Paris Goes Clean
From DARSIE GILLIE
PARIS
pAR1S is washing her face of stone. It began last winter, when the northern side of the Place de la Concorde suddenly blossomed like a Christmas rose, its eighteenth-century façades and colonnades gleaming and dancing in the win- ter sun. Opposite them on the far side of the river the National Assembly is now spreading for the first time in living memory a cheerful front with the two wings of the building suddenly assuming their true importance in relation to the central colonnade. The great flight of steps, dead for so many years, looks as if Napoleon, followed by his marshals and court officials in bee- embroidered cloaks, might mount it at any moment to announce a victory or two to the Legislature. (His drawing-room awaits him immediately behind the colonnade, partitioned between the post office, the commander of the parliamentary guard and the political directors of newspapers.) Further along the river, washing can do little to the Foreign Ministry except rejuvenate its dignified mediocrity, but the Invalides now spreads its enormous honest dig- nified bulk as if it had just sat down to picnic on what it supposes to be still the fringe of the countryside. Taximen point out to you with sur- prise that there is a bonlionune over the great door, whom they had never noticed before— Louis XIV himself, restored by the piety of Louis XVIII after he had been torn down by the Revolution.
Cynical Parisians declare that Parlianient should have begun by internal cleansing. That is precisely what, in a literal sense, the Louvre has done; while it still shows its great black shoulders to the world, the courtyard is now once again all yellow stone. Broad rivers of water have streamed, day after day, over Louis XIV's and Louis XIII% facades and are now washing the dirt from Henry Ws. Even in the July sunlight they continue to look strangely damp and the golden yellow is still mottled after the drenching. The masonry will take six months to dry out, say the Museum gardiens, sunning themselves at the ' door with an obvious doubt about the propriety of letting the building be seen as it emerges from its bath; two years, says the policeman, gripping his Sten gun outside the museum police station with an evident pleasure in having a younger person under his protection.
Over the river from the Louvre, the Institut, once Mazarin's college for students from the provinces he had added unto France, now the home of all five Academies, has taken to cleanli- ness and youth with a joy that does honour to the white beards which frequent it. But the Institut has been spring-cleaning for quite a time. It started years ago by suddenly dusting the marble busts of its immortals in the corridors. It is entirely refitting the hall under the dome, where elegant Paris has hitherto suffered the tortures of the damned in the abominable scats while sitting through the speeches that welcome new members of the French Academy and bury old ones; the dome itself has been regilded out- side and now beckons joyfully down the Rao Mazarin. (The dome of the Invalides will have to be regilded too if the soldiers are to keep LIP with the lettered, the learned and the scientists.) On the river side the Institut spreads her broad seventeenth-century skirts and curtsies to the Royal Louvre with a grace that was always hers, but which nobody noticed while she was dirty.
The more graceful and imaginative a building, the more it gains by being cleaned—even when the removal of dirt reveals darns with the wrong' coloured stone, as on the Invalides—or, alas, of cement on the Prime Minister's residence. not cleaning dullness is a mixed blessing. In front of the National Assembly sit the great lawyers and administrators of the old regime—L'HOPital, Sully, D'Aguesseau and Colbert. I have been On friendly terms with them for thirty years—or at least I thought I had been. I had often hoped that late in an all-night session they might drop into the bar which the journalists share with the huissiers and have a drink with us. They looked as if they would like to loosen their jaws with a little talk. But they are clean and now know that it was all an illusion. Its n'ont pas de conversation, ces gens-1X neither head nor heart' The huissiers are much nicer and certainly wiser' Turn your back on them and look at the Madeleine with the long black caverns between her pillars. She has character as she is, though a most unarniable one. She will have nothing but propriety (unsuitably in her case) when she is clean; she will not even be in the height of fashion like all the Mary Magdalenes of Italian painting. There are things to be looked forward to when washed—the Louvre river-front and colonnade, the Mint and the high-trotting modish- ness of the Opdra. But, alas; there are also already long stretches of boredom. Those chalk- coloured cliffs of Haussmann's Paris that Henry James describes in his early novels. and the inelegant indecency of art nouveau swellings on the façades of 1910.
They have just started on the Archives Nationales, housed in an eighteenth-century palace built by a bridegroom of sixty for a bride of twenty. It will look lovely clean, but as I con- sidered it, I was seized with a great thirst. I turned about and found I had a choice between a neat, new chromium-plated bar, and a café where all the metalwork shone, but nothing had been repainted or done up since, I should say, the siege of Paris. Without any exercise of will, any conscious choice at all, I entered the shabby café. It was where I belonged.
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