It's not the fall...

Spoiler (mostly for Aged P who will have completed that sentence in her head and begun, well, not quite panicking but panicking's slightly less anxious cousin): yes, somebody fell from l'Arc de Triomphe, no, it wasn't me, no, I didn't see it, although it must have happened right after I left, and happily (?), they got off with a concussion and broken ankles.

I ambled off this morning to climb yet more stairs for another panoramic view of the city from l'Arc de Triomphe. I sped through the entrance line once again with my lovely museum pass (there wasn't much of one but I still felt smug) and worked on my glutes hiked to the top -- after about 100 stairs, they break up the climb into manageable bits by making you go through various hallways and exhibits before you reach the next set of stairs.  Which is very nice of them, but it does prolong the agony; just when you think you are done climbing, you find there is still more to come.

Anyway, there I was at the top.  I had admired the lovely star of the roads and line from the Louvre to obelisk to Arc and was grateful for the line of spikes keeping me from toppling over the edge.  I was looking west straight through to La Défense (and thinking: Yeah, that is a large building), when suddenly I heard a kerfuffle.  I looked to my left as black cords were thrown over the side.  There was a person on the WRONG SIDE OF THE SPIKES.

I wasn't sure at first what was going on. I thought at first it might be one of those guys who gets famous by climbing up or down various buildings and monuments.
Then there was more of a stir as one of the employees, who thought the man was trying to kill himself by throwing himself off l'Arc de Triomphe, earnestly tried to stop him from doing so.  His friends managed to convince her that he wasn't, and it was then that I noticed that there was another person to my right.  On the wrong side of the spikes.  They were attached to ropes that went over the east side of the monument, where there were another two people. On the wrong side of the spikes.

As I watched, the young men donned masks and jaunty berets.  Then, on a signal, they went down.  I couldn't see what they were doing, so I left the top.  "That was kind of fun," I thought. "I now have an interesting story to tell about the time I went to the top of l'Arc de Triomphe and a bunch of crazy people in masks and berets climbed over the edge."

Until I got to the final spiral staircase. I was about halfway down when I saw that there were a lot of people below me.  And they weren't moving.  The police had arrived and weren't letting us leave.  There I was, stuck in a stone stairwell with more and more people talking loudly (what with the echoes and all). There wasn't much we could do -- one group of teens thought we were being idiots and tried to go down anyway by squeezing past the adults. Like we all really wanted to be stuck in a stairwell with strangers. (They didn't get very far.)


We were only held for about 20 minutes or so. I had surmised it was so the police could arrive and get the area under control. When they finally let us out, they hurried us off to the underground passage as quickly as possible. They didn't put anyone at the other end, though, because I saw some tourists who wanted to buy tickets, staring at the closed ticket counter.

On the other side of the street, I finally saw what all the fuss was about.

It turns out that they were Basque activists (Jon Anza was a Basque militant who disappeared and was later found dead). I think it was one of these two who fell after I left. He fell something like 47 m and got off with a concussion and broken ankles. The other one got tangled in the scaffolding (of *course* there was scaffolding; this is me, remember?)

So that was my morning. How was yours?

You can read about the event here: BBC News: Basque hurt in fall from Arc de Triomphe in Paris. If you can find the article. It turns out that this genius publicity stunt was rather badly timed, what with a little volcano in Iceland blowing its top and all...