The City of Lights

Guilaine and I left our teeny tiny apartment in Rome just after dinner on Friday April 22, and hopped (as gracefully as any two ladies could ever hop with so much luggage) on a very crowded bus to the train station. From there, we caught a night train to Paris, City of Lights. I love night trains- the way they whisk you off to someplace new while you're sleeping, and how the jolt of the wheels on the rail eventually subsides into a rocking motion, and the sound of the whistle seems to be heard from farther and farther off as sleep overcomes you. Gui and I shared a compartment with a little French family. The mother and little daughter (about eight) were equally cool towards us - Mademoiselle laughed with as much derision as an eight year old can muster when I exhausted my French vocabulary asking her name, and if she'd had a good time in Rome. The first thing she said to me was "adieu" the next morning as she got off at Lyon. Her father was completely good-natured and used his scant and heavily accented English to make jokes about the Italians in the compartments on either side of us. He also nodded appreciatively and tried to encourage our pathetic attempts at French, even when Guilaine slipped into Italian (that was the last straw for Madame and Mademoiselle, who, from that point on, ruined their attempts to pretend we did not exist by shooting us dirty looks throughout the evening). We passed most of the evening in the dining car, sharing a little travel size bottle of wine and a ham sandwich made with bread so white, it probably shortened my life three or four days. When it got too dark outside to see the countryside whizzing by, we shifted our attention to making eyes at the bartender. He became more and more attractive as he proved conversant in English, Italian, French, and German throughout the night. I got another opportunity to feel ashamed for only speaking English.

The next morning I woke up because the train had come to a sudden, lurching halt. When I wandered back to the dining car, there was only one man there, who asked me in French why I was up so early. I liked him, he had a pair of twinkling, old world eyes that I found reassuring- he also was kind enough to ignore my heinous French. He was able to tell me that we were stopped  because something had been caught under the train - a piece of trash, no doubt, but I never found out. When I asked him where we were, he said, "a beautiful field just south of Lyon, and what better place to stop?" and then he left the car, presumably to twinkle at other world-weary people. The scene out the window moved me deeply, though I have no idea why: an endless field of fresh spring green waved from our track to the far distant horizon, which sloped up, and was crowned with a ridge of dark pines. A small herd of brown cows munched near the tracks, and looked at us as though train breakdowns on this track were the main component of the ennui they suffered. They were unlike Vermont cows, they had a sort of devil-may-care look about them. Without speaking, they seemed to say, "go ahead, tip me, see what happens" ... with a French accent of course. One dirt road ran perpendicular to the tracks, with a single farmhouse situated about halfway between us and the horizon. The whole scene was enveloped in early morning dew, and the fog was so thick it would have given British fog a run for its money. It made me think of WWII and phantoms of de Gaulle's Resistance fighters continued to flit across the landscape even after I shook my head and blinked. Some of them fell as they ran, cut down by Nazi bullets, and others ran on, vanishing into the mists, and still no one else came into the dining car. I was glad when we started up again. A  little later, the bar opened, and I could get a hot cocoa to help keep the phantoms away.

We arrived in Paris mid-morning, and met up with Dad at the train station. He had a huge throbbing wound on his hand, and explained with expert nonchalance, that he had been attacked by gypsies in a deserted subway station the previous night. Apparently they had trapped him on an escalator, hitting the emergency stop, and cutting him off at the top and bottom. When they went for his wallet he apparently karate-chopped at their neck, and was bitten. I can picture him him bellowing like a wounded rhinoceros at this, and I believed him when he said that he then put up such a fight that they quickly ran off, without his wallet. It really is a spectacular bite wound- all purple and infected-looking, complete with teeth marks. Luckily nothing else of that magnitude happened while we were in Paris. Gui and I allowed Dad to steer us around the city since he knows it so well already, and we benefited from his superior knowledge of good restaurants and fluent French. He was only mocked once for his Canadian accent. As in Rome, much of our time was spent wandering around and taking frequent rests at cafes, enjoying the human fauna. Highlights of Paris include the Louvre (huge line to see the Mona Lisa, but no one standing in front of the nearby Raphels- WHY?), the Garnier Opera House (box 5 has a little plaque on it that says "Reserved for the Phantom of the Opera"- awesome), some big famous Paris department stores (Gui and I got yelled at for trying on hats we were obviously not going to buy), a three hour meal at Dad's favorite restaurant, le Lyonnais (direct quote from Dad, "there is sex, there is paradise, and then, there is le Lyonnias"), and an afternoon at les Bagatelles gardens. We also joined what seemed like half of Paris at Easter mass at Notre Dame. This was a great moment for me, because I had studied the cathedral at Oxford for one of my tutorials, and I knew exactly what I was looking at- they just don't do early Gothic cathedrals like they used to. Of course, the best part of the trip was Dad's constant commentary- a mix of pure academic professorial lecturing and mildly inappropriate commentary on tourists and "grotesque" modern architecture. This is one thing I cannot recreate on a blog, not even if I had written down all that he said.

Paris was very beautiful, maybe my favorite big city of all time. The height limit on the buildings and the amount of open space make it seem more open, the air more free (despite the thick second hand cigarette smoke in the air). I loved the history and the cafe culture, and it was fun to partake of the many pretentions of that culture for the week... still, by the time I got on the plane back to Vermont, I was more than ready to breath the fresh air, and see the lake, and hug my mom and my dog- not to mention do a load of laundry. I found the City of Lights to be dazzling and refreshing at first, but stare at any light too long and its bound to become blinding.