Paris, 20 April 2024
Our two suitcases stand at the front door, waiting to head for the Vaucluse. One hour now, all the packing and dishwashing, and making sure the fridge has been cleaned of anything that would go bad, before we catch Bus 63 for the Gare de Lyon. Paris has a wonderful public transportation, the Metro, of course, though since Covid we have more often taken one of the many buses in all directions more or less on our doorstop - unless our destination is within walking distance, a vast circle that includes much of the centre of Paris from Peter Brooks’ Bouffes du Nord’ to the Gobelin tapestry museum in the 13th.
Yesterday, for instance, I though I’d walk to the Tuileries to check on the plot of land on the river side of the Garden to see how one of my favourite sculpure sites was doing in this season: a very lifelike fallen log (in bronze) lying across a rectangular section of ground planted with ‘undergrowth,’ as if the meticulous Tuileries had been transformed into a suburban wood - for what? 50? 100 paces? You don’t walk through it - this is not bit of forest but a simulacrum. You can, however, sit on a bench and admire it. Which I do. Before turning and returning home through the Tuileries’ lesson in mostly plane geometry.
I am betraying my Canadian northwest childhood when I say that my preferred part of the Luxembourg Garden is the southwest quadrant, designed (very much designed) as a Jardin Englais, an English Garden, whose conceit is again, natural park- and woodland, topped by a very old orchard, meticulously maintained. There are even a couple of redwoods and some Wordsworthian daffodils, recently in bloom. Lawns you can’t walk - or, God forbid, sit on. Still I have grown to like their peacefulness, a little like a pool of green. And I’ve never heard the noise of a leaf blower, though I’ve seen gardeners (lucky them) with string and special clippers trimming the edges.
May I add that The New Criterion for this month of April has one of my Leopardi translations, ‘The Calm after the Storm,’ with its wonderful evocation of the life in an Italian village after a passing downpour which sent all the village’s inhabitants scuttling for shelter.