Odds and ends

One day, walking back from the market, I saw a dog--a pretty reddish-gold, medium-hair, medium-sized dog--lying beside one of the manicured shrubs in the garden beside Notre Dame. A man in a security uniform was sitting on the wall across the path from it. I asked him if it were his. He said--something, part of which was that he had called the police. Understanding that this poor, beautiful dog had been abandoned there, I held out my hand first for it to sniff, proper dog etiquette. So sad and terrified was it that it growled and snapped at me. He came over--he apparently had been with it long enough by then to have calmed it a little, just with him (I saw there was also a small plastic container near it holding water). It didn't know that it was spending its last moments of freedom, waiting to be taken away. I can't forget it.

Twice, now, in the past week or so, the bells of Notre Dame have begun to toll, slowly, and continued for more than ten minutes. I'm guessing a funeral is taking place--I looked online, the first time, and learned that the cathedral does hold funeral services. I'm either not decent or in the middle of doing something else, so can't dash over there to see for myself. The first time they went on, and on, and the sound was unnerving.

As if it were not enough as if Louisiana were following me, to find a rue de Mezieres, a couple of weeks ago over by Place St.-Sulpice, I keep having mosquitoes in the apartment. I realize I"m only--I guess it would count as two blocks, or one and a half, if I take into account the space the cathedral occupies on the other side of rue des Cloitres, from the river, but this bit of uncontrolled nature in the midst of all the pavement and formal gardens of the city is startling. I don't like to keep the windows fully closed all the time: the apartment feels stuffy (chronic fresh-air fiend that I am), plus the double-paned windows themselves are so soundproof I can't even hear the bells of Notre Dame--which is pretty seriously silenced. I like to, at least even faintly, have a sense of the people and vehicles passing in the street, the musicians in the distance, even the sirens heading toward the Hotel Dieu. The bells. And with that I get a side order of, as my daughter put it once in her mosquito-allergic childhood, "blood-sucking life forms."

Last Saturday, I finally paid a visit to the Pantheon. It's within walking distance, albeit a pretty good uphill climb once you leave Place Maubert. The church part (that actually spent so little of its life as a church) is, well, churchy, with impressive, massive pillars, very nice stonework floors, and huge, eyeroll-inducing paintings (the Battle of Tolbiac, Clovis vowing to be baptized if he wins). The crypt, the real reason anyone visits, is not the darkest nor the creepiest I've ever seen, but it is stuffy (no mosquitoes here) and unavoidably claustrophobic. I wanted to see the belatedly-added women's tombs: Marie Curie, for instance. Not only was it meaningful (I'm not one, generally, to be impressed by nor seek out the tombs of famous people: they're dead) seeing the burial monuments of Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola, I was moved to stumble across memorials to, of all people, Toussaint l'Ouverture (isn't it interesting to see how drastically opinions can change, and honor be given where it always was due), and to St.-Exupery. Back up in the "church," there was a special exhibition related to the newest honorees: Resistance fighters (whether in the field or in print and subversive activities) of World War II.