Dante in Paris

Yesterday we celebrated the 17th anniversary of our relationship. We had a late lunch at the Fourmi Aillée, a teahouse for elves located on the rue Fouarre. The vin blanc fleuri loosened our senses to the former feminist bookstore, still featuring its literature along the walls, with its ceiling mural of cloud wisps against that pale Parisian sky, the delicate blue that Renoir created so well. The restaurant's music evokes nothing but feelings, with a ravishing Beethoven Piano Concerto, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, arias from Figaro and Cosi fan Tuttie, and Peer Gynt, inter alia.

The rue Fouarre becomes rue Dante as you walk a few steps north. In 1308 Dante was said to have attended what was then one of the foremost universities of Europe, located in the Square Viviani (just north of the restaurant). Dante bedded down nearby in straw, hence the street's name Fouarre.

Bitter Dante at the College de France

I felt a vertigo in time, remembering our thousands of footfalls through Paris over 17 years. It was a strange coincidence that l'addition for lunch (quiche and salad, outstanding) came with two business cards, one of the Fourmi Ailée and another of a restaurant we had been to some ten years earlier, L'Eté en Pente Douce at the foot of Montmartre. In those days, since Jacques' apartment was rented out to tenants, on our visits to Paris we stayed in odd short term rentals. The one at the foot of Montmartre had been decorated with gauze.
 

Dante's stay in Paris was commemorated in the Divine Comedy by a tribute to the professor, Siger of Brabant, a dissident (and persecuted) Averroist who taught pure Aristotle, unassimilated to Christianity. Averroes, the brilliant Arab philosopher of 12th century Andalusia, had taught that philosophy and religion both reach truth, but by different pathways. How apt that was for our anniversary, at a time when we are deconstructing the effects of Paris' Cartesian logic on our relationship. La coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Dante wrote of his professor in the Paradiso:

«Celle-ci, d'où ton regard me revient,
est la lumière d'un esprit qui en graves
pensées trouva qu'il tardait à mourir ;
c'est la lumière éternelle de Siger
qui, enseignant dans la rue du Fouarre,
syllogisa des vérités qui éveillèrent l'envie.»

"He comes back to me, the light of a spirit who in deep thought found himself slow to die (he may have committed suicide). The eternal light of Siger, teaching on the rue du Fouarre, philosophised truths which stirred up envy"

Dante knew well the bitterness of exile, just as Jacques has also known from his years in the United States, a bitterness I have felt in my own exile in Paris. Dante wrote in Paradiso:

You shall leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste others' bread, how salty it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes ascending and descending others' stairs ...