a blind flaneur

Wait a minute, those barbarians at the gate, they don’t look like Jacobins. They’re wearing Armani suits. They’re investment bankers, tired of toxic debt, demanding a bail out!
About the image: Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Read Surfacing at Place de la Bastille and Fashionista Street: Selling Short

Rue des Rosiers. [Photo by lodrorigdzin; all rights reserved]
I didn’t realize Friday night that when Alex said he dropped by Café Mouffe, he wasn’t simply humoring my imaginary conceit. He was there, in Paris, and the photos of Café Delmas were shot and posted on his Flickr site that afternoon. I am touched by this [...]

Rhino Rouge.Centre Pompidou Beaubourg. [Photo by deneux_jacques]
Thanks to deneux_jacques for sharing this image in the Creative Commons. See his superb photo set, Ah, Paris!
Imaging Paris documents places in the city and the images that inhabit them. “Just as every tried-and-true experience also includes its opposite, so here the perfected art of the flaneur includes a [...]

War correspondent Lee Miller visited Pablo Picasso’s studio on the day Allied troops liberated Paris in August 1944. [Source: Guardian/Lee Miller Archives]
See Lee Miller: Flapper Fashionista, Lee Miller: Surrealist Muse and Lee Miller: War Photographer.

Gavroche’s sleep inside the Elephant is interrupted by a whistle from the thug Montparnasse. He needs the gaman to help rescue one of his gang who has escaped from prison and is stranded precariously on the edge of a high wall not far from Place de la Bastille. Chapter IV.6.3 describes the prison break in [...]

In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo’s characters do not exchange  dialog. They declaim at one another, often histrionically.  The novel was written immediately after the tempestuous debut in 1829 of Hugo’s play, Hernani. Dramaturgy in one guise or another was paying the bills, and it sustained the young novelist as he scrambled to satisfy a [...]

I continue to marvel at the rogue Gavroche and see in him the prototype for Huck Finn. After explaining how he “borrowed” his bedroom furnishings from the beasts at the Jardin des Plantes, Gavroche adds insouciantly, “You crawl over the walls and you don’t care a straw for the government.” Victor Hugo pauses in telling [...]

Gavroche climbed nimbly up the leg of the Elephant in Place de la Bastille, entering its cavernous belly through a breach so narrow “only cats and homeless children” could pass through it. He dropped a rope so the little boys could join him. Then Gavroche lit a bit of wax-coated string called a [...]

Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
The first time I came up from underground at the Bastille Metro stop, I imagined hearing the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio as they sang “Luft und Leit.” On some rational level I knew what awaited me above ground, but on a deeper, more archetypal plane, I [...]

Two 19th-century illustrations depict Place de la Bastille in the years before and after Victor Hugo ’s description of the Elephant in Les Misérables IV.6. 2: [above left] Elephant caparaconne d’or by Alvoine, from the time of Napoleon; [below left] La Colonne de Julliet, from the time of Louis-Phillippe.
The source for these illustrations is [...]