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After decades of battle with the groundwater seeping into Garnier’s subbasement, builders resigned themselves to nature’s will, letting the basement flood but in a way they could control.

I imagine the French firefighters who refract down this ladder to practice swimming in total darkness. After a while, that murky darkness must feel amniotic, like all they’ve ever known.

And I imagine their relief climbing out, the metal’s skin spalling off on their hands like scabs as they blink into the light. It must be like being born. They check their watches. Life begins again.
A portal to box seats and all the treasures the Palais affords. I try the latch: no luck. Fogging the rheumy, century-old glass, I realize this is less as a door than a filter, finely joined to separate the enlightened from the unwashed, and I don’t have nearly the coin to come clean.

But enlightenment is a state of mind, and that easily slips under the door. It says there are 6 places left: let’s go.
In the Rotunda, the creak of ancient parquet sounds the room, dimming the din of Paris to a whisper. I circle the banquette and snap myself like a pilot into the precisely angled back, letting my hand run absently over the plush velvet upholstery. Let the performance begin.
The stallions charge, serpents snare, waves of stone crash over gods and humans alike. But as I ply the Grand Staircase upstream toward its source, the sound of all this surging life is the silence of a held breath, everything frozen in its moment of creation, coiled and waiting to spring alive inside.
There’s a moment near the beginning of a performance when you’re no longer sitting in a seat at the beginning of a performance.

It’s the moment the world recedes and another takes its place, like here in the Salon de Soleil, a mirror of your own but distilled and swerved off toward an idea, one with its own rules that now, incredibly, are yours.

It’s a delicious moment that doesn’t in fact exist, because it only comes to be when we don’t notice it has. Like the delicious tumble off the precipice of sleep, the more we try to mark that moment, the more we stay stuck on the other side of the glass, staring at a reflection of someone sitting in a seat at the beginning of a performance.
Looking up at the ceiling, the universe explodes in creation, its big bang a fireball of intertwined salamanders, themselves classical symbols of fire, rebirth, and passion.

It’s clearly meant to celebrate the Artist’s performance, but as the nearly fractal level of detail unfolds above me, my imagination drifts backstage to its true creators, the nameless artisans who inflamed every nook and cranny of the Palais with the fire of their meticulous craft. My people.
To get an idea of how radical Chagall’s new theater ceiling was when he unveiled it in 1964, you have only to look anywhere else in the Palais: it’s totally anomalous in style, palette and vision. In fact, so outraged were some Parisians that Chagall was even contemplating a replacement for the workmanlike original, the artist created it in secret and assembled it under military guard.

The designer in me has to admit the haters have a point: this modern work simply doesn’t belong here in almost every way. But the revolutionary in me says it’s perfect for that very reason: a 2500 square foot finger to the stodgy establishment and self-appointed arbiters of What. Art. Is. And in the process, a celebration of all the Palais was built to empower.
You’re old enough to know there isn’t a Santa Claus, that the magic you see on stage was in fact laboriously constructed by unseen hands. But marveling at how deft those hands must be to conduct an orchestra of such intricate machinery, you’re also old enough to know that only deepens the spell.
Just under its cupola, the Palais has a magic lens that projects an image of the world outside: and not surprisingly, it is the color and flexibility of stone.

Even so, leaching through the shield of instruments designed to separate fiction from fact, the gray and grumble of Paris brushes this dark passage with a dim glow that illuminates my way.
I mean, look at these rivets.

From even a few steps back, the molten pins that give the building’s skeleton its strength are uniform in their cadence, precise in their craft. But up close, you notice a kind of companionable irregularity, the mark of human hands working rivet by rivet to raise a work, anchored in earth, that will last forever.
Outside the cupola on the roof, the ties that have bound Palais Garnier since its completion in 1875. But even thought it’s an iron framework wrapped in stone, note the shift reflected in the binding shadow: clearly breathing a little in the last 100 or so years, the Palais is alive.
Her set complete, an angel of Harmony cradles her horn and looks out into the audience from the roof of the Palais. I turn to follow her gaze, and it wings west, toward the Arc de Triomphe, a monument to violence and sacrifice her song never reached.

Still, the Arc is its own song, and like Harmony’s trumpet or the Palais itself, a song with such sheen we can see a reflection on our world if we take the time to look – a reminder to anyone glancing its orbit of what people like us were willing to die for, and what the cost of our forgetting it might be.
As twilight lowers its curtain, an angel serving Poetry wonders if there's any in Montparnasse, towering in the gloom to the south. But if poetry is a distillation of a moment – an idea or emotion detained in form – then maybe this isolated fortress is in fact a verse for ours.
Back out on the street, real life clocks back in. We’ve left so little time for poetry and harmony and the beauty all around us, some of it, even, lovingly made by us for one another. But there it is, always in the background, timeless and ever-present if we’d just turn and look. Exactly how much time do we have left? How do we want to spend it? How late are we?

Palais Garnier

My audience with Paris’ famous opera house

| © Matt Giraud Photography

From the watery depths of its sub-basement to its soaring apex among the angels on its roof, a journey through and behind the art and craft of the Palais.

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