Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides by Mitchell John Hanson

Author:Mitchell, John Hanson [Mitchell, John Hanson]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781497675377
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2014-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Nine

The City of Light

For a while during my student years and afterward, I had lived in Paris, near the Place Monge, and had sporadically attended the Sorbonne and involved myself in the international world of sometime students, radicals, and artists who inhabited the underbelly of the Left Bank. Like many American students I had originally come to Europe to attend university, but I liked it so much I stayed on and managed, albeit illegally, to find work to support myself. I gave away all my American clothes and attempted, by acquiring a smattering of European languages, to obscure my decidedly American identity.

This was the first time I had been back in the city in ten years and, as soon as I arrived, I went out to look for my old friends. Most of the people I knew would gather every day at a place called the Café Saint Placide, and the morning after I got to Paris, I went there for coffee. Not surprisingly, except for a friendly waiter named Gilbert, everyone had departed for other adventures, and the café itself had declined sadly, I thought. It was bright and noisy and crowded with older, rough-looking types, none of whom I knew.

I had other, more established friends in the city, though, one of whom was a man named Chrétien Berger, whom I found in the phone book and called. Chrétien and I had worked together in a restaurant on Corsica and in the winter, back in Paris, almost every Sunday, he would invite me to his parents’ apartment for dinner. They must have had some money since they lived in an airy sunny place near the Champs-Elysées and always managed to put on a fine five-course meal, sometimes with champagne. Chrétien had a pretty cousin named Micheline and often, after our midday meal, the three of us would go over to the Jardin des Plantes and stroll arm in arm.

Chrétien was overjoyed to hear from me and later that first day we got together, rehashed the old times and made more plans to meet again for dinner with Micheline. I spent the rest of that day and the next wandering around my former haunts. I went out to the zoo, and the Bois de Boulogne, and I found a gardener at the Jardin des Plantes whom I had befriended and who remembered me and chatted with him about flowers and trees, and then I went back to the Saint Placide and chatted up the waiter Gilbert. After that, I went over to Notre Dame and looked at the famous stained glass window in the south transept.

The immense expanse of glass was glowing as usual, even in the half light of the cloudy afternoon beyond the cathedral walls. There were a few informed tourists there who knew exactly what they were looking for and had trained the binoculars on the details.

Stained glass windows were a crucial element in the spiritual foundation of the design of the interiors of Gothic cathedrals. They

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.