PARIS AND ITS PHANTOMS

LOOKING FOR A NEW PARIS BUT FINDING ONLY THE OLD

The Opera Garnier - before work began.

            One could easily believe that half Paris is under renovation. Scaffolding is everywhere. It isn't just the building site that is Notre Dame, nor the numerous "For Rent" signs on retail premises that went bust during Covid. By law, each façade in the city must be steam-cleaned every ten years, a process known as ravalement, and some people, with next year's Olympics in mind, are getting an early start.

            André Malraux, de Gaulle's Minister for Cultural Affairs, introduced the so-called Loi Malraux in 1962, informing his successor, Françoise Giroud, somewhat grandly - he had a taste for grand gestures - "Behold, I bequeath you a white Paris." But you only need to see a city such as Edinburgh, which has similar architecture, though obscured under a century of grime, to recognise what a difference he made.        

  The fountains of Concorde - recreated for Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly in An American in Paris (1951).

Latest monuments to disappear are the fountains on Place de la Concorde, celebrated in An American in Paris but now enveloped in tent-like shrouds, and the Opera Garnier, that stone fruitcake of which empress Eugenie, consort of Napoleon III, on seeing it for the first time, is said to have commented "It's not Renaissance, not Baroque, not Rococo…what style is it?" To which architect Charles Garnier, displaying that skill in buttering up the client without which nobody in the property market can survive, responded, "But your imperial highness, it's your style."

            We're promised a grand unveiling of the transformed Opera before the Olympics - a consolation prize, some suggest, for President Macron's failure to fulfil his promise that Notre Dame would be ready by May and not, as now forecast, only in December.  With its stonework newly scoured and statuary re-gilded, the effect on, in particular, Carpeaux's La Danse, should be spectacular. The kind of art that gave Paris its racy reputation, La Danse so infuriated some citizens that they pelted it with ink.

   For most people, of course, the Opera is best known for its legendary underground lake and the various performers who have poled across its black depths and through its labyrinth of flooded crypts.  We've long since given up explaining that there is no lake; only a single flooded cellar, with water barely waist-deep.  

The Opera lake - sorry about the Phantom.

But like the tourists who queue up at the modern incarnation of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, eager to walk in the footsteps of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom were dead before it even opened, they find the legend too vivid to let it be blighted by the cold wind of truth.

            Not that the Opera is without phantoms. In 1991, LVMH financed the restoration of an archive and library in the former imperial wing, where Napoleon and his lady entertained before and after performances. Marie Dominique and I attended the gala unveiling. We gawked at the imperial guardsmen in silver breastplates who lined the grand staircase, and milled in the grand foyer, joining the glitterari, sipping Bollinger as we nibbled foie gras sandwiches thin as razorblades and petit fours pretty enough to wear on one's lapel.

            Hovering at the edge of the crowd, celebrity-spotting, we noticed an alien presence apparently doing the same. His beret barely covered a near-hairless head, and a loose sweater and baggy cords hung on his emaciated body. Many saw him but none acknowledged his existence, even when he spotted some friendly faces and dived into the crowd which parted silently and closed after him. Rudolf Nureyev, dying of Aids, has little more than a year to live, but to those who cheered him on the stage of this building, he was already dead.