It was about four in the morning, the temperature well below zero, and at the foot of the slope a frozen lake glimmered in a pearly half-darkness that could have been moonlight - had there been a moon. On the jetty where a pump kept a dark circle of water roiling oilily, a naked man stood for a moment, body steaming, and jumped in, leaving only by a wisp of vapour and some footprints in the frost.
It reminded me that I was naked too. My hosts, also naked, were rolling on the lawn at my feet, briskly rubbing themselves with handfuls of snow.
Well, when in Rome…or, rather, Helsinki…
The snow felt as soft as lamb’s wool and just as warm. I’d like to say that Emily Dickinson’s lines came to mind: “…as Freezing persons recollect the Snow/First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go.“ What I actually thought was how inadequate was the vocabulary of the south to the Nordic experience of not-moonlight, not-cold, not-clothed, not-feeling.
I climbed to my feet, brushed off the snow and went back inside, past the framed letter from the Duke of Edinburgh thanking the Finnish Sauna Society for its hospitality, to find my clothes and some of the potent local schnapps.
All this came back to me yesterday when a poster on Boulevard St Germain reminded us that 1st October would be observed as a Nuit Blanche – a white night, or rather “the contemporary all-night art festival Nuit Blanche.”
In 2002, then-mayor Bertrand Delanoe decreed that shops, museums and theatres should stay open on a Saturday or Sunday in the first week of October, and citizens be invited to roam the streets all night. The idea was picked up by Rome, Montreal, Toronto, Brussels, Madrid, Lima, Malaga, Leeds (Leeds?) Tai Pei and Seoul.
Isn’t there something cynical about re-writing the calendar in this way? France tried it during the revolution of 1789, making the week ten days long and having the year begin with the harvest rather than in mid-winter. Its organizer, Fabre d’Eglantine, ended up on the guillotine, about as decisive an expression of municipal dissatisfaction as one can imagine.
People in northern cities don’t declare white nights. They occur naturally in mid-summer when the sun stays above the horizon. Feodor Dostoievsky’s Belye nochi/White Nights doesn’t even trouble to describe the phenomenon. The title’s enough.
Not that Dostoievsky would recognise the Parisian White Night, loaded as it has become with incentives for people to stay up past their bedtime and bring their credit cards with them.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo (one-time deputy to Delanoe) is investing €1.5 million in eye-catching spectacle. “Parisians will throng the streets,” we are assured. Well, good luck with that. In my experience, certain arrondissements are pretty well unthrongable, even in daylight.
“I see Paris as a large exuberant garden, invested with unusual scenes, populated by rare forms and crossed by intriguing creatures,” explains Nuit Blanche artistic director Kitty Hartl. Madame Hidalgo is eager to make Paris more park than city, and has designated portions as “Urban Forests”, through the trees of which we will weave on bikes and electric trottinettes, trying to balance our groceries on the handlebars.
Mlle. Hartl explains that, “inspired by a digital reinterpretation of Hieronymus Bosch's famous Garden of Earthly Delights, I imagined a dreamlike and surreal universe where all creative delusions are possible.” Her piece de resistance is “Islands of Foam …filling the façade and parvis [forecourt] of the Centre Pompidou with a colorful and foam-made installation by artist Stéphanie Lüning,” a treatment already tried on other European capitals, with mixed results.
“He’s your dog. YOU clean it up.”
At the Hotel de Ville itself, more promisingly, “famous pastry chef and chocolate maker Pierre Hermé, named best pastry chef in the world in 2016, will offer the tasting of a monumental birthday cake.” Madame Hidalgo may plan to be present - making sure the slices aren’t too large. When M. Delanoe made a personal appearance in 2002, a gentleman stabbed him (not too seriously), explaining that he hated “politicians, particularly homosexuals.” While the mayor appears to be neither – her share of the national vote in the recent election was a dismal 1.74% – in her place I’d stay in bed.
A true white night needs nobody’s permission. Any summer evening, one can walk to the bank of the Seine, take a seat at one of the cafes that stay open until 2am and watch the moon over the Grand Palais or wait for that moment each hour when the Eiffel Tower comes alive with a million flickering lights. There will be music from the buskers who work the cafes on Place Dauphine, and perhaps your eyes will meet those of someone else on the other side of the terrasse, as they did for Jacques Prévert:
“Three matches one by one struck in the night
The first to see the whole of your face
The second to see your eyes
The last to see your mouth
And the complete and utter darkness to remember them all
While holding you in my arms.”
No islands of foam. But a garden of earthly delights? Oh, yes.
*
GIFT OFFER.
In the spirit of increasing the appreciation of my adoptive city, I’ll send a free copy of my book MONTPARNASSE; PARIS’S DISTRICT OF MEMORY AND DESIRE to any person who becomes a financial supporter, inscribing it to them, or to any person they nominate, and mail it post-free.