Free Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie Page B

a nearby traffic artery.
    From the Middle Ages to the late 1860s windmills rose among the ruined tombs and quarries. Nowadays the modest heights of Montsouris sport the parabolic antennae of Paris’s meteorological station. From the park’s belvedere we gazed down and saw a flash of steel—a train rattling over the RER regional express subway tracks. The railway, originally linking Paris to suburban Sceaux, has been here since the inception of Montsouris as a park. The engineers who landscaped the neighborhood used the quarries and the lay of the land to route the trains through almost unnoticed. Those of the Petite Ceinture ran through tunnels even farther underground.
    It was the thought of those tunnels that reminded me of the steam train we’d spotted earlier that day. A penny dropped in my head, a rusty handle turned, and I recalled a similar scene in another of my favorite time-tunnel parks, also built on abandoned quarries, Buttes-Chaumont. The event had taken place ten, maybe fifteen years ago, when I’d first stumbled upon the lush Buttes-Chaumont on the opposite side of town in the 19th arrondissement. There too I’d heard a steam train rumbling below, hidden by trees. Irrationally I now wondered if the ghost train we’d seen earlier could possibly be circling Paris, and if we could intercept it across town.
    I took Alison by the hand and rushed down Montsouris’s snaky paths to the RER station. We transferred at Gare du Nord then trotted from the Ourcq subway stop to the northern entrance of Buttes-Chaumont. Panting and sweaty like the droves of joggers on the park’s paths, we found the footbridge over the Petite Ceinture. Did we see the old black steam train conveniently chuff by? Of course not. But as I leaned on the bridge’s iron grilles catching my breath amid swerving perambulators, swinging picnic baskets, and bourgeois families seemingly whisked along behind us from Montsouris, I was glad to have been so impulsive. Though the scene around us was in living color—a riot of blossoms and garish outdoor casual wear—my mind’s eye focused on a sepia-tinted image from the Second Empire circa 1865.
    In it there were brand new boulevards lined by balconied buildings, and as many smokestacks as church towers on the surprisingly familiar horizon. It was an image my brain had clicked on and dragged from the novels of Zola and Balzac, the poetry of Baudelaire, the photography of Charles Marville—official photographer to Napoléon III and Haussmann. Welling up from it I could almost smell the electrifying greed of the Second Empire’s new bourgeoisie, a perfume powerful enough to overwhelm the cabbage-scented misery of the hundreds of thousands of peasants pouring into town, seeking their fortune amid the smokestacks. How might it have felt to wake up in Paris one day in the 1860s to discover a new city had mushroomed overnight, with not only new roads and buildings and parks like Montsouris and Buttes-Chaumont, but also a new soul, a new way of living—the birth of the modern?
    Alison tugged my hand. It was too hot to stand around waiting for a steam train that might never appear. We sought shade on the far side of a lake. A graceful suspension bridge spanned the greenish waters. Stone pinnacles shot up from the center of the lake. An airborne colonnaded temple nested atop one of them, at least a hundred feet above the groups of rowdy teenagers rowing in leaky boats around us. A waterfall rumbled in a grotto, setting mist adrift through gaps in the cliff face. A colorful kaleidoscope of neighborhood children played in channels of rushing water that spilled from rockeries. Sun-baked codgers pulled big, lazy bottom-feeders from the lake, dangled them in front of goggling toddlers, then tossed them back into the water. Swans and geese cruised by, honking and snapping at flotillas of stale bread. We cooled our heels in the shady stream, safely out of the swans’ reach, and Alison wondered out loud how