Travelers' Tales Paris Page 2

  —Jean-Paul Sartre, in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir

  I don’t mean they argued as in “had a fight,” which you almost never see in Paris, but an argument as Aristotle thought of it: a coherent series of logical reasons, advanced to prove a point. What could be more Parisian than that?

  The young woman in the café takes the young man’s coffee cup from his hand so he cannot hide behind it. It was not religion that invented love, she asserts, leaning forward. It was not your school or your parents, she continues, eyes afire. It is men and women who reinvent love together, and if we two do not make love, love is not made in this world. She crushes out her cigarette and throws her hair back over her shoulder in a flourish of valedictory passion.

  You don’t have to be Parisian to appreciate this kind of romance, or to participate in it either. An American woman I know spent years trying to convince her Provençal boyfriend that they should leave Paris and live somewhere, anywhere, else. Katie is a professor of economics, a discipline in which so little is actually provable that the ability to persuade is paramount. The discussion about leaving town should have been over in a month. They remained for years. How could this happen? They were in Paris, and in love: the argument illuminated their happiness like a bonfire.

  Another Parisian love story, that of Mimi and Rudolfo in Puccini’s opera, La Bohème, has made millions of people weep. It makes the Parisians I know squirm. They prefer the scenes between the second couple, Musetta and Marcello. I once asked a Frenchwoman to explain this to me. (Of course I started by stating a logical case; I was secretly in love with her, and we were in Paris.) Both Mimi and Musetta leave their artistic lovers to be kept by wealthy men, I argued, so one is no better than the other. Mimi has far lovelier arias, more vulnerability, and one of the most touching deaths in all of theater. Why do you spurn her?

  It’s not her, the lady said, rolling her eyes. (She was reversing the usual procedure by opening with attitude and then hitting home with logic.) It’s the story, she said. Rudolfo and Mimi meet in his room at the beginning, then she dies in his room at the end. But where’s the rest? With Musetta and Marcello you get to see them argue a little, so they express their love. The other two, they split up somehow, but we never see it. The real love is all offstage!

  Right now, on-stage in the café, the young man reaches for a cigarette. He lights it thoughtfully, blows out a cloud of grey-blue smoke, and considers the intelligent face of his tablemate. I cannot disagree with anything you say, he begins softly. This does not melt the young woman. She is in Paris, and in love. Instead her back stiffens a little.

  Even Paris itself, the physical city, is an argument for romance Parisian style. Baron Haussmann’s broad boulevards and great monuments argue eloquently that Paris is not like other cities, and its inhabitants not like other city dwellers. Why then should they love like others, with more feeling than reason? Even recent civic “improvements,” such as dropping a glass pyramid into the lap of the Louvre—Europe’s most romanticized museum—appear intentionally designed to stimulate passionate argument.

  The first time I took a woman to Paris, I discovered things about her—and her attitude about our relationship—that were previously unrevealed by years of polite American passion. We were sitting in the cozy corner of a small restaurant in the rue de l’Echaude, savoring winter soup and crisp Sancerre, when she said casually, “This is working out better than I ever thought it would.” I believed she was praising either the dinner or my management of our trip, and asked which she meant. “No,” she said, “I meant us, the whole thing.”

  The Louvre was wonderful. I spent three hours sketching one of Michelangelo’s slaves. Afterward I hopped on the Métro to try to catch the Rodin museum’s last admittance. My luck, it was pouring rain and only the garden was open. Funny how fitting it is to view Rodin’s work in the gray Paris mist, soaking cold, the rain tapping softly on black umbrellas.

  I missed you as I watched the water fall on the glassy surfaces of fountain pools framing beautiful bodies. His passion touches me the same as the memory of your kiss—like swallowing ice cubes—that sweet, dull ache.

  —Gina Granados, “Dear Patrick”

  I do not remember any of the courses that followed, nor how we got back to our hotel. I’ll never forget the argument that erupted, however, or the heightened passion of the remaining years we shared.

  The young man retrieves his coffee cup and gazes into it. When we make this change it will be glorious, he says softly, as if thinking aloud to himself. Our essences will be mixed, our destinies joined in a way that cannot be described, or reversed. He shakes his head slowly at the immensity of it all.

  The young woman’s body is still wary, but her face is beginning to soften, her eyes to glisten. The young man puts down the coffee cup and takes her hands. He continues speaking to her with such persuasive sincerity that even I am willing to believe anything he says. But what of today? he asks. Once we leave this moment we cannot return to our passionate innocence. When at last we make love, the wanting and waiting will be over, but they will also be gone. Then we cannot go back, he says. Ever.

  There is a long moment in which neither of them moves. The sun slides away behind the buildings, and afternoon becomes twilight. An older couple enters the café to warm greetings from other habitués; on the sidewalk a man in an elegant overcoat sweeps a woman in furs into his arms; inside, the bartender is talking on the phone with one hand and gesturing dramatically with the other. Yet somehow all is silent, waiting for love to decide the argument.

  Finally the young woman extracts her hands from his, sits back, and luxuriously smoothes her hair. It is not clear whether she is savoring victory or accepting defeat. A moment later, the two of them go out together. Do they go to her place and make love, or walk the Seine in silence for hours, arm in arm? Which one of them has prevailed? This is Paris, this is love. The argument continues.

  Thom Elkjer is wine editor for Wine Country Living and editor of Adventures in Wine: True Stories of Vineyards and Vintages around the World. His work has appeared in Wine Spectator, WINE magazine, and many Travelers’ Tales volumes. He is also the author of Escape to the Wine Country and a mystery novel, Hook, Line and Murder.

  Numerous writers have depicted the famed City of Light as a woman, and I must agree that she is definitely a sensual, voluptuous, sometimes loving, often laughing, playful spirit. She can also be cruel and cold in her sophisticated way, seeming to say, “I am all that is romance and splendor of the past, but if you do not respect my ancient history and try to understand my deeper mystery, then I will show you only one side of myself...the flat dimension of glittering night life, champagne and sequins, the odor of expensive perfume and cigarettes. But I will not unveil my inner beauty that lies within the cracks of every statue, depicting the glory I once knew. You will slumber in a drunken paradise, unable to keep the vigil as the sun rises on wings of fire that kiss the breasts of my monuments to the past. Because my light is invisible to the naked eye, it only touches and blesses those travelers who continue to dream and believe in their own muse with all their heart. For them, I will shine brightly through their tears of pain and infinite joy.”

  —Carole Brooks, “A Love Affair with the City of Dreams”

  JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

  Behind the Wheel

  Paris satisfies the drives of Private Dunne.

  I WAS 22 WHEN I WENT TO PARIS FOR THE FIRST TIME, A MEWLING, puling first-class private in the army of the United States, on a three-day pass from an artillery battalion in divided cold war Germany. I was drawn to the City of Light by Charlie Wales in Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited and by Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and by Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, drawn by wine and by (let’s face it) what opera stage directions call “women of the town.” I spoke a little French, un petit peu, as I was always quick to say, but I did know the most thrilling word I had ever heard in any language—apéritif.


  “Une fine, s’il vous plaît,” I told the barman that first day in Paris (at the Hemingway Bar in the Ritz, where else?) when asked if I would like an apéritif. I didn’t know what a fine was, but if it was good enough for Jake Barnes the night he met Brett Ashley again at the bal musette on rue da la Montagne-Ste-Geneviève, it was good enough for me. I had a second fine à l’eau (the barman discreetly suggested that cutting the brandy with water might possibly help me make it through the rest of the afternoon) and a third—bad news at lunch, but a gin martini seemed de trop, three positively vulgar. Full of brandy, youthful adrenaline, and testosterone and absent good sense, I decided I must rent a car; I would drive, not so much to see Paris as to take it on in my disorganized (and at this point quite hungover) fashion.

  The rental agency to which I was directed by the barman had only one car available, a stick-shift Renault 4CV of uncertain vintage and provenance, more a Tinkertoy with a pushback canvas roof than an automobile.

  It was scarcely larger than a carnival bumper car, but no matter; I soon discovered that a bumper car was perfect for what proved to be my first, and what I thought might be my last, destination—the Arc de Triomphe at rush hour. It was like being sucked onto a giant merry-go-round that, as if in a dream, I could not get off. Round and round the Étoile I went, swept by the tide of cars—there a glimpse of the Avenue de Wagram, and a moment later Wagram again, then a third time, a fourth, and always over my left shoulder the Arc, my lodestar.

  By the fifth time around, however, I began getting into it, feeling the rush, waving now, shouting, cursing, exuberantly singing “La Marseillaise,” cutting cars off, flipping other drivers the bird, and then suddenly, as if I had been ejected by a slingshot, I was off that demented carousel and onto the relatively safe haven of the Champs-Elysées. I could, however, only feel disappointment; the ride around the Étoile had been so exhilarating that I turned right around and went back again. It was as if I had finished basic training—now it was time for advanced Étoile maneuvers, except this time I would choose where to get off. And so, supremely confident, moving easily with the flow, darting through openings, I exited onto all the great avenues branching out from the Arc—Champs-Elysées, Marceau, Iéna, Kléber, Victor-Hugo, Foch, Grande-Armée, Carnot, MacMahon, Wagram, Hoche, Friedland. I will not say that I underwent an epiphany that afternoon, but in some inchoate way I realized that the only way I wanted to experience Paris was in an automobile.

  Ever since that first trip I have always rented a car immediately upon my return, more than twenty times now, and on my first day in the city, sane and sentient wife in tow and protesting vigorously, I make for the Étoile at rush hour: it is the way I let Paris welcome me back. Here a confession is in order that will perhaps explain my need for wheels. I have an aversion to sightseeing and little affinity for museums, monuments, cathedrals, shrines, grottoes, tombs, castles, and palaces. No organized bus tours for me, no group forays to Notre Dame or the Orangerie or the Palais du Luxembourg, no checklist of sites and sights to be ticked off: if this is the 7th arrondissement, it must be the Eiffel Tower, the École Militaire, the Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb. Guidebooks leave me numb, except for the odd nonessential fact that I might later put in a book of my own. My heart leaps, for example, to learn that the Florentines, while laying siege to Siena in the 13th century, catapulted excrement and dead donkeys over the city’s walls in hopes of starting a plague. Or that the Germans, during the Nazi occupation of France, added their own savage wrinkle to the guillotine: unlike the French, they made each condemned prisoner face upward, and taped his eyes open so that the unfortunate victim’s last terrifying sight was the blade heading toward his neck.

  I have an image fixed for ever in my mind of young, blond, admirably coifed, and chicly clothed young mothers in the driver’s seats of Renault 5s (the other part of this encapsulation of the essence of Frenchness), a Stuyvesant or a Virginia Slim or a Blue Blush by Helena Rubinstein held firmly in their lips (otherwise they would be biting them), a scarf by Hermés caressing their lovely necks, their Louis Vuitton bags by their sides, and two well-dressed small children strapped into the back seat—bearing down on the Étoile like tank commanders, shaking their hands with irritation (hand held palm upward, fingers splayed, and shaken up and down) at some offending other driver. Mais, qu’est-ce que tu fous?—What the hell are you doing?—they mutter under their breath as the battle ensues. Ta gueule, salaud—Up yours, you bastard (very rough translation)—they say.

  —Richard Bernstein, Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French

  What a car provides is the opportunity for unexpected adventure, a freedom to explore, to be overtaken by what might not interest others. A wrong turn, a one-way street running in the opposite direction from where I’m headed—getting lost is in fact the larger purpose. Exposure to the mundane puts me in touch with the rhythm of a place. I saw the locks of the Canal St-Martin and the slums of Belleville and Ménilmontant on market day before I saw the sublime stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle. I did not visit the Louvre until my sixth trip to Paris, and then only because a cloudburst had rendered my windshield wipers inoperable and the Quai des Tuileries impassable. I pulled under a tree, sure that in such a storm I would not get a traffic ticket, and ducked inside with my wife to escape the rain. We walked upstairs, smack into the Mona Lisa. How much better to be favored by the Gioconda smile that way, the first time, rather than as a sightseeing duty.

  In a car, on a given day, I can visit any number of destinations and never see a tourist gazing at a green Michelin guide. Sometimes I invent whimsical expeditions. One afternoon it was to find the apartments of American writers who had once lived in Paris (the addresses provided in an estimable volume, Brian Morton’s Americans in Paris). I zipped from the building on rue de Tilsitt, near the Étoile, which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had occupied for a time in 1925, when they were in the chips, to the house on the Ile St-Louis where James Jones held court, to the sawmill on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the 6th arrondissement, above which Hemingway, almost broke, had lived in 1924, and then to the two apartments across the street from each other on rue de Varenne where Edith Wharton passed her Paris years. Close by the Invalides, rue de Varenne is the same street to which Wharton’s memorable creation (and perhaps fictional alter ego) Countess Olenska exiled herself from Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence.

  On another, more louche foray I set out to locate some of the old maisons de tolérance, or brothels, that Brassaï had photographed in The Secret Paris of the Thirties. At the Chabanais, not far from the Place de L’Opéra, the Prince of Wales—later King Edward VII, a regular—had a Hindu room set up in homage to his mother, Queen Victoria, empress of India. In a nearby maison on rue des Martyrs, an elderly president of the French senate had years before expired in the arms of his Venus, a minor scandal at the time. On Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, near the Montparnasse cemetery, I found the site of the Sphinx, one of the few brothels where customers could bring their wives and children. It was a Wednesday, and the street alongside what had once been the most famous whorehouse in Paris was closed for market day. At covered stalls with a staggering variety of fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, and cheeses, I watched as the farmers and the bourgeois matrons of the quartier haggled endlessly. I bought some chestnuts and then wandered through the cemetery examining the dates on the crypts and monuments; it was a history of France since the Revolution.

  On this eccentric one-day tour I had managed to see a huge part of the city and its quotidian life, past and present, which would not have been possible had I not been driving. Each day has its structuring destinations. Sunday is park day—Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the 19th arrondissement, Montsouris in the 14th, Monceau in the 8th. It is to Monceau that my wife and I drive every Sunday morning to read the English papers and to watch the beautiful neighborhood children at play, many the sons and daughters of the diplomatic corps from the nearby embassies. Monceau is the most cosmopolitan of these parks,
almost a child’s fairy kingdom, alive with the squeals of preschoolers. In a sandbox full of forts and castles and battlements, Linda, a tiny black girl, shouts at Abdul, equally tiny in his pink Lacoste polo shirt. The merry-go-round doesn’t have just horses but also a fire engine, a tank, a stagecoach, two motorcycles, a Paris-Lyons bus, and a rocket ship.

  Then across the Seine to Parc Montsouris at the southern edge of the city. Like Monceau, Montsouris is a mix of nationalities—in this case students from the foreign dormitories at Cité Universitaire across the street. The students lend the park its raffish air of young love and unlimited possibilities. Adjacent to Montsouris is rue Georges-Braque, where the painter had his studio, and overlooking the park are the spacious ateliers of contemporary artists. Some of the nearby streets are cobblestoned and lined with ivy-covered cottages, giving the area a strange, almost Bavarian Mother Hubbard quality that makes it unlike any other place I have seen in Paris.

  I suppose my favorite park, though, is Buttes Chaumont in the northwestern part of the city. I discovered it quite by accident driving back to Paris from the World War I battlefield at Château-Thierry. There was a déviation in the road. I of course got lost, then suddenly came upon this park in what seemed to be a working-class district. On an adjoining street, old men were playing boules. Buttes Chaumont is one of the highest spots in Paris with a view of almost the entire city. Its hills are impossibly steep—vertical and vertiginous. Walking there is a workout. The park has a lake and a suspension bridge which at one time was called Pont des Suicides because, like the Golden Gate in San Francisco, it seemed to invite jumpers. It was the contention of Louis Aragon, former literary godfather of the French Communist Party, that before the city erected metal grilles along its sides, the bridge claimed victims even from passersby who had no intention of killing themselves but were suddenly tempted by the abyss.