Postcard From Paris ...

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 5

Postcard From Paris ...

by

MOLNAR

pARIS is hardly recognisable. The grimy splendour of black shadows in soot is gone. Doom-laden goddesses turn into flighty shopgirls. Architectural majesty gives way to grace. A miracle has happened. Paris has been cleaned.

Le Corbusier wrote a book in the twenties: “Quand les Cathedrales etaient blanches." A beautiful title and a nonsensical notion. The cathedrals were never white. It took many dozen years to build them. By the time they were finished they were aged looking and sufficiently dirty for veneration. But thanks to Monsieur Malraux and to steam cleaning, every building in Paris is now new and shiny as it never was.

A frightening realisation. The past is wiped away and it is only soot. Black

monuments of grandeur become all white and frivolous, like statesmen caught in their underwear. One is inclined to write a letter to "Le Monde" against the indecent frolic of Carpeaux's marble girls on the Opera. It must have started with the cleaning of pictures. Remove the dirt, and there is an Old Master. Remove the dirt from a building and a young master appears, or maybe a young spec builder. It is tremendously exciting and beautiful. De Gaulle stands again. At the Salon de I'Auto Rolls-Royce presents a new model. Mercedes worries. The Louvre shows pictures from the Hermitage. No reason now to go to Moscow. Tourists are carted around in double-decker bubble buses, all transparent—a mobile exhibition of aging wealth. The Parisians love it.