Son Et Lumière: A Footnote to France

Extract

During the last few years French taste and ingenuity have added a new dimension to the tourist’s pleasure— Son et Lumière, the articulated harmony of spoken commentary, music and floodlighting which evokes the past glory and the present beauty of such places as Versailles or Vézelay. As night falls the buildings come to life, their details made piercingly true in the brilliantly devised arc and shadow, and their meaning recalled in the actors’ declaiming of a sermon of St Bernard’s or a passage from Madame de Sévigné. And the music of Rameau or Lully, marvellously amplified without distortion or excess, completes the illusion of the years of magnificence.

Sound and Light: there remains Heat, the third of the trinity of the Physics one learnt at school. And Heat is absent on these summer evenings, so gracious yet so cold. Each monument has fundamentally the same history: war or revolution, the edicts of secular power, eviction, destruction, death. And now, for a moment, it painfully springs to light, but not to life, not to the warmth of a place where men live or of an altar where men worship—except it may be by occasional concession, the toleration that can be exercised now that the power is gone.

It is perhaps a fantasy to find in this an analogy of the state of France today, but it is as useful as any other. There seem as many diagnoses of the disease as there are men to make them. Political instability, inflation, a fossilized bureaucracy, the freemasons, alcoholism, religious unbelief: you may take your choice among these easy explanations and many more besides.