Seven years ago today, terrorists attacked Parisian cafes and restaurants, and riddled the Bataclan concert hall with machine-gun fire and grenades. 130 people died. I wrote the following in the wake of this tragedy, and included it as an envoi to Saint Germain des Prés: Paris’s Rebel Quarter.
*
In Musée des Beaux-Arts, a poem suggested by the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, W.H. Auden reflected on the almost casual way Pieter Breugel showed the rash experimenter’s end.
In the foreground, a plowman gets on with his day. All you see of Icarus and his melting wings is a pair of legs disappearing into the sunny waters. To Auden it embodied a truth about disaster:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
Or just walking dully along.
After terrorists attacked Paris on Friday the thirteenth, 2015, killing one hundred and thirty people, friends all over the world enquired anxiously after our safety and asked in what way we had been affected.
The question was surprisingly difficult to answer. If I were truthful, I’d say that, until we learned later that night of the atrocities, our day was mainly about cats and a new DVD player.
In mid-afternoon, the DVD player took precedence. The old one having failed, Louise and I took a crowded bus to Montparnasse and, plunging through waves of people at least as tumultuous as those that engulfed Icarus, emerged with a new and suprisingly cheap Sony. Whereupon Louise left me to carry it home while she went off – “for a stroll.”
Arriving at rue de l’Odéon brought the evening’s first note of disaster. Just as I opened our door, a neighbour knocked to tell me that, while its owner was in Japan, burglars had broken into the fourth-floor apartment.
Compared with what was to come, the event would appear trivial, but at the time it confronted us with a multitude of difficultes, foremost among them capturing our neighbour’s two cats, which, having escaped through the smashed door, were prowling the stairs.
As the sun set - and, as I would later learn, men on the other side of the city buckled on their explosive vests and checked their Kalashnikovs – we were busy trapping the errant felines, locking them in our own apartment and keeping them separate from our own cat Scotty while at the same time calling their owner in Kyoto with the bad news and contacting her housekeeper (who speaks only Romanian) in order to track down our neighbour’s son, the polar explorer Sebastian Copeland. You would not think a two-metre tall person could be so hard to find, but Paris, though charmingly open – too open, in hindsight – can, as we would learn that night, harbour all manner of secrets.
By the time we’d eaten a quick dinner, the worst appeared to be over. The tearful calls to and from Japan were concluded, the stolen items lamented. As a carpenter boarded up the broken door and replaced the lock, a gendarme from the Prefecture suggested the thieves were probably the same eastern Europeans who burgled us last year.
“But what about the expensive new security gate and entry-phone installed after that attack?”
He shrugged. “We think they climbed over the wall from the courtyard next door.”
Ridiculously in retrospect, I remember feeling insulted by the obviousness of their method, the lack of finesse. Smash, kick, kill. The crude solutions of lesser minds.
Only then, with all apparently dealt with and under control, the cats contented, even the new DVD player insalled, did my sister-in-law call.
“Is Louise there?” she asked anxiously. “Are you safe?” And the television began to ooze the horror that would dominate the night,
I sat and watched while Louise rang around to her friends, with whom she’d often attended concerts at the Bataclan, Happily, all were safe.
Disblief muffled understanding. Posted only a couple of blocks from the Bataclan, the BBC’s chief correspondent rambled to the camera on the improbabilities of the attacks, unaware that police had already burst in to find the hundred dead – the horror taking place, just as Auden said, “while someone else is eating or opening as window or just walking dully along.”
Maybe it was the thought of Breugel and Auden and the old masters that made me dig out the DVD of Civilization, the 1969 BBC documetnary series in which art historian Kenneth Clark assessed the intellectual progress of mankind. I hadn’t watched it in decades, but on this night it was as consoling as the Bible to a believer.
Clark, standing alone on the sunny bank of the Seine, with Notre Dame behind him, began by suggesting that it was “a good moment to look at some of the ways that man has shown himself to be an intelligent, creative, orderly and compassionate animal.”
I watched for hours as he enumerated barely a fraction of the works of the creative mind – Chartres, Florence, Dutch painting, English music: Wren, Bach, Picasso; each a further proof that civilization cannot be extinguished, least of all by so crude a tool as physical violence. War, plague, bigotry, fanaticism and genocide might stifle, but they can never destroy. Not the human spirit, and certainly not Paris.