Au Cimetière

Once again we were blessed with a sunny day, and all I had was my iPhone. But we got some decent photos anyway. Light doesn't just enlighten your mind, it enlivens your camera. This afternoon we decided to climb the Montmartre again. It's one of my favorite places in Paris and worth the climb. Whenever I see this view I always think of Professor Fate and Max coming down these steps in their car. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry for you (hint: watch Blake Edwards' The Great Race.)

Light was streaming into the basilica, where mass was being performed by a couple of priests and a small ensemble of sweet-voiced nuns. Sacré Coeur is at the top of Montmartre hill, the highest point in Paris. It is the most recent of Paris's landmark churches, completed in 1914 and dedicated after the end of World War I. Yet with its onion domes and mosaics it has a Byzantine quality that speaks of a time long before modern civilization. The church was built as an act of penance for the excesses of the Second Empire and the Commune. Perhaps it implies a rejection of the intervening centuries as well.

So here's a question for my learned friends. Sacré Coeur is generally disparaged for its gaudiness. It certainly is eclectic, with its neo-Byzantine Romantic Gothic Classicism. In many ways it represents civilization on the brink, a culture facing a stylistic quandary. I told Evelyn that it is the architectural equivalent of a Strauss opera or a Mahler symphony. Everything has already been done—there is nothing new under the sun. 20th-century modernism would soon reject all history and insist on unrelenting innovation as the primary artistic value. And yet we love Sacré Coeur, almost like it's the last deep breath before the abyss. So I guess the question in all that is just, "Does anybody else feel that way?" What do you think? Discuss. (Here's where my blog's readership stats take a nosedive.)

We also visited Montmartre cemetery. Before the late 1800s Montmartre was relatively unpopulated, and it was a good cheap place to bury people. Many cultural luminaries were buried there, more or less on top of each other.

We had the intrepidity to search out Hector Berlioz's grave and pay homage. I sang a quiet rendition of "Le Spectre de la Rose" and hummed a few tunes from Symphonie Fantastique and The Damnation of Faust. I'm sorry, all you violists, I can never remember anything from Lelio.

Tonight we went to the bookstore of my dreams, Shakespeare and Company. Run by Left Bank Englishmen, it has more books than three Barnes and Nobles in a space about the size of grandma's house.

After we got home we caved, bought the streamed seventh season of 30 Rock on Amazon, and watched the first three episodes in bed. So much for La Vie Parisienne.