Pissing at the Louvre

We had not visited Paris in years, and had forgotten how it is positively bursting with culture. Out for a walk, you’re elbowing through crowds of Rodins, tripping over mislaid Canovas and Fragonards.

This problem has become so vexing for residents and tourists, that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has instituted an emergency plan to reduce the clutter. I took the picture above at the service entrance to a mansion on the Left Bank, where surplus statues were lined up with the trash for weekly pickup.

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The Louvre is the biggest museum in the world, a colossus with nearly 35,000 objects on display. Meanwhile in vaults below the Seine, and in dozens of other sites in and around Paris, more than half a million more objects moulder in the darkness and wait their turn. Thousands of waiting statues, acres of clamouring tapestries and canvases, tons of…

Too much to even think about, and too hot. So we avoided the Louvre. Instead, we found a bench in the Jardin des Tuileries, within a small enclosure of clipped hedges, and studied a bronze sculpture by Aristide Maillol. A full-figured nymph striding toward us with outstretched arms, as if to deliver a moment of grace.

We did not take delivery. For even here we were distracted. Behind our bench roared giant buses collecting and releasing crowds of tourists, most of whom seemed to disappear down a flight of stairs. Apparently there’s now an underground mall attached to the Louvre, with retail and snack options beyond the scope of the museum shop.

I went down to find a toilet. It was a long way, through echoing plazas and halls along which streams of humanity flowed in every direction. Eventually shops and restaurants appeared and I found the public toilets, guarded by a drowsy African. He said I needed a euro to relieve my bladder.

So back I went, this time with greater urgency. Back to our bench and our bronze nymph, for I no longer needed her ounce of grace, but only a solitary coin to buy relief.

Lobster on a leash

What else we did in Paris. Well, let me see… Food and drink were consumed daily, followed by long digestive strolls on wide boulevards.

We stayed at a small hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and so I managed to get in a few runs by doing circuits of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Four hundred years old, the park is vast and gorgeous. Fifty-seven acres of flowerbeds, fountains, formal promenades and playgrounds.

And everywhere in these beautiful gardens, men and women melting, slumped in the garden’s green-painted iron chairs, these chairs scattered randomly beneath ancient spreading trees.

Shade offered no relief, for Paris in September was unimaginably hot and steamy, as it is just about everywhere now. Maybe that’s a good thing. If basic fellow feeling won’t bring us together, then hellish unremitting heat might instead do the job. Like dazed lobsters making slow circuits of their tank, our prospects have merged to a single pot on the stove, now coming to a furious boil.

The white bandage

Sometimes a moment of grace does arrive, not in a nymph’s outstretched hands, but in a shop, when you least expect it.

One morning, we stepped into the relative coolness of the famed Sennelier art shop, which sits on the Left Bank, at 3 quai Voltaire. Every artist who visits Paris and breaks a pencil eventually winds up at this cluttered place, with its floor-to-ceiling oak cabinets, its countless drawers and bins, its brass fittings and creaking floor.

I am not an artist, but for several moments I followed one around while pretending not to. At least, I imagined her to be an artist. Middle-aged, thin, with colourless unkempt hair. Wearing an elegant cream-coloured linen dress, with a pattern of green fern fronds. On her feet, chic pale green sandals with tiny gold buckles, and on the big toe of her right foot, a white bandage.

This small detail, an inexplicable gash in the canvas, caused me to shadow her until the moment the artist paid for her chalk pastels and left, trailing a small cloud of question marks.