A Paris Moment by Gordon Cope

Author:Gordon Cope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel; memoir; France; Canada
ISBN: 9781987878028
Publisher: Gordon Cope
Published: 2015-02-11T20:25:06+00:00

There is a tiny coffee shop on the corner. The walls are covered with several dozen different clocks, none of which tells the correct time. It is a perfect place to relax and have a morning espresso and croissant, secure in the knowledge that you can simply tell the boss you had no idea what time it was when you roll in late. When Ramon arrives back from a fashion photography shoot in the Maldives, I suggest we go there for a drink.

Although Ramon is tanned from his sojourn in the Indian Ocean, he isn’t very relaxed. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

Ramon glances around the café and sneers. “It’s full of Bobos.”

“What?”

“Bourgeois Bohemians. They are rich, but they don’t want to look it, so they live in the Marais. They drop their kids off at the crèche and then come in to have a coffee and compare jewelry.”

Now that he mentions it, the café is filled with women in frosted hair and designer sports gear pushing Louis Vuitton prams. According to Ramon, these suede-clad invaders are ruining the Marais, driving up housing costs, replacing butcher shops with earring emporiums and parking their Range Rovers in handicapped spots normally reserved for bar owners. Just to cheer him up, I suggest we finish our coffee and go in search of doorways.

If you happen to possess an obsession for doors, then the Marais is heaven. They tend to be large, wooden, double-hinged affairs, designed to swing open wide enough to let a carriage and four horses exit with aplomb. They are tall and rounded in an arch at the top and painted in various shades of red, green and gray. Many still have heavy iron plates bolted into the oak, put there in order to stall a mob with a battering ram long enough to boil a pot of oil. Now that’s what I call a door.

The door at 23 rue Barbette is disappointingly small, hardly large enough to let a parson’s dogcart and a donkey through, but just across the street from us is a magnificent portal. The twin doors soar 20 feet above the pavement and are decorated with a double cameo of a beautiful young woman. The archway, in solid limestone, has been carved with a curious coral relief, and if you look closely enough at the lintel, you can make out the ghostly imprint of the former address, rue des Clouteries.

Ramon’s favorite doorway is a large red affair on rue Vieille du Temple, just south of rue de Bretagne. It is so big that a special, smaller door has been cut in the middle for pedestrians to enter. If you stand across the street and consume some hallucinogens, you will notice that the trim on the door has been designed to resemble the stylized helmet of a medieval knight.

My favorite door is just down the street at 47 rue Vieille du Temple. The entrance to the Hôtel Amelot-de-Bisseuil features a twin set of garish Medusa heads in bas relief. This

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