The Solace of Musée d’Orsay

Today Paris is good enough to provide me with a reassuring selection of clichés. The equivalent of stock footage shorthand allows my tired brain to construct the city with hack readymades. The end of the street has an artisan boulangerie where I can buy croissant from 6am. Turn right onto Avenue Ledru Rollin and there is a pâtisserie window that turns chocolate, glazed apple and Crème anglaise into erotica. Green neon crosses, more night club than pharmacie, wink at bar patrons who look as if they have had permanent hangover headaches for decades. One billboard in four seems to pander to the French obsession with lingerie.

The walk to Gare d'Austerlitz is enlivened by unexpected road closure. Exasperated stabs of horns and an explosion of shouts offers the aural cliché of Parisian gridlock. Arbitrary police searches are conducted to a soundtrack of bleating sirens and the distant barrage of whistles – a sonic cue that always runs ahead of the storm front of protest. Hitting the Seine and the first flea market, cause is encountered amid coalescing CGT placards.

In this city of Haitian handshakes, kisses at altitude and ancestors honoured with Dubonnet salutes, the most glorious cliché is the Musée d’Orsay. However fevered the mind, however battered the body, my spirit is always elevated by the art of and in this building. Today its exhibitions include Masks, from Carpeaux to Picasso and Le mystère of pastels, but its constant magic is that of transcendence. When Paris has left me broke and betrayed, the solace of Musée d’Orsay has never failed.

Beyond its train station façade, Musée d’Orsay possesses the extra dimensionality of a TARDIS. The gigantic clock and dwarfing light and space are pure Time Lord. Its selection of sculpture, Impressionist and Symbolist work so good their acquisition suggests Gallifreyan temporal prescience.

In the elegant bustle of Café des Hauteurs and the romance I have taken in the galleries of Romanticism, there is no room for the language of dust. This is not a theatre for ghosts. Here is joy and inspiration. Gateways forged from imagination, diligently guarded by the great Ours Blanc. Pompon’s finest piece is one of my surest Parisian friends. Being nose to nose with my beloved polar bear always brings smiles.