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.