Paris Plus Ça Change
My business takes me to Paris and, in what used to be considered normal times, I live there three months of the year. I hope to do so again. The last time I was in Paris was February 2020; prior to that, November 2019. In the intervening months the gilets jaunes, or Yellow Vest movement, staged massive and destructive demonstrations and brought the city, indeed France, to its knees with strikes. It was a heavy blow and I wrote about my impressions upon my return to Paris that February. It was a reentry of a sort. Now, in hindsight, that time seems almost like a dress rehearsal to what Paris has endured during wave after wave of the coronavirus and the attendant periods of confinement.
“We cannot step twice into the same river,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Twenty-five hundred years later those words still ring true. Each time I return to Paris and metaphorically step into the same river, something about it is a little different. No doubt I am a little different.
Sitting in an opera house dating from the late 19th century, watching an early 19th century ballet whose very first performance took place in this city — a city where evidence of humans living 10,000 years ago exists, a city whose name derives from a Gaulish tribe active 200 years after Heraclitus — I was moved by so much significance. Somehow the idea of change filtered through my mind.
I’m never sure if I’m someone who embraces or resists change. I know that’s not the point. The point is, change is a given; the response merely colors it. Still.
Paris is a great measure of one’s tolerance, of the ability to adapt, to accept change. Because Paris changes, in ways big and small, significant and insignificant, sudden and gradual, all the time. The fire that destroyed Notre-Dame’s familiar spire, and nearly consumed the cathedral itself, was, in the scheme of things, not so remarkable. The ballet I went to the other night premiered in a different building a few blocks away that was once home to the Paris Opéra; a building considered advanced for its time that saw many premieres and legendary artists; a building destroyed by fire.
There is change, and there is change. Returning after eleven weeks away, I noticed right away something different, a subtle shift. People I was used to seeing in my neighborhood’s shops weren’t there. It was as if the bench were suddenly playing for the starters. I thought I was imagining things until a friend remarked on my intuition.
While I was gone, Paris struggled through seven long weeks of strikes. The trains, the radio, everyone struck in protest against the proposed pension reforms. Even the ballet dancers went on strike. Before the curtain rose on the performance, there was an announcement whose text was projected onto it in French and English: The artists wished to convey that they danced out of respect for the audiences rather than approval of the reforms. Many applauded, a few booed. A crippled transportation system wreaked the most havoc. Still, there was some humor, with stories of people dusting off bicycles that hadn’t been ridden since World War II. And many continue to ride, even with the trains more or less back to normal.
But Parisians seem weary. The strikes, after all, follow a year of gilets jaunes demonstrations. And they are worried. The woman in a boutique where I went to exchange a gift I’d bought before the holidays — a different woman from the one I’d had a long conversation with when I bought the present — told me the smaller shops feel the pinch. At the same time, there is wide support, and, above all, resilience. A blow to the economy of Paris is not a blow to the soul of Paris.
I’m cheered by familiar faces returning to the neighborhood. Some, though, like the man at the market who would offer samples of clementines to passers-by and select the best ones for me, have disappeared. Rather than try to explain something difficult or inevitable, the French look you in the eye and say, c’est compliqué. Indeed, change can be complicated.
The other day I heard bells ringing from a nearby medieval church. I love hearing them, one of the perks of my apartment. I stopped what I was doing to listen. In that moment, with the sound of bells pealing through the tiny, ancient streets, very little, I thought, had changed.
