Return to the Great Lady

France is the place I keep going back to. It’s new and old. It’s mystery and memory. 

Stuffed like sardines in a big American Airlines can soaring over the Atlantique, we land at CDG, Charles de Gaulle Airport, north of Paris at 9:00 am. When we boarded, it was midnight in Paris, so I didn’t eat the provided dinner and did my best to fall asleep. Most of the nine hour flight I was semi-conscious, watching movies without sound playing in front of other passengers across the aisle. The two men surrounding me were both industrious: in the window seat, a man working for a company who helps athletes with muscular issues, and in the aisle seat, a man writing a book about communication. We spoke briefly at the start of the flight and remained in our own sardine worlds through the rest. The end of a flight is one of those times when chewing gum is indeed polite. 

There is a place I always want to see first in Paris. I am eager to arrive, but navigating the CDG Airport proves challenging. Signs indicate that the RER (Réseau Express Régional) is down for repairs and it is necessary to take a bus. With help from some other travelers, we find our way to the waiting buses that take us to the métro. I get off at Saint-Michel. 

Deep underground, I press out of the jammed métro car like some kind of burrowing animal and into the swirling bustle of people. There’s the distinct cry of a Chinese violin ringing through the pedestrian tunnels. I follow SORTIE with its arrows and the heads of little people walking up stairs. There is a flight of stairs, a twist through the tunnels, and then another flight of stairs, at which point you begin to feel somehow that you are coming toward the surface as if you’ve been in a submarine for weeks and at last you will break water and see the light of day. And yet, there is another flight of stairs, which is when you are very glad you are not carrying any sort of suitcase and that everything is on your back and you feel really accomplished with your light packing.

People bustle. There’s a saxophone playing in this tunnel and another flight of stairs, but they lead up and the light from above looks promisingly natural. 

I’ve seen her at night. I’ve seen her in the morning. And I try, when I come, to make Our Lady my first view.

Notre-Dame de Paris.

And there she is. 

I first saw her when I was 17. 

The bravest woman I’ve ever known was the first to bring me to Our Lady’s spacious and intricately carved entrance in 1985. Madame Tolbert brought fifteen or so adventurous Alaskan teenagers to Europe and beyond for two months and we had a group photograph made right in front of her. All the girls wore skirts because we were advised that was how we were to dress to show respect for the countries where we travelled. My skirt was light green and, accustomed to wearing pants, I had to come up with some sandals quickly. Untested, they bit into my heels so severely that my first walk along the Champs Élysées involved jabbing pain at each step and wore to the bone on the right heel. I never again travelled with footwear I hadn’t tested first. 

We tried to wrap our minds around flying buttresses and what the word Gothic meant. I was stunned to silence by the enormity and the streaming colors of stained glass. Inside, it was dark and low candelabra lit, so I imagined a young cleaning girl with a broom walking the echoing halls in the very, very early hours of morning when no one else was there. And our minds nearly exploded when our tour guide said that the people who built the cathedral and made the fine, elegant carvings thought that God would strike them dead if they made a single mistake. Think about it! With God, it’s not like you say, oh, a little mistake won’t be noticed. I didn’t like the fear involved, but think about the level of craftsmanship you’d be inspired to achieve! Scene after scene, statue after statue, the tiny hands, the haughty eyes, the tailors and the knights, and the loyal dogs. All those fabric folds. The detail is breathtaking. And the gargoyles, creatures of nightmares, extend from all sides of the church. 

Three years later, the parvis, a fancy name for the large courtyard in front of Notre-Dame de Paris, was where my friend Beth and I met our former boyfriends at 2 pm on October 2, 1988. The original plan was that all four of us would travel together, but we were young and things happened and we decided that the girls and the guys would travel separately for a month and meet together to decide if we wanted to proceed as a group. Against the odds of novice European train travel, we all made our appointment with the Notre-Dame parvis. The boys were there with a Swiss young man they’d met along the way. There was conversation and a meal and the decision to go watch a movie. I decided to return to the second floor balcony of the Young and Happy Youth Hostel on rue Mouffetard, still operating more than thirty years later, where I found one of our shared roommates, a woman who was likely my age now, eating out of a can of sardines and it seemed so very lonely. Maybe it just seemed that way because it was right then, for the first time, that I began to travel alone. Beth traveled with the guys for a few weeks in Spain and I traveled around France speaking French as much as I could until meeting Beth at the agreed time and place. Voie 3 at the Geneva Train Station at 2 pm on October 15, 1988. 

And she wasn’t there.

So, as we’d agreed, I went back the next day.

And she wasn’t there.

Now what? 

This was before cell phones, before the Internet began making its digital connection into our every breath of life. There was no way to contact her. And if I used a pay phone to call home, I’d just worry her parents perhaps without cause. 

After I shook off a brief lapse when I talked myself into thinking that she might have decided that she didn’t want to travel with me anymore, I decided to turn to logic instead. She was likely coming from Spain. When did trains from Spain arrive in Geneva? I looked at the train boards inside the station and discovered that the next train originating from Madrid would arrive that evening at 7 pm. I’d walk around the lake, enjoy the swans and the fountains, and come back. 

And there she was.

After the two month backpacking trip with Beth, I wasn’t in Europe again for two decades. At 43, I stood in the parvis before Our Lady once more, again travelling alone.  And two years later, four of us went inside to see the stained glass and the grand Gothic arches and a statue of a writer I’d not heard of before, Dubray, apparently an intense man because he seems to be dying while straining to hold up a quill pen next to the words: “Puisse mon sang être le dernier verse” (“May my blood be the last verse”). 

And three years after that, back in the courtyard again to look for the statue of St. James, known in France as St. Jacques, as part of our quest for the ancient Way of St. James, known in Spanish as the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. It was night and my consort and I were walking around the outside of Notre-Dame on our way back to the lovely hotel with the birds flying together on the ceiling. He spotted the scallop shell on the bag. Yes, St. James. We landed at Orly Airport the day before and emerged from the métro station to see Our Lady wrapped in darkness, lights showing every tiny patterned bump and thin archway and round petaled window and sainted statues passively bearing a weapon of some kind, quietly prepared to do the same lethal damage that had been done to them. Looking at its two towers she seemed like a princess. 

Two days later, we descended at the same métro station, this time with a violist carrying her luggage down all those stairs, and I turned back at the top to see Our Lady, this time with the light blue glow of dawn shining through the arches of her towers. 

If you look at her from the right direction, she’s a ship on the Seine. Always the grand lady of Paris.

And now I see her again. And this time I notice, high above along the spire, green statues lining the way coming down from the top and it looks like one of them has his or her hands out to keep balance, a comic surfer of famous ancient rooftops. It brings a smile after a long night and morning of travel.

I walk along La Seine, along the Quai Saint Michel, facing Notre-Dame de Paris on the city island across the river to my left. There are bookstores. The French call them libraries. And shops that the French call magasins. I continue along the road as it goes a bit to the right and there are trees all around me and then I see The Shakespeare and Company Bookstore.

Next France for Two Months: Shakespeare and Company Bookstore