President Mary McAleese chose a perfect day to visit Paris - one of those clear, cold autumn days when your breath comes out white in the air.
In a way, Saint Columbanus chose it for her, by dying 1,390 years ago yesterday. To commemorate the 6th-century Irish monk credited with reconverting Europe to Christianity, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the Irish Bishops' Conference and the Columban Fathers commissioned a statue from one of Ireland's best-known sculptors, German-born Imogen Stuart.
And what a statue. Four metres high, 3½ tonnes in weight, and cut from white Portuguese limestone by stone carver Philip O'Neill.
"I'm too old to do it all myself," said Stuart.
A petite woman in an artist's beret, she does not look her 78 years. "From a distance, it looks like a flame or two hands," she said of her work, entitled The Flame of Human Dignity. At close range, two feathered wings are visible.
Mrs McAleese packed a lot into her brief stay in Paris, the first in five years: dinner on Tuesday night with 250 guests of the Ireland-France Chamber of Commerce; a private lunch yesterday at the Café de Flore with her husband, Martin, followed by the reception at the Irish College.
"Columbanus was one of many Irish monks whose lives were dedicated to pilgrimage, exile and evangelism," Mrs McAleese told the crowd in the Irish College courtyard. "But his is the name that sticks." So much so that Robert Schuman, one of the founders of the European Union, called Columbanus: "One of the patron saints of all those who today seek to build a united Europe." The words are engraved on the base of Stuart's sculpture.
The successors of Columbanus, Mrs McAleese said, are "all those who seek reconciliation, who invest in peace, who instil respect for the otherness of others, who forswear sectarianism. . . is the father of us all, whether we are Protestant or Catholic, unionist or nationalist."
Representing the bishops' conference, Bishop Joseph Duffy provoked laughter when he quoted Saint Columbanus as saying "there has never been a heretic or schismatic" in Ireland.
Father Thomas Murphy of the Columban Fathers said the saint "arguably had a greater influence in France and Europe than any other Irish person, living or dead".
