I must confess, because of Watteau’s portait’s handsome looks. Here are two larger pictures:

And here is the famous Medicis Fountain:

As I was taking pictures I saw a very blond figure sitting beside the fountain feeding birds. It looked very much like Héléne, who was at Scylla and the dinner afterwards, and indeed it was. She told me the fountain was one of her favourite places in Paris; I could certainly see why. The sky had clouded over again and it was getting very cold. I had planned to walk through the Latin Quarter, but decided to call it a day and head back home. On the way I stopped in at Berkeley Books, an American secondhand bookshop, looking for new reading material. I picked up Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Deep Song, containing his essay on duende, which has been on my shopping list for a while. It’s going to rain tomorrow, so I might go to the Louvre - I’ll see if I’m in the mood for a major expedition.

I managed to be very late rendezvousing with Laurent Kloetzer and his wife Laure, who I met at Utopiales. I thought I’d missed them, but we found each other eventually. Our meeting place was the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Montmartre. This was a surprise for me, as Laurent had only given me the street number, 16 Rue Chaptal. It was therefore a delightful discovery to walk up the lane and find the house, the home of artist Ary Scheffer in the early 1800s, frequented by Georges Sand, Liszt, Chopin, Delacroix, Ingres, Turgenev (the liszt goes on…) I was delighted to see that the museum was presently holding an exhibition of memorabilia and art relating to the life of Pierre Loti, whose book The Desert I read while writing The Etched City. Certainly, the long stretches in Loti’s book where nothing whatsoever happens were an inspiration to me…but he writes about nothing happening with such exactitude of observation and penetration of feeling that you don’t realise you’ve just read five pages about the light changing colour on a rock until the description moves to something else, such as the pitching of a tent, and you’re shocked out of your reverie as if a gun had been fired.

A romantic figure (with pallor):

Romantics aren’t meant to smile like this, apparently:

Chopin:

On Laurent’s blog you can see a number of pictures from the exhibition, including a portrait of a bohemian bishounen by Charles Zacharie Landelle that especially took my fancy. I couldn’t work out whether this was an actual gorgeous creature that Loti also fancied, or just a picture of the general type he went for. In either case, he clearly had good taste. Apparently, for a long time people thought this was a picture of a (very flat-chested) girl (with an unusually strong jaw and solid neck):

(image from here)

Orientalism attracts a lot of criticism, and as Laurent said, people in Turkey and the other Middle Eastern and North African places Loti visited would probably have laughed at his selectively sumptuous and exotic construction of their world. However, I suspect Loti might have laughed at any reader who took his Eastern dreams for objective descriptions of reality. Foreign places can provide doorways to inner worlds, almost astral worlds, where the senses and the imagination work together to take you to your own Elsewhere. (Strange-seeming places in your own locale can do this as well, of course.) No one complains, that I know of, about the perennial romantic attraction of Venice. Everyone knows that you go there to escape into a dream for a few days or a night or just an afternoon. I’d have to congratulate anyone who can dream for more than five minutes at a stretch in modern Istanbul or Cairo. I sometimes wonder whether there might not be just a pinch of subconscious envy of the dreamer with at least a bed to lie on, in the more aggressive critical volleys against 19th century Orientalism.

After this, Laurent and Laure took me wandering around Montmarte at night. It’s a beautiful part of the city, with stairs between some of the streets, one of my favourite features in any urban environment. I saw the Moulin Rouge, now in the centre of a strip (pun unintentional, but an appropriate collective noun) of sex shops and lap dancing joints. You can go and see a cabaret there, but something told me I’d do better to keep the movie and my own idea of Belle Epoque Paris in my mind, and leave reality out of it. Laurent gave me a copy of his book Mémoire Vagabonde, which I was delighted to have, and which I’m determined to read in French.

It was a cold, grey day with rain in the afternoon, in other words suitable weather for walking around cemeteries, which I did, though not for as long as I would have if it had been a nice sunny day. I wanted to find Oscar Wilde’s grave at Pere Lachaise, but despite having a map I couldn’t locate it. While the cemetery is full of beautiful old tombs, it’s a bit too orderly for my liking. Everything’s rather upright, the sections divided by paved roads, and there’s a distinct dearth of the rambling ivy that’s a must-have accessory for a cemetery if it’d going to be really romantic. And no, I didn’t visit Jim Morrison’s grave. I did, though, shelter inside someone’s family vault to get out of the cold and the rain and have the sandwiches I’d brought.
Random pictures of tombs:

I like the middle one that looks like a little greenhouse:

Family vault / janitor’s closet:

Next I went to the cemetery near Montmartre where Isidore Ducasse, one of my literary heroes, is buried. Again I had no luck. His name wasn’t on the list of celebrities interred there, and I suspect it may be one of the fairly many with no discernible name. I did bump into Nijinsky’s grave (looks a bit like a garden gnome, doesn’t he?):

And here’s ballerina Marie Taglioni, first star of the Romantic ballet era. There’s a story that a pair of her shoes were sold in Russia for 200 roubles, cooked, served with sauce, and eaten by a group of her fans.

Some of the tombs are under a bridge:

Graveyard moggies:

More tombs (not much else to take photos of here):

By mid-afternoon it was unpleasantly cold and wet. The weather drove me back to the hotel, where the dark matter was lying on the mat:

At supper time, Adri and one of the women (I’m afraid I don’t know names) gave me tea and a slice of delicious pie with beautiful juicy raspberries in a light bed of custard on top. This may be a very simple hotel, but find me a fancy hotel where they give you free pie.

Around 1990 I read a book called Bad Voltage. It was a cyberpunk novel set in a dystopian future Paris. I loved it. It was weird, hip (I thought), and violent; it was all about music, skating (some kind of antigrav skates, if I remember right), losing your lover, losing yourself, being young, etc.; the characters and the world got to me, I read it at least three times, and kept an eye out for anything else by the author, Jonathan Littell. Nothing appeared. There were rumours that Littell was a pseudonym.

Then, yesterday, as I was searching for info on the Paris catacombs, I came across Littell’s Wikipedia entry. Blow me down, he’s recently written another book, Les Bienveillants (The Kindly Ones), written in French, and published in France this year. It’s about WWII through the fictional memoirs of an SS officer, and it has won the Prix Goncourt and the grand prix du roman of the Académie Française. Needless to say, I’m going to tell this to anyone mumbling darkly about me either taking a long time between books or planning books in non-spec fic genres.

But…in this article, Littell apparently says of Bad Voltage that ‘it was so bad and he was so young (22 when it was published) that it doesn’t count’. Yes, it was a young person’s book. I wouldn’t dig it so much if I tried to read it again now. But it was perfect for me when I was 18, and I’m glad Littell wrote it. It gave me a lot of pleasure and actually broadened my suburban horizons a little bit. I understand the impulse to want to hide your juvenilia under the bed, but I think it’s a mistake to say it doesn’t count. First of all, everything you do shapes you. Second, well, I learned this lesson a couple of years ago. I’d gone back to my old school to do a naginata demonstration. A few of my former teachers were still there, including Mrs A. I’d never been close to her; in fact, I don’t think I was ever in her class. But we got talking, and almost immediately she started telling me about her husband, who was suffering from premature senility, and who had recently gone into a care home. I didn’t know what to say apart from “I’m sorry”. You stand there squirming with vicarious despair and hope it doesn’t happen to you or yours, just as you hope to avoid cancer and horrific accidents. Then she asked me about my art. Did I still draw dragons, she asked. I used to draw a lot of dragons in my teen years, but by then I was out of my ‘wings and teeth’ period, and had chucked out a lot of my art from school in early post-adolescent fits of, well, post-adolescence. There was one particular image Mrs A. remembered - an engraving of a dragon inside a circle. I remembered it, but could hardly believe she had. But no, she said she’d always liked it, and hadn’t forgotten it. If she’d asked me at the time, I could easily have run her off a print. I suddenly wanted to find the image, so next time I was at my parents’ place I went hunting in all the places it might be. Nada. I must have thrown out all the prints, and the metal plate. What I’m trying to say here is that for a long time it didn’t count. And then it did, when I was looking, as you occasionally do, for discarded bits of yourself that the older you could find room for, and wouldn’t mind having back for whatever reason. And even if it doesn’t count for you, it may count for someone else. I’ve written a couple of stories that really didn’t mean much to me, but strangers sent me appreciative notes about them - so it would be arrogant to say those stories didn’t count at all. Even if it only counts to 1, or 2, or 2 1/2, it counts, and you’re stuck with it counting, you poor demiurge, you.