Glare but not gloire

Peter Ackroyd

'The late run to the French capitol may have undeceived my countrymen in very many particulars, on which distance, the illusions of imagination, and the glare the French have the address to throw round every object, may have led them to form very erroneous opinions'. A Few Days in Paris (published 1802).

Paris I found myself in the middle of a great plain; large tower blocks, reflecting the light from each other, would have dazzled Christian and led him astray from his Progress. They receded into the distance like a modernist, more bewildering, version of de Chirico. A painted grotto and a marble hill rose in the middle distance; behind them, placed as the vanishing point in this ever diminishing perspective, was the Arc de Triomphe. The only noises were those of the escalators, running up and down with no people — for this was Sunday morning — to disturb their even motion. Bright electronic messages circulated above my head, one of them announcing a new film, La Terreur des Zombies. A sculpture of Miro's, like a great bone painted in bright primary colours, gleamed; it was the presiding deity of the place. It was elegant, perhaps a little chilling. The 19th century traveller had got it right: not gloire, but glare.

When I retreated underground, into a Metro station as large as a cathedral, I recognised the shining halls. The area is called La Defense, a modern precinct set carefully apart from the old Paris, and it was here that the opening sequences of a recent picture, Buffet Froid, had been filmed. In this filmGerard Depardieu had wandered ,in a Paris so empty of human beings that it resembled a crystal vessel, and had become involved in 'crimes de passion' without sequence and without sentiment. The film had been elegant, perhaps a little chilling.

Later that day I found myself sitting in the Café de fore. Quite without warning a middle-aged man, a few tables in front of me, let out a loud and sinister rattle, like that of a crank being turned too quickly, and fell backwards upon the floor. He may have been having a seizure; he may have been dying. The elegant middle-aged lady in front of me put up a hand to shield her eyes from the sight, looking at me for sympathy in her predicament. Some smart young men and women, immediately behind the now supine man, paused momentarily to take in the spectacle and then resumed their conversation. An elderly man to my right kept on reading his !lyre de poche. Within a few seconds the manager of the cafe, and two of its waiters, surrounded the man, as if shielding him from the censorious gaze of their clients, and propped him back in his chair.

He seemed, fortunately, to be recovering when a police van drew up outside the café; three policemen hurried up and, apparently against the man's will and despite his protestations, took him away. Perhaps they were about to take him to hospital — it was, after all, unlikely that he was being arrested • for falling ill in public. But it would have been impossible to ask anyone sitting around me since — with the exception of the manager whose dignity seemed in some way to have been impaired — they went on talking and reading, taking not the slightest interest in proceedings. They were all very well-dressed, very chic. If the furs around the middle-aged lady's shoulders had come suddenly to life and started eating her face, they would no doubt have remained calm and called for a policeman.

The Pompidou Centre is a miracle of lucidity; it resembles one of those fashionable watches with a transparent back, through which every detail of the mechanism can be seen working in unison. Transparent, tubular passageways hang from it like stalactites. It it is so constructed and designed that one knows exactly where one is — both in relation to the building and to the rest of the city — exactly what material it is constructed out of, exactly how it has all been arranged. One gets the same sensation with the Grand Palais which housed the Exhibition of 1900, and with the Eiffel Tower — when the rays of the sun strike the metal girders of the Tower, it is like looking into the mind of the engineer. Everything exists in a clear and even light.

And then inside the Pompidou Centre, within a section marked `La Galerie Retrospective du Centre de Creation Industrielle', the history of technological civilisation was marked out as if it were also part of some majestic son et lumiere. Seven separate screens glowed, severally or together, creating a symphony of information and enlightenment. Reading contemporary French literature affords a similar experience — the screens of the sentences and paragraphs glow and fade and glow again, and the world is transformed into a number of discrete theorems placed in careful relation to each other. You are continually invited to marvel at how it is being done, rather than what is being said. Outside the Centre, the travellers are propelled up and down the transparent tubes, like specimens waiting to be anatomised within some future galerie.

It is impossible to overestimate the effect of architecture upon manners. In Paris, it is something to live up to rather than in. The pavement cafes are places where people go to sit and watch, and be watched in turn. It is almost as if the French had invented glass, that medium which imparts brightness but not necessarily heat. The clearness, the unambiguity, the lucidity are everywhere: the relentless clarity of French realism, the lucid structures of French philosophical thought, the sometimes comic obviousness of French fashion. In such a place, the world itself is transformed into spectacle. The main function of Paris is its appearance: the subways look like museums, and the museums like theatres. When certain French radicals, in the early Sixties, defined capitalism as`the societyof thespectacle'they were in reality talking about themselves. The election campaign was noticeable for its posters. There were several images of M. Chirac — to the untrained eye, they might all have looked the same but there were subtle differences. One proclaimed 'II nous faut un homme de coeur': M. Chirac is wearing a grey suit and a blue shirt. Another, 'II nous faut un homme de nouveau': M. Chirac is wearing a pullover and an open-necked shirt. Yet another: 11 nous faut un homme de parole': M. Chirac is wearing a dark suit with a white shirt, the cuffs peeping through. Grey for the heart, black for the truth.

Everything is to be seen to be believed. The waiters of this city look more like waiters than anywhere else in the world, and as a result they have never found any necessity to change their behaviour. The traveller of 1802 had champagne poured in his ear by one of them: 'We were attended by an impudent French waiter. He did everything but attend civily on us. I never took a greater aversion to a man in my life'. The workman look more workmanlike than anywhere else, as if they had stepped out of a film starring Jean Gabin. The tramps who lurk in the Metro — relegated, as it were, beneath ground, beneath the level of elegant discourse — more gnarled and twisted than their counterparts elsewhere, as though they had modelled themselves on Charles Laughton's performance in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The elegant young men and women are stridently, ferociously elegant. Glare, not gloire.

But this attention to, or absorption in, appearance is a great virtue. It leads to a certain vivacity and a genuine freedom of spirit, a wit unattached to questions of 'purpose' or 'meaning'. Only a very clever, or at least quick-witted, people understand the virtue and importance of appearance. Walking through the streets of Paris is like being trapped forever in the first 15 minutes of Les Enf'ants du Paradis. And so it was before, in 1802: 'They are a century behind us in the common conveniences of life, carriages etc; but their great quickness and versatility of talent is visible in everything'. The important word, again, is 'visible'.

Some things, of course, have changed. 'Why Paris?' Ezra Pound wrote in 1921, 'Paris is the center of the world!' And, indeed, so for a while it seemed — Joyce, Picasso, Apollinaire, Ravel, Stravinsky; now all that is left of them, and of those Americans and Englishmen who joined them, are the photographs affixed in the walls of small bookshops. Those Englishmen and Americans I met complain now of the dullness of the place, of the tide of prosperity which has submerged everything else. Prosperity is not conducive to an exciting life; it creates elegance, perhaps, but not value.

Americans still come. I met a young man from California who expatiated on the wonders of Paris. 'It is,' he said, 'just as beautiful as San Francisco'. I suggested that there were more palaces here, more buildings of note, perhaps even more culture. 'But we've got music and movies,' he said, 'Music and movies are universal'. There is still, as in the Twenties, a 'lost generation' of Americans — only the present one does not know that it is lost.

Of course there is beauty here. All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris. Those whose relations are founded principally upon commerce and upon the ferocious claims of domestic privacy will build a city as ugly and as unwieldy as London. It is the law of life.

The tomb of Oscar Wilde, at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, is covered with marks and graffiti — the only sepulchre in that city of the dead which still attracts the living: 'Oscar Nostro', 'Love For Life', 'I Love You' and then, less plaintively, scratched upon the white stone in large letters 'Sex Pistols' and then, less plaintively still, 'You Old Fruit'. There is no peace for Oscar Wilde even in death. A car zoomed down the path between his grave (it would be ironic, I thought, to be killed in a cemetery— it would fit the peculiar French sense of propriety). But he would not have minded; at least here — with Bellini and Bernhardt, Piaf and Moliere, Proust and Bizet, Balzac and Ingres , Heloise and Abelard — he would have been in good company. Oscar Wilde, like the French whom he fled to, knew the importance of appearances, the values of the surface.

And it is perhaps the evident truth of this which makes the modernist complex of La Defense, with its Miro and its painted grotto, at once so astounding and so chilling. Everything here is designed to be seen and, once seen, admired. The eye wanders across the buildings as it would wander over the surface of a dead planet thrown into sharp relief by the light of a distant galaxy. The truth is precisely this: there are only appearances. It is foolish to look for any other reality, any other meaning, as the spectacle moves on. The appearance is reality. Glare, in the end, is gloire,