Paris Journal 2013 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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We walked into a church we
passed along the way. We didn’t get
down on our knees; we didn’t pretend to pray.
Maybe the preacher had a cold? He wasn’t there that day. Oh, Parisian dreaming, on such a summer’s
day! Apologies to The Mamas and
the Papas. We did walk into a church
on the rue de Lille yesterday. We’d
walked along the Seine and had a snack at a little brasserie on the corner of
the rues de Lille and Bac. The streets
of the 7th arrondissement are calm and quiet on a Sunday;
wandering there seemed like a good idea. We had gone almost no
distance at all when we realized that the Baptist church on the rue de Lille,
which we’ve passed many times, was open.
That was different. Welcoming
looking faces greeted us at the door, and with smiles urged us on,
wordlessly. Tom speculated that this
was a Korean/French Baptist church.
Korean is what their language sounded like to our ears. The language of music is
universal. Live music, contemporary
church music, was flowing down through the stairway into the entry vestibule. We climbed up one long
flight of stairs and entered a bright, sunny sanctuary. We sat and listened to a choir, an
amplified guitarist, a keyboard, and a drummer. The choir sang beautifully,
as if with one harmonized voice. The
sanctuary’s acoustics were lively. The total effect – of the sunny
sanctuary, the heavenly voices, and the rhythm section – was uplifting. When the music stopped, we smiled and left
quietly. It seemed that a church
service was about to begin, and it would be in Korean. I checked later on the
internet: our visit to the Église
Évangélique de Toutes les Nations at 48 rue de Lille was as the 2PM worship
service in Korean was about to begin.
The church also offers a service in French at a different time. We walked on down the rue
de Lille and made our way over to the rue de l’Université, which changes
names to the rue Jacob at the boundary of the 7th and 6th
arrondissements. We window shopped all the
way down the rue Jacob to the elegant and quintessentially Parisian Place de
Furstenberg. We stepped into the courtyard
of the Delacroix museum to admire some restoration work that had been done
recently. Back out on the Place, we
saw a couple of groups of people on one of those scavenger hunts. A bas
relief on one of the walls on the Place was evidently on the list of
things to find. Here it is:
We walked on to the square
in front of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. We heard what we hoped we would hear: the music of La Planche a Dixie, a swing
jazz ensemble. Christian Giovanardi, the
percussionist, is the leader of this group, so he is Tom’s “homologue.” (For those of you who may not know, Tom –
my husband – is the drummer, founder and organizer of Island Jazz, a group
that plays on Sanibel Island in the winter.) La Planche a Dixie sounded
better than ever. A soprano sax player
was there in place of the clarinet player we’d heard in the past. That soprano sax guy was superb. We listened to them play
for a while. They played one of our favorites: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that
swing” – a great tune with an ungrammatical title. Then it was time to walk
down to the Luxembourg Gardens. We had
to be there before 4PM, so we could participate in a photo op to wish
President Obama a happy birthday. The
event was in front of the small Statue of Liberty. Only six of us showed up,
but that was fine. Kim, who thought up
the idea, made a cute “happy birthday” sign which we propped up on the bushes
in front of the statue, while Roniece took our photo.
I told Roniece, who is from
New Zealand and Australia, that she is an “honorary American.” She liked that. She’s never been to the U.S. The photo was sent to the
Organizing for America group, and I hope the president will see it. When President Obama came
to Paris shortly after he was elected the first time, one of the French journalists
who interviewed him asked if he would like to stay longer in Paris. He was here only for a day or two. He answered, “I don’t know
anybody who wouldn’t want to stay longer in Paris!” Great answer. I first met Barack Obama
when he was a Senator, and people were just starting to say, “wouldn’t he
make a good presidential candidate!” The very small gathering in
which I met him was organized at the last minute at the Sanibel Harbor
Resort, where he was attending a conference for the sales staff of his
publisher. His book, The Audacity of Hope, was about to be
released. He was amazingly real and
down to earth; not the least bit phony or superficial. He was a great listener, and incredibly
knowledgable on just about any topic anyone brought up – and he had no
preparation for this gathering. He was
impressive. And now both he and I look
so much older. Those birthdays will do
that to you. I hope he had a fine,
happy birthday. Maybe someday after his
presidency, he and Michelle can come to Paris for his birthday and stay much
longer than a day or two. After the photo session, we
stood around and talked for a while.
Roniece’s friend Olivier came by.
I especially enjoyed meeting him.
He volunteers along with Roniece at the American Church on Fridays,
preparing and serving lunch to the needy. Later, Tom and I strolled
across to the café and bandstand part of the Luxembourg Gardens. An electrical outage had the café closed
for the day, and so we thought the concert scheduled for 6PM probably would
not happen either. There was no sign
of any activity on the bandstand, even though many people occupied the chairs
that were scattered all around it. The
people were there for the shade provided by the stately, mature trees in that
part of the gardens. After a brief rest in the
shade, we decided to take the metro back over to our neighborhood, and then
figure out what we’d do for dinner. We were closer to the Odéon
station than the Mabillon station. We
walked around the Odéon national theatre and up a few blocks to the
station. Once inside, we realized what
we’d forgotten: it is a long, circuitous walk through the bowels of that
station to get over to the line 10. We
should have walked over to the Mabillon station. It would have taken less time. The train almost emptied by
the time we reached our neighborhood, where the shops are mostly closed on
Sundays. Our neighborhood was sleepy;
the 6th arrondissement was busy. But there’s always a bakery
open. Our favorite one, the organic
bakery that has good, traditional baguettes and is located very close to the
metro exit was open, so we bought a fresh baguette. Then we walked down to one of the Chinese
carryouts to buy dinner. After a long day out, it
was nice to dine at home. It was a
perfect summer evening for opening all the doors and windows. A gentle breeze wafted through the rooms as
we dined leisurely on what turned out to be far better Chinese food than we
expected. After dinner, we had plenty
of time for reading. I continued with
Professor Colin Jones’ “biography” of Paris, which I am still enjoying, but
I’m far enough along in it now to know that it has a serious flaw, in
addition to some more minor mistakes. After spending much time telling
his readers about the French economic situation of the 1300s, 1400s, and
1500s, he does not even mention one of the factors that allowed Paris to
“improve” economically in the next few centuries: slavery in the French colonies. Many beautiful buildings
were built with money made on the backs of slaves. Haiti, in particular, was an enormously
profitable colony for France. Slavery
was particularly brutal in Haiti, where French plantation owners figured out
that it was less expensive to work a slave to death and buy a new one than to
allow slaves to procreate. Horrible. Professor Jones does not
address this reality, but then he has that European blindness about this
subject (he’s British). So may times
I’ve noticed Europeans seem to think that slavery was an American problem. Slavery was instituted in
the New World by Western Europeans, long before the United States existed as
a country. In Professor Jones’
country, England, Bristol was a center for trade in which slaves from Africa
were trained to be household slaves before being sent to America. It is illegal to deny the
Holocaust in France; I understand and support that law wholeheartedly. But it is wrong for
Europeans not to take responsibility for instituting and profiting from
slavery in the New World, even well beyond the time in which they banned it
within their own borders. I wish our founding fathers
had the courage to abolish slavery when they signed the Declaration of
Independence, but they did not. It
took the bloodiest war in our history to forge a real union that would be
strong enough to abolish slavery – the slavery that was started hundreds of years earlier, by Europeans, in
a territory that many Europeans had immigrated to in order to find their own
dreams and freedom. C’est ironique. |
Monday, August 5, 2013
Walking
along the riverbank of the Seine has never been more fun.
Large
blackboard recently installed on the riverbank, for the amusement of the
masses.
Some
people are more talented than others at the blackboard.
This
new café on the riverbank has lounge chairs.
Kids
“climbing” the wall on the riverbank.
Thomas
Jefferson, a slaveowner who signed the Declaration
of Independence. His statue stands by
the Passerelle Solferino,
near the French Legion of Honor.
Looking
toward the Pont Alexandre III from beneath the Pont
des Invalides.
Photo
exhibition on the riverbank.
A
new structure that provides steps down to the riverbank, places to sit in the
sun, shade, and shelter in case of rain.
Lamp
in the Place de Furstenberg. |
