Triomphe. Our second day in Paris brought us triumph even though we began inauspiciously.
After a splendid breakfast at the Marriott, we walked the couple of blocks to the metro station and inadvertently bought weekend day passes for the metro instead of weekday, for a net loss of about fifteen dollars. Then, we rode the metro to the Natural History Museum where Zachary was set to see his fill of dinosaur bones, only to learn on arrival that the museum is closed on Tuesdays. Never mind that the web site specifically said the contrary. (Now that I’m back writing again, having gotten in our trip as far as Munich, I can say we subsequently learned that only the Hall of Evolution is closed on Tuesdays, and had we walked to the other end of the jardin to the building that houses the dinosaur bones, we may well have found it open.)
Since we were in the southeast portion of the Latin Quarter, we took a meandering walk through a portion of the city that we otherwise might not have taken time to see. The Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and the Jardin du Luxembourg with its lovely sights of the Medici Fountain and the French Senate were our reward.
The Pantheon was especially interesting. The original Foucault’s Pendulum and memorials to the French grands hommes in the crypt get most attention, but I particularly rallied around the touching, lovely murals depicting St. Genevieve’s care for the Parisians of her long-ago days. It’s a telling irony that in one and the same building (it is no longer a church) significant homage is paid to the likes of Diderot and Rousseau, whose monuments in the crypt stand before all others. They were great wits, no doubt, but they hardly exercised the quality of charity for the people of Paris that St. Genevieve lavished devotedly upon them.
From the Jardin du Luxembourg we took the metro over to the Bin Harkeim station, from which we made a ten minute walk to the Eiffel Tower. I believe it may be the single most impressive monument I’ve seen. The scale of the thing cannot be appreciated in a picture. Its soaring ascent does not quite stymie the imagination, but it is quite astounding that a mere man, Monsieur Eiffel, would have wagered it practical to build in fact, in hard steel, a figment of the imagination on such scale. The views of the city in every direction from its summit were more than worth the tarrif.
We capped the day off by riding the metro over to Sacré Coeur. With freshly made crepes and cold drinks in hand we sat on a bench halfway up the long, steep walk up the hill to the church, enjoyed our meal, and looked out over the city as the sun begin setting.
Before sunset we walked on up to the church and joined a Mass already underway. We arrived in time to hear the Gospel reading and the homily. My French is so poor–nonexistent would be the honest truth–that the words themselves, taken strictly in their meaning, had little effect. Here’s a terrific instance, however, in which a distinction between the informative meaning and the performative meaning of words is helpful. Or if preferable, the difference between saying something and showing something is important. I could not understand much informatively beyond a reference in the reading to the virgin and l’enfant. Nonetheless I grasped a great deal in the assuring, clear conviction of faith in the voice of the priest, in the beauty of the choir of nuns, and in the presence of the great diversity of persons there to hear the word of the Lord, to receive grace for life, and to seek hope beyond the grave that looms near.
I regret that we did not stay for the whole service. My long-entrenched Protestant practices make it harder than my actual beliefs to enjoy what Catholics regard as the whole point of Mass, namely the consecration and the receiving of the Host. Perhaps if we had been present from the beginning of the service and seated nearer to the transept, we might have gone to the priest for a blessing, and in that way satisfied the terms of our “protest” and acknowledged publicly and poignantly the brokenness of the Church.
The upside of our early departure was time to walk the three hundred narrow, spiral stairs to the top of Sacré Coeur’s central dome before sunset. The western sun cast long-to-be-remembered reddish-orange hues over all the pale stonework of Paris’s sprawling center. Here’s how I interpret the tableau we witnessed: God’s grandeur, displayed in an ordinary sunset, overwhelmed all the petty pretenses of the grands hommes while it simultaneously ennobled the pious gestures of humility and profound sacrifice to be seen all around. If the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so also does the sun shine on both, but with a decidedly different meaning.
