[belated blog post] “sun is in the sky, oh why, oh why, would i wanna be anywhere else?”

What does one usually do on their last day in Paris? If my trip had begun with an extremely fast blister-raising pace and a prepared list of sights to see, then it ended with a more aimless and the slowest of strolls.

I began my last day with a visit in the afternoon to the Père Lachaise cimetière. A cemetery? Sounds depressing, until you see how mystically beautiful overgrown and cobwebbed family chapels, shrines, and embellished tombstones can be in the springtime. Père Lachaise is the biggest cemetery in Paris, and comes with maps that vendors at the entrance will try to sell to you for 2,50€. I decided to forego this paid option, and found a map on a board inside, with a directory for the gravesites of famous actors, composers, political leaders, singers, writers, which are indicated by their corresponding number on the map. It is also such a big cemetery that it is organised into 97 divisions by numerous avenues and chemins, and includes a chapel, a crematorium, and a roundabout. Grabbing my mini Moleskine cahier, I scribbled down several notable names and their numbers and division sites, took a photo of the map with my iPhone, and set off down the sun-spotted, tree-lined paths.

la petite flâneuse

When I went to Shakespeare & Co. on my third day in Paris, after much browsing and deliberation, I finally resurfaced into the warm early evening with The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, by Edmund White.Of course, not two minutes after leaving this splendid bookshop, which included a tiny, rickety staircase at the back leading up to a Sylvia Beach bibliothèque with a majestic view of the Notre Dame across the Seine river, and to a group of older people singing along to a man playing English tunes on a piano upstairs, I was accosted by a group of brash young men with a selfie stick who tried to persuade me to take a selfie with them. Covering my face with my Paris metro map, I scurried away to the crosswalk where they followed and attempted to ask the policewoman on the corner for a photo as well‪. Oh, Paris.

Interestingly, White mentions this cultural practice in The Flâneur, when he clarifies, that “unlike Americans [and Canadians!], who feel menaced or insulted by lingering looks on the street, French women – and men! – consider la séduction to be one of the arts of living and an amorous glance their natural due” (44). After reading this, I tried to reconcile myself to this fact at any other times I felt “menaced or insulted by lingering looks [and suggestive compliments] on the street” – and there were many! If in Cahors, I feel overly appraised by men, in Paris (and in Lyon), I was drowning in invasive stares. I miss Canada for the way I was able to saunter through crowds without a single unwelcome remark. I miss being able to smile frankly at strangers without fear of unintentionally suggesting an invitation.

But, the lovely thing about Paris, as White shows us through his writing, is that Paris is the “land of novelty and distraction, is the great city of the flâneur – that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps” (16). “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail,” he says (34).  White also quotes Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur as someone who is “not at home, but [he feels] at home everywhere,” “for the perfect flâneur…it’s an immense pleasure to take up residence in…whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite” (36).

mes souvenirs de Paris!