My eyes are barely open and I can already feel the city - highly charged and magnetic - leaping about behind the windowpanes. A harsh light flashes between the slats of the blind, a radiant announcement of a radiant day. And in the slanting outline of the window, a rowdy sun is blazing high in the sky. The cold is enough to take your breath away.

Yet again, the programme for the day is simple and unalterable : I am going to wander the streets as usual.. interminably... with no particular goal... cross dusty boulevards and avenues... stroll along dirty pavements and shop windows... in the crush of the crowds and the tumult of the traffic... wherever the fancy of the moment leads me.... in which ever direction my feet carry me, I will wander until dusk... my shirtsleeves and collar blackened with adventure.

The air we breathe, the areas we pass through, the gardens we dawdle in. aren't these the only things that are still free today ?

It is said that the shape of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal...

Personally, I haven.t seen anything that was beautiful in the past erased. And my memories are heavier than rocks.

Obviously, the ancient prophecies have almost all come to pass. The tiring world of compulsory incomprehension has gained some more ground. But how does it matter. We know only too well that whatever man can still do to this earth will be done, without our being able to express our disapproval. Society has been unwilling to take the blame for so long now...

Personally, I still love this city. I think I know it well, but that is not true. I rejoice, rather than being unhappy about it, on the numerous occasions when experience belies this pretension.

Because between the absolute knowledge of the area where I live and where I know every single meter of every single road, every shop front and every building.s entrance, the exact location of the schools and the parking meters, where you can find a letter box and a tobacconist open on Sundays - a knowledge to which you must add the more distant familiarity with other areas, that other habits or vices annex like so many territories that end up constituting the map of the city I think I know ; so between this global familiarity, that does not signify either lassitude or boredom, and the unknown geography of a foreign city, deflowered for the first time in the drunkenness of surprise, of this insatiably voracious curiosity that overcomes fatigue, by increasing it with what fights it - between these two extremes, for me, lies Paris. A Paris where at every moment I live the rule and its exception ... married bliss and adventure... what I already know and still ignore.

So, when I decide to purposely lose myself in a totally unknown area, the myth that I have suddenly been parachuted into foreign territory always works. A sleepy corner of the XIIIth resembles a provincial market town with its deserted cafe and small, sad square... another, a bit of a Provencal village, with its siesta drenched winding streets... However, as the distant outline of a monument, the shape and colours of a newspaper kiosk, a metro entrance or a bus, always pop up in the scenery to prevent the illusion from taking over completely, it is only in brief spurts and for sudden dazzling moments that Paris gives me this special feeling of being nowhere, yet somewhere familiar...

*

I am going out of my building now, a black silhouette against a grey background, melting into the pavement that is haunted by a vivid sky - a clear, blue, well-framed rectangle.

At the first crossroads, a chaotic cacophony of metal and insults. Irate passengers on the steps of a bus. Groups of dumbstruck bystanders. Two men have got out of their cars without switching off the engine : chins raised, caruncled Adams apples. They look like two cocks at a fair hurling their insults.

In the moving flesh of the crowded streets, I carefully follow a route of straight lines and curves, as if I were drawing the brand new outlines of an unknown promenade. At certain places real borders divide the city : this happens at the level of the tall gothic buildings where Boulevard Sebastopol melts into these colourful, noisy lands, where the grime is heart warming. Everywhere else is the overwhelming nausea of goods for sale.

Now I am heading towards the Sentier labyrinth, through streets strewn with empty cartons. The covered passages are deserted, their windows black with dust.. Behind them you can make out a whole population of dislocated ghosts, divested of their finery, grimacing their plastic smiles. You can also imagine the coloured efflorescence of gift ribbons, spooled out by the meter, but the shop fronts have long since been colonised by grime and you would be hard pressed to date the catastrophe.

I wander for a long while in this gloomy maze until my feet carry me off towards the Palais Royal where I decided to indulge in a halt. There, in these other deserted galleries where only my footsteps resound, I savour a different calm as well as the spangles of refracted light on the dead waters of the fountain. the sandy games played by crouching children, the gentle trembling of the lime trees in the enclosed azure.

It is autumn already. The first dead leaves dot the gravel, patiently creating a new gleaming, varnished carpet. I sit down on a chair in the garden to automatically light a cigarette, thinking of this sentence by Degas that says to produce good fruit, we must grow as if on a trellis, spend our whole life there, arms outstretched, open mouthed to assimilate what is happening, what is around us and to live off it...

The wind comes up. The leaves flutter momentarily above the ground then fall again further on, suddenly inert. The sky darkens with the speed of lightning, but I don't want to go home. It is five o'clock ; it is still early.

So I come out on the other side of the garden. Cross the columns of furious vehicles. Let myself glide mechanically along rue Saint Honore where a range of extravagant rubbish glitters... saffron gauze, shades of brown, chocolate undergrowth, moss, chestnut...

I easily remember certain hair colourings for example, because I see it as hair made of varnished walnut, or of oakum, or even of Indian chestnut bark... Leaning against the glass wall of a bus shelter, I think about another remark Degas made while watching the confused flurry of women in front of the phantasmagoria of shop windows... their long jointed necks, like woodcocks pecking at a toque or a beehive... their pupils suddenly widening at a wild frock coat... the bustle of capes and feathers fluttering from window to window under the golden globes...

That's when I start to follow one without her knowing, just for the pleasure of admiring, at my leisure, the perfect osmosis of her toilette and her body... her legs sheathed in rust coloured silk, ending in sweet shoes with autumn straps... the two little mink pompoms that bounce against the finely shaped brown flannel bust... the purple suede reticule gracefully swinging on her forearm with each little step... I think she reminds me of my mother... my mother whom I loved for her elegance and her perfume... a heavy bouquet of tuberoses that has since disappeared, which she took with her forever to her grave...

Excerpts from Cecile Guilbert's novel Le Musee National (The National Museum) Gallimard