Saturday started in the eleventh, in Popincourt, where the galleries are small enough that the artist is usually the person saying hello. No hello today, just an easel in a window with a work made entirely of old postcards, cut and layered until the stamps and handwriting become the sky. The label says Susana Machado. I stood there working out how she did the edges for longer than I will admit.
Around the corner on Rue de la Forge Royale a whole shopfront has been given over to painted cats. Dozens of them, every colour, climbing over the signage like they pay rent. Paris takes its murals seriously and its cats more seriously still.
Then across to the Marais and the real reason for the day, the Maison de Victor Hugo on the Place des Vosges. He lived in that corner apartment for sixteen years, and right now the house is showing Hugo et l’Architecture, about one hundred and sixty of his drawings, done with the BnF. Subtitle, from the stone to the quill. I went for the novels connection. I stayed for the drawings.
Look at this one. A moonlit castle from 1857, brown ink and wash, charcoal, white gouache picked out for the light, and the label says he used stencils and left reserves of bare paper for the moon. That is not an author doodling between chapters. That is a full technique, the kind you arrive at after years of getting it wrong. The man wrote Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris and then, for himself, mostly in private, made hundreds of these.
Two other things stayed with me. A caricature of Hugo as the tower of Notre-Dame itself, quill in hand, which he apparently earned. And a small terracotta of Cosette from 1884, by Louis Convers, made barely twenty years after the book. Write a character well enough and other artists start building her for you.
I walked back across the Place des Vosges thinking about the postcards from the morning and Hugo’s inks in the afternoon. Both of them people who could not leave paper alone. Fair enough. Neither can I.
Monday’s list said Butte aux Cailles, so naturally I went Sunday. A stencilled rat guarding a doorway, and Aydar’s flowering women watching the street from two walls of the thirteenth. All of it in black and white, which is to say, my language.
For a few minutes around eight the sun sits inside the Arc de Triomphe and the whole avenue turns to brass. Then home through the metro, where the Picasso museum has hung its rooster over the escalators.
A day of looking through glass. A gallery window near the Palais Royal, a photograph growing a charcoal mountain at the Drawing Lab, and a two metre pink figure guarding a window full of toys.
