La Grisaille Parisienne

To everyone who's buried in snow right now, I am either sorry for you, or extremely jealous. Whichever you prefer. If it makes you feel any better, we're supposedly experiencing one of the worst winters in decades here, and that means six snowfalls of an inch or less. And a few weeks of highs in the low 30s. Terrible!

Clearly I can't complain too much, since Paris boasts a pretty mild winter by Boston standards. So consider what follows not as a complaint, but as a report. Only true facts. When people warned us about how rough the Paris winter is, this is what they were talking about. And they were right.

It's called the "grisaille parisienne" - the endless days (stretching into months) of gray (gris) skies. "Grisaille" is technically a term from the art world - it means any monochrome painting. It also refers to the gray color used in a lot of stained glass.

We sense the grisaille parisienne as surely as we sense that Panda smells bad. But it's also measurable. The French weather service keeps track of hours of sunlight by day and by month. In January, we had 47 hours of sunlight. That's out of roughly 273 possible hours of sunlight (calculated based on average sunrise/sunset times for the month). So we had sunshine around 17% of the month, or about 1.5 hours a day, or about 5 full days out of 31. That's pretty awful. (I can't find any data on Boston's sunny hours in January, but if anyone else can I'd love to have something to compare.) The sunlight-hours measurement was up in January from 46 hours in November but down from 52 hours in December. So far in February we've had 9 hours of sunlight, and we're on track for the least sunlight yet, despite the days getting longer. Hooray!

The grisaille parisienne makes even beautiful things look drab. It turns happy days into sad ones. It stamps out fun, hope, good health, and contentment.

In full daylight, St. Augustin looks like your typical neo-baroque cathedral. The grisaille turns it into a hulking, sinister fortress. I heard Darth Vader lives there.

I'm not the first to spend some time describing the grisaille parisienne, nor will I be the last.

Even Jean Nouvel couldn't design the Institut du Monde Arabe to withstand the tyranny of the grisaille, which washes out contemporary architecture, sucking windows that normally reflect the brilliant blue sky into a gaping gray hole of clouds and darkness.

Eden and JP Care Bear Stare the grisaille, but to no avail.

I wouldn't mind the gray skies if there were only 2-4 feet of snow on the ground to watch Panda frolic through. But nevermind. Tomorrow will be a brighter day.