Hot night. Lightning flares.
Gasp of wind. Thunder cracks.
Downpour. Ah, so cool!
IF YOU WANT A WINDY PARIS, MARCH IS YOUR MONTH. BRISK breezes sweep away those clouds that build up on February afternoons and furnish the gaudy sunsets beloved of Rubens. By contrast, April’s pale, cloudless skies look as well scrubbed as a Vermeer.
Rounding the corner onto avenue Winston Churchill, I was buffeted by an eddy of air solid as a shoulder. Big buildings created wind tunnels, and this corner of the right bank had two of the largest.
The block–long Grand Palais, or Great Palace, sufficiently long and high to house a 767, stands as grandiose as a moored ocean liner in the heart of the right bank. Its domed glass roof makes it the preferred setting for blockbuster art shows and displays of everything from equitation to farm machinery.
Across the street, the Petit Palais, or Little Palace, tries but fails not to be upstaged. Neither building was ever a palace. Dating from the late nineteenth century, they were built to house the expositions at which France boasted its expertise in industry, design, and art—in the case of the Petit Palais, the Universal Exposition of 1900. Once the fashion for such displays of excess declined, the Petit Palais became the City of Paris Fine Arts Museum, a cousin to the national collection housed in the former Gare d’Orsay railway terminal, just visible on the other side of the Seine.
Statuary groups of writhing naked figures populated the building’s exterior, making the ancient world look more exciting than it had been in real life. Admirers of excess found the result enchanting. One was Leopold II of Belgium, the tyrant of the Belgian Congo who, in the process of looting its natural resources, killed more than ten million of its inhabitants. The Petit Palais so impressed him that he kept its architect in work for decades. (Not surprisingly, Leopold isn’t mentioned on the palace’s website.)
The website is, in fact, notably short on detail, which was why on entering the museum’s entry hall I headed for a uniformed guard, a rare speck of humanity in a cavern of murals and white marble.
“Je cherche Le Vent,” I told him.
He peered at me as if I had uttered some obscure African war cry. “Comment?”
“Er . . . Le Vent?”
I gave the pronunciation my best shot, complete with an attempt at the moue, that disposition of the mouth in which one pushes out the lower lip and presses the upper lip against the teeth to produce the “eeuw” sound without which certain French words make no sense. Judging by the blank look on the face of the gardien, I didn’t succeed. All those hours watching Maurice Chevalier movies, wasted.
Maybe I had the name wrong. If the work I was looking for wasn’t called The Wind, perhaps it was The Storm.
“L’Orage?” I suggested.
Inside the blue serge uniform, his shoulders began to assume that configuration, as characteristic as the moue, that we call a shrug. The French know it as un haussement d’épaules, a term that, like “passing gas,” describes an act but omits any suggestion of its significance. If you press a Frenchman to be more precise, the best you’ll get is another shrug.
From behind me a man said quietly in English, “Perhaps I can help.”
My savior was, unexpectedly, Japanese. He looked to be about my age, gray haired, bespectacled, and dressed in a dark suit.
He spoke in rapid French to the guard, who responded with equal speed. The former embodiment of ignorance became a fount of information.
“I believe the figure you’re looking for,” said the Japanese gentleman, once he had finished, “is Tempête et ses nuées by François–Raoul Larche.”
His moue on “nuées” was faultless. If one doesn’t understand a language, the next best thing is to pronounce it well. I put this belief into practice immediately.
“Arigatou gozaimasu,” I said and bowed.
“Douitashimashite.” He followed his responding bow with a torrent of Japanese, which I halted by holding up my hand, palm out, like a traffic cop.
“Sorry,” I said. “But that’s almost the only phrase I know. Except . . .” I took a breath. “. . . Onako ga suite imasu.”
“Ah, yes.” He nodded. “Very good. But perhaps you mean Onoka ga suite imasu, ‘I am hungry,’ yes?”
“Forgive my pronunciation. I’ve only visited Japan a few times.”
“No, your accent is excellent,” he lied diplomatically. “But by all means, let us continue in English.” He held out his hand. “Yamada Minosuke. So you are interested in Tempête et ses nuées?”
“If it’s the piece I’m thinking of,” I said. “I’ve only seen photographs. Is it a statue, or rather a sculpture, of a storm, represented by a female . . .”
I stopped myself from miming her pose. One look at my impression of a naked woman, eyes wide, arms spread, mouth howling as she flung herself out of a sort of bronze waterspout, and the guard would have thrown me down the front steps.
Fortunately I didn’t need to. “I know this piece,” Minosuke said. “The title translates as ‘storm and its clouds.’ I believe it’s in the permanent collection. Shall we see if we can find it?”
He led me confidently up the curving marble staircase.
“You must come here a lot,” I said. “Are you an art historian?”
He sighed. “No. Sadly, excuse me. I am a tour guide. I often bring groups here.”
Tempête et ses nuées by François–Raoul Larche. Photograph by the author.
I didn’t volunteer that I too dabbled in the dark art of the guided tour. Instead, I told him why the sculpture interested me. He was immediately intrigued.
“In Japan, we are also most interested in the weather. It has inspired some of our greatest poetry.”
“Oh, you mean haiku?”
The five–seven–five syllable pattern of these little poems seldom adapts perfectly to other languages, but experimenting with it can be as absorbing as completing the Times crossword puzzle.
Traditionally, a haiku refers to something in nature. The springtime cherry blossoms in Tokyo’s Ueno Park and the crowds who walk there, intoxicated by the pink storm, have inspired thousands. I quoted one of the most famous:
“Wind through cherry trees
Fragile petals shaken loose
Drifting like pink snow.”
Minosuke pursed his lips. “Yes . . . not quite like the great Bashō. But most interesting. Do you know . . .
“Hatsu shigure
Sarumo komino o
hoshido nari
“In English, you might say:
“The first cold shower.
Even the monkey seems to want
A little coat of straw.”
“That’s not the version I know,” I said, “but there’s another:
“Winter downpour;
Even the monkey
Needs a raincoat.”
Minosuke actually giggled. “Oh, yes. This is most clever. Speaking of haiku and rain . . .”
I didn’t get to see Tempête et ses nuées, at least not that day. Instead, we sat in the Palais café for an hour, emptying pot after pot of tea and talking haiku, or rather, as my new friend corrected me, its plural, haïkaï.
In doing so, we reaffirmed an affinity between France and Japan, between literature and art, but, above all, between art and the seasons. Those roots were old and deep. Japanese ukiyo–e wood–block prints inspired the impressionists, in particular Claude Monet. The exercises in word and image Guillaume Apollinaire called “calligrammes” were a union of calligraphy and the haiku. Sept haïkaï is a signature work of the composer Olivier Messiaen.
As the philosopher Heraclitus said in Hellenic Greek, “Panta rhei”: all things flow. And they often flow through Paris.