There’s no denying it; Moûtiers is not Paris. Neither is Albertville nor even Chambéry, the ancient capital of La Savoie. Yet for the first half hour of my two-day stay in Paris I might well have been visiting Lyon, Savoie’s biggest city and a place I have recently got to know a little. There are the same grand avenues of six-storey high apartments with the grey leaded mansard roofs and embellished round ‘lucarnes’ or attic windows. There is the same constant flow of traffic and pedestrians, both vying for supremacy and each obeying the lights just long enough but no longer - people in a hurry. The centre of Lyon may be on the Parisian scale; not so its stations. Emerge from the vast Gare de Lyon in Paris and look back and up at white stone towers, bas-relief sculptured figures of gods, warriors and kings, decorating the upper reaches of the building, multi-paned glasswork in huge arched windows, so different from provincial stations with their modern streamlined premises. There is a harmony of style to the squares in the capital. Architects’ names and dates visible above the doors show most of the buildings are from the first few years of the 1900s. Small blue enamelled signs at first floor level still state ‘gas to all floors’. Identical shutters and fancy iron-work balconies are repeated on each floor with, here and there, a potted plant, as you look upwards to the complicated roof line, many storeys above the street. Even here are gardens and greenery; private spaces among the roof tops.
Back at street level, colour-coded teams of cleaners, this one bright green (everything - overalls, brooms, vehicles) sweep continually among the business people, workers and tourists who are hastening along in the bitter March wind. Restaurants and cafés, their outdoor terraces screened and heated to maximise the comfortable seating areas, display their menus and tariffs and must benefit from this cold weather. ‘’Les deux Savoies’’ advertised ‘tartiflette’’ and ‘’raclette’’ as if it was the finest treat, rather than traditional mountain shepherds’ fare. Another, next door, dedicated to seafood. Where better to take refuge than at a table with coffee or a meal? What better place than a warm window to watch the world’s travellers scurry by in hoods and scarves. A well dressed elderly lady in a large hat came and sat, at an outside table, to take her coffee. Surely a true Parisienne out for her morning stroll in her local ‘quartier’, its streets named after philosophers. In Brides les Bains only smokers stand outside in this weather, in a street named after a regional politician. Not far from here is Léon Blum square, certainly not a village but with all you would need most days to save going further – four ‘boulangeries’, three ‘bouchers’, two small supermarkets, a specialist cheese shop, a ‘charcuterie’, a greengrocers and a metro station named after Voltaire (would he have laughed!). Our hotel was two minutes from here. The square rates as a relatively minor one yet it had a grandeur and sense of space I don’t see anywhere in my region. It would take some minutes to walk around it, the centre being wide green areas and uncrossable roads. In public gardens, signs inform the populace that ‘the lawns are in their winter resting state’ from December to April. In Savoie it is clearer; if covered with snow, they are ‘resting’. Trees are also known to be resting if they have been severely pollarded, a practice which reduces the amount of autumn leaves. This has been done extensively from Moûtiers to Chambéry, yet less so in Paris where tall plane trees are the prevalent variety, along the avenues and beside the Seine. The hotel room was on the sixth floor and looked out upon their pompom flowers. Pigeons seem welcome; I saw no buildings netted to deter them. On the ‘’Ile Saint Louis’’ where Notre Dame stands, forming the prow of the island, they rose in dozens as we walked. There stands too, the enormous statue of France’s first King and Emperor, Charlemagne, mounted on a charger with his two henchmen beside him. The pigeons and the weather have blackened his eye sockets so that his stare is rather a baleful one as he watches over the comings and goings on the river. He was a good king and a man of great integrity. Would he approve of his country nowadays and think it in good hands with the current president? This is the emperor who endowed my local town, Moûtiers en Tarantaise as being one of his important metropolitan cities more than a thousand years ago. A sudden outburst of motorbikes and sirens turned heads, as outriders cut across the traffic, followed by a blue police van, its headlights flashing – a sense of excitement, of being in the capital city: something happening across the river along the Quai d’Orsay. Maigret hot on a trail again I suppose, I said. We went the same way on foot to revisit our favourite works of art at the ‘musée’.
Unlike many cities, Paris invites walkers – you could go right across the city in a few hours, if you wanted to. But why, when there is such an excellent transport network under your feet. Why bother with cars at all? Who are these people who must fill up the streets with their noisy vehicles? A ‘carnet’ of ten tickets costs 11 euros and one ticket lasts until you leave the system, no matter how many stops you take. Nowhere have I enjoyed public transport more. We sat looking back through the carriages as they flicked to and fro like the body of a serpent, following the bends in the track, the sounds and smells unaltered in my memory from the time when I worked there. An attempt to deodorize the metro corridors was made some years ago, but abandoned when it was found that travellers preferred it as it was. If you want to ride the streets, there are stands of grey bicycles, fifty at a time, chained to coin-in-the-slot posts. This is still a huge body of people and no one catches your eye in the Metro or lets you notice they are looking at you on the street. In the restricted personal space of a crowd, I see that people keep their gaze fixed on the distance and move at city speed, to create an illusion of space around themselves. Only tourists like us look at everything. Down here this happens less and in the village, would be considered positively rude. There is one part of Paris which always seems less formal however – Montmartre and the ‘Sacré Coeur’, where we arrived just before sunset, to photograph the city in hazy shades and the basilica in rosy white. A musician played his guitar and sang for the pleasure of the people seated on the steps, until his hands were so cold he had to stop – you must be in a big city to attract live music like this. We had to josh with the African sellers to keep from being their last sale of the day, then headed back to the Champs- Elysées, that huge motorway of a street leading to the Arc de Triomphe, filled with airline offices and car showrooms, but, disappointingly, no ‘moules-frites’ restaurants, so we had to make do with bacardi mojito cocktails followed by a super smart supper, splendidly served – now that’s different; you won’t find that in my village – I don’t do cocktails!
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copyright Julia Austen 2015