train from Vitry-le-Francois to Gare de l’Est, Paris
I got to Paris at noon and to my hotel not long after. I was staying in a neighborhood I knew well, although it was not necessarily close to the places I would be going. I had a studio flat for the week but since I ended up coming a couple of days early, I booked a nearby inexpensive hotel.
I had a problem. It was hot. I had originally planned to have a couple of my “regular” clothes to wear in Paris during these days but before I got the chariot and had to do a major paring down of my baggage in order to have a hope of even lifting the backpack onto my back, these clothes were part of the cull and had been sent to a pick up point at the end of my road in June.
Off I went to little India in the north end of the city, passing the burned and beloved Notre Dame (you can’t see much unless you get close, and you can’t really get close as it’s all barred off), but you can see there is no roof or steeple anymore.
After a short search, I had a few relatively inexpensive things to wear. I got a pair of hiking sandals to stand in for my too-heavy boots and I felt I was now equipped to face the city without feeling too much like granny from the Beverly Hillbillies.
I spent the next ten days in a kind of shining cloud of love – not the typical Paris-in-springtime romance, but a love rediscovered for the Orthodox services in French, and a revival of the precious memories I had of an important time in my life here over 40 years ago. I also had the great joy of meeting again with one or two friends from those times, whom I had not expected to see, which redoubled the pleasure.
I navigated (with some interesting challenges, as both Saturdays the “gilets jaunes” protests closed down most of the transportation in the center of the city) between three different parishes and as anyone who is Orthodox knows, spent nearly all my time while there in church. Happily. Hence this post is short.
Pascha night I celebrated in the grand cathedral of Alexandre Nevsky. I was a bit sad at the end because there was no communal celebration after the service, and I hied myself off home with an Uber and went to bed. At least this meant that the next day I did not have a hard time getting up…
I put my departure off another day and in the afternoon attended the funeral of a bishop who had been the auxiliary at the cathedral years before, and then had the great good fortune to attend the opening of a cultural center dedicated to Mother Maria Skobtsova, in the grounds of a lovely little Orthodox church hidden away in an interior courtyard with a secret garden and a tree growing within the sanctuary! Mother Maria is a recently canonized saint who was an eccentric and passionate nun, artist, and so many other things, who saved many lives during WWII and was arrested, deported and killed at Ravensbruck. A hero of mine. On display in the church were icons she had painted, a chasuble she had embroidered and a scarf. As I don’t know the intentions of the center with regard to these artefacts of her life, I am not including photos of them here. But I have included just a part of a scarf and I would like to mention the story.
In Ravensbruck, in the terrible conditions that all the camps experienced, Mother Maria had a bet with a close friend also interned with her about who would liberate the camps – the Russians or the Allies. Mother Maria bet on the Russians. When they heard that the Allies had landed, Mother Maria said that she had to pay her friend the bet, and so she undertook to give her a scarf. She was able to dye a piece of plain cloth using the green that was available for army uniforms. The thread was procured because many of the women were made to work at the Siemens arms factory nearby, and the electric wiring was wrapped in thread, and so bits of this thread were carefully unwound (presumably from stray bits of wiring) and brought into the camp. Mother Maria would embroider while standing in the interminable hours of roll call, hidden behind one of her compatriots. And so this extraordinary scarf, with a story of a war triumph (in old English, apparently!) was completed and given to her friend for winning the bet. Her friend survived and passed this scarf on. Mother Maria was killed in the camp.
After this extraordinary evening, on my last day in Paris, I left my friends at the door of the cathedral on a truly luminous Bright Monday evening.
more photos in gallery – they are a bit random, from my ten days there….
Love the photos and the story of Mother Maria- scarf is remarkable!