To Versailles or Montmartre?

I’ve written a number of times about meaning and transformation, about the significance of understanding what the highest level of meaning is in life. In writing about where I need to live and why, I just wrote ‘Paris’. That’s technically correct, of course, and being autistic technically correct is the best kind of correct! Autism humour. But Paris is a big place. As with any city, saying I need to live in Paris is a real simplification.

Ever since I first visited Montmartre it’s been there that I’ve dreamed of living. It’s still recognisable from the fin de siècle photos that can be so easily found on social media. The streets still look the same, though the shops have changed of course. That’s because building restrictions were implemented very early. And with Musée de Montmartre at its heart, the history of old Montmartre is still alive. For the sensitive, for artists, it still feels different. The weight of artists like Renoir, Valadon, Toulouse-Lautrec, and countless more is too great when the area has been preserved. Montparnasse, the area to which many of the Montmartre crowd gravitated in the first two decades of the 20th century meanwhile, feels like that old artistic tradition has been pulled up by the roots. Today, it feels like what it is: a business district.

It’s that artistic history of Montmartre and the feeling it creates that’s always appealed. It does still feel like a village that got brought into Paris, which is exactly what it was and exactly what happened in 1860. The artist in me resonates s strongly with Montmartre that, for as long as I’ve been going, it’s been the only place that I’ve longed to live.

Then, earlier this year, I visited Versailles for the first time. I’d always been snobbish about Versailles, seeing it as being so appealing to tourists as to drown all meaning there. I was very wrong. What I’ve found there is a similar level of art to Montmartre, but also a weight of history that’s rarely found anywhere in the world. Yes, there’s the art on the walls of the chateau. There’s the Hall of Mirrors. The fabric of the building, the architecture, is art. The statues, the gardens, the different types of gardens, the Petit Trianon, the Temple of Love… It never stops. Never. The Moberly - Jourdain incident adds a layer. The history adds more layers still. The weight of Versailles, specifically of the chateau, is monumental.

And this is the difficult thing in terms of sifting out meaning: I haven’t yet finished exploring the chateau and the estate. The town of Versailles I don't know. There’s still so much more to explore here. ‘Here’. Interesting that I should use that word. Not ‘there’ but ‘here’, as if it’s already where I live. That’s the kind of revelation that I was hoping to find in writing this. It’s why I categorised this as a diary. As if a diary entry, I’m writing this as an inward journey of discovery. But unlike a regular diary, I’m casting this out as a need to the universe: I need to live in Versailles.