It has been raining on Montmartre all morning. The steps are slick, the tourists have retreated into cafés, and the dome of Sacré-Cœur looks, if anything, brighter than yesterday.
It isn't your imagination.
The basilica that washes itself
Sacré-Cœur was built from a limestone quarried at Château-Landon, south of Paris. When rain touches it, the stone releases calcite, a white mineral that rises to the surface. So while the rest of the city darkens with soot and time, the basilica keeps bleaching itself, a little more with every shower.
Next time it rains in Paris, it's the one monument worth visiting in bad weather.
A prison you can only see by its absence
People arrive at Place de la Bastille looking for the Bastille. They find a busy roundabout and a column, which actually commemorates a later revolution, in 1830. The fortress itself was dismantled stone by stone after 1789.
Look down instead. The outline of its towers is traced in the paving stones of the surrounding streets, and a fragment of its foundations survives in the metro station, on the line 5 platform. You end up admiring something that isn't there. There is something moving about that: a monument to freedom made of empty space.
A hill made famous by cheap wine
Until 1860, Montmartre lay outside the city's tax wall, so wine sold there wasn't taxed like wine inside Paris. Parisians climbed the hill on Sundays for cheaper drinks and open-air dancing. Painters followed, for the low rents and the light. They gave the place a meaning far bigger than its wine.
Now we go to Montmartre because they went. (To see it before the crowds, try this painter's walk at 8 a.m..)
Reading a building slowly
You don't need a guide to start. On your next walk, Paris or anywhere:
- Choose one building you pass often.
- Stop for one full minute. Look up past the shop signs.
- Find one detail you've never noticed: a carved face, a date, a balcony that doesn't match the others.
- Ask it quietly: what are you hiding?
Some of the most beautiful details in Paris were made to dress up ordinary things, like the Art Nouveau metro entrances.
You can't tell me how I feel
Before I moved here, people loved to warn me: Paris is dirty, the waiters are rude, the courtiers at Versailles relieved themselves behind the curtains. Some of it is true, some is stereotype, some is exaggeration. You can tell me all of it. You can't tell me how I feel. Knowing everything that's wrong with a city and loving it anyway may be the best beginning of all.
A letter from Paris, every month
"(letters) On Art" brings you a letter from Paris each month, with a postcard and the seasonal printed issue of "(meditating) On Art". A small piece of the city, on your doormat.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi