5/8/2023 0 Comments Regress vs digress![]() ![]() ![]() He described to me how each day he circulated through the older part of town, down the vaulted streets paved in polished white marble. An anti-Cartesian swarm of humanity conferring existence on one another. The streets are lined with pedestrians moving through narrow, winding streets like electrical current, young women, be-sneakered garçons on their cells, smartly dressed middle-aged couples, tiny old ladies with enormous straw bags, jabbering foreigners, dog-walkers, baby-strollers, nomads, all of them smoking, texting, queuing for crepes, pizza, roasted chestnuts, flowers. Later he told me that in France he felt as though he were always about to fall.ġ1:30, Montpellier. He said the roundabouts reminded him of the merry-go-rounds of his childhood, especially on one occasion when he fell from a wooden horse. He wrote: the right side of her face has been darkened by time. To see her on this narrow street, you need to arch your neck until it hurts. ![]() The Virgin Mary, the patron of the Blue Penitents, is standing high on a pedestal atop the façade of the church, where she commands a lofty post, fixed in a gesture of greeting only pigeons can hail. Except on Sundays, every winding street in Montpellier is clogged with pedestrians and scooters. He wrote: It’s Friday afternoon and the bells of Saint Denis are ringing the noon hour. He told me about the Royal Chapel of the Blue Penitents, hidden between a lingerie boutique and an upscale shoe shop where sneakers go for 300 euros a pair. On this trip I’ve pursued them with the curiosity of a stonecutter. He wrote me: I have been around France several times and now only old stones still interest me. Did you know that the largest plane tree in France is at Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert? By the end of the nineteenth century, France had as many as three million plane trees now there are less than two hundred and fifty thousand. Albert Camus drove into one on his way to Paris on a cold and foggy morning in January of 1960. Nearly one in every ten road deaths involves a collision with a tree.Ī French Minister, whose constituency vowed revenge against the tree that ran into a motorcyclist, declared plane trees were a public danger and should all be chopped down. Today, the trees are blamed for fatal traffic accidents. He said they were originally planted by Napoleon to provide shade for his troops from the heat of the mid-day sun. He described to me how the plane trees, with fat trunks and scaling bark, form great leafy canopies arching high above the winding roads. He wrote: southern France is a region crisscrossed by grapevines and plane trees where old shrines and abbeys rise up like grain elevators in Kansas, when you least expect them. For a brief moment I imagine him as a statue, a religious sculpture that has been stolen from its niche and set on this marble-paved street as a provocation. He kneels exactly in the manner of aristocratic donors portrayed in 15th-century religious triptychs, only he has on Air Jordans and a leather rucksack. His posture is so precise and formal that he could be caste in a medieval play. No older than twenty, he is white, healthy and comfortably middle-class, but he is seeking charity, s’il vous plait, with the intent and conviction of Joan of Arc. He wrote: a young man is kneeling on Rue Jean Moulin with a cardboard sign that reads SVP. He contrasted the panhandlers of New York to their French counterparts. With studied disinterest, the French pretend not to notice, even though they are walking to the beat of “Bamboleo.” ![]() Tonight, a trio from the Camargue is performing a rumba-styled tune in the large square. Summer evenings are roused by the music of Romany, the raw sentimentality of which confronts the fastidiousness of the French bourgeoisie with a flagrant challenge. I’m just back from southern France, where the air is filled with the sound of gypsies. ![]()
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