Postcard from Paris
Pierre Bonnard, Montmarte sous la pluie
Despite being coined the ‘City of Light’, Paris is a place that looks best in the dark.
This starts to become apparent at twilight. As the light dims, there is an elasticity between the rooftops and the sky, by which they soften and blur into each other. Little by little, the sky seeps its way into the walls and the windows as it adopts the hues so typically associated with the city. Grey, black, and blue, Paris is the colour of a fresh bruise. At this hour, the sky and the stone are the same colour, and the city in its entirety becomes dusk; a living, breathing creature stitched from faded light.
The language shifts, too, as it gets darker. In the day it is a constant, familiar rumble that washes over me like white noise. But at night it seems to become sharper, I feel myself noticing it more. It is a clamour amidst the chairs that line the pavement, it is a gruff shout from a car window. It is a raised voice over loud, unfamiliar music. Something about French is well suited to the crowded corners of bars. The language emerges, blazing, at this time of night, and pulses its way along the boulevards. Paris becomes loud, and a feeling of urgency coats the air.
This is prime watching time. People seem to kiss and shrug a lot here, and sometimes alternate quite rapidly between the two. The smoke of dangling cigarettes weaves its way through the silvery, cooling air, and curls along with the language. A comforting smell is nascent: tobacco, mixed with the lingering, savoury warmth of some open restaurant door. I breathe it in deeply, and its headiness promises a manner of elusive, unidentifiable things. The bars and cafes glow a proud amber under the moonlight, as if aware of their role as muse to the many artists who wandered these hazy streets.
At no discernible time, and with almost magic instaneity, silhouettes emerge, so rapidly that the city loses almost all tangibility, and becomes instead a place of shadows. The blur of sky and buildings is no longer, and the houses are now angled outlines against a pool of ink. Windows become reams of bright yellow spotlights, each of which tells a different, silhouetted story. The hint of half a family at dinner, of a silent couple. Tiny blurbs of people’s lives, dotted into the darkness.
It is much later that the noise and lights stop. It often rains, and the rain turns the pavement slick-dark. All you can hear, as you walk home, is the pitter-patter of this rain, the murmur of familiar voices, and a distant, consistent siren. A sort of Parisian witching hour. I have an odd, bone-deep feeling that something ghostly and otherworldly is happening at this silent time of night. Soon the ashen gargoyles of the Notre-Dame will take off from imagined rooftops, soon the steel curves of the balconies will soften and slither down into the puddles of the wide streets.
From the comfort of my bedroom, the silent darkness of the city outside is almost oppressive. It presses up against my windows, and I can feel its expectancy trickle in through the crack in my windowpane. I turn away, into my pillow, yet the thrum of the city’s crepuscular mechanics pulses in my ears. A siren’s call, luring me back out into the night.
