Cité des Fleurs

I mentioned the Le Corbusier, but I think I got away with it…….

Saturday 23rd May, Paris

We went to the Cité des Fleurs. It was in the 17th arrondissement. I had been told about it by a man in a café who knew about these things. He was a good man. He drank badly but he knew streets.

The street was 320 metres long. I had walked longer streets and I had walked shorter streets and this one was in between, which is the only honest thing a street can be. There were flowers. I will not lie to you about the flowers. They were there and they were flowers and they did what flowers do, which is stand there, doing nothing, being looked at by people who have come specifically to look at them.

There were gates at each end. The gates were good gates. They were the kind of gates that open and close and I respected them for that. A gate that does not open is a wall. I have known walls. I have known men who were walls and they were the loneliest men I ever met, and also the least useful when you needed to get somewhere.

Sisley had lived here once, at number 27, and painted Montmartre from the window before buggering off to wherever painters bugger off to when they’ve finished painting.  I thought about Sisley. Then I stopped thinking about Sisley because it was making me feel things and I was saving the feeling things for later, possibly for a book, possibly for the afternoon, depending on whether there was wine.

Each proprietor was obliged, even now, to plant at least three trees in their garden.  Three trees. Someone had decided this, in 1847, with a pen, in an office, and the trees were still there, obeying. I have never been able to make a woman plant three trees for me. Or one tree. I once asked a woman to plant a small shrub and she left me for a Czechoslovakian. The trees stood there in their quiet arboreal compliance and I hated them a little.

The stone pilasters were surmounted by Medici vases in cast iron, each one of a very specific model.  I looked at one for a long time. It did not look back. This is the difference between a vase and a marlin. A marlin looks back. A marlin has the decency to fight you. The vase just sat there being decorative and I thought: this is what Europe has come to, and also: I should probably have eaten something.

Catherine Deneuve had been born here.  I did not meet Catherine Deneuve. I met a small dog on a lead. The dog looked at me in the way that dogs look at you when they know something is wrong with you but are too polite to say. It was a good dog. Honest. I liked it better than most people I have met in the literary world, and considerably better than Scott.

It began to rain. This was fine. Rain is honest. The rain came down on the flowers and the Medici vases and the gates that opened and closed and the memory of Sisley and the dog and me, and I stood in it and felt it and thought: this is a thing that is happening. This is a real thing. And then I went and had a croque-monsieur in a brasserie nearby and it was, if I am being truthful with you, which I always am, a bit disappointing.

But the bread was good. The bread was very good.