The problem with Paris, spring or fall

with books. A musty paper smell mixed with the scent of old leather.

And then, when you’re not quite looking, it looms up before you — the majestic Notre Dame.

People all the way back to 1300 have been praising the singular beauty of this Catholic cathedral. John of Jandun, poor misguided French philosopher and theologian, in his Treatise on the Praises of Paris wrote that this church “shines out, like the sun among stars”.

All I could see were grotesque gargoyles on the roof edge, angry, open-mouthed funnels keeping rainwater away from the masonry. Frightening, ugly sculptures and monstrous chimera, those fire-eating hybrid creatures composed of the parts of more than one animal. Shiver!

Paris, with its 37 bridges spanning the Seine, the most ridiculously beautiful being (in my opinion) Pont Alexandre III, named for the Tsar of Russia during the Belle Epoch, decked out with gold-tipped garlands.

There’s another thing of such beauty that you are blinded by it: the white church on the hill, Sacred Heart Basilica of Montmartre, commonly known as Sacre-Coeur. Its domes and turrets, its pure white exterior, its position … one is humbled and awed and annoyed at oneself for gasping with such pleasure.

Everywhere you look there are things of beauty. A walk from Place de la Concorde, Paris’s largest square with its statues and fountains, through the Tuileries Gardens with their formal, stiffly ordered beds, to the Musée de l’Orangerie …

In this gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, in a circular room on the ground floor is the most magnificent sight you will see — walls and walls of Monet’s water lilies. Such is their beauty that hours will go by before you head out again to witness more of this city’s stifling beauty, beauty that sticks in your craw, that sours everything you see afterwards.

I’m not going back to Paris. —© Charmain Naidoo