La pub

I regret to disappoint those who have arrived expecting an inebriated tribute to the British public house.  In 'King's-Arms'-bereft France, the word pub is short for la publicité: also falsely friendly, for it means 'advertising'.

French advertisements are in the main much the same as advertisements everywhere: irritating (but for their being in French), garish and depressingly materialistic.  Nevertheless, I have observed several campaigns or quirks which, if not peculiar to France, would look rather out of place in Britain:

1.

Hervé Marseille, Senator-Mayor of Meudon and the Municipal Council wish you a Happy New Year, 2013.

First come messages from Monsieur Hervé Marseille, Mayor of Meudon (not of Marseille, alas, although he is incidentally also Senateur for the Hauts-de-Seine).  He and the town council wish the good people of Meudon a Happy New Year.  The poster above has appeared on bus-stops and small bill-boards all over the town, and on the municipal web-site.  Equivalents appeared in Paris as well.  Even if an electoral concern doubtless has something to do with the warmth of these wishes, it remains a nice gesture. 

2.

(from www.saintaugustin.net).  'Giving - receiving:  (I) give to the Church!  Church funds: everybody is involved!'

The second are advertising campaigns undertaken by the Catholic Church to request financial support (for priests' allowances, for the support of retired priests and for material maintenance), something unthinkable in England.  Not even the C. of E. does this, in fact. (If I feel brave enough, I might write a further post about the Church in France, because the religious landscape of France is very interesting, especially compared to Britain's).    'Denier de l'Eglise' does not mean a 'denial' (one hopes!) but comes from the Latin denarius - in short, another word for money.  And who wouldn't donate, if it makes you as serene as the lady in the photo...!

Many French advertisements and posters also use the first person as an imperative: 'Je donne pour l'Eglise', or 'Je monte - je valide', to remind bus passengers to stamp their tickets.  An interesting usage which does not exist in English.

3.  Finally, we see very few adverts in Britain containing funny words from other languages, but here is a new French advert for package-holidays:

Mais qu'est-ce que c'est alors, le « fun »?

 which makes rather ironic promise number 1 below:

100% French-speaking?

This huge bill-board at Montparnasse also astonished me:

I will also write another blog-post about Anglicisms like this, and about the slow tremendous seep of the English language and of Anglophone culture into France, which is invisible from Britain.

There - I think that more or less covers French advertisements.  No doubt a post about the English pub will follow one day...

Quelle merveille! Les King's Singers!

What a treat I had yesterday evening!  Who should deign to descend upon Paris but the inimitable, insurpassable, incandescent King's Singers (whom I might have mentioned before)?  And who should see fit to conjure up two tickets to see them at the Salle Gaveau but my friend Edward, who teaches lycéens in Reims, who blogs here and the excess of whose generosity defies comprehension?

Five King's Singers at the Salle Gaveau

The King's Singers were founded in 1968 by six choral scholars of King's College, Cambridge.  From the beginning they made sure of great breadth in their repertoire, from all ages, nations and movements, and also of an astonishing sound.  Six men sing with the richness of an orchestra and the togetherness of a single voice!

The members of the King's Singers have changed over the decades (none of the founders remain), but the composition, the superlative musicianship and the jokes remain the same.  The present singers are:

The King's Singers take a bow

David Hurley (countertenor).

Timothy Wayne-Wright (countertenor).

Paul Phoenix (tenor).

Christopher Bruerton (baritone).

Christopher Gabbitas (baritone).

Jonathan Howard (buttery biscuit bass).

We made our roundabout way to the 8e arrondissement and arrived in time to digest the news that David Hurley, being ill (though recovering), was not able to perform.  The remaining five presented a much-changed programme, which took us from various arrangements of the Lord's Prayer (including, gloriously, Duruflé's (not sung here by KS)), to a panorama of Baltic music, to lively Spanish Renaissance songs.  They introduced all their music in French, and Paul Phoenix's heroic and fearless efforts reminded me how this business of speaking a foreign language ought to be done!

After the interval came lighter and more modern music ('un oeuvre résolument de saison').  For example (albeit now with some members now replaced):

and

.

 

Christopher Gabbitas

Christopher Bruerton

As if being the best a cappella group known to mankind were not enough, the King's Singers always like to meet their audience after the concert.  We managed to speak to and obtain the autographs of four of the five (Timothy Wayne-Wright fled in terror).  Christopher Bruerton recommended a restaurant which it will be my solemn duty to try out!  And then an entire choir which had come to hear the concert burst into song in the foyer. 

How uplifting it was to hear fine musicians, who are also content to be decent fellows, in effortlessly civilised France, and in the company of a good and generous friend and (needless to say) fellow fan!

Christophers Bruerton and Gabbitas, Jonathan Howard and Paul Phoenix woz 'ere.

P.S.  It is worth mentioning that, when I published the post below, I was completely oblivious to what was in the pipe-line...

Se déplacer dans Paris: le métro

Station Saint-Jacques - ligne 6

The London Underground is 150 years old (hurrah!), so the least I can do is to undertake a grand tour of the famous métro system to see how the Parisians answered!  This answer took a full thirty-eight years to appear (in 1900), but was no less vigorous.  Ask for a map (try not to despair when handed the tourist version, five months into my Year Abroad) and you will see this vigour by the sheer density of the lines.  

Cité - line 4 runs beneath the Seine.

The Parisian métro was constructed with a different philosophy from the London Underground's. In the British capital, the Metropolitan and District lines behaved like main-line railways : they carried freight, ran far out into the London suburbs and Buckinghamshire, and bickered with each other of course.  The visionary eccentric Sir Edward Watkin,  Metropolitan chairman, even wanted to run direct services from Manchester to Paris via the Great Central railway, the Circle line and a Channel Tunnel for which preparatory excavations were actually undertaken.  Imagine the Eurostar setting off from Sloane Square!  Even the subsequent 'Tube' lines (built by tunnelling deep underground) cover significant distances between stations.

Ligne 6 - above the street on steel viaduct (métro aérien).

The métro behaves rather more like a bus or tram.  The rapidity of transport is achieved not so much by the speed of the trains in the tunnels, but by the high frequency of stations.  The idea has been to reduce the distance on foot required between origin and destination; the result is that the network can be reached within five minutes from most of central Paris, and that stations can also be seen from each other along the tunnels.  Most of the lines were built not by the deep-level tunnelling of  later London lines (here I tread carefully in case any engineers are reading), but by the 'cut-and-cover' method of the Metropolitan and District: the digging of an enormous trenches, and their subsequent covering-over to form a tunnel. Occasionally they leap out of the ground and into the air on steel viaducts (métro aérien). This means that most lines follow the streets, and also that the passenger need drop or climb only two or three flights of stairs to reach the platforms.  It also has the consequence that the trains can be heard and felt above ground: through innocuous vents in the pavements, for example, or with particular resonance by the congregation of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs near Montparnasse...

From Denfert-Rochereau station on ligne 4, two stations (Mouton Duvernet and Alésia) are visible down the line.

The R.A.T.P. Logo (obtained from Wikimedia Commons).

Responsible for the infrastructure and operation of the métro, along with the buses and two R.E.R. lines, is the equivalent to Transport for London: the R.A.T.P. (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens).  (The R.A.T.P. incidentally owns the London United bus company - so the logo of a company owned by the French state is displayed proudly on buses all over London!).  It is easy to see how the R.A.T.P. views the métro's job by its numbering system (there are no names; could you imagine a French Jubilee line?).  The underground lines are numbered from 1 to 14, numbers which are taken up again at number 20 by the hundred or so bus routes which thread the city and which deserve their own blog-post.

Um... have I boarded the wrong train?

Another peculiarity of the Parisian métro is that the station names take quite brief forms of the place-names they serve.  They normally take the name alone of a street, a junction between two streets, a main-line station, a square, a church or an important building, with exotic results: "Raspail", "Cardinal Lemoine" or "Maubert-Mutualité".  It is as if stations in London were called "Baker", "Warren" or "Sloane".  "Monument" or "Bank" have a similar air.  The result is that you can travel to Crimea, Stalingrad, Strasbourg, Liège, Luxembourg and Rome for 1,30 euros one way.  Other stations are named after battles, monuments public figures and writers (of course!).  And there are also stations called "Temple" and "St-Paul" where, sadly, there are no connections with the London Underground.  

The famous Art Nouveau style at Cité.

Being French, the system has effortless style, particularly the well-known art nouveau iron-work and typography which indicate the stations, or the glazed white tiles of earthenware lining the walls and ceilings.  Also, being French, it works: the R.A.T.P. has five hundred trains in service at rush-hour and carries four million passengers a day; thanks in part to lines 2 and 6 which effectively form a 'Circle line'  most journeys can be made with only one change.

The ten-year-old film below, from the series 'C'est pas sorcier', is good fun to watch: if not for useless facts such as line 4 being the warmest because it is all underground, has the greatest number of trains and uses rubber tyres, then for the colloquial high-speed French!

Finally, the Parisians know how to have fun with the métro:

As one of the comments pointed out ("Pas mal... mais bon, c'est pas très difficile de doubler le métro de la ligne 10 ;)"), they have picked two stations very close to each other on one of  the quietest and slowest lines on the network... but still more than I could do, given my croissant consumption! 

Pont du Bir-Hakeim (Ligne 6)

Un joyeux Noël...

...to all who have the misfortune to read this blog!  Here is a nice mixture of the best of Britain and the best of France:  the French carol Noël nouvelet, sung by the inestimable King's Singers, in the Round Church at Cambridge.

La veille de l'hiver.

It is the eve of winter (it was when I began to prepare this post), the air is no longer empty but heavy with chill, and everything is hueless but the trees :

rue Monge

Musée Carnavalet, rue de Sévigné

More impressive than the colours of the sky are the colours of heaven.  "Les couleurs du ciel" is an exhibition, presented by the marvellous Musée Carnavalet, (Madame de Sévigné's old house) of paintings made for Parisian churches in the seventeenth century.  In the first half of the century, the expansion of Paris, the arrival in its outskirts of numerous religious orders, the piety of Louis XIII and particularly the influence of the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation yielded a great movement for the expansion or renewal of existing churches and for new ecclesiastical construction.  The new churches needed new ornaments and paintings, of course, and artists newly returned from Italy began a great revival in French religious art.  Although much of the construction and decoration had completed before too long into Louis XIV's reign (1643-1715), he did not neglect the construction of two enormous new Parisian churches (Val-de-Grâce and les Invalides), the designs of whose enormous dome frescoes were also included in the exhibition.  There was also at this time a tradition of commissioning a new altar-piece every May for Notre-Dame de Paris; these were called mays and began the careers of many young artists.  My favourite painting there was L'adoration des mages (The Adoration of the Magi) by Claude Vignon, who incidentally had thirty-four children by his two wives.  From afar, the painting glitters, and at a close inspection (there was no glass and only a small barrier - much gratitude for the trust placed in the visitors) it is possible to see how brave Vignon was, applying slabs of paint to the canvas.  Reproductions of the picture do not seem to be on the Internet, sadly, but the work itself is a marvel to behold.

Concert d'orgue à l'église de Meudon

That evening an organ concert was held in the church of Saint Martin in Meudon.  The parish's organist collaborated with her counterpart from Meudon's Polish twin town to show off the instrument, which is  soon to undergo further renovation by the council.  The organists performed a grand tour of the centuries, with a particular emphasis on the music of Marcel Dupré, who lived and died in Meudon.  I particularly enjoyed this little meditation on the plainsong melody of Te lucis ante terminum .  A wonderful French sound - as French as the eagerness to commemorate local personages.  Now that is the way to spend a winter evening!

 

The Tour Montparnasse slices mist

Pélérinage balzacien: rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève

Another of the touristic perambulations which I undertook in October might better be described as a literary pilgrimage.  The rue Tournefort is deep in the 5e arrondissement, running southwards from the Panthéon, and Honoré de Balzac, the great nineteenth-century novelist whom I might have mentioned once or twice, knew it well enough to set Le Père Goriot there. 

 
Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, est une vieille femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, entre le quartier latin et le faubourg Saint-Marcel.

My effort at a translation: Madame Vauquer, née  de Conflans, is an old woman who for forty years has kept a boarding house in the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, between the Latin Quarter and the inner suburb of  Saint-Marcel.
  

Much has changed, mercifully:

           ...les maisons y sont mornes, les murailles y sentent la prison....  Nul quartier de             Paris n’est plus horrible, ni, disons-le, plus inconnu.'

    ...the houses there are grim; the walls suggest a prison... No part of Paris is more horrible nor, it      might be said, more unknown.

Much has not, though:

A brusque and rude slope

Elle est située dans le bas de la rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, à l’endroit où le terrain s’abaisse vers la rue de l’Arbalète par une pente si brusque et si rude que les chevaux la montent ou la descendent rarement.

 [The boarding-house] is to be found at the bottom of the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, where the land drops down towards the rue de l’Arbalète so abruptly and roughly that horses rarely go up or down it.

What is also striking about his description of the area are the 'tons jaunes' and sombre colours: he described the street as a 'cadre de bronze', a picture-frame of bronze well-suited to the picture he was about to paint.  Much of what inspired this description must have disappeared with the smartening-up of the street, but there is still a papery yellowness about it.  Certainly the relative quietude remains.

It is generally accepted that the house to the left is the Maison Vauquer, also described in meticulous detail by Balzac.  Here he played out the first episode of his great drama: here Rastignac planned his conquest of Parisian society, here Goriot, because of his compulsive generosity, had to move progressively further upstairs as he gradually tightened his belt; here Vautrin met his come-uppance!  It is fascinating to  find the settings of books or places frequented by authors and by people I admire.

  
'La façade de la pension donne sur un jardinet, en sorte que la maison tombe à angle droit sur la rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, où vous la voyez coupée dans sa profondeur.

   The front of the house overlooks a little garden, and it is at a right angle to the rue Neuve-Sainte-  Geneviève,  which cuts it in section from top to bottom.

In an imminent post I will follow the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève to its namesake, the tomb of St. Geneviève at the church of St-Etienne-du-Mont.

Jour de l'Armistice

I break my fortnight-long silence (for which I apologise) because of today's date and its commemoration in Meudon.  The Armistice which ended the First World War has been remembered first with a Mass in Meudon's parish church of Saint-Martin (St Martin of Tours, whose feast-day is also on the eleventh of November), and then with a parade from the hôtel de ville to the cemetery to the south of town.

The congregation outside Saint-Martin

Having set off from the town hall down the hill and on the left, the parade turns into the rue de la République.

The parade approaches the cemetery.

The parade enters the cemetery.

All of this was done with calm and unaffected dignity.  A similar impression was given by the Tricolore flags fixed to the cab of every bus:

The Tricolore (just above the driver's cab).

The sobering thought has not escaped me that those of my age a century ago were sent to France not to enrich their lives, studying the luminous subtlety of man's art and being, but to have their lives ruined or ended in the calamity of industrialised warfare: requiescant in pace; qu'ils reposent en paix.

La gastronomie - encore une fois.

Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?

Caption competition!

 The B.B.C. reported, as a trade delegation was sent to Paris this week, that British food exports to France have doubled since the year 2000.  To investigate this matter, a scheme of the utmost audacity was executed. The B.B.C. loitered outside the Louvre with Scotch eggs, cheese and pickle sandwiches and Bakewell tarts, offered them to a random sample of citizens of the République Française and filmed their responses.

I have two questions:

a "Trianon".  I think Alain Gié ought to be canonised!

1)  Were the interviewees merely being polite?  After all, as I have mentioned once or twice, the French are accustomed to, and indeed expect, dishes which it is beyond the English even to describe, let alone forge.  The image to the right shows an example:  click for a double portion. 

The result of a gathering of English people

2)   Actually, what am I saying?  I am rather partial to a Bakewell tart!  Why could they not have conducted this experiment a week ago?   I was at this very spot with a good friend, who was visiting.  We were soaked in accordance with the ubi Anglorum ibi pluvia rule, but it was no hardship that a cheese and pickle sandwich, prepared by the B.B.C. no less, could not have eased substantially.  Students are always hungry!

The good friend (Edward), who has hopefully dried off by now, is spending his year abroad as a language assistant in Reims (N.E. of Paris).  He blogs prolifically and much less ponderously here.  It is remarkable how different our year abroad arrangements are to each other, though neither will have been less profoundly formative than the other  for it.

Quelquefois, Cambridge me manque...

One of the many things which make me miss Cambridge sometimes:

The glorious Collegium Regale Te Deum and Jubilate (or the Morning Canticles) by Herbert Howells - he of the Hymnus Paradisi from whose Proms performance I am still reeling - will be sung at Matins in their namesake King's College Chapel at 10.30 a.m. this Sunday, the 21st.  They will sound just as magnificent as the above.  I will be sorry not to be there, but perhaps I have enough blessings!  If you do not have time for the whole video, make some at least for the almighty finale of the Te Deum (O LORD, IN THEE HAVE I TRUSTED: LET ME NEVER BE CONFOUNDED ! ! ! ! !) - from 7 minutes and 20 seconds onwards, and make sure to fasten everything around you securely to the ground.

As if this were not treat enough for the congregation, the Organ Postlude will be Crown Imperial by William Walton.