Everybody photographs the tower. Nobody photographs the floor around it. So this morning I did the floor.
Two bottles on their sides in the dry grass, a bottle cap, a bit of foil, some leaves. And the whole enormous iron thing standing over the lot of it not caring at all.
I got down on the grass for this one because at eye level it is a postcard and at grass level it is a story. Down there the bottles are the size of the tower’s leg. That is all composition is, in the end. Deciding what gets to be big.
And I like what those two say about last night. Somebody sat here in the dark with a bottle each and the most famous object on earth for a ceiling. Then they went home and left it. In August this city half empties out and the people still here treat it like a back garden.
Earlier, up on the other side of the river, before any of that light.
The Trocadéro esplanade at six, wet, under a lid of cloud. There were maybe five people on it. By nine you will not see a single paving stone.
And that floor. Great interlocking rectangles in dark and pale stone, running away from you and getting narrower, doing all the work of pulling your eye to the tower while nobody so much as glances down at it. Somebody drew that. Somebody sat with a ruler and worked out how big each band had to be so it would read correctly from standing height. Then they laid it in stone and every visitor for ninety years has walked over it with their chin up.
I know that feeling. It is what a background is.
Then down onto the road under the arch, which at that hour belongs to delivery trucks and nobody else. It had rained in the night and the tarmac had held onto just enough of it to take the entire tower, upside down, right down to the tip.
What I want you to see is the litter. Paper, a bottle top, a blue wrapper, all of it lying about while the grandest structure in the country hangs perfectly still in a puddle four centimetres deep. Nobody has swept yet. That is the only hour you get it.
By half nine the barriers were up and the queues had started and it was a monument again. For about ninety minutes this morning it was just a very large thing at the end of somebody’s street.
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.
