Rue du Pont Louis Philippe

I should remove my blog from google. I already feel for the random web surfer googling "Rue du Pont Louis Philippe" and landing on my bizarre musings, but anyway...

Rue du Pont Louis Philippe is one of my favourite streets in Paris. Not far from it, on the Rue des Barres, there's a cool little tea-shop, l'Ebouillante, where I go back every time and where I've got memories of some fantastic brunches surrounded by friends, and of rainy afternoons reading Zola.

On the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, there is also a small craft shop, kept by a monastic order. The way it works is that Paris has got so many churches by square mile that some of them have been "given" to monastic orders for them to bring life to the building with whatever it is that they do. So the St Gervais church is run by the Fraternites de Jerusalem. From what I gather, they're a pretty benign bunch, a far cry from the acerbic conservative catholicism that regularly invades the streets of Paris.

I spent a few days there in January and the communaute's shop had some beautiful santon-like statues. The most impressive one, however, was a shepherd, about 50 cm high, which they had displayed right at the centre of their vindow shop, with almost nothing surrounding it. It was so stunning it beckoned you to stop, and for a moment it filled me with longing. For all I know it could have been a solemn shepherd carrying a sheep, but it could also have been a visual depiction of the parable of the lost sheep. There was such tenderness in that little statue that I could never forget it, and it propped up in a number of conversations, notably with my dad.

I walked past that shop-window again in August with H., the santon had been replaced by an angel (which looked almost as good) but the shop itself was closed. Then last week, while visiting my best friend and looking for a present, I walked back there, hoping to get one of those if I could. To my delight the shepherd which had been displayed in the window several months before was still there, tucked away in a corner. Trembling with excitement, it took me about 30 seconds to purchase it. My best friend and I were both quite excited because we both found the statue stunning. And, because she's nice and because it's true, she said it reminded her of my lovely fiance, who is also full of that same tenderness.

A day later, H. unpacked it, and loved it. But strangely I found it less jaw-droppingly stunning in H.'s living room than I had when it was at the centre of a shop window on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. And I felt a bit strange for having brought it into private ownership, it seemed to belong on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe where it had literally glowed. In H.'s living room it was just a pretty statue, which looked a little sterner, and a little bored. I'm sure shop lighting had a bit to do with it.

Then I thought about all the other passer-bys on that street, who maybe had once interacted with the statue of a good shepherd who would leave behind ninety-nine sheeps to go look out for a lost one. Jesus for once not depicted dying on a cross, but tenderly caring for the oddball sheep. I thought about Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, a street which had been the centre of the jewish community, and from whose flats children and adults had been sent out to die, less than seventy years ago. The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, in whose letterboxes came the last postcards of young dads who knew that they would never see their families again, and who hoped against hope, and prayed to God, for their wife and children to live.

The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe finally, now at the centre of the fashionable gay district, a pretty posh street, but I could imagine quite a few sad souls, me included, walking past on some nondescript days, wondering if God's tenderness was for them also.

I wasn't the worst person to take the little statue out of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. For one, it was no longer on display in that window. It might be produced as part of a series and there might be several more of it. And then of course I gave it to an Anglican priest. I wonder if someone will interact with it again. I'm really not into auras and things like that, and it's embarassing to write this, but that little statue seems to say, sadly almost, "I was the good shepherd statue of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe". And this gives art, and material culture, a whole new angle.

(grrrr... I'm ambivalent about this post. I don't like writing cute reflexions that end up sounding like Zondervan fodder, but I'm unwilling to take the post off, because it's got something in it that is quite important and that I like, though I don't really know what it is. I wish I could postface it with Hemingway's scathing observations of the way in which the rich and comfortable kill art. It's at the end of A Moveable Feast. But I don't have the text with me and it's not available online.)