Mature Flâneur

Gray Par-ee

In November, it’s “dog weather” in the French capital.

It rains a lot in Paris in November. Not the gentle spring rains that make this city seem so romantic. No, for this foul weather, the French don’t mince their metaphors:

Il pleut des hallebardes/cordes — “it’s raining spears/ropes” (we would say, “It’s raining cats and dogs”).

Pleuvoir comme vache qui pisse — “to rain the way a cow pisses” (torrential rain).

Un temps de chien — “dog weather” (from the days when urban dogs were considered filthy and vile: a rotten, rainy, gray, cold and cloudy day).

It’s dog weather today. Enough to keep most sensible people indoors. But not me. I need my walkies. So, out I go, along one of my favorite routes, the Coulee verte, or “Planted walkway.” It’s on an old tram line that used to connect the Bastille with Vincennes on the periphery of the city. The raised viaduct runs through residential streets and parks and is planted with shrubs and flower gardens all along the route. In fact, it was the first such train-tracks-to-park-path conversion in the world.

At this time of year, the foliage is fading, the leaves are falling, the petals of the roses drop one by one upon the ground. It practically drives one to contemplate mortality, especially while one’s own hair is also fading and dropping, as if there’s a race between going bald and going gray. Ah, for the days when powdered wigs were de rigeur for men in Paris!

Yet, I’m inspired by today’s gray skies, gray buildings, gray pavement, for this month’s Globetrotter’s writing challenge is to write on the theme of gray. And so, rather than dismal, voilà, the day is perfect. All things gray are exactly what I’m searching for. Can I find the beauty in this withering world?

Along the sides of the Coulée Verte, one gets a pigeon’s-eye view of the gray residential buildings of the 12th Arrondissement. Perhaps they once were white, but the Paris air has permanently smudged them. Even so, the occasional flourishes of Art Deco and Art Nouveau remind one this could only be a suburb in Paris.

I stop at a bridge and gaze out at the main police station of the 12th. This drab building is one of my favorites in the whole city, and I never walk by without a smile, for it features along the top floor exterior a row of larger-than-life replicas of Michelangelo’s famous male nude, “The Dying Slave.”

The higher floors are residences of the senior officers, and their windows are sandwiched between the statues. It greatly amuses me to think of the officers peering out at the streets below between the abs and buttocks of this obviously erotic male art. Apparently, there was an uproar over the building design — President François Mitterrand himself had to step in and resolve it. He approved the project, but the artist had to modify the original statues — they all had to take a step to the right. Otherwise, each statue would have shown his genitalia!

Just past the police station is another cool bit of architecture: two gray buildings built right up against the old tram line, so that it looks as if the path has cut through them with a sharp knife. The edge of one is tapered into a long thin wedge, as if sliced by that person who always wants the teeniest sliver of a pie.

The Coulée verte now enters a lovely circular park, Le Jardin de Reuilly — Paul-Pernin. Formerly this was one of the main stops on the tram line. A bridge crosses over it, but before you get to the bridge, you come upon across a large silver gnomon. It sticks up about a meter high, and looks like a giant gray shark fin embedded in the concrete, surrounded by radiating lines.

At the end of each line is a Roman numeral, from I to XII; it’s a sundial — obviously not working this cloudy day, when no shadow will be cast by the sun. Because we are in France, a land of mathematical precision, the inside of the gnomon is a detailed etching that explains exactly how a sundial is designed according to the movement of the earth around the sun, and the variation of its course through the seasons (click the link to find out more).

I feel for one of the park statues as the cold weather moves in: she has nothing but a blanket to keep her warm!

Grass is still green in the park itself…lawns never really die in Paris, as it does not stay below freezing for every long. But the trees yellow and lose their leaves. Spiny seed pods also litter the ground, a symbol that tempers the beginning of winter with the promise of new life come spring.

However even as they fade, some plants in the park and along the Coulée verte do not relinquish their foliage without a struggle. They go out in a blaze of glory:

Gray Parié can’t stay that way forever. Yes, the dog weather might remain for weeks. But every now and then, it loosens its grip, and the sun breaks through, sometimes with a dramatic flourish — if you are lucky and catch the city when her whim changes, as I did on my walk back from the Coulée verte that day. It had started to rain in earnest, but then the clouds parted for an instant, and voilà, a rainbow!

***

I was inspired by the grey meditations of my fellow Globetrotters, Jody Lynn McBrien, who writes so powerfully about the grey dreariness of life in a refugee camp:

And by Serhii Onkov, who takes us on a grim tour through a “never born” town in Ukraine.

Please check out my new book about slow travel in Europe: