close encounters

17 October

My street, Notre-Dame des Champs, is long, narrow, crooked, and very old. As its name suggests, it dates to a time in the Middle Ages when it bordered the fields; likewise, more recently, the nearby Boulevard Montparnasse once marked the edge where country and city met. According to old guidebooks Parisians as late as the Second Empire would repair there of a Sunday for recreation and country air. The name of my café, the Bal Bullier, recalls one of the open-air dances that regularly took place here. At another of these lieux de plaisance, the Grande-Chaumière, just across the street from where I write these lines, in 1845 the Can-Can was invented. There ought to be a plaque.

I can't recall if it was Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin who  remarked that the essence of the urban experience is the incongruity of chance encounters, and the effet de choc that these routinely cause the city-dweller. One of the most incongruous juxtapositions I have encountered anywhere in Paris lies just at the bottom of my street, where it meets the boulevards. There at the corner sits the Closerie des Lilas, a famous old restaurant dating to Montparnasse's quasi-rural past. And there in the little square just in front stands the statue of le Maréchal Ney, Napoléon's most celebrated commander. The Closerie, as its name suggests, is completely enclosed by a tall green floral hedge, a singular fact that gives it an air of bucolic tranquillity despite the busy boulevard. Marshall Ney, on the other hand, stands in an agonized posture, his neck twisted sideways and his sword poised over his head as if to decapitate some aggressor approaching from behind. One struggles to imagine what these two landmarks can possibly have to do with one another--did M. le Maréchal fail to make a reservation? Was the Suprême de canette "vigneronne" avec galette de pommes de terre aux cèpes not prepared to his taste?--yet there they are, sharing en permanence the same little piece of Parisian sidewalk.