Believe it or not, I was once young.
And as a young man, I dreamed of coming to Europe.
It sounded – Europe did – like a much more sophisticated place than where I grew up, out in the middle of the Arizona desert.
But I figured I’d never be able to visit.
My college-dropout-cum-barista salary didn’t allow for a lot of lifestyle indulgences.
Then, when I was 21, my dad sold his house, and wanted to use some of the extra money to go to France and Spain.
He invited me to come along as a travelling companion, and I accepted.
So in the summer of 2004 we flew to Paris, stayed in the 17th arrondissement, and then used Eurail passes to travel on to several other cities: Lyon, Montpelier, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid.
Young Mr Chorizo didn’t know it, but his life was about to change.
Because a few weeks later, he was back home, and things began to fall apart completely.
Soon he (or, more first-personally, I) decided that rather than continuing to participate in that desert train wreck any longer, he (or I) could scrape together the money to get one more plane ticket to Europe.
There, perhaps, he/I could live briefly, and intensely, and die poetically, like the great poets of yesteryear.
I counted my dollars. The plan could work, as long as I didn’t care about coming back. And I didn’t.
Such was the state of mind of your narrator the first time he went to Europe, now more than 20 years ago.
A Spanish-American in Paris
Things are different these days.
Mr Chorizo, who I will will henceforth be speaking about mostly in the first person, now lives in Europe full-time.
I even have a European citizenship – my Spanishness is legally recognized, and gives me the right to live anywhere in the entire EU. The whole thing is quite sophisticated. I’m practically a local.
My wife Morena had been wanting to go to Paris for some time, because of the romance. And finally, feeling a bit romantic myself these warm spring days, I agreed to take her.
And so, 22 years later, I end up back in the 17th arrondissement, in a much better state of mind.
Not only that, but I now have a lot more worldly knowledge, and context about what I’m seeing – and access to Wikipedia.
What follows is a series of observations about Paris, the City of Light. The City of Love. The capital of France and (perhaps) of all Western Civilization. Maybe call it Random Thoughts: Paris Edition.
Arc de Triomphe and the Peninsular Wars
Barcelona has an Arc de Triomf – it’s an impressive bit of modernist architecture.
But it doesn’t celebrate any specific triumph.
Paris’ Arc de Triomphe is supported by four huge columns, each of which celebrates a different series of victories by the French military.
The column that I can read, from where I’m standing, has a long list of Spanish cities on it.
Or, more accurately, a long list of French spellings of Spanish cities. There’s La Corogne and Valence and Saragossa – that’s A Coruña and Valencia and Zaragoza, respectively – along with several others, including the Catalan cities of Vique (Vic) and Lérida.
This was all part of Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, which lasted from 1808 to 1814.
A listener asked me, a few months ago, if there’s any noticeable anti-French sentiment here in Spain. I said no. Some people might consider the French a bit annoying, but I’ve never gathered that there’s some long-standing resentment about the Peninsular Wars.
In fact, this is the first time I’m hearing about the Battle of Vic.
I’ve been to Vic several times, it’s about an hour and a half by train from Barcelona. There’s no huge monument to the struggle against Napoleon. And generally, people aren’t talking about things that happened in 1810 anyway.
The Battle of Vic pitted a Spanish force under General O’Donnell against a French army, out on the plain in Central Catalonia. The French cavalry overwhelmed the Spanish, who fled. O’Donnell – of Irish descent – was the uncle of the more famous Leopoldo O’Donnell, who led a coup later, in 1856, installing himself as President.
Also, according to Wikipedia, the city of Lleida (or Lérida) has been under siege at least nine times in its recorded history. The 1810 siege lasted about two weeks, and ended in a defeat for the locals – that’s why it’s on the list of French triumphs.
The Louvre and Parisian architecture
The taxi driver gets us to the Lourve 5 minutes before the time on our ticket. It costs us an arm and a leg, because of the FreeNow app’s variable pricing. But apparently flagging down a taxi at rush hour on a Friday isn’t some easy task.
The architecture along the way to the museum is awe-inspiring. It’s hard for me to imagine anybody, at any time, caring this much about their city.
But I guess none of this was done democratically, or achieved by committee. If Louis XVI or Napoleon wanted to build huge monument to his own ego, he could just make it happen. Who’s going to say no to an absolute monarch?
In a republic, like the US, the courts can stop the president from building a ballroom. Do we really need all this decoration at the White House? How much taxpayer money are we spending on gold leaf, exactly?
So, we go on vacation to marvel at the elaborate architecture elsewhere.
Inside the Lourve, we follow the signs towards the Mona Lisa, and then towards Venus de Milo.
What makes those two works more important than anything else here I couldn’t tell you – I enjoy paintings of the Virgin Mary quite a bit these days. And the Jacques-Louis David painting Leonidas at Thermopylae is quite striking as well (despite all the male nudity, or perhaps because of it.)
But the painting that sticks with me this time is The Coronation of Napoleon, also by Jacques-Louis David, which shows the scene inside Notre Dame on the day Napoleon was crowned.
As Pope Pius VII and others look on, Josephine kneels, and Napoleon holds up the crown.
Apparently, he’s about to place the crown on Josephine’s head, but the original concept was that Napoleon was to be painted crowning himself, which in fact, he did: the Pope handed him the crown, and he placed it on his own head.
Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral
The next morning I’m up early for the 8:30 mass at Notre Dame cathedral.
Actually, I’m up a couple of hours early, so I catch the metro towards the center, and then walk the rest of the way, looking for coffee. Nothing seems to be open at this time, but eventually I find a churro and hot dog stand with a Lebanese guy who makes me an espresso allongé in a tiny paper cup.
After that, I walk into the cathedral. There’s a black priest giving a speech around the baptismal font near the entry – it’s all in French, which I barely understand, but he’s young and he’s got a charisma about him.
After a few minutes, he leads everyone back to sit down near the altar. Mass being approximately the same in every Catholic church, I’m able to understand some of it.
The mea culpa has a few familiar lines: “Je confesse à Dieu tout puissant … que j’ai beaucoup péché, par pensées, par paroles et par actions.”
The Lord’s Prayer as well: Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain de ce jour. Pardonne-nous nos offenses. Et ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation, mais délivre-nous du Mal.
After mass, I make the tour around the cathedral. It looks great after the 2019 fire and subsequent repairs, but you can still see some scaffolding here and there.
Behind the altar, there’s a giant gold sunburst that contains Jesus’ crown of thorns, and a piece of the true cross. The crown was acquired by King Louis IX in 1239. The thorns were all broken off over the years and distributed as gifts.
Nearby Saint Chapelle costs some money to get in, but I go with Morena later that morning – it’s all stained glass on the inside and truly spectacular.
French Cuisine in Paris
The restaurants of Paris have a definite aesthetic.
Colorful interiors, upholstered chairs and booths, lots of mirrors, tiny round tables crammed together outside on the sidewalk.
A waitress near Notre Dame serves me a tiny cup of coffee next to a tiny glass of water after mass. I guess that Americans coming to Europe for the first time find this vaguely ridiculous – everything is smaller in France.
Then there’s the food. My main concern, food-wise, is getting enough protein at every meal. So if you take me to a French restaurant, I’m probably ordering the steak. Unfortunately, all the steaks are very small – about the size of my palm.
I try to fill up on freedom fries, salad, and bread, and end up just feeling sluggish. Morena’s a bit disappointed as well. Although to be fair, the ingredients are high quality, and things basically taste good.
It’s like a slightly better version of Spanish food, but more expensive and served in smaller portions. Underwhelming, most of the time.
Elsewhere, we have a bad South Indian dinner, and a good meal of Chinese noodles at La Taverne de Zhao – but that’s not really typical French cuisine.
The best French meal we have is at Prout-Prout (which apparently means something like “hoity-toity”). I would recommend the tuna croquettes, but I also get the idea it’s a place where the menu changes frequently.
The culinary highlight for both of us was an impulse buy: pâté en croûte that I got at a little charcuterie. That’s liver and fatty meats with beef gelatin, baked into a pie and served at room temperature. It’s much better than it sounds (or looks).
Famous Graves at the Cemetery of Montmartre
On Saturday afternoon, Morena goes to meet a friend who’s now living up here in Paris.
I head off to see some famous graves.
When I was a teenager, it was well-known that Jim Morrison’s grave was here in Paris, and that American tourists would come out to leave gifts in front of his tombstone. But Morrison died 55 years ago, in 1971, and his most ardent fans are probably in their 70s these days. I don’t know if his grave is still attracting pilgrims.
Anyway, that cemetery is an hour away by metro. Instead, I end up at the cemetery of Montmartre, where I wander between stone monuments to people I’ve never heard of.
There’s Louise Weber, known as La Goulue, who worked on the development of the can-can. Once called the Queen of Montmartre, she performed at the nearby Moulin Rouge. (She ended her days alcoholic and destitute, selling peanuts on a Montmartre streetcorner.)
There’s Alexandre Dumas fils, the illegitimate son of the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. (He – the son – was a novelist, too, but not as well known as his father.)
There’s Michel Foucault – the physicist and inventor of a large pendulum that’s hanging across town in the Pantheon. And François Truffaut, the filmmaker and pioneer of French New Wave cinema.
All that information I just got from Wikipedia. I may recognize names like Foucault or Truffaut, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about them.
Finally, I find the grave of the only name I can attach some biographical data to: Edgar Degas. (The tomb just has the name of the famille de Gas, and a little portrait of Eduard with a signature under it, rendered in bronze.)
The only problem is, when I look up Degas later on, I realize I wasn’t thinking about Degas at all. Eduard Degas painted young girls dancing, I’ve seen one of his famous paintings at the Met Gallery. But on this journey to find his grave, I was thinking of a surrealist painter. Maybe Kandinsky.
I google Wassily Kandinsky to find out. Nope. Not him either. Eventually, I realize that the picture I have in my head (and wrongly associated with Edgar Degas) is I and the Village, by Marc Chagall.
Welp, that’s enough high culture for today. Sorry, Degas. Sorry, Chagall and Kandinsky.
Napoleon and Joan of Arc
Years ago, I read that crazy people in the 19th century often thought they were Napoleon.
Not literally, I assume – but grandiose narcissists in those days might imagine themselves to be great men of history, above the law and common conceptions of morality.
Raskolnikov in Dostoyevski’s novel Crime and Punishment is an example. He’s a great admirer of Napoleon, who decides he’s free to invent his own version of right and wrong. When he kills two women with an axe in a sordid scene, he’s feeding his inflated self-image. He thinks he’s a superior being.
The point of the article about people imagining themselves to be Napoleon was that different times create different sorts of crazy people. Which brings us to Joan of Arc.
Plenty of people hear voices. Not all of them benevolent.
Joan of Arc, around age 14, started hearing voices that identified themselves as Saints Michael, Margaret and Catherine, and they were telling her to go to Charles VII and announce she was the liberator of France.
The future king believed her, oddly enough. I suppose in those days, young people having visions wasn’t completely out of the ordinary. And so Charles sent her to the siege of Orleans, where she rallied the troops. Apparently, it worked. A few days after she arrived, the English abandoned the siege, and the city was saved.
After that, Joan became a valued military advisor – all this was during the Hundred Years War (which lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453). Everything was fine, for a bit… until she was captured by the English.
The English thought she was possessed by the devil, and put her on trial for heresy.
Among the charges: wearing men’s clothes, and having demonic visions. She was burnt at the stake, around age 20, in 1431. (A later retrial found that she wasn’t a heretic, and she was canonized and made a patron saint of France in 1920. But by then she’d been dead a long time.)
Great (Wo)Men of History
After he crowned himself emperor in 1804, Napoleon began transforming Paris into an imperial capital, intended to rival ancient Rome in its grandeur.
And it worked. Walking around the center of Paris, on either side of the Seine, I’m stuck that this must be in some sense be the capital of Western Civilization.
What Napoleon would think about France in the 21st century, or about the state of that civilization as a whole, is an open question.
Napoleon was surely one of the great men of history – which doesn’t mean he was a nice guy. And I suppose Joan of Arc was one of the great women. The fact that they both came to bad ends is a statement on the price of greatness.
(Former Emperor Napoleon died in exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic. And Joan of Arc, as I said, was burnt alive, and died of smoke inhalation. Later her remains were burnt two more times.)
I enjoyed Paris, although maybe not in the way that other people do. The famous graves, the boulangeries, the epic architecture and the tiny steaks.
On the other hand, the Eiffel Tower is just a bunch of iron bolted together.
Barely worth the walk. Two stars.
Yours,
Daniel AKA a much older and wiser Mr Chorizo.
P.S. I know, I know, Paris is the most romantic place on earth. But I’m a bit suspicious of the whole idea of romance. Check out my article on the history of romantic love (from Exodus to Onlyfans) for more about that. And for more travel, please enjoy my articles on New York, or Kerala and South India, or my home town of Phoenix, Arizona (which I didn’t visit for many years after my life in the desert fell apart).
P.P.S. I have more random thoughts articles on here too. I think they’re pretty entertaining – although the final judge of that is you, gentle reader. Also, I have a podcast, but articles about my travels outside of Spain usually don’t become podcast episodes. So maybe you should follow the podcast too. It’s called Spain to Go and it’s on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well as everywhere else.
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