After dinner, Parisians and tourists descend on the Tuileries Gardens and gaze in awe at the globe 60 metres above the ground, a bubble of light in the darkness.
“You have to see it to believe it,” says Khadija, a Parisian dentist of Moroccan origin. “It gives me goosebumps,” confirms Lorenzo, a physiotherapist from Aranjuez. And Juan Antonio, also a physiotherapist from Fuentepelayo, adds: “I have never seen anything like it.”
It is past midnight and the three of them, having finished their work day at the Olympic Village medical centre, did not want to miss the spectacle. They are absorbed in front of the mobile and elevated cauldron that was lit on Friday, at the end of the opening ceremony, by the athlete Marie-José Pérec and the judoka Teddy Riner.
—You could spend the night looking at it.
Juan Antonio is the one who says it, but he would be supported by the dozens of people who at this untimely hour follow the movement of the balloon, 30 metres high and 7 metres in diameter. Illuminated by an electric flame, it does not pollute, but, with the steam that surrounds it, it fascinates like an eternal flame.
It was said that these Games would not leave behind any monumental legacy, and that is true. But, without anyone seeing it coming, Paris has invented a new monument, and suddenly it is difficult to imagine the city without it.
This monument does not refer to centuries of history, to kings and revolutions, although it fits perfectly into the perspective that goes from the Louvre of the kings of the Ancien Régime to the Mitterrand Arc de la Défense and passing through the Obelisk of Concorde and the Napoleonic Arc de Triomphe. It is not a stone monument. It neither overwhelms nor imposes.
It is fragile, a portable object, like the mobile feasteither laptopwhich was the original title of the Paris was a party by Hemingway. Because another Paris is possible. Not pompous but light. Not grumpy but smiling. A warm breeze blows and the balloon oscillates. It looks like a living being or an alien spaceship. The night is magical.
—It’s like an Olympic sun. When the real sun sets, this one takes over.
On the phone, the father of the balloon, the man who designed it: Mathieu Lehanneur. He explains that he, too, goes to the Tuileries every evening to look at this Olympic, nocturnal sun. His creation. And there he looks at those who look at the creature, and says that he sees pride in their gazes. Pride in the echoes of a very French history that resonates in this artifact. The story of the first human flight in 1783. That of the pioneering Montgolfier brothers. That of Jules Verne’s fantasies: “This cauldron speaks of us, of history, of the human dream of flying.” There is already talk of leaving it up forever once the Games are over, just as the Eiffel Tower was left standing after its construction for the Universal Exhibition of 1889.
“If this object one day becomes a monument,” says Lehanneur, “it will be the people who will have made it into a monument, because it was not intended to be a monument, but an Olympic cauldron.”
The fervour is a symbol of a city that, after months and years of looking at the Games with mistrust, after months of anger and polarisation, after weeks of nerves, is finally surrendering.
“Very peaceful,” says Uravashi, a doctor of Indian origin living in New Jersey, as she looks out into the darkness with her son Prunil, an advertising executive in Chicago. They say the Arc de Triomphe in the distance reminds them of the Gateway of India in New Delhi. Prunil points to the balloon: “When it’s up there, so visible, it gives a feeling of security. It’s cosy.” Her mother adds: “This place gives serenity.”
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