From the Observer archive, 25 December 1960: an artist's vision of a secret city

Look at Paris as a visitor would and you come to appreciate its ramshackle charm
Jean Cocteau, 1929
Poet, novelist, artist and film director Jean Cocteau. Photograph: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Paris is a city of seven hills, or even more – Montmartre, Montsouris, Montparnasse, Mont Valérien, the Buttes Chaumont, the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.

Upon these hills and between these hills are the villages that make up the town. For example, the Palais Royal, where I live, is a little town walled in by ancient and decayed buildings. In my film Orphée, I constructed a city from several different districts of Paris taken out of their context. In this way I discovered towns hitherto unknown to me.

Foreigners know Paris better than we do. They bring a fresh eye to it, a vision undimmed by habit. Often, they can make us aware of the secrets of our own surroundings. Similarly, when we go to their countries, they think we are wrong about the character of their capital cities, when in fact we are seeing them as they should be seen.

But Paris, for the zealous explorer, because of its ramshackle beauty, because of its mixture of propped-up old age and modernity underlining the squalor, is like an enchanted loft in a child's storybook. Fields, orchards and farms lie hidden behind the facades of the least pretentious streets, gypsy caravans standing on waste ground overlook a surging, restless sea of misty rooftops; steep flights of steps plunge between tiny gardens; and silence reigns in the midst of uproar.

The spirit of Balzac clings to a piece of wreckage. Stony waves of oblivion threaten him; but he survives. And my heart turns over whenever an old plank breaks off from the raft.

We love this raft, or the remains of it, which the authorities persist in demolishing, oblivious of the fact that they are squandering a treasure and that the new cannot but gain by being set off against the old. If London razed Soho, Dickens would be the victim.

But we are moved by the ruins of certain districts, for ruined beauty is in itself beautiful. The ruins of the Marais, for example, impress us by the splendour of their shapes and certain disembowelled buildings are haunted by the ghosts of dead life that seem to be pleading with their vandals.

Of course, Paris must expand; over-population makes this unavoidable. It is nonetheless tragic to destroy the scenes of illustrious events, the witnesses of deeds and ceremonies whose lingering shades make up the moral atmosphere of a city. It is true that the pickaxe cannot subdue these restless shades whose self-appointed task is to sanctify custom and erect for the soul of their defunct city an invisible and fabulous mausoleum.

There is always one district of Paris that takes the lead in launching the fashions of the mind. Once it was Montmartre and Montparnasse; now it is St Germain-des-Prés. A generation loiters idly there, contemptuous of work, but it is where they loiter that France invents her secret weapons and her mysterious explosives.

This is an edited extract

Today's best video

Today in pictures
