Affichages (left to right) graffiti-like decoration painted up on the wall of a school, St. Cloud; small bits of wood stuck to massive stone columns of La Madeleine (Supports? This seems impossible); stamps stuck up in a window for sale; CRS troops with their backs stuck to the glass, café, Place Royale.

The minister's car came to a stop as it tried to enter Rue Rivoli. The escorts jumped out of the chase cars with their fingers on the triggers of their squat Italian submachineguns, greatly suprising all the tourists. In 1944 this little intersection impeded the advance of American tanks heading down Rivoli toward the headquarters of the German Kreigsmarine in the Hotel Crillion on Place de la Concorde. The above all taken 08.04.04, when a CIA tip stopped the RER trains cold, the CRS boys loitered on corners with their riot sticks, and the gendarmes worked the platforms of Montparnasse. It was a day of embassies, demonstrations, sinister abbreviations, endless menace.

Paris is a city that takes pictures of itself. One can try to find images that coalesce outside the developing fluid of common experience, but this is damn hard. Save yourself the weight and time and simply buy postcards; I wonder if Paris is any more real than Dallas or Los Angeles sometimes. I left for Nantes fatigued and looked into my own reflection in the window of the night train trying to see out to the wide plains around Le Mans, where the surprising fields of yellow flowers were closing their buds against the chill.

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