Nocturnal emissions of light

What a masterpiece of a city! One would imagine that the most masterful mastermind ever to have existed fashioned the city from his imagination, from his very loins. The long, wide boulevards, the busy cafes on either side teeming with the seeds of society (people), the nocturnal emissions of light! It is no secret why members of society term this city the “City of Lightness”!

This morning — a brisk one with the smell of buttery, flaky croissants nearly bringing me to a state of rapture — I mounted what many here have termed a “double ducker bus”. This is because one must duck when traveling under low-hanging bridges. We began our esteemed journey at l’Arc de Triomphe. I hardly recognized it, since I first commissioned the beautiful monument. It has grown nearly as much as an erection in the intervening years.

The double ducker galloped down the Champs Elysee, where the souls of such long-dead Greek gods as Pluto and Aristocrates sleep in peace. Hundreds of little mechanical turtles impeded our progress, so we exited and many of my troops fired upon the turtles with their photo-muskets. The turtles made shrill sounds like bleating calves and began slowly moving forward — for there is no hurrying turtles, especially when there are other turtles in the way. Hence the phrase, “It’s like herding turtles.” Finally, we triumphed over the turtles and arrived at the Place de la Concorde, where the formidable Obelisque of grand stature rises, trumped only by the greatest military rulers ever to have lived. The shadow of l’Obelisque fell across our faces like a monumental minute hand, urging us to make haste! For time waits for no man, not even Napoleon.

The Opera

“This concludes our tour of the 8th arrondisement,” my whiskered captain of the double ducker announced. Next, we were to voyage to the Opera. After fording La Seine, we arrived at the steps of the Opera. Many of my officers took aim at the Opera with their photo-muskets.

“Gentlemen!” I admonished them. “I understand you may have a distaste for the garish architecture of this building! I myself am put off by the fact that it refers to itself by a single name, as if it were the only Opera in the world. But we need not take up arms against this building! It has willingly acceded to the power and majesty of our Empire!” Les batards opened up fire anyway. A series of clicks like the sound of hail (the emperor) breaking loose on a roof. I was furious. The men had disobeyed a direct order of mine. But I began to suspect that they had packed their photo-muskets with faulty powder. “Troops! I certainly hope that you are treating this as a training exercise only. Your powder is faulty!”

They stared at me with confusion. I slowly realized they did not even speak our lingua franca. They certainly looked Greek, their faces blank as those of grazing cows. I waved them off and entered the Opera to verify that it was being maintained to my standards. The Grand Staircase awaited me. At its summit, I raised my arms to embrace the room. My disobedient subjects continued to walk by me. It was like I was a ghost, a phantom in my own Opera. I heard a man whisper to his chancre of a lover, “Look at this modern-day Napoleon.”

“I am Napoleon!” I shouted after the man with the sharp bayonet of my voice. He quickened his pace out of my sight. La batard. I would have thrown him into the lake on which this Opera was built if I hadn’t had other more pressing matters to which to attend. What sort of man preferred song to strategy, anyhow? The sort of man that causes Empires to crumble.

The Offal Tower

I instructed the captain of our double ducker to continue onward in our appraisal of the City of Lightness. We proceeded to the Offal Tower, the gleaming metal giraffe that the governor who helmed Paris during my stay in Saint Helena had the forceps to deliver from the bowels of Parisian ingenuity. What a beautiful monument! After summiting the Tower’s snowy peak and seeing that indeed, the vast capital city of my Empire was intact and thriving as a beehive, we entered the 7th arrondisement for our final stop of the audit, at The Hotel of the National Invalids.

The Invalids

This was where I should have started my tour de la Paris. A stately, gold-topped monument housing France’s most important military rulers to have ever lived and died, a grand hotel to billet our Parisian heroes permanently. My footsteps echoed hollowly down the halls until I arrived with my troops in a chillingly silent room. In the middle stood a regal tomb of red. I will admit that I endured a pang of jealousy that the French people had devoted such a lovely tomb to someone other than their beloved Napoleon. But how could I think that? For I was not yet deceased. When I die, the French would no doubt place me in a sarcophagus of glass, suspend the tomb from the Offal Tower, and place a spotlight behind the glass so that my silhouette would shine forever above the streets of Paris.

I approached the red tomb and read the inscription above the lintel: “I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine among the people of France whom I so much loved.” Ah, I thought to myself. Now that is true poetry. A beautiful monument of words! The captain of the double ducker clasped me on the shoulder. I agreed with him that it was time to go. That night the gracious people of France shot off works of fire in my honor, explosions in the very sky where my silhouette would be ensarcophagus-ed a century hence, when I planned to succumb to death. It was true, the City was truly one of Lightness. At times, an unbearable lightness. But a lightness that would indeed suffice for the time being.

Finis