Re-Reading Les Misérables

Thoughts and commentary on Victor Hugo’s masterpiece.

Not exactly Javert’s bridge, but close enough

Funny coincidence time! I’m a long-time Flickr user who never left, and I’ve been having fun with their TwitterTuesday events: Every Tuesday, they post a theme on Twitter, and you post a link to some photo from your archive that fits the theme. This week the theme was Bridge. I ended up submitting a recent photo from a seaside park in California, but when they posted the highlights of the week’s entries on their blog, one of them looked familiar.

Jean-François Pfeiffer’s photo Pont du Carrousel vu du Pont des Arts, Paris was clearly taken at the same spot as a shot I took on a trip to Paris almost 15 years ago…the one I ended up using (with some faux-vintage effects) to illustrate my commentary on Javert’s suicide!

Here’s my photo, scanned from a 3x5 print and cropped (but not yet filtered).

Kelson Vibber: Seine Bridge and Clouds

At first I wasn’t sure – I mean, there are lots of bridges across the Seine, not to mention lots of bridges across rivers all over the world. But the caption placed it in Paris, and the bridges looked the same, and then I started looking at the buildings. The scaffolding on the rightmost tower from 1999 is gone, but otherwise it’s clearly the same spot!

And as an added bonus: I can finally identify where I was when I took the picture!