More Dead History

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Mes semblables de Dieu,

One of the wonders of Paris is that when not stepping in dog turds one is forever stepping back in history, and yesterday I stumbled into the Cimetière de Picpus, site of the mass graves of 1,306 final victims of the Terror. Picpus is just a short tumbril ride from the Place du Trône Renversé (or “overturned throne,” its name itself later beheaded to be simply the Place du Trône), where the guillotine was moved in the summer of 1794 after shopkeepers near its more stylish and central location in the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) began to complain that the stench from the blood-soaked cobblestones was driving away customers.

(I suspect this may well have marked the beginning of the now-annual tradition of nearly all Parisians to flee the city during the hottest summer months, and perhaps even of their disinclination to pick up after their dogs. Maybe they originally hoped that the perfume of pervasive poop might mask that of baking blood, and when that failed—their canine poopers of choice being so small and the guillotine so busy—they fled to the seashore until cooler weather returned.)

But I digress. Parisians did grow tired of the daily carnage downtown, and moving the Big Blade to the Place du Trône allowed the Committee of Public Safety to continue a steady separation of corps and têtes, including the aforementioned 1,306 whose 2,612 parts were carted down the street and dumped in a couple of big holes at Picpus during the brief period from 14 June to 17 July—a mere ten days before the public got truly cranky, turned against the Committee, and sent its leader Robespierre to the scaffold himself.

You enter the grounds of the cemetery through a courtyard across the street from a Renault repair shop. Inside, a man takes three euros, opens a locked gate, and sends you wandering through a pretty little park to look through another locked gate at two big patches of gravel and grass with explanatory plaques. Picpus is really two cemeteries, one containing two mass graves of the decapitated, and then a rather sad little graveyard of the decapitateds' relations who died later from mostly bladeless causes. (I couldn’t help picturing them all interred wearing tee shirts silkscreened with the words “I’m with headless” and a little arrow pointing in the direction of the mass pit.) This area contains a few notable corpses whose heads were intact upon burial; the Noailles are buried here (the Comtesse of Noailles was to Marie Antoinette sort of what Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers was to Joan Fontaine's character in Rebecca), as is the Marquis de Lafayette, who we all know and love as the French guy who lent his military expertise to help out our own revolution and now has a park named for him across from the White House where our own grouchy citizens gather to complain.

When I arrived at Picpus, the caretaker was very chatty, and after determining my nationality he asked, "So, tell me: Why do you speak English?"

"Huh?"

He repeated the question. "Why do you Americans speak English?"

"I don't think I understand what you’re asking me," I told him.

"It's the language of your oppressors! Why would you want to speak that? Didn't you fight to free yourself from the British? It makes no sense that you'd go through all that trouble, and then continue to speak their language!"

"Um..." I hesitated, not really sure if he was joking. "Well we were British for a long time. What would you have us speak? What do they speak in France's former colonies, like those in Africa?"

He grinned broadly. "Well they speak French, of course! But French is the language of freedom! English, well, ha, that's the language of slavery!!"

"Well, I suppose our Navajo might agree with half of that," I told him.

He laughed, shook my hand, welcomed me, and handed me two little pamphlets. One contained information about the cemetery and its history and the other was a small tract titled The Sixteen Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne. Before unlocking the inner gate and showing me how to let myself out at the end of my visit, he pointed to the entrance of the adjacent church and told me not to miss checking that out too. “It has the most important Virgin Mary in France,” he told me. “Very important, even if you’re not a Christian. It’s been recognized by a number of Popes, including Pope Pius X and that last one, the Polish one.”

Inside the cemetery, I read through the little tract he’d handed me. It tells the story of the Carmelites of Compiègne, a knot of nuns who since their order’s foundation in 1641 have been "doing good" by remaining silent, poor, and prayerful. In June of 1794, 16 of them were arrested, condemned to death (according to the tract, “for their fidelity to the religious life and for their great devotion to the Sacred Heart”), beheaded on July 17, and tossed with the others into the Picpus pit.

“What happiness to die for one’s God!” one was reported to have cried out from the scaffold. “May we be the last ones to die.”

As proof of the power of the sisters’ prayers, the tract tells that “just ten days later, ended the torment that for two years had shed upon France’s son’s (and daughters).” Say what? Granted, this little chapel with its "most important Virgin" is nowhere on the Magnificence Scale compared to Venice's
Santa Maria della Salute, but c'mon! Stop already with the adoration of Holy Virgins who seem to be everywhere blessing—with little or no success—the bejeezus out of people who are doomed! If she had been a real, live, breathing human being, no doubt she'd be vilified instead of venerated, and she'd be marched to the scaffold lickety-split. And I thought the deaths of Nixon and Reagan brought on amnesiac, rosy-hued posthumous saint status! Heh.

The tract then provides a prayer (which I will spare you) “for obtaining graces through the intercession of the Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne” and an address where anyone who has received graces and healings through such intercessions should immediately send notification of same, so that beatification procedures can be started, tout de suite.

Despite the multi-Pope appeal that Picpus presents, and an entertaining painting hanging in the church that depicts the martyred nuns silently, poorly, and devotedly praying beside the guillotine under the watchful (if ultimately no-count) eye of the Blessed Virgin, I must admit that more graveside fun was to be had on the other side of town, at the Cimetière des Chiens in Asnières.



If any of you were wondering where little French doggies go after they’ve taken their last supper at their favorite Parisian brasserie, it is here in this pet cemetery on the banks of the Seine. The sentiments engraved on their headstones are no less sappy and sentimental than those at the Pet’s Rest outside San Francisco, and they’ve been engraving sappy and sentimental doggerel and best wishes on headstones here considerably longer—since the late 1800s, in fact. Here too lie rabbits and cats and something that I think was a monkey (though possibly some breed of canine that was stylish for a mercifully brief time in the 1960s) and whose tombstone is adorned with her likeness, posed in what must have been her favorite gingham dress.

As I strolled past the many tombs of long-deceased Fifis and Mouchettes, I nearly stumbled over a woman who, looking quite fetching with a miniature French bulldog under her arm, sat weeping over the grave of another dog, now departed. I did not wish to disturb her by asking if the deceased was her current dog’s mother or if perhaps it was of a breed that no longer matched her shoes and I’d solved the mystery of what happened to all of Paris's no-longer-fashionable Jack Russell terriers. Whether the former or the latter, her grief over the dog-loss seemed genuine and bottomless, and if I’d been to Picpus first, I might have provided her with the words of prayer she could use to obtain the graces and intercession of the 16 headless, martyred virgins of Compiègne, but as it was I just left her and Fifi II to continue unassisted with their own miracle-free grieving process.

À bientôt au paradis,

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Fureur Antionette

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Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates on les pendra!
Si on n’ les pend pas
On les rompra
Si on n’ les rompt pas
On les brûlera.
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira

Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
Aristocrats at the lantern
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
The aristocrats, we'll hang them!
If we don't hang them
We'll break them
If we don't break them
We'll burn them
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
— "Ça Ira," popular tune of Revolutionary France

"Nevermind."
— Gilda Radner as Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live

Citoyennes et Citoyens,

For those of you who didn't get the memo, the French recently had a change of heart regarding their past grumpiness that resulted in the separation of Marie Antoinette’s head from the rest of her package. Just as we Americans are easily distracted from truths and are encouraged what to think about political figures by trivialities hammered into us by the media and special interests, so too were the French during the reign of Louis XVI. When the incredibly unhappy populace, starved for liberté, égalité, fraternité, and (perhaps most importantly) food, were worked up into a revolutionary lather by round-the-clock pamphleteers who placed much of the blame for their troubles on Louis’s high-living and seemingly uncaring bride, they cheered on their bloodthirsty leadership to hack first and ask questions later—sometimes two centuries later.

Two-hundred and some years after the executioner's celebrated slam dunk of Her Majesty’s noggin, a well-researched and well-reasoned biography of Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser and (more effectively) the 2006 Sofia Coppola film that used Fraser’s work as its basis, has convinced the French people of their poor public judgment back then and transformed modern opinion from "mad at" the woman to "simply mad about" her. The only bit of restraint I’ve been able to discern among all the gaga is their failure to honor her as they honor Mona Lisa, by manufacturing day-glo flip-flops bearing her image. Such footwear is one of the very few items of commemorative memorabilia not available in the gift shop of the Grand Palais, where people this month are paying ten euros a head and lining up for hours, sometimes in pouring rain, to suck in all-things Marie-Antoinette at the current smash-hit expo there that chronicles her life.

I haven’t had the chance to run a poll since I attended, but I may be the only person in Paris who’s disappointed by this oversight and a couple of others. Certainly there is an embarrassment of other riches from which the chotchke-starved Marie Antoinette-o-phile can choose, including Marie Antoinette needlecraft pillows in assorted sizes; Marie Antoinette gowns for four-year olds; Marie Antoinette parasols; Marie Antoinette ballpoint pens; Marie Antoinette Post-It note pads; Marie Antoinette CDs and DVDs; dozens of Marie Antoinette book titles; replicas of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles dinnerware; and umpteen styles of Marie Antoinette postcards. But Marie Antoinette zories? Zilch.

I entered the shop excited about the prospect of finding a postcard of my favorite item in the exhibition, but was terribly disappointed that whoever ordered supplies for the show—likely the same old fart who didn’t think a proper nod of apology for mistakenly chopping off a woman’s head should include printing her picture on a pair of made-in-Taiwan plastic sandals—neglected to make a postcard using the illustration from the frontispiece of a small volume of slanderous 18-century filth on display called Fureurs Utérines (Uterine Madness), a racy little inking that depicts the queen with her skirt pulled up high to reveal the most precious royal jewel. In a silent financial protest (which I understand probably went unnoticed by the cashiers processing the long line of customers whose arms were piled high with merchandise) I bought rien de la reine. Nothing.

The small volume is tucked away in a tiny case in the exhibit's final room, which focusses on anti-Marie Antoinette mudslinging, and would have been easy to miss save for the fact that the room has surprising little else in it despite reports that Revolutionary propagandists were prolific and relentless in such pursuits. According to Fraser and other historians, print shops in France worked round the clock churning out anti-monarchist matter, much of which characterized Marie Antoinette as a woman with an uncontrollable carnal appetite who denied herself little in her attempts to satisfy it, bedding both men and woman, and even her own son.

Overall, the show is disappointing in its lack of new information for anyone with a passing familiarity with French Revolutionary history, and with the exception of side-by-side portraits by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun it's rather uninteresting. Le Brun might be considered the mother of modern Photoshop journalism, the genre that brought us a blacker O.J. Simpson on the cover of Time Magazine. To present a more innocent image of the increasingly unpopular queen, Le Brun was asked in 1786 to re-paint a portrait she’d done three years earlier, but this time losing the jewelry and haute couture. Using royal portraits for spin control was hardly new, especially for the Court of Versailles (another famous portrait, commissioned after the disastrous “Affair of the Necklace” from which Marie Antoinette’s public image never really recovered despite her complete innocence in the matter, shows her as the doting and relatively simple mother, more concerned with family values than sucking peasants dry to pay for sparkly neckwear), but this pair of paintings is interesting in that the artist actually re-painted the exact same portrait, changing only the queen’s clothing and accouterments. It’s a treat to view the two together, and fortunate that the original wasn’t destroyed. (Keeping it around strikes me much like leaving the original jpeg image on your hard drive so investigators can retrieve it to prove your questionable journalistic ethics.)


While overall the show’s a disappointment, it is morbidly fascinating to me to witness this hubbub over the old girl, and to refresh and expand my understanding of those times while reflecting on them in a modern context. A comparison of those days to these doesn’t reveal any newfound reluctance by people to react rashly, with one exception—and granted, its a huge exception: Today there’s no guillotine sitting in the Place de la Concorde, lopping the heads off of everyone who suddenly finds herself (or himself) on the wrong side of public opinion.

When I arrived here in September, public approval for French president Sarkozy was enormous, but in a few short months plummeted after a combination of political and social blunders to the point that now it’s hard to find anyone in Paris with a good word to say about him. Some of it’s superficial, concerning general distaste for his recent marriage to Italian supermodel/pop star Carla Bruni, some of it is policy related (which confuses me, since none of the dreadful things he’s said or done politically should surprise anyone who was paying attention before the election), and some of it has to do with a complicated sense of what it means to the French to be French and their general horror over Sarko’s low-brow cultural tastes. At the height of the Terror in 1794, any one of these things would have gotten him dragged to the scaffold after a speedy trial with a predetermined guilty verdict.

I don’t think Sarkozy will be much remembered in 200 years, or at least not remembered or studied by French schoolchildren the way the last monarchs of France are remembered, or the Girondins, or the Jacobins, or any the those who went from being ahead to losing their heads during the Terror. I do think that Carla Bruni is very, very fortunate that the French aren't as quick to behead as they were back then, even if they are as fickle. As a foreign-born, wealthy, and highly visible wife of a French leader and the subject of much negative public sentiment and a lot of negative media hype in a country facing severe problems with unemployment and rising prices, her story sounds quite a lot like Marie Antoinette's. If the French still dispatched the objects of their scorn the way they did back then, there’d be a very good chance that one day thousands of people would be lined up at the Grand Palais to view an apologetic retrospective of her life and to buy whatever the 23rd-century equivalent will be of Carla Bruni Post-It notes and ballpoint pens (and perhaps some cheap made-in-USA flip flops), disappointed that there are no postcards of the more entertaining fureurs being hyped by today’s media.

Ça ira...

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ADDED NOTE (22 APRIL): These nifty lollipops from Archie McPhee aren't sold by the unimaginative vendeurs at the gift shop of the Grand Palais, either.

Further Adventures in Live Performance

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Bougeurs et trembleurs,

I haven't suffered an overdose of creative self-expression like last night's since I went to art school in the early 1970s. (And if any of you say you recall my having said I miss the experience of art school in the early 1970s, either you're hallucinating or you're a liar.)

Gwen told me she'd be performing at the same theater near the Place des Fêtes that Sandra's baby has been known to frequent, and though I felt improperly attired, not having yet had the chance to locate a tee-shirt that said, "Je ne fumerai pas dans le bac à sable si vous n'amenez pas votre enfant au théâtre" (I won't smoke in the sandbox if you don't bring your child to the theater), I was delighted to go. Gwen is an extraordinary performer—a jazz singer whose talents I've been loathe to write about before because I can't come up with a description to do her justice. Whether singing a familiar jazz standard or an obscure gospel hymn, she's astonishing on stage, with an incredible vocal range and an infectious energy. She's absolutely electric, vibrating from within even when still, yet evincing a center of calm when at her most frenetic. And she can get very frenetic.

Her appearance last night was no disappointment, a ten-minute improvisation with her dance instructor, Elsa, and the drummer from Sandra and Julien's last performance. Gwen entered the theater imitating a freight train, hissing steam. Then, crying "All aboard!" she launched into an old Peter Yarrow/Paul Stuckey number styled after a negro spiritual, in a solemn a cappella moaning…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train…

Gwen took long pauses between the lines, as if she was waiting for the words to find their way from deep inside her and bubble up to the surface…

This train…
done carried my mother…
well, this train …

With Gwen center stage, Elsa appeared from the side and approached her as if pulled, physically, by the sound of Gwen's voice.

This train, done carried my mother
my mother, my father, my sister and my brother
this train, done carried my mother, well this train…

Her tempo quickened and she and Elsa faced each other. While Gwen sang, Elsa danced as if she were a marionette whose strings were being jerked by the rhythm of Gwen's words, and then the drummer started in and Gwen and Elsa just went wild as if possessed, and the initial plaintiveness of the spiritual dissolved into a joyous, crazy, raucous frenzy.

When they finished, the audience went nuts applauding, and well they should have, because it was just stupendous. It was wildly creative and simultaneously funny and moving, a combination I don't understand how one arranges or choreographs for, but from witnessing it in Gwen's previous engagements and in Sandra and Julien's dance that Elsa had conceived and directed, I know isn't accidental.

But Gwen and Elsa's performance was the last of the evening, and Gwen shouted her initial "All aboard!" after 10:30 p.m.—long after the train that I wished done carry me—home—had left the station. Because aside from this spectacular finale and the act that immediately preceded my friends’—two shirtless, contortionist break dancers who whirled themselves into pretzels accompanied by a young man who recited the articles and advertisements from a tabloid newspaper in a beat-box, forward-and-back turntable-scratching style—the rest of the program was at best lackluster and was at worst right out of Alfred University circa 1974, had all Alfred's ceramic arts majors taken up modern dance. The motley assortment of entertainment began at the very un-artfully early hour of 6:45 p.m., and performances took place in various corners of the multi-room theater building over the next four hours.

First up were two middle-aged men with shaved heads, wearing jock straps over nylon track pants, who to space-age techno music danced the roles of space explorers in a wayward rocketship. This was represented by a seven-foot cube of steel tubing, its walls formed by a criss-crossing of bungee cords in which were entangled a couple of dozen G.I. Joe dolls in various military get-ups, adventurer costumes, and cowboy suits. The two space cowboys swam in slo-mo through their simulated weightless environment, making emergency announcements in futuristic-computer voices and picking up random G.I. Joes and waving them back and forth while making whhzzzzhh-ing sounds (which, as all boys know, indicates that your G.I. Joe flies really, really fast).

Some time after I exhausted all hope of finding answers to the question "What the fuck??" that was begged by this spectacle, the music segued into something less techno-sci-fi and more techno-gay-dance-club, and the pair donned boxing gloves and head guards, thus transforming their bungee-and-steel space station into a bungee-and-steel sparring ring in which they first did a little pole dancing like the girls down at the Badda-bing do, and then re-created the slow-motion fight scenes from Raging Bull, but without the sweat and blood, the crisp black-and-white cinematography, or any of the drama Scorcese offered attendees of the film version.

After they had sparred for a few minutes, and their last right-left right-left jab-jab ended in a sexually ambivalent embrace, the pair stepped apart and in an apt metaphor for the artistic masturbation their performance embodied, they each reached down into their jockstraps. But rather than stroking their cocks they instead pulled dental protectors from their crotch protectors and inserted them (in their mouths) for some final bit of symbolism that in all honesty escaped me. A more literal interpretation might be that they feared violence by their patience-stretched audience. I have no idea. (And to be truthful, their audience was far more generous than I am being, enthusiastic in their appreciation of all the evening's performers. I admit that only I was the crab.)

A long intermission followed, during which attendees had a choice of listening to an “intervention musicale à l’harmonica” (which is exactly what it sounds like) or stepping outside to smoke with a couple of other artists on the program, two young men who had hung a large canvas on a wall in the courtyard and were covering it with spray paint. The burning cigarettes dangling from their lips and from those of the theatergoers as the small outdoor space filled with volatile paint fumes added some otherwise-lacking suspense to the evening.

Upon my return to the auditorium, two solo dancers wordlessly challenged me to endure them until Gwen’s promised appearance. The first did a dance I can only describe as an interpretion of the hypothetical existence of an unlucky love child borne of Anna Pavlova and Marcel Marceau, in which said offspring inherits the dancing talents of his father and the miming talents of his mother. (If this was indeed the motivation for this dance, it was sheer brilliance.) The second, by a woman who was a much more gifted dancer, but who occasionally reminded me of the character in the Jules Pfeiffer cartoons who was always offering up a dance to some modern-day neurosis or political situation, was simply way too long.

One more intermission to inhale paint fumes and risk self-immolation with a much needed nicotine fix, and then a drawn out performance piece (I won't call it dance) in which a woman wearing nothing but a 20 x 40-foot satin tarpaulin that completely covered the stage ever-so-slowly rose from the floor where she lay as the audience filed in to take their seats, reciting a long list of first names of people who may or may not have known, know, or will know each other, winding the enormous fabric around her all the while, and I was inspired to choreograph my own performance, “A Dance to the Stay-at-Home Parisian.”

And tonight, I am doing just that. (Not developing a dance, but staying home.) And that’s my latest news from here, where the daylight already lasts late into the evening, the weather is warming up, the public gardens are a-riot with blooming flowers, and Spring has greatly improved the mood of the average Parisian.

Profitez des beaux jours,

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