Paris is made up for voyeurisme. When I first came here, a long time ago, it was striking that all the wicker chairs in the brasseries were facing the street. In my mind I could hear Charles Baudelaire's poem "A une passante":
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet ;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit ! - Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité ?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici ! trop tard ! jamais peut-être !
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !
Nothing has changed in the soul of this city since Baudelaire wrote this sonnet back in the XIX century, nothing has changed since then, except that now the girls dress more casually but they are still as beautiful, mysterious and unapproachable.
Michel Houellebecq warns in his novels of the dangers of Parisian indifference as the source of all the evils of his characters.
Honestly, I am having pleasure with my Old Man's hobbys. I am back to hatching and cross hatching, I am back to reading. A couple of weeks ago, I ran into a bookshop and bought George Orwell's Upside Down in Paris and London, hillarious, and, so true..
Life is very strange, I am meeting people who has never heard about Casablanca nor To be or not to be and Gone With the wind is being rated as a racist film.
Social soft power is moving, and those, who, like me, grew up, in the fascination of Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, or Woody Allen, now we are being told that all these idols where either sexual predators or heavy smokers or slavers.
Maybe I don't want consider the fact, that, I am getting old and my world is being wiped away by new values.
Let's see.
Have a nice week and if you have a good day, frame it!
The little glimpses of Paris are always fascinating !discovery 40
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