The Latin Quarter: Through the Window (#694)

There is a particular kind of walking one does in Paris that has very little to do with getting anywhere.

You begin with a destination, or at least the pretense of one, and then Paris interferes.

A café catches your eye. A dog trots past with the confidence of a regular. Someone emerges from a boulangerie carrying a baguette under one arm. A narrow street seems more interesting than the broad one you are following, so you turn down it. And before long you have forgotten where you were going.

That is how we walk around the Latin Quarter.

And then there are the shop windows.

On this particular afternoon, Moira stopped in front of Desigual.

I kept walking for a few steps before realizing that she was no longer beside me. I turned around. There she was.

Not inside the shop.

She was standing directly in front of the window, hands at her sides, studying what was on display with the concentration usually reserved for paintings in the Louvre.

I knew that look.

We had encountered Desigual before. It is difficult not to notice it. There is nothing timid about the clothes. They seem determined to resist the Parisian preference for black, beige, navy and varying shades of tasteful restraint.

Desigual offers color. Patterns. Flowers. Embroidery. Asymmetry. Clothes that appear to have been designed by someone who started with the question: Why should these things match?

In the window stood mannequins wearing trousers covered with flowers and patterns, bright tops and handbags that refused to disappear quietly into the background.

Above them, enormous photographs of impossibly stylish young women looked down upon the street.

And below them stood Moira. Looking.

There is something wonderfully revealing about watching someone look into a shop window.

Shopping itself is purposeful. You enter. You touch things. You look at sizes. You inspect price tags. Decisions eventually have to be made.

But window-shopping belongs to imagination.

Through the glass, everything remains possible.

Perhaps that is why Paris is such a good city for it.

The windows here are not simply places to display merchandise. They are small stages. Each one offers a miniature version of a life you might briefly imagine inhabiting.

The elegant dress in Saint-Germain. The extravagant shoes near Boulevard Saint-Germain. The jacket you would never have considered wearing at home. The handbag that seems completely unnecessary until you see it illuminated perfectly in a Paris window.

And Desigual is particularly good at temptation.

Moira stood there for some time.

I watched from behind.

There was something about the scene that made me reluctant to interrupt it.

Perhaps it was the contrast.

Inside was a world of warm golden light, color and pattern. Outside were the pale stone walls of Paris, the grey pavement and the subdued architecture of the Latin Quarter.

Between the two was a sheet of glass.

And Moira stood exactly at the boundary.

Was she looking at the clothes? Almost certainly.

Was she wondering whether something in the window might suit her? Probably.

Was she calculating whether there was enough room left in the suitcase? I suspect so.

But perhaps she was doing something else as well.

Perhaps she was simply enjoying the pleasure of being in Paris.

That sounds like a small thing, but increasingly I think it is not.

Travel is often described through destinations. We visited the Musée d'Orsay. We walked through the Luxembourg Gardens. We saw Monet's water lilies. We ate lunch at Saint-Sulpice. We wandered through Saint-Germain and the Latin Quarter.

These become the entries in the diary.

But when I think back on trips, it is often not the destinations I remember most clearly.

It is the pauses between them. A family eating lunch together. An old man walking a tiny dog. A woman sitting alone at a café with a glass of wine. Couples dancing the tango late at night in the Place Saint-Sulpice. A girl sketching Monet's water lilies in a notebook.

And my wife standing outside Desigual, looking through a window.

Nothing happened.

That is precisely why I like the photograph.

It is an ordinary moment.

There was no monument behind her. No famous painting. No Michelin-starred meal waiting on the other side of the glass. There was simply a woman looking into a clothing store while her husband, a few steps behind, noticed her doing it.

And somehow that is Paris too.

Perhaps more than we realize.

The great sights give a journey its structure, but moments like this give it texture. They are the spaces between the itinerary - the moments when nobody is trying to create a memory and, for that very reason, a memory is created.

Eventually, of course, there was a decision to be made.

Would Moira walk away? Or would she go inside?

I waited.

Because after enough years of marriage, a husband learns that there are certain moments in which his contribution is neither required nor particularly welcome.

She took one more look through the glass, and walked away.

No purchase. No shopping bag. No addition to the suitcase.

Just a moment of temptation, considered and declined.

We continued along the street, soon distracted by another window, another café, another dog, another small piece of Paris unfolding in front of us.

And I found myself smiling.

Perhaps that is one of the pleasures of growing older together. You don't always need to possess the things that catch your eye.

Sometimes it is enough simply to stop, to look, to enjoy - and then to walk on together.

#bunyipsbooksbeyond