One glorious college summer I lived in Paris, housed under the slanting roof of a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s tiny, unused chambre de bonne.
My goal for the summer was to come home speaking fluent French. But all the college students I met were eager to practice their English. Among them was a droll group of friends who studied at the Institute of Political Studies. In a most French of Saturday outings, they drove me out to Versailles in a battered slate-blue Citroën. It was the first day of the year that the palace fountains were to be running. We wandered down to the water’s edge as the time neared. In my anticipation I didn’t notice that my new French friends had all drifted back from the poolside. The array of jets coughed aloft a curtain of thick orange sludge. The wind was just right. A sheet of water steeped all winter in rusty pipes came down on my head. Not only was I drenched, I was pumpkin-colored. My copains laughed and laughed.
My experience with Notre Dame was no less humiliating, but at least it was edifying.
Many of my days in Paris were spent consuming art: Impressionists, then at the Jeu de Paume; old masters glimpsed through the crowds at the Louvre. I was inspired to give it a try.
I bought a pad of drawing paper and some charcoals. I should have bought an eraser too.
[Also read: Tested by fire: Notre Dame has witnessed a thousand years of history]
At first it was easy enough. I would stroll public parks until I found some easily sketchable still-life — a stone vase in Tuileries Garden was about my speed. Having had some rudimentary success with small, simple subjects, I made a ludicrous leap. I set out to draw Notre Dame.
It was a fine June day, with a buttery sun high in an azure sky. I sat myself down on a bench in the Square René Viviani, a small park on the Left Bank that, at a diagonal to the bell towers, brags perfect views of the cathedral. I positioned myself so the park’s 400-year-old black locust tree framed the church for me. Pencil in hand, pad on my knee, I started to draw.
If you can call it drawing. The perspective managed to be off-kilter in several directions at once; the beautifully curved buttresses supporting the nave looked for all the world like a frenched rack of lamb turned upside down on a platter. Scribbling the rose window, I longed for the aid of a Spirograph. It was awful. I turned the page and began again. Two hours later, I had drawn something even worse. I turned the page and began again. Hours later, I had something worse yet, something that looked like a Gehry. I knew it was time to quit.
I found a trash can and put the sketch pad away where it belonged. I had failed, and had failed because I hadn’t taken seriously enough the artistry of the individual parts, let alone the harmony of the complex whole. But I’m glad I tried my hand. It made me interact with the structure in a way I never would have experienced in a day of sightseeing. It took the ugliness of my own inadequate and unserious effort to appreciate how much more real beauty requires.
Or, the takeaway could be the blunt one I wrote in my journal that night: “Bought some paper & pencils to do some drawing, before I remembered I can’t draw — Notre Dame reminded me of that.” Quel dommage!
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning auther of How’s Your Drink?
