Paris. City of Lights. Oozing history and art. After years of wishing to visit this iconic city I finally had the chance. Business was taking my husband there and I could tag along.Grandma and Grandpa came to liberate us from our domestic responsibilities and we gallivanted off on a romantic long weekend in Paris. Unfettered, footloose and fancy free like young honeymooners. Ooo, la liberté.
As a history major I had long dreamed of visiting Paris. I could not wait to see the Louvre, cruise the Seine, walk in Louis the XIV’s footsteps at Versailles, and kiss my sweetheart in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I wanted to stand as witness to history in the Hall of Mirrors, the Bastille, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe - everywhere.
We did it all, crammed into four full days. We traipsed along from monument to museum, stopping to fortify ourselves with café crèmes and baguettes as needed. We sat elbow to elbow at the bustling sidewalk cafés in our front row seats for that most Parisian of past times – people watching.
Swimming in the flood of greatness and grandeur that is Paris can make one feel very small, and even insignificant. Everywhere there are monuments to kings, poets, generals, artists and ideas, celebrating their greatness. Or, perhaps, trying to persuade us of it.
One of the more intriguing was Napoleon’s Tomb at Les Invalides. It is located in a former church, now an altar to a man. You walk under a grand dome, lean over a balustrade and realize you are inadvertently bowing to Napoleon. His body is entombed in a large red stone sarcophagus containing successive coffins of wood and metal. Surrounding the sarcophagus is a series of stone bas-relief panels, illustrating for us Napoleon’s legacy of legislation, education and public works. The whole crypt is effusive in its exaltation of the emperor.As I wandered through the weekend I found myself wondering what my legacy will be. What will be my chef d’oeuvre, my masterpiece? I will never have a painting hanging in the Louvre, or a monument to my spectacular accomplishments. There won’t be a statue with a plaque commemorating my contributions to society. What would such a thing look like anyway?
Perhaps I would be cast in bronze, standing beside my mini-van with a laundry basket on my hip. Swirling script around the base would extol my virtues and record my demise: Jennifer Zach, maker of meals, driver of children, cleaner of toilets, finder of lost homework, drowned in her family’s laundry…
I started to feel just a little bit sorry for myself, to feel like a nothing who will accomplish nothing. Then as I sat hand in hand with my husband in another café, it occurred to me that we are building a different kind of masterpiece. Not a magnificent stone edifice but a family. And we’re working hard at it.
We are certainly not master artisans but we are trying to lay a firm foundation of faith. We are trying to instill values of love and respect and hard work. We pray for our children to grow stronger and accomplish greater things than we ever will. We pray for them to be people who will love God with their heart, soul, mind and strength and that they will love their neighbors as they love themselves. A living legacy.
Outside and around the corner from Napoleon’s grand tomb, you can see the simple headstone that adorned the general’s grave in exile for 19 years before he was returned to Paris. The English governor of St. Helena and Napoleon’s remaining men argued about what to write on the tombstone so it was never finished. It simply reads:
“Here lies…”
This has lingered with me. What would I want mine to say? What would you want yours to say?
