Free Ransacking Paris by Patti Miller Page A

notes: ‘ Jamais je n’ai vu mon visage ’, ‘I have never seen my face’. There was a sudden shock of realisation; it was both blindingly obvious and a startling revelation. Of course we never see our own face, only a reflection. And a reflection, of course, is the exact opposite of the way others see us. Those angles, that imbalance, they are all the other way around. I can never see what others see. Stendhal, in his memoir The Life of Henry Brulard , put it even more precisely: ‘The eye cannot see itself.’
    Any truthful portrayal of the self probably has to be a multiple and messy reflection rather than Matisse’s few spare and beautiful lines. How can it be anything else when the mirrors we gaze in are tinted, cracked, murky, overlit, fragmentary, reflecting infinitely? And the one who gazes is just as disjointed. Montaigne said that trying to see himself was like a drunk examining a drunk: ‘I am unable to stabilise my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness.’ The observer and the mirror are both disunited and unreliable.
    I have never seen my face.

Four
    September
    While we are doing nothing the days pass, and our poor lives are made up of those days, and we grow old and die.
    Madame de Sévigné
    One day in September, needing to be amongst trees, I walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and again saw the bee-boxes, but not, this time, the beekeepers. I wasn’t puzzled anymore as I had since found out about the Rucher École, the beekeeping school. It was founded in 1856 and apparently the honey the school collects is richer and better than anywhere else in France because of the many different flowering plants in the city. The bees love the chestnut trees in the Champs Élysées and the linden trees of the Palais Royale and the lavender and geraniums in the window-boxes and gardens of Paris. What is beginning to puzzle me is why bees seem to be skimming into my mind as I turn over my memories of the year in Paris.
    I don’t remember bees as being significant at the time. I can see they come from Montaigne and his metaphorical bees making ‘honey which is entirely theirs; it is no longer thyme nor marjoram honey’, but I don’t know why they have started multiplying. I do know that Napoleon had chosen them as his symbol. They had represented immortality for the Merovingians, the first line of French kings founded in the fifth century by Childeric and his son, Clovis. Engraved golden bees were found in Childeric’s tomb a thousand years after he died, although some sources say they were actually cicadas. Either way, Napoleon was connecting himself to the origins of France. He wove himself into the story of his country, stamped himself into the fabric, an indelible bee. Even without Childeric, bees are an image of devotion to the common good; they store riches for future need, they are armed with a ferocious sting to defend against intruders. I can only hope the bees flying into my head are intent on making honey rather than stinging.
    *
    It was the evening of my first meeting with the choeur , the choir. I liked that choeur was the word for heart, coeur , but with an ‘h’, like a breath, in it. I felt nervous, but not too jittery. I had been in a choir before, after all, and survived. And I knew Montaigne, whose good opinion I already wanted more than anyone else’s, would approve. He wrote that there was nothing more striking about Socrates than his taking up music and dancing in his older age, to make himself vulnerable by becoming a beginner again.
    I arrived early at the hall in the Marais, up a flight of wooden stairs in one of the narrow streets running off the rue de Rivoli, the spine of central Paris. There were dozens of confident, well-dressed people milling about and chatting to each other, mostly in French, although I did hear a couple of English voices and a couple of Italians. They all knew each other