A couple of snapshots of Paris the other night, by yours truly.
Happily the so-called Genie de la Bastille — the winged sculpture atop the Bastille Column — drags your eye away from the hulking Bastille Opera House. When I interviewed its architect Carlos Ott about his much-berated pile, he did a snake-dance with his hands and squirmed in his seat. He claimed that he was unfazed by the criticism (does anyone remember that Newsweek dubbed the Bastille Opera “the mothership that spawned the public toilets” in Paris?).
Admittedly, the Place de la Bastille is fairly brutal by day, with its crazed traffic, but becomes almost magical at night, in a meretricious, garish way. The Genie is its most appealing element — the Genie and the temporary fun fairs that set up on the edges of the square. A long, coiling story hangs from this shaggy dog. Our Paris, Paris Tours clients enjoy hearing it, and they’re rarely able to view the Place de la Bastille again without thinking of what’s underneath the Column.
The other pic shows a wider, inky sweep of Paris City of Night, with many beloved and some reviled landmarks. Among the popular ones: Notre Dame, the Pantheon, the Eiffel Tower, with its headlight raking the city from a height of over 1,000 feet. The unloved include the Jussieu University skyscraper and the Tour Montparnasse (both eyesores from the 1960s-’70s).
When we take visitors out for our patented “nightwalks” of Paris, we give them a magic lantern show of interiors (a voyeur’s dream), and plenty of exteriors, many overlooked or under-appreciated. As I collect more photos I’ll post them. The par-blind photographer-blogger!
Interestingly, the antihero of my thriller, Paris City of Night, has some unusual eye problems — unilateral dyschromatopsia — that turn out to be a boon. If only reality would follow that particular fiction…
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