I have always felt the period between Christmas and new Year a peculiarly dead time. Late mornings, mindless telly, simultaneous but distracted reading of two or three Christmas books, bored over-eating - all conspire to create a feeling of nervous sluggishness. The only guaranteed antidote to this sub-human state is to go to the mountains. I had suggested taking the train down to Kandersteg, one of our favourite spots in the Berner Oberland, in order to spend a few days kicking around in the snow, my own secret ambition to perhaps bag a couple of peaks on snow-shoes. Carol ruthlessly rejected this proposition on the grounds of expense, winter-sports incompetence and not really liking snow much anyway. As it turned out, with it being the mildest winter on record, there was hardly any snow in the alps. "Just as well we didn't go then" - irresistible feminine logic! What we did agree upon was to spend a few days in Paris. Having been there on our honeymoon in December 1974, Paris will always be a romantic draw. Back then we got travel from London (train and ferry!) plus four nights in the swanky Hotel Baltimore on avenue Kléber all for £27 for the two of us! This time, with the united family requiring three rooms, the bill was ever so slightly more, even though we were staying in the modest but quaint Hôtel St. Dominique in the 7ème near the Eiffel tower.

Being less than an hour-and-a-half away from Brussels on the fast train, Paris can almost seem a banal destination. Of course, in truth, it is inexhaustible - if you are tired of Paris, you are most definitely tired of life. So, as if to prove we weren't, on the morning of the 28th, Holy Innocents' Day and our wedding anniversary, we struggled out of our hibernatory torpor and somehow got ourselves down to the Gare du Midi. Knowing the fissiparious tendencies of any group, but of family groups in particular, I planned our three days with near military precision. Even "rests" were the subject of detailed forward planning. I hoped in this way to avoid lengthy and irritable debate as to what to do next, and despite a few grumblings in the ranks about the "Stalinistic" approach, things worked out broadly according to plan.
Hitting the platform at the Gare du Nord, we immediately fanned out in formation towards our respective pre-established destination points - they in a taxi to the hotel, I by Metro to FNAC to pick up the museum tickets I'd ordered in advance in order to avoid potentially fractious queuing. I then walked briskly down from the Arc de Triomphe towards the Eiffel Tower through an exhilarating shower of rain, enjoying, however briefly, the pleasure of my own company and the childish frisson of being able to stride through such a décor. Maintaining radio contact with the advance party, we were able to rendezvous at a café on the corner of Dominique and Tour-Maubourg. The place was buzzing with lunchtime customers, Parisian accents and ever-alert and occupied waiters squeezing around the closely packed tables, calling out their orders to the kitchen. Trenchantly I ordered the plat du jour and a glass of Bordeaux. Endives au jambon is virtually the Belgian national dish, but it took on a whole new flavour in this excitingly different context. No fuss bill-settling completed, we retreated to the hotel to regroup.
The Hôtel St. Dominique is a cosy little place in traditional French chintz with what estate agents call "a wealth of exposed beams" and, above all, that special French hotel smell which they all used to have but which is less and less the case these days . [On the subject of smells, I particularly regret the pungent cloud of tabac brun which used to greet you at the Gare du Nord as you stepped of the train. It was as if Concentrated Essence of France had been deliberately released in spray form. It's all no smoking these days - doubtless healthier, but something magical has been lost irretrievably.] The rue St. Dominique affords a classic view of the Eiffel Tower with the look and the feel of the shopping streets from "Chez Nous", the school magazine in French to which, aged 11, we were required to subscribe - Le Boulanger, Le Boucher, L'Epicier, Le Traiteur, Le Cordonnier, La Brasserie etc. All very Amélie Poulain.

Having established base, we proceeded according to plan to the Musée du Luxembourg to see "Titien - le Pouvoir en Face". Borrowing the master's great works from around the world, the exhibition gathered together an amazingly impressive collection of paintings you'd somehow seen somewhere before - in history of art books or as illustrations in historical biographies. All the stars were there: Charles V, François I, Phillip II, a succession of grave and wily Doges. As W. pointed out, it does give you a strange feeling to think that these unimaginably powerful figures had all actually posed for Titian and that with his paints and brushes he had created not only their image but also, even allowing for inevitable flattery, their psychological portrait - and that we were looking at them now. Fascinating, impressive, powerful. Touching? Well, not really, but then Titian wasn't working for us, le grand public, but for his patrons. He wasn't seeking to reveal unseen truths, but very specifically to reveal seen truths, the truths of prestige and power - le Pouvoir en Face. Emerging from the museum, W. threw out the line "champion brown-nose!" Hard to deny at the end of the day.
As is now unfailingly the case in this consumerist age, we were steered out via the museum shop. Amongst the stacks of Titian paraphernalia, my eye was instinctively drawn to a print of one of Matisse's later floral motifs with their blocks of rich, solid colour and the signature looping blooms. How can you compare? You cannot possibly. They were trying to do very different things. However, it cannot be denied that Matisse somehow nourishes something positive at an emotional level which remains untouched by Titian. Could it be that modern art speaks more directly to the modern age? Possibly - but looking through the post cards for a souvenir, there was Fra Angelico's Annunciation. Again I felt touched by that specially fine sensibility which Fra Angelico conveys - such delicacy, such intelligence, such understanding. I can't help thinking that real art, as opposed to sensationalist gimmickry or mercenary self-promotion, must somehow call you to a higher place in yourself. To communicate this through paint, the artist needs to be in a certain inner state himself. This ambition, as I understand it, becomes quite explicit in the case of Zen painting, where the master must spend a long time inducing in himself a certain inner state, before expressing this state as a gesture of creative spontaneity through the medium of ink on paper. Quite a demanding undertaking.

Emerging from the museum, we drifted down towards the river through the back-streets of the Latin Quarter, eventually finding ourselves on the Boulevard St. Michel. We tried to get into the Deux Magots, but there were already long queues of would-be Jean-Paul Sartres and Simone de Beauvoirs, so we continued happily on our meandering way. Wandering the streets of Paris must be one of the most civilized pleasures in the entire world. Wherever you turn there is harmony of structure and grace of line. The consistency of colour and form makes for a cityscape which is homogeneous but never monotonous. The river Seine describes a perfect bend through the city, a consistent unifying leitmotif, the two banks united and reunited by the constant rhythm and equilibrium of magnificent bridges. And all these themes lead with an expectant inevitability to the crescendo of the Ile de la Cité and the jewel at its heart, Notre Dame. Notre Dame is the one iconic building in Paris which, even disregarding its magnificent setting, is a thing of intrinsic beauty. The reputation of other obvious icons, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Sacré Coeur are dependent on association and context, being in themselves eccentric, pompous and tasteless respectively. Their effect is a function of the whole, Paris in its totality.

It was above all this totality that we continued to enjoy over the next two days, museum and exhibition visits being essentially a pretext for us to tramp the streets. Passing under the Eiffel Tower, crossing the Pont d'Iena, we headed west to the Jardin de Ranelagh and the Marmottan Museum. The Marmottan contains a superb collection of Monets, and since it is a little out of the way, the visitor has the time and space to dwell on the paintings. It is sometimes claimed by art historians that the Impressionist experiment was an attempt to paint light as we really experience it. I'm not sure. I rather think we see the world with the same mechanical literal-mindedness as the video camera. What the Impressionists offer us is in fact something larger-than-life, a heightened version of the world around us. For the very reason that the themes are frankly quotidian and straightforwardly identifiable, the viewer has a glimpse of his own familiar reality elevated to a new intensity. I am convinced that this is the secret of the consistent popularity of the style, the suggestion that, behind the veil of the apparently ordinary, life can be, should be, a vivid and meaningful experience for each of us. In this sense Impressionism is profoundly democratic - the very antithesis of the elitism of Titian.

Reflecting on these ideas, I am groping my way to an understanding of the implications of what, at the time, was a revolution in art. With the radical changes brought on through industrialisation and the wider distribution of wealth and the (concomitant?) secularisation of society, do we not see the beginnings of the new (bourgeois?) religion, "Happiness in this World"? Are not the works of the Impressionists almost literally icons of this new religion? My theory was bolstered by our visit to the Musée d'Orsay. For the scrum of people wading round the exhibits, which painting was the biggest draw? A straightforward empirical experiment. And the winner was...Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette by Renoir! Dancing on a warm summer's night, drink, conversation, the lights, the colours, the pretty girls, the delectable flirtation, the wit, the sumptious dresses, the movement, the life, all done without any "ship of fools" moral commentary. Yes, of course, no question, we can be happy in this life!

Returning home, Brussels seemed scruffy, small-minded and provincial by comparison. Of course, it's quite unfair to compare - "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife"! It's in that very pell-mell, earthy quality that the charms of Brussels are to be found. And we have the Grand'Place which burns off pretty much any single monument in Paris. And don't forget - Paris is only a convenient 1h25 away on the train!