Sunlight in Stone

The most dazzling new sight in Paris is--Paris. For decades, the face of the city was as grey as its ubiquitous cats. But since 1959, squads of yellow-slickered workmen have scrambled up metal scaffoldings to hose down and sand-rub buildings and monuments encrusted with the industrial soot of the 20th century. The grime fighters have now cleaned more than a third of Paris' buildings, and visitors to Paris are discovering a beauteous city they never saw before, the city that De Balzac called the color of cream.

Paris skies may still be grey, but there is sunlight in its stones. As if ready to abandon his Gallic faith in wine, one slightly awed clochard said, "And to think that water can do all this!"

Surprises Under the Grime. It took more than water. It took a long-ignored Second Empire decree signed by Napoleon III in 1852 requiring facades to be washed every ten years, and impassioned pressure from Minister of Culture Andre Malraux. In practice, the government rarely has to fine building owners, for landlords can ease the cost of cleaning by borrowing as much as 40% of the tab. Face-washing a private apartment house costs about $2,000. To clean the 18th century building in the Place de la Concorde that houses the Morgan Bank,* the Automobile Club of France and the famed Hotel Crillon, cost about $60,000.

To its chagrin, the Crillon discovered that some of its columns were made of wood cleverly painted to simulate stone. The facade of the Invalides, where Napoleon lies buried, provided another embarrassing surprise. Pockmarked by gunfire during the liberation of Paris, it had been repaired on the cheap, with cement.

Some Like It Dirty. Inevitably, the big cleanup has divided Paris into two camps: black and white. At the start, white was a dirty word, particularly since Montmartre's white Sacre-Coeur basilica has long been regarded as a bulbous eyesore. When it was suggested that Notre-Dame be scoured, a venerable member of the Paris city council counterproposed: "Paint Sacre-Coeur black instead." Notre-Dame may yet remain the great unwashed building, since architects fear that its 800-year-old lacy filigree would crumble. The pro-blacks argue that character, dignity and age are lost by cleaning. Sputters one irreconcilable rear-guardist: "It is immoral, like face lifting. Old people shouldn't look young."

Pro-whites contend that style, not dirt, gives a building distinction. Says Bernard Vitry, who directed the cleaning of the Madeleine: "I love stone too much not to wish to see it." Malraux says that art is "the presence in our lives of what should belong to death," and holds that classic buildings cloaked in mantles of soot are deadened, if not dead. To look on beauty bare, as it is emerging in Paris, is to see what is agelessly and vibrantly alive, what T. S. Eliot called "the present moment of the past."

Saving Utrillo's House. For Malraux, "our monuments are France's greatest dreams." Like De Gaulle, whom he serves more like a gauntleted knight than a Cabinet minister, Malraux wants to spur the French will to new greatness through shining images of past glories. He resurrects, he conserves, he dramatizes what he believes is the universal genius of French art. This year's summer cleaning schedule includes the theater of the Comedie-Franc,aise, the Pantheon, the Hotel Sully, the Fontaine des Innocents and the Oratoire du Louvre. As such monuments return to their pristine freshness, Malraux hopes Parisians will see their city anew.

Since his ministry is responsible for everything from the Louvre to provincial cultural centers, from national archives to Sevres porcelain works, from the Comedie-Franc,aise to thousands of historical monuments, Malraux is chronically hamstrung by a budget that at $80 million a year comes to just one-third of 1% of the national budget. He cannot prevent bad aluminum-and-glass boxes from being constructed on the Champs-Elysees. What he tries to save is France's cultural real estate. Through a legal device known as the Inventory of Beaux-Arts, he has managed to preserve Utrillo's house, Verlaine's bench, the window from which Renoir studied the Moulin de la Galette, the mansard on the Boulevard St. Germain where Apollinaire lived, Picasso's Montmartre studio, and a number of art nouveau Metro stations.

Of all the things Andre Malraux has been--adventurer, revolutionary, novelist, a squadron commander in Republican Spain's air force, resistance hero, Gaullist propagandist, esthetician--it may be that he will be best remembered as the tastemaker of the Fifth Republic. In the age of the blast-off and the countdown, he has made art's "voices of silence" audible. In the youthful, glowing vistas of a freshly scrubbed Paris, he has thrown open a "museum without walls" for Everyman.

*And until December 1962, the Time Inc. office, now on the Avenue Matignon.

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