I meet Deborah at the appointed time, near the empty buses that crowd the Oyak parking lot like remnants of a faster-paced, larger-scale world. I don’t know her all that well, but her status as fellow traveler and pilgrim to Taizé ensures a positive correlation of trustworthiness, genuineness, and fun times. She is going to Paris too, to meet a friend, and, when she heard my plans, said, "Why don't you come along? My friend can show us around." So I'm at the bus, a little unsure of whether the city bus is operating and wondering why she has booked us travel on a gigantic charter bus just to get to the TGV station thirty minutes away.
"This goes to the Mâcon train station, right?" I ask as I sling my rucksack the size of a middle schooler into the crowded luggage space. "No," she says, looking confused, "this is going to Paris." I think about protesting for a minute -- I mean, I have a train ticket and won't be able to get to the station to get my money back, but Deborah has done all of this work booking us travel on a bus full of Germans... Whatever. To be with a friend headed to parts unknown is more fun. We thank the bus driver in three-word French and take our seats.
Soon, the bus begins to fill, and its occupants look at us with a mix of surprise and congeniality. I can't help but notice there are no dudes boarding, and that their language doesn't sound like any German I've ever heard. As we start rolling, and their good-humored chaperones finish a small spiel – that by the sound of it is quite profound – all of the travelers begin to sing, and I learn the answer. Instead of German, it is French, and this is a French girls' school.
I should give a narrative aside: everyone oohs and ahs when I mention "a French girls' school", but when it comes to high schoolers, I automatically put on the “counselor cloak” which loves their company, but skillfully deflects any romantic notions into vines of the rapidly disappearing French wine country. We meet friends, talk about rugby, and watch Zorro in French, although the movie keeps its random bits of un-subtitled Spanish.
Emmerich is soft-spoken, with kind eyes and a legendarily-thick – but still professional – dark beard. He is a student in Marseilles, I believe it was, but was born and bred in Paris, coming home to visit his parents and house Deborah. He knows I’m coming… well, he heard it yesterday or so, and Deborah is confident he can tell me a good – and cheap – place to stay; this is good, because I never hear stories of a “cheap” stay in Paris. Yet when we meet him he tells us there is no need for a hostel: “There are lots of rooms at my parents’ house,” he says. So for three days I live with a French family with my-age kids and dogs, eat French food, drink good, complex French wine, and otherwise feel incredibly blessed at the doors that have opened when, just earlier that day, I felt great anxiety about going alone.
We Lourve it up on the first day, venturing beneath the glass pyramids to the first home of Louis XIV, the Sun King, the short man who invented high heels. It used to be a castle or fortress before those times, surprising some of the archaeologists who have now dug it out so that we can walk, inside and air-conditioned, through the moat. I wonder if, for cardio, soldiers ever had to do laps around the castle. Emmerich says no, because what if there were crocodiles in the moat. It is a good point… even though we know there were no crocodiles in France, especially during those times, imagine the fear of attacking a castle suddenly compounded with the double fear of seeing crocodiles in the moat one has to cross… and crocodiles would have been unknown to the attackers and look triply fearsome… the thought goes into my strategic notebook for when I eventually have to defend the royal keep in a land where there are no crocodiles; yeah, it’s gonna be big.
The Mona Lisa is there, too, smiling at us from behind slightly green, photograph-proof glass. She’s in the huge corridor full of brilliant Renaissance paintings, though I am puzzled by one of St. Francis receiving the stigmata where Jesus is flying and supposed to look like a cherubim, but really looks like a six-winged eagle shooting laser beams out of his wounds into a fainting Francis’ wrists and feet. Impressive too is the Code of Hammurabi downstairs, the famous beheaded Nike statue of Samothrace, and the miles and miles of exhilarating corridors, some transporting you into ancient Assyria, others to their own well-preserved worlds.
Deborah is not happy, however, when we visit the mummified cats, or when we bring it up later. And later. And later. But the mummification process is interesting and well-documented, and I see more species of mummies here than ever before. Usually museums stick to people, dogs, and cats. But at the Louvre there are scarabs, crocodiles (whose skin is so tough you don’t need to wrap it, just remove the vitals and put them in jars), and so on. Of course, this isn’t all you’ll see at the Louvre, just as the characters in
The Night at the Museum movies are only a very tiny selection of all of the collection pieces that come alive at night, but if you want to see the world’s first piece of art – two reindeer swimming, carved on reindeer bone – then I guess you’ll have to go. I would live there if I could, for never have I seen such a fantastic jungle of art, people, and history, where you can pluck culture out of the air like unfortunate flying squirrels.
The next day is my last full one. We have a choice of Versailles or Paris, since Versailles, Louis XIV’s second palace – built to be the grandest in Europe, because the Louvre had been recently surpassed – and we choose Paris. It’s difficult to chronicle this part of the adventure, because there is just so much seen, from the church of the Sacred Heart (
Sacre Coeur) with its incredibly bright mosaic of Christ with, literally, a heart of gold – perhaps my favorite church in Europe – to Notre Dame minus the hunchback (the bells are all automated now, with no new Quasimodos, which makes both me and Victor Hugo sad inside). We stroll through many other churches and neighborhoods and all with Emmerich’s detailed description of artistic styles and where Gothic and Romantic blend in these features… the Eiffel Tower and how it was meant to be dismantled after the World’s Fair, but has persisted in all its simplicity to symbolize Paris to the world… and the whole city is preserved to an extent that it doesn’t seem that people have ever touched these statues; occasionally we see a toe chipped off of a statue on a façade of a building, but for the most part they look untouched, brilliant, as if a society of statue-protectors has been watching them for centuries and is watching us now…
We head home after a great day talking about how we will go about catching a cat to mummify. We should have done it yesterday, when we had energy, but hey, we could just try and use a net or something. Deborah squirms, we men smile mischievously.
I wanted to end it there with that image, but I can’t. By virtue of being a late post, things have percolated some, and I realize things I didn’t then. I was anxious, scared even to go to Paris by myself, especially when I heard about the price and availability of hostels, but then Parisian doors, like doors in so many places across the continent, opened, and instead of being anxious, indeed, anxious at all, Paris became one of my favorite cities in the world. Conscious of being a third wheel, I made sure that Emmerich and Deborah had friend-time to catch up and stuff, and made every effort to help his kind mother and father in the kitchen, writing them a very gracious letter as I left, but never once did I feel like an outsider, or even a surprise. I have to write this because of
my surprise, and how this reminded me of something that Peter Cross said to me back in September, when the trip was still a dream beginning to wake up, when we had just barely heard from South Lincolnshire. I’d written him about my shock at seeing how doors opened with Colin and South Lincs, how surprised and blessed I felt that we looked to be something they could really use. He wrote: “We shouldn’t be surprised about the way God works really. He has his plan and purpose and he shows it to us as and when we need to know.” Amen, brother, amen.
