Ah, Paris in the spring, er, fall. October takes me back to Paris on the David Wiegers 2020 calendar. Given lack of travel in the time of COVID, this is as close to Europe as I have gotten this year. Last year I went only to Costa Rica and Cuba (my “C” year), so it’s been a while since I’ve seen the old country.
I don’t recall offhand how many times I’ve been to Paris. My first trip was the tail end of a London/Paris week back in 2002. Those photos are stuck somewhere in storage as I was still clinging to 35-mm film at the time. I went back a few years later for a few days to get away from the grind. In 2008 I moved to Brussels, Belgium to begin my three-year stint working from my previous company’s European office. That’s where the fuzziness comes in. Soon after arrival I took the ultraspeed train from Brussels to Paris and spent the day at a consortium meeting for a client, and occasional work would take be back. I also had friends and family visit me in Brussels, and usually that meant hopping the train to Paris because, well, everyone wants to visit Paris. I became quite adept at the “highlights tour,” both in the city itself and the Louvre. I’ve also been to Paris once or twice (or thrice?) since I returned to the states and even after quitting my job at that company. It’s been a while since I’ve been so finding this month’s calendar featured photo was a treat.
This particular statue is unique in that it is the work of two men. In 2009, the American embassy commissioned a statue, which was dedicated at the University of Chicago Center in Paris, located a bit upstream on the Seine River from the traditional tourist areas. The structure of the statue itself was created by Henri Marquet. It shows a standing Lincoln with one arm to his side and the other stretched above his head. But all but the head of this structure is covered by the mosaics of Vincent Charra. Interestingly, the original statue structure included an homage to new U.S. President Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” campaign slogan. This was covered up by the mosaics, but the visible pattern does include “Captain O’ My Captain,” Walt Whitman’s poem about Abraham Lincoln following his assassination.
As with other statues in this calendar, I wasn’t aware of this one until after my last visit to the City of Lights. I’m eager to go again.
COVID is keeping me traveling solely by memory and photographs this year, but hope reigns that next year I’ll be back on the road and the air and the sea.
[N.B. The next post will get back to answering rebuttals to my “Rational Case for Removing Confederate Monuments” post.]
David J. Kent is an avid traveler, scientist, and Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World as well as two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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