Place-Neuve, 7:12 a.m.: the grand staircase reads “Wrong way” on each riser, and no one knows which way to hesitate anymore.
We attempted the ascent; so did the article, and one of the two lost the thread along the way.
At dawn, the most photographed staircase in the neighborhood decided to take itself so seriously as to refuse any ascent that wasn’t properly scripted. The arrows painted upward yesterday now point toward… the idea of down, which is pretty but impractical. The public, initially reassured by the objective existence of landings, realized too late that these now serve as parentheses: places to catch your breath and doubt everything, especially the preceding sentences.
At this point, a perfectly reasonable newspaper would provide numbers; here are ours: 14 steps, 0 ascents, 3 attempts at an explanation, 1 slightly winded writer. “We tried everything: put a foot on it, pose the question, then pose for the photo. Nothing works; the staircase insists on being literal,” says Élise B., passerby of circumstance, in a quotation whose scrupulously invented but emotionally authentic nature we freely admit. A rope was stretched, not to block access, but to remind everyone of the notion of a line: it didn’t help.
The stone object, evidently aware of our haste, set its conditions: that we start at the end, out of pure narrative logic. So we drafted this conclusion first, then walked the paragraph back in reverse, which explains the slight syntactic vertigo above. Between two scans of our notes, a hypothesis drifted by: what if the staircase wasn’t against going up, only reluctant to serve as too easy a metaphor?
Like any story that limps, this one will end horizontal: while waiting for a step willing to set an example, our newsroom pledges to publish an update as soon as the proper steps are followed. In the meantime, we suggest the oldest known solution: the detour. It works like a charm, especially in articles that know perfectly well they’re exaggerating.
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