Plaster and Stone

There is a theme about Paris that I’m starting to pick up on, and that is pretty much that no matter when people are living there, they always wish that Paris was the same as it was in the past, and I don’t think I ever really understood this seemingly universal disillusionment before this week, especially studying Bauldelaire. During the course of his life, Paris underwent a very wide variety of social, political, and architectural changes that Bauldelaire general considers in his poetry to be worse than what came before it. He speaks especially of the constant construction sounds disrupting things that used to be stable, and new plaster buildings covering up the stone monuments of ages past. I think I originally read this as a phase of construction that had started at one point and was eventually completed to transform Paris into the city in which I live today. However, upon touring areas of Bauldelaire’s Paris with this new lens, I realized that this construction culture is a way of life that is continuing today. There was scaffolding almost exactly as Bauldelaire had describe some 150 years previous right next to one of his former residences, and even blocking some of the buildings we had set out to see. Not that I am disillusioned with Paris yet by any means, but it was interesting to see how studying poetry was able to give me an entirely different perspective on that part of the city and what it might have been like before.

The weather was gorgeous this week (hardly any rain compared with the two weeks prior) and so I got to take advantage of that by visiting several gardens. The two most significant visits were the Jardin du Luxembourg, which houses the French Senate, and the Monet gardens in Giverny. While both were huge tourist destinations, they were both amazing, and very different from each other. They shared, however, a much more relaxed pace than most of Paris.