Bill Bryson remarks somewhere that a Martian visitor desiring to be taken to our leader would chose Vienna as the likeliest place to find him or her, judging by the magisterial grandeur of its imperial architecture and the overbearing opulence of the baroque sculptures that strut their muscles and bosoms along the Ringstrasse. Surely other capitals, in particular Saint Petersburg and Washinghton D.C.,would be major contenders, scale-model London being a 100:1 outsider. Whatever the Graeco-Roman grandeur of other capitals, however, I think that the archetype they all seek to emulate is PARIS.
So, on or around Bastille Day, it is time for a typically Gallic histrionic, over-the-top, ruthless and megalomaniac makeover of one of the city’s great public open spaces. The upset will be as nothing to that occasioned when les grandes Places et les Boulevards were originally butchered through the homes, workshops and lives of a teeming city, municipal destruction in scale and senselessness commensurate with British “slum clearance” of the 1950’s and 1960’s , except that little very impressive came out of the latter.
Le Quatorze Juillet is the number pair (14,7), is of form one even, one odd, so yielding a Lattice Labyrinth tessellation of the Chinese family, specifically of a subfamily where the two numbers share a common factor,in this case 7.
Here is a little region of Chinese Lattice Labyrinth (14,7).
The outline of this figure does display that cockiness (suffisance?) which forms part of the French national self-image and can arouse animosity among les étrangers.
Below is the present unfinished state of the re-paving of the Place de la Concorde; batches of slabs in the national colours have to be specially manufactured.
The Lattice Labyrinths workbook is available from the publisher or you-know-who , or from a good independent bookshop or via Google.
Le classeur Lattice Labyrinthes est disponible auprès de l’éditeur ou de vous-savez-qui, ou à partir d’une bonne librairie indépendante ou via Google.
LatticeLabyrinths 