Out the door before seven. I went to the Trocadéro first, filmed the big view for a good half minute, and then watched it back and realised I had made a home movie of other people’s holidays. That one is not going anywhere. Straight up the hill instead.
Everyone shoots this building from the bottom of the steps, straight on, with the flag and the crowd. Go around the back and you get it in the low sun instead, and suddenly it is not a postcard, it is a drawing problem. Layers of arches, a dome with a fish scale pattern cut into it all the way round, an angel on the corner gone soft green, a gargoyle leaning out under it.
It is younger than it looks. Foundation stone in 1875, finished in 1914, and then the war put the opening off, so it was not consecrated until October 1919. Romanesque and Byzantine mixed, in white travertine, and built as an act of national penance after the war of 1870 and everything the Commune did to this city. So a building put up to say sorry. Standing on the hill where the trouble started.
They knew what they were doing with that stone, though. It never goes grey. Everything else in Paris is honey coloured and this one thing stays white.
Then the streets, and this is the whole reason to be up early. Empty cobbles. A yellow post box somebody has signed all over in one long tag. And on the corner, pasted flat to the render, a woman in a rainbow dress with a tambourine over her head, mid step, looking back over her shoulder.
She is signed in the corner, small. Whoever made her cut every strand of that hair separately and coloured it like a highlighter drawing, and then glued it to a wall where the rain will get it.
And at the bottom of the steps, the merry go round, switched off. Painted panels around the canopy, gold beading, two horses out the front with their feet up and nowhere to go. The basilica sitting up behind the balustrade. Both benches empty.
Yesterday around lunchtime this hill was licensed painters, portrait queues and more people than I could count. This morning I had the whole thing to myself for forty minutes.
Write this on your hand if you ever come. Everything worth drawing here happens before eight o’clock. After that it is somebody else’s day.
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.
A postcard collage in a Popincourt gallery, a wall of painted cats, and then the Maison de Victor Hugo, where the man who wrote Les Miserables turns out to have drawn moonlit castles in brown ink better than most of us ever will.
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.
