Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [169]
SUSAN ALLPORT is the author of The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love (Crown, 2000), A Natural History of Parenting (Harmony, 1997), and Sermons in Stone: the Stone Walls of New England and New York (Norton, 1990), among others. She contributed this piece to the travel section of the New York Times.
I CAN’T IMAGINE that the Musée Carnavalet in Paris sells too many copies of the book Cadrans solaires de Paris—Sundials of Paris—an inventory of more than one hundred of the city’s sundials. But when it sold one to my husband, David, he was immediately hooked. And so David and I began tracking down these timekeepers of old when we celebrated our twentyfifth wedding anniversary in February 2002, continuing the mission in January the following year.
There are many ways to look at Paris—through its architecture, history, museums, cafés, or street life. Sundials are one of the most esoteric. But somehow it was fitting to be thinking about time on an anniversary that few would ever count on celebrating. Moreover, searching for sundials required skills of each of us: my husband’s excellent sense of direction and my high school French, which allowed us to make sense of the tome that was our guide.
As I discovered when I sallied out alone to revisit a nearby sundial and found myself walking in confused circles—or as David discovered when he arrived at the location of a sundial to learn that access required written authorization—we both were absolutely necessary for this hunt, a mutual dependence that is reflective (but that we often chafe at!) of the rest of our life.
And a hunt it was, a citywide scavenger hunt, taking us to places we would not otherwise have gone: a corner of the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden in the fifth arrondissement where the architect, Edme Verniquet, had placed a folly of a sundial within a maze on top of a hill; or the center of the Place de la Concorde, where we saw from the bronze lines radiating out into the busy roundabout and from the numerals embedded into the sidewalks that the obelisk, transported from Egypt in 1833, had been transformed by the French into the gnomon of a giant sundial, a project that was started in 1939, then abandoned during the war and never completed.
David loved this part of the business, finding our quarry, in which I felt like a small, obedient child, clueless as to where I was heading. But even I was taken by the Alice in Wonderland aspect of the sundial at the Hôtel de Sully in the Marais, examined on our second visit. We entered the building, the home of the Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings Commission, from the busy rue Saint-Antoine and walked through one courtyard into a quieter, interior courtyard with a lovely parterre garden. Then, after viewing the simple sundial on the handsome seventeenth-century rear façade, we popped into the Place des Vosges through a small door in the garden’s outside wall. Without this excuse of a sundial, we might never have discovered this delightful shortcut through the Marais.
Without question, however, the sundials themselves are fascinating, and many are inscribed with such apt reflections on the nature of time that they were worth seeking out for those snippets of truth alone. One might already be familiar with the inscription on top of the recently regilded sundial in the center court of the Sorbonne, Sicut Umbra Dies Nostri—Our Days Pass Like a Shadow—but standing below that dial as the shadow of its style moves slowly from one Roman numeral