Europe @ 2.4 km/h (32 page)

Pavel Nevzorov, one of the Moscow students met in Kem and an occasional correspondent, has fallen in love. Or at least it looks that way from this email, phrased in his characteristically expressive English, which would not look out of place in a novel.

Friday 28 September. 8.35 pm AEST

The Russian sour-colour-face was opened in a new way for me recently.

The woman I have met in August.

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world and, despite having seen some great ones these past five months, I expect it will be the best. None of the attendants cautions the camera-toting flash Gordons. When I ask one why this is he informs me that on 1 July the photography ban was lifted ‘because we couldn’t enforce it’. I start with the large-format French paintings in the Salle Daru, beginning with Delacroix’s triumphant
28 July 1830: Liberty Guiding
the People
and Jacques-Louis David’s equally memorable depiction of Napoleon crowning himself emperor.
²⁶

But for everyone who stops in front of these works there are dozens who swarm into the Salle de la Joconde to lay eyes on the world’s most famous painting. For many, it is the only one they have come to see.

Directly behind the mysterious Mona, I am confronted by an equally impressive depiction of youth in no way inferior, so far as I can tell, to what Leonardo has achieved with Lisa Gherardini.

Titian’s ‘Man with a Glove’, formal title
Portrait d’Homme
, seems to be whispering,
You want mystery? I’ll give you mystery.
Titian’s subject is more mysterious than that of the man from Vinci; we haven’t a clue who he was, only that his portrait was completed ‘towards 1520’. And it is clear that the decision of the Louvre authorities to place him behind, but facing away from, Lisa is the only possible reason the whole world passes him by.

When I come face to smiling face with the Lady herself, what hope have I of seeing what thousands of others have missed? A realistic one, it would appear, because they’ve also missed the clue provided by the young man who spends his nights with her in this darkened chamber. And, while they know her face well enough, none of her many admirers — probably yourself included — seem to have noticed her hands. Observers down the centuries have argued that her eyes pose a question, and now I think I know what it is.
I
dropped one of my gloves somewhere around here. You didn’t see anyone
pick it up, did you
? At long last her secret is out.

It’s late in the evening when I surface in the Louvre courtyard next to the famous glass pyramid, and I head straight back to the hotel because tomorrow I must be up before dawn. Time to give culture the boot. The ‘one day of September’ is at hand.

961-970 km
Cyril, the Belle Epoque’s receptionist-manager, tried hard to understand when I told him about Australian football and the significance of this day. I could only compare it with France’s hosting the World Cup of soccer, or rugby, and even then I’m sure we both missed the point.

My 5 am wake-up call left me one hour to push the 3 km to Les Halles and the Cafe Oz, which is really a bar. As I pushed across pre-dawn Paris this wet, braw morning it was hard to picture the excitement among 98,000 fans gathering at the MCG, the highest attendance at an AFL grand final in years. But that was not going to stop me from trying.

On the Rue St Antoine, which I almost missed (it’s one of eight roads that converge on the Place de la Bastille), I met a family of power walkers decked out in Kangaroos beanies and scarves, a true display of fanatical devotion since the Roos weren’t even playing today.

Perhaps 150 people, most of them wearing Geelong colours, were waiting for the bar doors to open. When they did, I secured a front-row position in return for telling those at the head of the queue what the weather would be like at the MCG today (‘overcast but no rain’), intelligence relayed by a woman at the end of the queue who’d been talking on her mobile to a friend at the ground.

By quarter-time (Geelong 5.7 37 to Port Adelaide 2.2 14) the sleepyheads who arrived closer to 7 am had brought the spectatorship strength in our own Great Northern Stand up to 250. Laconic Australian humour would announce itself from time to time. Late in the third quarter Geelong were thirteen goals ahead and streaking away when a male voice somewhere in the ruck behind me could be heard to say, ‘They’re not playing well, Port Adelaide’. Then a disappointed female spectator told a new arrival, ‘There’s been a bit of fighting but you really want a melee’. (And we say pardon the French!)

After Geelong had trounced ‘the Power’ by an all-time grand final record margin of 119 points, a result that sent this crowd delirious, I conducted my own post-match interviews. It’s more than a game for any fan who cares, but for the expatriate what is ‘more’ tugs at the heartstrings. Paul Dillon, 30, once of Swan Hill but away from home for eight years, said he felt ‘the magnetism of Australia growing stronger’ (I’ve always said we’re a lyrical bunch beneath the surface). ‘I’m going from an Australian pub in the morning to a friend’s wedding in a 13th-century chateau this afternoon,’ he told me, scarcely needing to spell out that no one back in the wide brown land would be spending the day like this. And then Paul, an instant media celebrity, did a second interview, with Natalie Vella, from Melbourne and new in town, who within weeks would be presenting contemporary Australian music to Internet users in Paris.
²⁷

In the last chapter I started to tell the tale of how drowning my camera led to a personally guided tour of Versailles. Siegfried Karbe, the friend I found through that debacle, told me that he and Ingrid had a son living and working in Vaucresson, a few kilometres from Versailles: so, before arriving in Paris, I had emailed him to ask whether we could meet up while I was here.

The royal palace with the most glittering reputation of them all was originally a hunting lodge for Louis XIII. His son, Louis XIV, transformed and enlarged it, and made it the seat of French government. We can appreciate Versailles better than Louis XIV could; its magnificence only increased during the reigns that succeeded his. Coloured marble from the Pyrenees, covered with gilt bronze, has me mentally discounting other splendours as second-rate.

In the Louis XV Room Goetz Karbe directs my gaze upwards, where the entire ceiling is covered with 142 figures in a work it took three years to execute. The preponderance of gold, porphyry and other precious substances in the Royal Chapel is so dazzling that for the first time in my life I regret not wearing sunglasses indoors. At the end of the parquetry corridor we wheel left into the Hall of Mirrors, where the First World War peace treaty was hammered out. One can imagine Billy Hughes hurling verbal mortars at the illustrious over there, as perky and pesky as a blowfly in a bottle.

And then we enter the King’s Bedroom, created for Louis XIV in 1701, where he lived and slept and gave daily audiences from his bed — those legendary
levées and couchées
. Nearly a century later, on 6 October 1789, Marie-Antoinette used the (not so well) hidden doorway in her South Wing bedroom, camouflaged by a Gobelin tapestry, to flee the bloodthirsty horde.

Afterwards Goetz and his wife, Beate, treat me to a traditional German meal and good conversation; they even suffer me to give an amateur piano recital. Then Goetz drives me back to Paris and, dismissing my attempts to conserve his petrol and time, shows me several landmarks up close. The Eiffel Tower, the Pompidou Centre, the hollow cube at La Défense known as La Grande Arche. We circle (make that circumnavigate) the Arc de Triomphe, on the world’s biggest roundabout; and at 60 km/h disappear into the Pont d’Alma tunnel where, exactly ten years and a month ago, Henri Paul sped into oblivion at 160 km/h. A great chip of concrete is still missing from the thirteenth pillar on the left, and in ten days’ time inquest jurors will come here all the way from England to inspect it too.

970-980 km

Notre-Dame de Paris didn’t need Victor Hugo to immortalise it. The most celebrated of Gothic churches would probably have lasted aeons anyway. Gloom-loving Quasimodo won’t be making an appearance on this gloriously sunny Paris Sunday, and anyway you can’t hear his bell-ringing for the deafening peals of organ music.

Today there is an Australian element to the Mass, with a guest choir from Sydney’s MLC school. Somehow I doubt that an invitation like this would have gone out to the old Methodist Ladies’ College. Rebranding works miracles.

One of the side chapels, I see, invites parishioners to partake in CONFESSIONS, DIALOGUE. Dialogue? This is very post-Vatican II. In the brilliant sunshine outside I pass dreamy minutes wandering through John XXIII Square before crossing Archbishop’s Bridge over the Seine. Then I head up the Rue St Severin, a tourist alley in the Latin Quarter, where the prevailing French impression is of a foreign legion.

I’m not wandering now, but searching — for the fabled Left Bank. The Rive Gauche, it appears, was never on the riverbank, so I head ‘inland’, wheeling in a giant circle but one that uncovers no trace of this legendary scene of cultural ferment, not to say debauch.

Towards five I make out the Cafe de Flore, haunt of Paris’s literary elite since the day it opened in 1885. Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and Picasso ate here — on separate occasions, except for the first two. A block away is Les Deux Magots, frequented by Ernest Hemingway, although he, too, could sometimes be seen at de Flore. Other habitués included Lawrence Durrell and Truman Capote, Leon Trotsky and Zhou Enlai. Brigitte Bardot is said to have preferred the terrace.

The crowded interior makes me glad I brought my own seat. The waiters, predictably, wear vests and bow ties. A club sandwich costs €17 (A$28), lemonade €8 (A$12). J-P. Sartre developed his philosophy here but, judging by the interval between my arrival and that of a waiter, today’s aesthetic preference is for non-existentialism. And it is here, now I’ve ceased to trundle after the Left Bank, that I learn why this was a futile pursuit. An article in today’s
Observer
laments that the ebb tide of independent bookshops has sent the Left Bank the same way as the Champs-Elysées which, once ‘the most beautiful avenue in the world’, is now dominated by ‘luxury goods brands or universally known chain stores’.
²⁸
It so happens that M. Herbert, a news-stall holder quoted in the article, is the boss of the vendor who sold me the newspaper. Having gone a-hunting for the Left Bank only to stumble across its corpse has come as a shock. Herbal tea at Les Deux Magots — a little cheaper there at just €4.50 (A$7.75) — will be the perfect reviver.

This evening I push from the Tuileries Gardens to the Place de la Concorde, dominated by an obelisk Napoleon’s troops stole from Egyptian Thebes and by a giant Ferris wheel, Paris’s answer to the London Eye. And then it’s a sprint up the Champs-Elysées — not completely dead while the Lido dance troupe is still kicking — to the Arc de Triomphe.

Twelve roads meet here, making the Bastille look straightforward by comparison. Choosing with care, I take the Avenue d’Iéna downhill to the Seine, directly across from a modern wonder of the world (whatever the latest list may say). However many times you have seen it on television — and at some of its most glorious moments, such as the night of the ‘false millennium’ when it rivalled even the Sydney Harbour Bridge for pyrotechnic wizardry — the sight of those Promethean steel feet splayed across the terrain will always send your senses into a spin.