Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-06-18 02:03 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-06-18 02:03 am
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Somewhere out there, Hugo is smiling ineffably at me.
I had a very strange day today.
It started out uneventfully enough. I slept in far too late, lingered over my computer far too long, set out with a list of museums I needed to go to, and only had time to do the towers of Notre-Dame. Which I did, and I'm proud to say the fear-of-heights dizziness didn't descend until I was on the wooden platform in the belltower. Afterwards I wandered around near Châtelet/Les Halles/Beaubourg for a while, stopped by the Théâtre du Châtelet only to realize there was no Les Mis tonight due to a Mahler concert, and so set out on another Les Mis location-hunting expedition. Current target: the convent.
According to the very smart and very well-researched people at Carnavalet who put together the Paris in the time of Les Misérables exhibit and book, the convent not only didn't exist, it was an amalgamation of two or three separate things. The everyday-life detail was taken from a Benedictine convent near the Rue Mouffetard where one of his mistresses was educated, and Hugo was originally going to set that part of Les Mis there, but his editor warned him off it due to legal issues. So he transplanted it to a completely fictional location near the Gare de Lyon and called it Petit-Picpus even though it was quite a ways away from the real Picpus. And the real nuns of the Perpetual Adoration were, in fact, in a convent that adjoined the Picpus cemetery.
I had previously made trips to photograph the various streets through which Valjean flees during the nocturnal chase from the Gorbeau tenement, and since there are no coincidences in Hugo-land, of course Valjean's route takes him right past the real Benedictine convent. So I already had photos of that. I went and got photos of the Rue Traversière near the Gare de Lyon without incident. And then on a whim, I decamped and headed off to the Picpus cemetery.
Well, I spent ten or fifteen minutes wandering around the block, seeing no sign of a cemetery entrance and wondering why the fuck I had gone all the way out there for such a tangential connection when there was possibly nothing there. This is why the Les Mis tour guide exists, so that people don't have to have moments like that. Then I found the door. It was closed, there were no opening hours posted, I pushed and it opened. Inside was a courtyard, a church, and a gate--again, closed but not locked. I felt a little bad going through the gate, since it was 9pm and the place was probably supposed to be closed, but there was no one around to scold me and I was being otherwise well-behaved. Beyond the gate was a garden, and...
...no, wait, let me backtrack for a minute. The Picpus cemetery is a two-minute walk from the Place de la Nation, and at some point en route I found out that Picpus is where they dumped the bodies of those guillotined there during the Revolution.
So I go into the garden and it is the creepiest thing I have seen since I went down into the catacombs alone. The garden itself embodies the phrase "silence of the tomb" ten times better than any of the major Parisian cemeteries. It is 9pm around midsummer, therefore dusk, there is not another human soul around, and the garden consists of nothing but walls covered in climbing roses, gravel paths around the perimeter, and a series of big open lawns. Naturally my first thought is "is this the mass grave?"
Turns out it is not, but the garden is still creepy. There are probably beautiful passages in the Brick about the creepy, gloomy silence of a convent garden, and this garden embodies every one of them. It just keeps going on and on, and finally I find the door to the cemetery. It is not an elaborate Parisian cemetery. It is mostly stone slabs covering tombs, a lot of them are broken, there's a rotting wooden cross as a grave marker somewhere. In the back are a few larger graves for nuns put to death in 1794, and yet another closed-but-not-locked gate, this one going to the mass graves. There are two of them; one has over a thousand people in it.
By this point it is going on 10pm and I am seriously worried about whether I'm going to go back to the entrance, find the gate locked, and have to spend the night with a bunch of dead nuns for company. I head back through the creepy dead-silent garden, make my way back towards the entrance, and hear something. At first I think I'm imagining it. Then I get closer and no, I am not imagining it, that is a choir singing. It sounds like it's coming from the church. The church that is dark and locked.
I have now moved beyond worrying about whether the gate will be locked, and on to worrying about whether I am unwittingly re-enacting a scene from the novel and will have to smuggle myself out in a coffin. Fortunately, though, everything is still unlocked, and as I struggle with the front door latch someone flicks on a light for me. I can't see the someone, and the windows in the doorkeeper's house are dark, but I assume for the sake of my own sanity that it was not a ghost turning on that light.
On my way back I see a very interesting-looking bird in the street, brown with blue wings, completely different from the usual Parisian fauna. It's hopping around on the pavement and obligingly holds still while I take a picture of it. A little too obligingly--and it follows me down the sidewalk and barely seems scared of me at all. Intrigued, I bend down to get a closer look at it, and it tries to fly away and I see that its wings are clipped.
Shit. There is a pet bird hopping around on the street. I cannot just leave it there, especially since the Picpus cemetery made kind of an impression on me and it would feel doubly shitty to walk indifferently away. The building bordering this stretch of sidewalk doesn't have a doorkeeper or any windows at head level, so I can't ask if anyone's lost a pet bird. And it looks very bedraggled and possibly hurt. I lean down and hold out my arm, and it only takes about ten seconds' hesitation for the little guy to step up on it. Definitely a pet, almost certainly hand-fed, looks like a baby. Tamer than a lot of pet birds I have handled. Either someone is distraught because their bird escaped, or someone is enough of an awful bastard to clip a baby bird's wings and render it mostly helpless before abandoning it on the street. What the hell am I going to do with him?
So I am standing there looking like an idiot with this bird clutching my arm for dear life and nuzzling up to me, and this girl passes by with her bike and her dog. And let it never, ever be said again that Parisians are rude and unfriendly. This girl stops and says "Oh wow, he looks tame, did you pick him up off the street? Poor guy, we can't just leave him here." And locks up her bike and shows me the veterinary hospital down the street, which turns out to be closed. So she calls her mom and her brother to see if one of them can take the bird for the night, since he wouldn't be safe at her place with the dog there. The dog, it turns out, was adopted after someone him abandoned him on the beach, and this girl has a Thing about people who abandon their pets. So we take turns holding the bird until her brother shows up and takes it back home, and we exchange phone numbers so she can text me about what happens to him.
Just... wow. I am dumbfounded by how nice she was. People going out of their way to make sure an animal gets rescued when there's a convenient stranger already trying and failing to take care of it? In a big city? It's enough to temporarily restore your faith in humanity.
And it is 2am and I have to be up in three hours to catch my train to London, so thus ends this over-long post.
It started out uneventfully enough. I slept in far too late, lingered over my computer far too long, set out with a list of museums I needed to go to, and only had time to do the towers of Notre-Dame. Which I did, and I'm proud to say the fear-of-heights dizziness didn't descend until I was on the wooden platform in the belltower. Afterwards I wandered around near Châtelet/Les Halles/Beaubourg for a while, stopped by the Théâtre du Châtelet only to realize there was no Les Mis tonight due to a Mahler concert, and so set out on another Les Mis location-hunting expedition. Current target: the convent.
According to the very smart and very well-researched people at Carnavalet who put together the Paris in the time of Les Misérables exhibit and book, the convent not only didn't exist, it was an amalgamation of two or three separate things. The everyday-life detail was taken from a Benedictine convent near the Rue Mouffetard where one of his mistresses was educated, and Hugo was originally going to set that part of Les Mis there, but his editor warned him off it due to legal issues. So he transplanted it to a completely fictional location near the Gare de Lyon and called it Petit-Picpus even though it was quite a ways away from the real Picpus. And the real nuns of the Perpetual Adoration were, in fact, in a convent that adjoined the Picpus cemetery.
I had previously made trips to photograph the various streets through which Valjean flees during the nocturnal chase from the Gorbeau tenement, and since there are no coincidences in Hugo-land, of course Valjean's route takes him right past the real Benedictine convent. So I already had photos of that. I went and got photos of the Rue Traversière near the Gare de Lyon without incident. And then on a whim, I decamped and headed off to the Picpus cemetery.
Well, I spent ten or fifteen minutes wandering around the block, seeing no sign of a cemetery entrance and wondering why the fuck I had gone all the way out there for such a tangential connection when there was possibly nothing there. This is why the Les Mis tour guide exists, so that people don't have to have moments like that. Then I found the door. It was closed, there were no opening hours posted, I pushed and it opened. Inside was a courtyard, a church, and a gate--again, closed but not locked. I felt a little bad going through the gate, since it was 9pm and the place was probably supposed to be closed, but there was no one around to scold me and I was being otherwise well-behaved. Beyond the gate was a garden, and...
...no, wait, let me backtrack for a minute. The Picpus cemetery is a two-minute walk from the Place de la Nation, and at some point en route I found out that Picpus is where they dumped the bodies of those guillotined there during the Revolution.
So I go into the garden and it is the creepiest thing I have seen since I went down into the catacombs alone. The garden itself embodies the phrase "silence of the tomb" ten times better than any of the major Parisian cemeteries. It is 9pm around midsummer, therefore dusk, there is not another human soul around, and the garden consists of nothing but walls covered in climbing roses, gravel paths around the perimeter, and a series of big open lawns. Naturally my first thought is "is this the mass grave?"
Turns out it is not, but the garden is still creepy. There are probably beautiful passages in the Brick about the creepy, gloomy silence of a convent garden, and this garden embodies every one of them. It just keeps going on and on, and finally I find the door to the cemetery. It is not an elaborate Parisian cemetery. It is mostly stone slabs covering tombs, a lot of them are broken, there's a rotting wooden cross as a grave marker somewhere. In the back are a few larger graves for nuns put to death in 1794, and yet another closed-but-not-locked gate, this one going to the mass graves. There are two of them; one has over a thousand people in it.
By this point it is going on 10pm and I am seriously worried about whether I'm going to go back to the entrance, find the gate locked, and have to spend the night with a bunch of dead nuns for company. I head back through the creepy dead-silent garden, make my way back towards the entrance, and hear something. At first I think I'm imagining it. Then I get closer and no, I am not imagining it, that is a choir singing. It sounds like it's coming from the church. The church that is dark and locked.
I have now moved beyond worrying about whether the gate will be locked, and on to worrying about whether I am unwittingly re-enacting a scene from the novel and will have to smuggle myself out in a coffin. Fortunately, though, everything is still unlocked, and as I struggle with the front door latch someone flicks on a light for me. I can't see the someone, and the windows in the doorkeeper's house are dark, but I assume for the sake of my own sanity that it was not a ghost turning on that light.
On my way back I see a very interesting-looking bird in the street, brown with blue wings, completely different from the usual Parisian fauna. It's hopping around on the pavement and obligingly holds still while I take a picture of it. A little too obligingly--and it follows me down the sidewalk and barely seems scared of me at all. Intrigued, I bend down to get a closer look at it, and it tries to fly away and I see that its wings are clipped.
Shit. There is a pet bird hopping around on the street. I cannot just leave it there, especially since the Picpus cemetery made kind of an impression on me and it would feel doubly shitty to walk indifferently away. The building bordering this stretch of sidewalk doesn't have a doorkeeper or any windows at head level, so I can't ask if anyone's lost a pet bird. And it looks very bedraggled and possibly hurt. I lean down and hold out my arm, and it only takes about ten seconds' hesitation for the little guy to step up on it. Definitely a pet, almost certainly hand-fed, looks like a baby. Tamer than a lot of pet birds I have handled. Either someone is distraught because their bird escaped, or someone is enough of an awful bastard to clip a baby bird's wings and render it mostly helpless before abandoning it on the street. What the hell am I going to do with him?
So I am standing there looking like an idiot with this bird clutching my arm for dear life and nuzzling up to me, and this girl passes by with her bike and her dog. And let it never, ever be said again that Parisians are rude and unfriendly. This girl stops and says "Oh wow, he looks tame, did you pick him up off the street? Poor guy, we can't just leave him here." And locks up her bike and shows me the veterinary hospital down the street, which turns out to be closed. So she calls her mom and her brother to see if one of them can take the bird for the night, since he wouldn't be safe at her place with the dog there. The dog, it turns out, was adopted after someone him abandoned him on the beach, and this girl has a Thing about people who abandon their pets. So we take turns holding the bird until her brother shows up and takes it back home, and we exchange phone numbers so she can text me about what happens to him.
Just... wow. I am dumbfounded by how nice she was. People going out of their way to make sure an animal gets rescued when there's a convenient stranger already trying and failing to take care of it? In a big city? It's enough to temporarily restore your faith in humanity.
And it is 2am and I have to be up in three hours to catch my train to London, so thus ends this over-long post.