What Objects Can Be Used To Masyurbate

alone against all, the hero by Polanski

Hello,

I take a little free time to write and this time I am here to talk about movies for a change!

In recent weeks I have seen several movies in quick succession by Polanski. It is a filmmaker I like especially since my tender age. I have often wondered why, but I think I can now move forward a few reasons: first because it has dabbled in all genres, from horror to psychological drama, the film suits the pure comedy Each of his films bears a particular mark and all these impressions, a film to another, creating a powerful work, talented and unique. I often watch a movie to tell me that it would could be done by someone else without that it shows ... but some filmmakers, including Lynch, Scorsese, De Palma, Polanski could not be exchanged. Some films
Polanski I entered the head and I was never left. Their images are there, intact, when I close my eyes. So it is with those of Tenant . I saw him recently but many of its sequences were still imprinted on my retina, almost fifteen years after seeing it for the first time. The strength of this film is writer in me a willing prey, such as the bewitched victim offering his neck. I accept the credits soon to follow where it leads me his camera, knowing that the journey will be neither easy nor always happy surprises that will be gruesome and that I will not reach the shore in the serenity of the generic end. I accept all this by playing a spectator, but mostly because he manhandles his audience, Polanski moved him more. If I tell you so you remember to Pianist and the poignant figure of a man stumbling through the gaunt ruins of Warsaw.



But I could also talk about the plight of Trelkowski screaming, too nice tenant stifled by the wickedness of its neighbors, or Tess, bravely following the road that destiny soap for her.



I could even add the look of Carol at bay, the young manicure Repulsion , although when she committed the first murder and we know the danger, the compassion that it inspires the troubled ... repulsion, exactly.

Polanski is certainly one of the best filmmakers have talked about the loneliness and anxiety it generates.



Vertigo around in circles in an apartment, look out the window hoping that someone will speak kindly, will seize the silent signals that your body emits unnecessary. His heroes are often deeply alone, eaten from within by the silence of the soul that just decide suddenly strange and frightening sounds of objects, animated or inert matter: the young and Carol will it with more more deeply into the sounds that surround it, the drop of tap water not closed to the echoes of the street.
If they are alone, these characters are not only emotionally. Sometimes they even have someone in their lives, as Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby , or someone who wants to enter, as the boy who loves Carol patient and pay dearly ... Their solitude is complete. She is social, psychological, emotional and sometimes political. Their situation cutting more ... or would do such other malicious confining them in themselves to madness, even robbing them of the urge to flee?

What is certain is that the hero is most often polanskien alien status in the community where he lives. In Repulsion, Carol manicure lives in London with a French accent while his sister spoke perfect English, and her dread of men shut up in distress without words. Trelkowski is a naturalized French Polish everyone insists on dealing in foreign accent and brands. American tourists Frantic is even more desperate than nobody understands in Paris. About Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist, the Nazis made him an outcast in his country. Status of foreign natural consequence of misunderstanding, contempt, rejection. But sometimes, the character is a hacker community of which he understands how these mechanisms because the shudder ... Rosemary is the case, discovering slowly that its neighbors are nice a gang of Satan worshipers who were trapped.



Or Gittes, the detective Chinatown, which advances the plot in which all have rotten related party a real swamp.

As the film progresses from one revelation to another negative, the hero joins polanskien solitude where he is confined to the malevolence of the group that rallied around him and against him. From there the plot takes shape: they want to silence, reduce to thank you, to steal her baby, raped again and again, to exterminate. But the Machiavellian genius the filmmaker is almost always to preserve the ambiguity: his character is he mad? He slipped, you it imagines the conspiracy, or is he the only one to hold a truth unbelievable? On one film to another, Roman Polanski has more or less always the same story: an individual is manipulated by a group within which he is abroad. More or less naive when the film begins, his eyes are opened slowly and he understands the full scope of the trap in which he struggles. But according to the film, the camera hovers like a needle between these two poles: real conspiracy from the outside, schizophrenic delusions the hero. In Repulsion , it is clear that the balance from the beginning to the madness, even if madness can not be hard to explain everything to Carol. There are things we know, White led the tragic young woman at the stage where the audience got to know him, at which point it is probably already too late. This film has everything from a clinical case study, even if it misleads the viewer to design a scenario of horror movie.




In most movies, however, Polanski plays perfectly the ambiguity by using the subjective camera: everything we see could be seen by the hero. We discover the plot through his eyes, which has two advantages of size for a filmmaker adept at outwitting of the viewer: first, we position ourselves instinctively "side" of the hero: we are with Rosemary, with Gittes, with the pediatrician Frantic , including when it took the runway most likely (that of a kidnapping) to explain the disappearance of his wife in a hotel in Paris. We are willing to believe what they believe. But in a second time, this identification allows suspicion to burst at a time selected by the director, and in Rosemary's Baby , we convince ourselves that gradually Rosemary is manipulated by his neighbors with the help of her husband.



It seems clear that she was drugged, raped, made pregnant by dark forces. We convince ourselves that it is surrounded by wizards, and even her obstetrician belongs to the sect. It was then that Rosemary is trying one of these "false leaks" cherished heroes polanskiens, ie a leak that proves a cul de sac. She takes refuge with another gynecologist, who receives it. She begins to explain in detail everything he arrived, the whole plot, and suddenly his words seem the most crazy, crazy, here we are in the skin of the doctor who listens and says she suffers from a paranoid depression linked to maternity. The question then arises in the minds of viewers: they have been abused? Rosemary is she crazy? She thinks these things?



In Lessee , this ambiguity between insanity and paranoid conspiracy is even more striking. Take a shy young man with Polish accent, charming and uneventful. He rented an apartment and tries to gain acceptance by a community of hostile residents. But little by little, he is convinced that people want to put the building in the shoes of the previous tenant, Simone Choule, which ended up defenestrate. Everyone seems to conspire against him, the nice bartender coffee opposite its owner intransigent. Spy on the people, the bully. Then he starts seeing things that do not exist, the real and the delirious mix so intrinsically at the end of the film, the viewer confused would be hard to decide what caused the loss of Trelkowski , malice concerted its neighbors or its own psychosis.




Fiction is by far the best way to tell a conspiracy. Take a crowd that says "white" and one who yells "black!". In terms of objective truth, the majority tends to prevail ... unless, by means of a work of fiction, you take the viewer (or reader) by the hand and have attached the beginning of the poor not to "fool" who swears that others are lying. So you are willing to believe that this man is right against all. And even if this truth is stifled by the powerful, it will forever remain between one who has ... and you. After the last image Chinatown, the bitterness that now you share with Detective Gittes drag on in your mouth.



And you complain of poor Rosemary, his lucidity and courage have done more than tie a doom.

To conclude, I could not but speak of Pianist . For if there is a truth that was most difficult to believe, and some still are bent on denying, it is that a conspiracy to eradicate an entire people, to the point that it remain no trace of the millions of victims. This perfect crime, we known, experienced some failures that allowed the truth to gush. But again, only fiction has the power to bind us to one of those people who were gradually excluded from society, ghettoized increasingly narrow, private rights and dignity, before being driven to the cul de sac of Auschwitz.



As if all his films had to lead us to it, and all the plots to the Holocaust, The Pianist staged the first polanskien hero who manages to truly escape: through music, but especially for the first time, thanks to the solidarity of other positive human brothers.


that, I leave you, and if you want to see some movies that I just mentioned, do not be shy! Except Frantic , which is a bit dated, Polanski's filmography through time without a wrinkle and it is a pleasure to revisit it.

soon ...

Gaëlle

2006 Fleetwood Niagra

From poetry instead of the heart beat message

Hello!

You dared to dream but I'm back at last for a ticket worthy of the name. You Seaver in these pages I prefer authors who I am excited and make me feel very small ... and though I read like a turtle, I even brought one in as my luggage!
You surely know. But if. If I tell you The Hours, Nicole Kidman viewing decked out with a nose impossible (if indeed Virginia Woolf looked like this I pity her twice: for his unhappiness and his nose), but behind this film there is one book and its author, Michael Cunningham. That here.



There are writers whom I turn around time (I'm slow but determined) before I venture into their work. That was the case for it, with this nuance I read the Hours and I did not like. I feel that some people are outraged but Virginia Woolf was not my cup of tea and three portraits of women left me ice. Believe me, I regret it but at the same time I like Proust, but never caught on Henry James is like that, my brain is forging connections with one or that one, at will. Not that it's snobby, it just tastes good to him. The Hours therefore left me on my hunger and I decided that Michael and I were not yet ready for regular attendance. But now, I succumbed to his latest novel, The Book of Days . A funny thing indeed.





this point of my post, please introduce some drums, bagpipes and Irish voice singing "Paddy's Lament " in Gangs of New York . Because we are going back in time in one direction, then another, wandering Manhattan in the 1850s to a future which I hope will not resemble the vision of Michael Cunningham ... Three stories, three times, a specific place - Manhattan - and a metaphorical place: America, the pilgrims, outcasts, those that greeted the American dream in a mocking spin before dinner at Pierpont Morgan, Malcolm Forbes and George Bush. The hours were so infused Woolf, days The book exudes poetry of Walt Whitman. And I think it wins! Not only because Walt has a nose proportionate to the rest of his face ... (I'm bad ... I will do penance, stand, I shall reread walk to the lighthouse ... someday.). Mainly because it exchanges a writer who could not stand life against a poet who celebrated in all its forms ... and finally, because the book we Cunningham useful reminder that Walt Whitman was the poet of the poor before being rescued by private school students for whom the height of the rebellion was to stand on a table, tearing textbooks or read some poems in the night Timber!



Ah yes, thanks to the Book of Days - which bears the English name of a collection of prose Whitman, Specimen Days - I reread Leaves of Grass . Yes, I admit, the first time I had read, I was fifteen and I came out of Dead Poets Society ... I take this opportunity to move to drag a message to Vincent Delerm: he forgot to mention the impact of this film about high school girls swooning in his song about the girls of 1973. For there was Big Blue AND The Dead Poets , and my girlfriends were going to class again loop before writing poems in red ink to say how life was ugly and beautiful at the same time celebrate the beauty of the revolt, the absolute and suicide, all that. (Even those with a nose of a reasonable size.)
So I read Whitman but I missed out on.



Once I read it carefully and a bilingual version please, in order to recite the stanzas in English like this:

"My call Is the call of battle, I nourrish active rebellion, He going with me
must go well arm'd, He going with me
Often spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions. "

The active rebellion, poverty, angry enemies ... as you say it is far from the kind of film students and their teacher misty eyes. But the good news is that Whitman is also great! Michael Cunningham has not chosen any poet. This bearded protester, cantor of a transcendent moral life, a spirituality freed of religion, a powerful vision of the world came together life and death, living and ghosts, animals, humans and plants in a symphony transgenerational. .. remains today one of the most accurate voice when it comes to talking about America. His most famous book, Leaves of Grass , completed and edited his entire life, carries thousands of voices: that of the famished pilgrims landing on the New York Harbor, the exhausted workers in factories in the first Industrial Revolution ... happy or tormented voice, voice young or old, innocent or condemned, all lancinent the reader in a single stroke to claim a better life: that famous "pursuit of happiness " that Americans inscribed at the heart of their Constitution, and which was constantly undermined by the wars of independence or secession, slavery, inequality of opportunity that did nothing but widen and widen, glorifying the American dream back the initiative and individual achievement.




For pariah, America has always said he was in their power to change fate, that their determination and courage were their social ladder and at the same time, they wandered over the surface of the earth or did not fare by combining three jobs, was their fault.

Celebration of winners, contempt for the losers who have failed to transform the tenacity of gold. Those to whom the world end without murmuring: "You do not want to hard enough. You did not get up early. It was the fate we deserve." And amid these fragments of broken dreams that tread the city worse off than the triumphant looks down, walking Walt Whitman, feeling the pulse in his footsteps a country integer:

" Through me many long dumb generations,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices
sick and desperate thieves and dwarfs,
And [...] rights of those that trample on the other foot,
Some poorly trained, insignificant, stupid, the despised, Fog
in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. "



The Book of Days opens on this first picture, that of Whitman's time. Times are hard and machinery carnivorous who devour the workers' arms and sometimes entire men, without shame. Simon has just died as well. In the factory. He leaves on the floor helpless father, mother slipped into madness, an impoverished young brother, a beautiful fiancee, Catherine, now deprived of the status of a widow and pregnant by him. Suffice to say a future pariah. Lucas takes the place of his elder brother at the plant. It's a weird boy, ugly and sickly, who lives in the company of Leaves of Grass and recites verses when he opens his mouth

" Lucas had no soul at all. He was a foreigner, a citizen of nowhere hand, came from County Kerry but failed to New York where he grew up as a potato riddled with mildew; where he sang nor cried like other Irishmen was not living as a foreigner but not an empty soul filled here and there with painful outbursts of affection, to map the stars and the reflection of flames on the glasses Mr. Mulchady; for Catherine and her mother and a horse on wheels. "

Lucas wants to support his family alone to help Catherine he loves. Every day he works on the machine that killed Simon. He knows she is watching, she is hungry another body. The machines are predatory, it is in their nature. In the world of Lucas, the poor are everywhere and they are ghosts in the making, that poverty has been cut off from life:


"Gradually, he realized that the days at the plant were so long, made a gesture so often repeated that in the end they became a world inside the world, and that those who lived in this world, all men from the factory, would spend most of their lives, making short visits to the other world, where they ate, slept and were preparing to leave. The men at the plant had renounced their citizenship; they had migrated to the factory as Lucas's parents had emigrated to New York after leaving County Kerry. Their past lives were the dreams they did every night, they awoke every morning at the factory. "



a hospital for the needy at a fire scene in a sewing workshop is all America in rags who seizes the reader by the throat. At the heart of a crowd watching helplessly burn brightly poor workers, Lucas feels the presence of ghosts, which tightens the grip each time around Catherine and him

"The air tasted. Lucas turned it into his mouth and he recognized him.
the dead had penetrated the atmosphere. He understood as surely as he had felt the presence of Simon in the pillow. With each breath, he would enter the dead in him. He felt the bitter taste, so it was that they were - earthy and warm - on the tongue. "

A woman burning speaks to him without words, speaking on behalf of all those beings who have surrendered after a battle of the most unequal:

"She said (without saying the words ): This what we are now. We were exhausted and operated, we live in reduced, we ate sweets in secret, but today we are radiant and glorious. We are no longer insignificant. We're part of something larger and more wonderful than imagine the living. "

Thus it appears the death as the doorway to freedom forfeited. And even as ironic as it may seem, to life, as if the rogue could not hope to regain full control of their lives ... and in death.

Second time: we are in contemporary America, the one after September 11 2001, that the Patriot Act and paranoia omnipotent. Cat, a black woman of about forty years, working in standard font. She receives calls from all stamped oozing rage, those who want to set fire to the apartment of their neighbor, eradicate homosexuals or librarians. Most are content to issue threats, but now a teenager who blew himself called, hugging a businessman, not far from Ground Zero. The panic that keeps New Yorkers since Sept. 11 is reactive flows back into the blood vessels, accelerates blood

"The danger which had poisoned air a few years earlier resurfaced and people breathed in the smell. Today, they were reminded - we reminded us - a truth that the world had known for centuries: we could easily, at any time, commit a fatal error. We walked all safe on the streets because nobody had decided to kill us that day. It was impossible to know, as we deal, if we walk away from the blast or if we rush into it. "

And the tension up a notch when a second teenager called Cat. It trying to make him talk. He replied by strange sentences:

Nobody really dies. We perpetuate the grass. We perpetuate the trees. [...] Each atom is mine is yours as well.

Cat is grown, it recognizes the poetry of Whitman.



A second attack took place, this time beating a black man and poor. As the noose tightens around Cat, a third boy seems to have chosen as confidant and as a target, is emerging profile of these young suicide bombers: the lost boys raised by a crazy, brainwashed and fed to the poetry of Whitman. Kids injured and without heart, inaccessible and disempowering. Wild creatures out of control, who grew up without the knowledge of society, on the low side, and who now choose to embrace the victim they take with them into death. Again, this attempted possession of live by the "ghosts", these creatures that cross each day without looking at them as they exist, so to speak. Again this desperate search for life, that this escape is through death as a corridor through which the brotherhood would again become possible, this song brought the pariahs by the poet.

The third story takes us into the Manhattan of the future: a totalitarian world where the sinister and outcasts come either from another planet (as Catareen, a 'dian' green-skinned one reduced to menial tasks), experiments carried out either on the machine by idealists. The first time Lucas had suspected the machine that killed his brother Simon to be animated. In the future, Simon is a robot whose circuits are mixed with human tissue. His appearance is that of a man but did not affect. To replace feelings, its creator has injected a "circuit Poetry. "In the poetry of Walt Whitman, of course. Simon is supposed to have no heart, but he focused on Catherine the dian and both try to escape certain death. On their way they will meet a teenager named Luke and an inventor who has injected the poetry inside his robots and now runs a community bizarre about to leave the land.

Three times, three genres (ghost story, thriller, science fiction) Three stories linked by powerful echoes and by the poetry of Whitman.



In each, a character in whom the poem takes place heart or soul, and who sees the world as a symphony in which death and life are intimately linked, as are all beings that breathe and suffer with those who went to the other side. You did I want to dive into the book days? Reading or rereading Walt Whitman? I hope. I predict that you will be captivated and troubled, you believe in ghosts. Anyway poets ghosts that haunt the great writers of today.

And if we left a few verses of Walt Whitman, like, for the road?


" The words of true poems give you more as poems,
They give you enough to train yourself poems, religions, policy, war, peace, your driving history, testing, everyday life and everything else [... ]

They prepare for death, yet they are not the end but rather the beginning, they
n'amènent person, man or woman, at the end of his journey, or to consider themselves happy and satisfied, one
they bring, they took him into space to show the birth of stars, to teach him one of the meanings,
They took him for he soars with absolute faith, so that traverses the endless circles and would never be off. "



Good evening to you all and see you soon!

Milena Velba Bus Lesbian

Small wind

Dear visitors, You


the faithful of the faithful who ask you for weeks and weeks" good, but what it becomes in the end? She's gone, she put the key under the door? She packed her bags and walks around the world? It has taken a vow of silence? That's it, now she is an author, so it has a watermelon ego and no longer wants to talk to us? "I had to come tell you what it is. Vanity aside, I'm pretty quiet and I think that this is not tomorrow the day that I will make a scandal because it makes me walk a hundred yards (just think, a hundred meters!) As some stars who haunt the pen festivals ... As we go, as I have no plans to write a novel about a future infanticide, a member of al Qaeda pedophile or a politician practicing jogging election, I'll make a cushy career in the Stone Michon, away from paparazzi and yachts, and in ten years I still pegs quite reasonable size. Phew.
side around the world, but I'd like my daughter did her first back to school August 28 and as I must go and fetch all day in his class among his playmates begging to be released, it undermines some my projects.

Well, I'm not here to tell you about my life in large widths, or even try to make delicious as chronic Thom has set the bar too high ... but say that life in recent months, I shoved, shaken to my foundation and my little words rattle could not follow. That they are timorous, my words. Accustomed to speak in a calm and silent, since that they are tame, that they pray a little (they are happy to pray because they know that without their help I am not much!). Earthquakes leave them speechless, petrified the storms and they take weeks to regain the floor. This does not, you know, that shake and stir the words is a good way to wake up and make them more fertile in the second time. So today I'm hopeful about my future literary career ;-)



course I was sorry to leave you to read all your little messages of love and discover that very nice of newcomers had come knocking the door in my absence, until a long table that they used a small strong coffee and a few pages of a good novel! So thank you and pardon Gael and all others, your insistence pushed me out of my den. I do not promise to write frequently tickets, you know me and I would not get into the promises of politicians. On one hand I am overwhelmed and secondly, I always prefer to dig my subjects how long it takes before you post one, even if it hurts productivity. (Er. .. did I hear "lazy!" ??...) And I do not read as quickly and although Clarabel , Lily, Thom Yueyin (by the way ... HAPPY BLOGANNIVERSAIRE!) Flo , Livrovore and all those with whom I do not hesitate to go stretch my PAL for the ten years. To be frank, I might have to call the turtle if that name had not already been taken ... by a singer "who do not know what he wants" and my little sister!

To summarize, I am not party and I do not put the key under the door. I just finished a book exciting but before you talk like I want, I'm getting back into the work of a great American poet ... So, dare I ask you again a little patience? Ouch, I feel that I waste! My next post had better be fairly successful, otherwise you'll end up sulking me and I can definitely give you wrong. (There I take a face appitoyé by my fate and life, but fortunately you can not see it)

I hope your respective income went well. Mine was strange, interspersed with literary salons in Collioure and Besancon deserving alone writing a novel ... funny, and cool games. ( Patrick, Jean-Philippe , Murielle and Jennifer, I miss you already!)

I leave you, a bearded poet and libertarian to me and it does not look comfortable ...




Come on, hay drunken promises: I'll be back as soon as possible. And in the meantime, drink a little Irish coffee to my health.

Gaëlle

PS: That all those and all those I have not mentioned the names excuse me, the list of all livrophages I like to visit was so long that I had to hide behind " etc "but I have not forgotten you!

Costco Spinning Bicycle

The spirit of the hills

Hello,

In general, I prefer to speak to you of novels, but today I decided to make an exception. Because I just did a fabulous walk in Paris through time, following a guide both exciting and committed scholar Eric Hazan. His book, The Invention of Paris will delight not only fans of this city but also lovers of literature and history. It is 481 pages of buzzing life I reluctantly closed, and I could not not make you share my enthusiasm. So I know that most of you prefer to read novels, but I invite you to make a little way with Eric Hazan, if you agree. You have good shoes?



Like all cities built inside an enclosure, Paris was built in concentric circles from the wall of Philippe Auguste (in 1200) to the fortifications erected in 1843, that were destroyed after the war of 14-18. His final frontier - hardly the most aesthetic! - Is embodied by the beltway. Meanwhile the appearance of the town had changed many times, the wall of Charles V at the wall of the farmers general (1780), including at the As suburbs and adjoining villages, to face a composite of the city today.





Over time, neighborhoods are dead between the right and the left bank of the Seine, others are born, others have experienced declines and apotheosis, and c is this ride through the centuries we invite Eric Hazan, making himself the defender of old Paris: Paris threatened, almost disappeared, where every neighborhood had a strong identity born of its history and its people. Not

qu'Hazan is an opponent of modernity, not at all. But would not you want to walk the old Balzac areas, if possible? Or get lost in the Paris of Victor Hugo, Baudelaire and André Breton? The great writers, thinkers of our illustrious history tumultuous loafers were primarily romantic Paris. Breathe the wind in this city in perpetual metamorphosis, haunt your turn haunts de Nerval, the ones where the villains in Les Miserables robbing the good people and cut their throats, those where the narrator Research would pick her first feelings love, and finally those that Zola browsed a notebook in hand in search of material for his novels: the Paris Stock Exchange, one of fortifications, the "zone" where street vendors and taverns flourished, The Paris chic Faubourg Saint-Honore and rue du Faubourg-Saint-Germain, Paris Courtille the poor or the old Les Halles district, this "belly of Paris" overflowing with food piled near which trimmed the ragged in the old downtown. And take pleasure in rereading, the appointment of a page, a few lines of Mysteries of Paris of Nadja or Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans on the night of the city:

"These narrow streets, dark and muddy, which carried industries outside of their careless, take the night a mysterious face and full of contrasts. Coming from the bright spots in the Rue Saint-Honore, the Rue Neuve des Petits-Champs and the Rue de Richelieu, where the crowd is unrelenting, where glitter the masterpieces of Industry, Fashion and art, every man to whom Paris at night is unknown would be seized with a terror sad falling into the maze of small streets that encircle the light reflected to the sky ... In passing during the day, we can not imagine that all these streets are at night and are crossed by strange creatures that are no world of half-naked forms furnishing and white walls, the shadow is animated. He slipped between the wall and the toilet from walking and talking. Some doors ajar start laughing out loud ... the tunes come out of the blocks ... this whole things is staggering. "

For survey the historic Paris is relearning the dark night, that we no longer know because lighting increasingly violent have relegated more and more away from our cities, scaring the stars in the streets safe. In the Middle Ages, only three lanterns lit up the Paris night: a candle in the heart of the terrifying cemetery of the Innocents (which haunts François Villon), a lantern in the tower of Nesle and the Conciergerie. Can you imagine that? A black city, three small flames nothing to protect themselves from moving shadows, often malicious, was talking about Balzac? In the nineteenth century, the outskirts of Luxembourg still dirt roads surrounded by trees where the unwary are lost before you make bad meetings, and behind the walls of the Montparnasse cemetery, are murdered every night.


But first, what do you know Paris? Do you know that at the heart of the Marais, Francis gave the first fights of lions in the park of his hotel Saint-Pol? In the Trail, already vested in the textile trade in the eighteenth century, was the highest Court of Miracles of Paris, so dangerous that when it tried to build a street which crossed from side to side, in 1630, masons were killed before able to lead the project? That famous gibbet of Montfaucon, where Francois Villon was hanged after his mother was on the current location of the Buttes-Chaumont? That all the innovations of the nineteenth century, as the first terraces of cafes and gas lighting, were tested on the boulevards of Paris?





Eric Hazan hate façadisation, this modern invention which, he says, "is to keep (more or less) the facade of a building and empty like a chicken to install office floors. façadisé A building is the original building What a stuffed animal in its living form. " But it was especially after Baron Haussmann ... the minister of Louis Napoleon redrew the face of the capital not only for modernization, but to eradicate rebel heart, the Paris barricades he hated with all his heart. He hugged this part of the Boulevard du Temple was called the "Boulevard of Crime", and where the populace had to distract Looking at the fairground attractions and enjoy the mime Debureau from the bottom of the "paradise". This neighborhood was destroyed but there is no thank you in imagination through literature and film by Marcel Carne, Children of Paradise .

Haussmann was best shave with jubilation on the streets of anger, those of Saint-Merri, Area de la Bastille and Place de la Republic. He wiped the Earth Transnonain little street where we fought in 1832 during the riots that are the backdrop of Les Miserables. The narrow street where soldiers Transnonain party of the Order broke into buildings and killed whole families, on the orders of General Bugeaud, because a shot had been fired from a window and that these gentlemen, when it came to punishment, had few qualms ...



Urbanization always doing political will, the streets of Paris were extended to allow the regiments to scroll more conveniently ... This is called a "strategic beautification" and the first victims were the streets of the rebellion. As the Latin Quarter, never the last when it came to challenge those in power, he left a warning in memory of the most eloquent :

"Who, among those who now traverse the Place Saint-Michel, the figures of the fountain, surrounded by beer cans and Coca Cola, they still have something to say? Who would be able to historically decipher this allegory for tourists, to recognize that the archangel with a sword pointed at the back of Satan looked to represent the triumph of good over evil people from June 48? But in the era of insurgencies, the threshold of the rebellious district, this statue was a way devoid of ambiguity. Everyone knew that St. Michael the Second Empire symbolized crushing the demon of revolution and the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Latin Quarter could recognize their image in the infernal beast thrown to the ground. " (Dolf Oehler : 1848, The spleen against forgetting )




To those who would say that aesthetics is the price, I will respond with Eric Hazan, Haussmann buildings without denying their elegance, beauty is also nestled in this jumble of old buildings, houses in the coexistence of popular and venerable hotels individuals in these "passages of Paris' now forgotten where we strolled in good company and remade the world. Haussmann could not go after every project and I'm happy, because he had to break the street from the Louvre which would have destroyed in its wake both monuments of Paris I love the most ... Victor Hugo but I let you speak better than me:

"The vandalism was his idea to him. He wants to do everything through Paris a great, great street. A street in a league! What beautiful devastation along the way ! Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois will spend the admirable tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie will spend perhaps. But who cares! A street in a league! a straight line ... drawn from the Louvre to the barrier from the Throne! "

But, concludes Hazan, "Haussmann, who was Protestant, refused the project, fearing that the destruction of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois was interpreted as a revenge of St. Bartholomew, whose signal was given, it is said, by the bells of this church. "

It always blows of symbols that we fight, we buried some parts of the past to ensure that the future of Earth ... Symbol symbol cons, cons flag flag. Thus, the revolution of 1848 was a clash of symbols: the tricolor flag, icon of the Revolution but also of the empire, the repression of barricades of 1830, against the red flag waved as the rebellious workers descended from the suburbs of St. Antoine and St. Marceau, Ménilmontant, Montmartre and Popincourt district, the Butte-aux-Cailles where the blood of the Commune is now cured but which remains a greenhouse still echo the heart the walker who can hear.




Eric Hazan passionately loves the hills of the city, these popular suburbs where so often blew the wind salutary revolt of a people who were confiscating all its revolutions. He devotes part of his book, called "red Paris", where Gavroche from 1830-1832 went to die among the students and workers in the Rue de la Chanvrerie to June 1848, where barricades were drowned in blood by those who had made themselves the champions of the Republic.



In June 48, were shot in Luxembourg prisoners who had surrendered and had to close the garden for two weeks to allow time for the rain to wash the pools of blood. The Second Republic did not survive long in these episodes where she claims was savagely massacred all this "junk popular" at whose side she had fought on the barricades of 1830. And Victor Hugo would save his or her breath or pen, Perhaps to atone for (as suggested by the author) his complicity with the forces of repression during the days of June, to defend those that Miserables crushed every convulsion of society:

"There is in Paris, in the suburbs of Paris that the wind of revolt raised once so easily, there are streets, houses, sewers, where families, whole families live pell-mell, men, women, girls, children, n 'whose beds, having no blankets, I almost said that clothes stinking piles of rags in fermentation, Ramm in the mud at the corners, species Manure cities, where human beings live every burrow to escape the cold of winter ... "


hills and suburbs of Paris were populated by immigrants from successive layers escape poverty and persecution, such that these Poles were among the leaders of the Commune, finding a heroic death and poignant. Later, their descendants swelled the ranks of the Army of Shadows while "uptown", the Grands Boulevards, Champs-Elysees - where they had preferred a pact with the Prussians against the Communards of Paris drew the contours of the Collaboration. Although Obviously there were also resistant in the neighborhood of the Star and all is not settled, but the geography of the commitment is no less interesting. And it is certain that these immigrants - some already saw as outbreaks to limit or eliminate - never hesitate to shed their blood for some sense of dignity, freedom and human brotherhood. Now that it is fashionable to recover the great figures of popular rebellion, I think look a little on that story does not hurt. Because history belongs to everyone and it would be a pity to abandon the ideologues ...



" Paris on foot " concludes the tour of Eric Hazan, although in reality it never ends and calls other convolutions in the footsteps of all those illustrious walkers. Beginning with Balzac, including Théophile Gautier wrote:

"As he loved and knew that in this modern Paris that time lovers of local color and picturesque appreciated so little beauty! He traveled in all directions, from night and day ... He knew all about his beloved city, it was for him a huge monster, a hybrid, great, a polyp with a hundred thousand arm he listened and watched live, and which formed in his eyes as an immense individuality. Everyone could meet him, especially in the morning, when he ran to cover printing and copying tests look .[...] Nobody had ever tried to take a big unknown this vulgar man who was carried away by his dream like a whirlwind. "

Or Victor Hugo, Baudelaire which, other compulsive wanderer, was surprised he could reconcile the demands of his hard work and his taste for walking, when he himself felt chained to his stroll like a drunk from his bottle. Baudelaire, threadbare and tormented figure who sought in his long marches through the city this unexpected also hoped for André Breton, pacing years later the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle. Baudelaire, who was preparing his poems while walking and defines perfectly the attraction of all those curious minds, psychics, artists, for the beating heart of the City:

"For the perfect flâneur, for the keen observer, c is an immense pleasure to elect domicile in the number, the swaying, the movement in the fugitive and the infinite. Being away from home, yet feel at home everywhere; see the world, be the center of the world and stay hidden from the world, these are some of the lesser pleasures of these independent-minded, passionate, impartial, that language can only clumsily define ... The lover of universal life enters into the crowd like an immense reservoir of electricity. We can also compare him to a mirror as vast as this crowd in a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, which at every movement, represents life and the multiple moving through all life events. "

It is time we part, closing the book, to leave all these figures become confused in the fog: Eugene de Rastignac, the Duchess of Guermantes Montparnasse and the rogue General Lamarque, Tocqueville, and Louise Michel Delescluze, Huysmans and Robert Desnos, whose shadow still haunts wandering surely, the hour of darkness, the former Saint-Merri he loved.

soon!