Paris in the meantime

A Free Man in Paris

There is something strange about the reconstruction of Notre Dame.....  Perhaps it is because it represents the phoenix-like resurrection of a dream.  Paris has been a part of my world for over fifty years - only a small part, but with comings and goings and this and that, from Absinthe to Maryland, from Cluny to Joyce. But now, as the cranes tower over the burned-out corpse of Our Lady, and passers-by take selfies, I lapse into reveries of times past and retrace the cinders of my life.

This picture graces the sous-terre of Bofinger Brasserie on rue de la Bastille, and I wondered what the lady was implying with her book....  On the internet I found that someone else had asked the question:

Que signifie : quo non hac duce?

 To which this was the reply:

Bonjour, 

« quo non hac duce » pourrait être traduit par « Jusqu’où ne va-t-on pas sous sa conduite» [How far do we not go under his guidance? ] which is to be found on the reverse of coins from the reign of Napoléon III.

NB [François Houtin, jardinier-paysagiste, réalise un rêve d’artiste et met au service de la gravure sa maîtrise de l’art topiaire en réalisant cette composition paysagée de la place de la Bourse, siège de la Chambre de commerce. Palmiers, ifs et cyprès, bassins et jets d’eau ornés de coquilles et dauphins, donnent à cet espace emblématique de la ville un luxe versaillais, digne de son appellation d’origine, la place Royale. Au XVIIIe siècle, une médaille de la chambre de commerce de Bordeaux portait l’inscription Quo non hac duce (Jusqu’où ne va-t-on pas sous sa conduite ?), remplacée sur la gravure par florente, faisant référence à la floraison et la prospérité.]

Qui savait?  And what, pray, does this have to do with my freedom?

Well, in the meanwhile, upstairs chez Bofinger there is la coupole (not, just now, to be confused with the restaurant in Montparnasse made famous by Josephine Baker (and, incidentally, my mother's godmother, though that's another story....):

And while my ROGNONS DE VEAU FLAMBÉS AU COGNAC (sauce au poivre vert, fricassée de champignons, purée de pommes de terre au beurre) are prepared:

Lady Gaga (whose privacy I respect, but who does not recognise me.....) enjoys PÂTÉ EN CROÛTE MAISON at la table à côté de moi:

Hey Ho!  It's a mad mad mad mad world, full of celebrities or simulacra.  At Bouillon Chartier in Montmartre I once ate close to Samuel Beckett - (but he did not recognise me).  Now I find myself seated with three pretty maids from North Carolina - Rosa:

Caroline:

And Lily:

Yes, the world is full of wonderful people:  some, comme cet homme, who could have been in the same chair on the left bank when I first took pictures here:

Others, like this combination of Monsieur Hulot and Magritte, seem to be artistic creations from a somehow better age:

In Le Jardin du Luxembourg two friends rehearse the news of the day:

While others remind themselves of the way to go:

Sunshine is le mot du jour.  One takes simple pleasure in the fresh air:

While another stocks up on vitamin D:

Within The Musée du Luxembourg they are asking, Who was Gertrude Stein? in an exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. And here she is, as pictured by Cecil Beaton, with, and without, her overcoat.....

Though despite her manteau, there is sunshine here too, and, in the background, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century by Andy Warhol, to remind us that the sun shines equally on all of us:

Yes, the world is full of interesting, different people, and their enigmatic shadows:

I am particularly pleased to meet this girl, who Picasso called Buste (étude pour Les Demoiselles d'Avignon).  It seems that she is gentle, and I think she might make a demure companion for a free man in Paris:

In the Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre I find myself touched by the space, enveloped, perhaps, by a sense of peace. I know that Amanda would love this, but she cannot be with me, and, though my thoughts fly up, my words remain below [sic].....

Outside there are crowds - (but they don't recognise me either).  I am a free man in Paris....

Free to drink Ricard at a pavement cafe:

Free to draw on a Gauloise (Disque Bleu) in the street at dusk:

And free to take a selfie by the Seine, with the charred skeleton of Louis Vierne's organ en arrière-plan.....

I was a free man in Paris

I felt unfettered and alive

Nobody was calling me up for favors

No one's future to decide

Joni Mitchell

A Free man in Paris

Place de la République, Paris. 

Marianne, the young and fictional woman who represents the republic, wears her Phrygian cap, the symbol of Liberty.....

The Milky Way (2)

 Memories' Lanes

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.... (Matthew 10:34)

 

From Innsbruck it is all downhill.  I have Lucio Dalla on my headphones and Anna Karenina to read.  We pass Brennero at midday, bidding farewell to the Tyrol with its steep gorges, cantilevered autoroutes, rocky peaks and high pastures.  Hello (again) Italia.  Around half one we cruise past fruit farms, and vineyards, some olives and the occasional palm.  Bolzano still in the mountains, with pinnacle castles, then down to the flat and into Verona.  From here to Bologna we cross the vast plains of the Po Valley, with rice and maize and vegetable fields all flat under an azure sky.

 

Bologna reminds me, as I referred to in Part 1, of Easter 2015, and Amanda.  I find it hard to grasp that it was so long ago, but the memories are still sharp.  But I also have memories of visiting the city with my brother and parents the day that Elvis died, August 16^th 1977, when the heavens wept.  Are memories good to hold on to?  If Amanda was with me, would she recognise the place?  Would she have feelings, stirred in any way by familiarity?  Would she remember climbing the 498 steps of the Asinelli tower?  As I retrace paths we walked in the past, I begin to wonder whether it is healthy to hold on to all these recollections?  Just as I have begun to question the value of looking at works of art, I now question whether memories are worth the pain they may contain.

 

Non-stop train to Rome.  The first half hour or so tunnelling through the Apennines, then out into the freshness of Tuscany and then spearing through Lazio, glimpsing the green waters of the Tiber, and rolling to a halt amidst the graffiti and the crowds of eternal Rome.  I am almost overwhelmed by the crowds, a teeming mass of people from all across the world, hurrying there, hustling here.

 

It is hot.  I wander lanes of memories: there I used to eat: here was my (ill-fated) pub, now a Pizzeria whose sign claims existence since 1984 (i.e. the year we were closed down by police....).  The narrow path above Trajan’s Forum, from which Antonio and I played Hoopla with bicycle tyres over the stumps of antique columns by moonlight.  

I have a snack lunch at the Tre Scalini in Via Panisperna, where once we shoved the tables aside after dinner and danced to the tunes of a harmonica....

 

From the rooftop I gaze across the emotionless façade of Santa Maria Maggiore, raising a martini to the stone folds of the Madonna’s cloak, then I descend to dine with friends.

 

Over the next few days I encounter many old friends – ageing now, like me.  Illness almost goes without saying, from burst gall bladders to cystic fibrosis, depression to breast cancer (male and female).  Things fall into perspective – everyone is somehow worse off than everyone else – or are we all better off than somebody else?  It’s life – get over it!

 

In the morning I take another wander down my memory’s lanes.  Via Gregoriana, the Spanish Steps, an espresso in the Antico Caffè Greco (not that I was a frequent customer) in Via Condotti, 

a glass of Greco di Tufo in l’Antica Enoteca in Via Della Croce (once a simple Vini e Oli where you could fill your bottles with wine from the Colli Albani).  I pay my respects to the hooded statue of Giordano Bruno where he was burnt in the Campo de’ Fiori; I cross the Ponte Sisto where I passed twice a day for the bus to and from work in the 70s.  In Trastevere I chance upon an open door to the back of the old Cinema Pasquino, where we watched English language films under the stars when they slid the roof open.  

It looks like a bomb site now, but I am informed that it is to reopen this Autumn – which is glad news!  I have a drink in the Caffè di Marzio, on Piazza S. Maria in Trastevere, where my flatmate was knifed one night.  

I peer into the closed interior of the Pizzeria Ai Marmi (which for some reason I knew as Moroni’s) and lick my lips at the thought of their Supplì al Telefono (so called because the strands of mozzarella in the rice croquettes stretch like old fashioned telephone wires).  

I stroll to the river, enjoying a Grattachecca (hand shaved ice, flavoured with fruit syrup) from an old kiosk on the Lungotevere, then cross the Isola Tiberina and wind through the Ghetto and back up to my hotel.

Before leaving Rome, I visit Nero’s Domus Aurea.  Some forty years ago I managed to get into part of this dingy ruin, but at the time there was little to see and nothing to explain.  It is now visitable in guided groups and various panels and pictures bring it to life, around 2,000 years since it was obliterated by Trajan when he bulldozed the foundations of his baths over the tyrant’s palace.  The centrepiece of the modern visit is a Virtual Reality display which takes my breath away.  

This show strips away the grime and infill of the millennia and eventually brings you out into the flowering gardens where grasses shimmer and trees rustle in the breeze as you look out across the valley to the Palatine Hill.  Nothing I have ever seen, nor read, has made the ancient city come alive quite like this. 

 

I meet my daughter, Hannah, at the airport and we stay for a short while in Trevignano Romano, on the shore of Lake Bracciano, where she began her life.  

It is breezily pleasant here and we catch up with several more old friends, though sadly there are gaps in the line-up these days.

 

Then it is time to move on again and we motor up to Tuscany, stopping for a fishy lunch on stilts over Lake Bolsena.  On Monte Amiata we enjoy the quiet and rustic isolation of our friends’ old house, and have a wonderful feast under the fig tree as the sun sets.  Fegatelli and wine from Col d’Orcia; a glass of grappa by the fire.  Wonderful.

 

I have coffee in the morning with 94-year-old Corrado, when we manage to find the off/on switch to his coffee machine!  His days are lonely since Concetta passed, but he maintains an interest in the ways of the world, and asks kindly about Amanda. 

 

Time passes all too quickly here, and Hannah and I have to return the car to Pisa, where we meet up with my cousin Sarah for supper, then, subsequently, in the rain, we climb the slippery steps of the Leaning Tower – a strange first; strange as I am beginning to wonder if I will pass this way again. 

 

And then, wistfully parting from Hannah who will fly home, I take the train to Nice, where, again in the rain, I treat myself to a platter of seafood at Le Café de Turin in Place Garibaldi.  Memories here are from years ago.  I used to meet my parents at a campsite in Vence, and we traced Matisse and D H Lawrence together.  Then, later, friends lived in the old town and Amanda and I helped carry bottles and bottles of Vin Rosé to their fourth floor flat.  But now – all is changed.  The Flower Market teems with tourists (again, I know I am one too!) who seem to be happy with Irish Pubs, chain restaurants, smoking shops, trinket sellers.  Gone are the oyster shuckers and chilled wines of yesteryear!  Perhaps it is time to ditch my memories! 

 

It is a coincidence that while I write these words, I am listening to Radio 3 on Sunday, and Michael Berkeley’s guest on Private Passions is Dr Jules Montague, whose book, Lost and Found: Why Losing Our Memories Doesn’t Mean Losing Ourselves, could hardly be more appropriate.

Another coincidence, perhaps, is that in yesterday’s Guardian there was a long piece by Ian Black, and his wife, Helen Harris.  The article was entitled, As my brain is shrinking, so is my world, which might appear to contradict Dr Montague’s thesis.  As someone from the Alzheimer’s Society told me, some years ago, however: When you have met one person with dementia – you have met one person with dementia.....  There is, at least as far as we can tell, no absolute certainty about the way a person will behave or feel or live once the brain begins to deteriorate.

 

In fact, one of the things I learned from Ian Black is that a side issue he may be suffering from is Corticobasal syndrome (CBS), a type of frontotemporal dementia that is characterised by damage to the cortical and basal areas of the brain, which control movement, thinking, language and behaviour. It is sometimes known as atypical Parkinsonism.  While [this] shares symptoms with Parkinson’s disease, including slow, stiff movements and tremors, it also causes problems with movement, memory, problem solving and speech. There may be changes to personality and loss of inhibitions. One of the most common symptoms is gradually losing the use of one limb, known as limb apraxia.

 

I find this most interesting, as Amanda has at times shown signs of tremors, and has progressively become slower on her right side, her right leg being less responsive than her left, her right arm weaker than the left.  As Ian Black writes, A key element is a growing inability to use one side of the body.  The underlying diagnosis can only be confirmed, however, in a post-mortem examination of the brain....

 

It is the end of the season. I turn my back on the south, on the sparkling Mediterranean which I have enjoyed so much in my life, and am borne at speeds of up to 300 kph, non-stop from Marseilles to Paris.  Here I make my way to 7, Rue de Faubourg Montmartre, where I have supper chez Bouillon Chartier, where I have lunched and dined almost every time I have been to Paris for fifty years now.  

I love the place, and I guess I would not love it if I had no memories of the meals I have had there.  Meals with friends, such as the late Lindsay; with family such as brothers and parents; and with Amanda.  Notably we went there for lunch on a Eurostar day trip from Harpenden on our wedding anniversary some years ago....  I don’t want to lose that memory.

 

So now, again, I am home, recovering, and preparing for the next phase of our lives.  I have had enough of travel, for now, and am glad to be home.  As the future slips into the past, I will continue to treasure memories, holding them for Amanda if for nothing else.  She may have lost her memories, but she is still herself.  

 

On my travels I have been reading Anna Karenina.  I crawl to bed at home and read the last chapters.  On page 809, Levin (the character closest to Tolstoy’s own ideas) mentions the soul, inadvertently connecting the conversation with the thoughts that occupied him so much.  This prompts Levin’s half-brother Sergei Ivanovich to quote: ‘I have brought not peace but a sword,’ which is the very passage of the Gospel that had always disturbed Levin most of all.

 

I am startled, as these are almost the very last words (spoken by Christ) in Luis Buñuel’s film La Voie Lactée (The Milky Way), his surrealist film about two pilgrims on their way from Paris to Santiago de Compostela.  The exact words in the St James Bible are: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.... (Matthew 10:34). And as I drift to sleep, I wonder if the coincidence of this passage appearing in two works of art currently on my mind has a particular significance.  [No, it isn’t an excuse for Trussonomics.]  An orthodox interpretation is that Christ is telling his disciples that there needs to be change and that change will not necessarily be entirely peaceful (it is not new to proclaim Christ a Revolutionary). 

 

But perhaps there is a more homely interpretation, for me at least.  

 

I need to be cruel, to be kind.....

Paris, City of Light

A Moveable Feast

Don't put on any airs

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there

And they really make a mess out of you

(Bob Dylan - Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues)

If rape or arson, poison, or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life —
It is because we are not bold enough!

(Charles Baudelaire - Dedication to Les Fleurs du Mal, translated by Roy Campbell)

Bohemians - il y a quarant'ans

From Edgar Allen Poe to Bob Dylan, from Joyce to Simenon, Baudelaire to Queneau, Paris has touched the inspiration of generations of writers and artists. Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast (unfinished at his death in 1961) wrote that, There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were poor and very happy.....

The Left Bank, early 70s

Paris first took me in some forty years ago.  I think it was a little after someone dismembered Oscar Wilde's tomb and just before they buried Jim Morrison.  We lodged in the Rue d'Aboukir, not realising until afterwards that this seedy street was named after Napoleon's defeat at the hand of Nelson in the Battle of the Nile.  The room was tight, to say the least, up a spiral stair some seven floors, and the open bidet, the first I had ever seen, inspired my first novel (View from a Bidet, still unwritten!)  My innocence at the time was confounded by the hungry women who lined the streets at dusk, stretching out their arms to measure their pitches.  We found bars where absinthe still existed in unlabelled greenish bottles on high shelves.  I learned somethings about the drab canvas of life over moules marinières in the early hours and got a taste for the bohemian that still burns.

Prices in French Francs (10FF = c£1)

We dined at Chartier, and discovered steak tartare at Le Drouot (sadly no longer in business), and in those days Le Commerce, in the 15th arondissement, was also under the same management.  These bistrots were vividly different from anything we had experienced, with an irresistible conviviality. I return whenever I can, and on the day I borrowed the above menu I sat next to a man with a face so wrinkled it seemed to be made of corrugated cardboard.  Here was one who would take the air willingly in graveyards, when take the air he must. I understood then that the end was near, or at least fairly near.  No amount of rognons saute sauce moutarde would stave off the need for his epitaph soon:

Hereunder lies the above who up below

So hourly died that he lived on till now. 

Break bread with Samuel Beckett I did, though we did not speak much. Strangely it was on the very same day, one year later, that he died, and he now lies with Suzanne in Montparnasse cemetery.

Conviviality! This week I sat next to a Parisien who also first ate chez Chartier some forty years ago.

Bouillon Chartier today

At 102 Boulevard du Montparnasse La Coupole conjures a slightly more upmarket sense of history. Here Art Deco reigns, and here, since 1927, the famous have partied amongst the pillars and mosaics. Brassai, Picasso, Man Ray, Derain; Georges Simenon dined with Josephine Baker, whose image adorns the cupola; Matisse drank beer here, Henry Miller took breakfast, and Joyce held court. More recently, since Sartre and de Beauvoir have moved on, Patti Smith played guitar, Serge Gainsbourg lunched with Jane Birkin, and Francois Mitterand took his very last meal, a lamb curry, at table 82.  

I take a p'tit cafe creme at the bar, only to learn that on Bastille Day 2014 this bar will have become history - though the restaurant will survive.

In 1973, as part of President Pompidou's drive to modernise Paris (on the coat heels of Hausmann), the Montparnasse Tower was inaugurated. The 59th floor, open to the sky, is at 689 feet above the street level.  

View from the bridge - the 59th floor, Montparnasse

A lift takes you to the 56th floor in 38 seconds, at 19 feet per second. From here, whatever the weather, you can gaze down across the city, or have your photo taken against les toits de Paris.

Or lean out to touch the sky:

Paris is not a city of skyscrapers. The Montparnasse Tower is really the only modern high point in the centre of the city, though the Eiffel Tower, which was built in 1889, is the highest structure at 1063 feet.

The Arc de Triomphe, which was inaugurated in 1836, is only 164 feet high, but is still a much visited viewpoint, set as it is in the midst of one of the craziest roundabouts in the world.  

It is just possible to glimpse the arch on the wing of this speeding car.....

The Pompidou centre is an attraction in its own right, packed with artistic interest, and framed by tubes. But it does offer a view over the rooftops of Les Halles, where the markets used to fill the heart of the city. It also has some seriously unfinished staircases....

And the lead-clad roofs and chimney stacks continue to fascinate, where there is no smoke, without fires....

You can just about hear Rodolfo tearing paper....

The Basilica of Sacre Coeur de Montmartre is the second highest point in Paris after the Eiffel Tower, standing 200 metres above the river Seine, though the dome itself is a mere 83 metres high.  It was completed in 1912, though not consecrated until 1919.

The oldest viewpoint is at the top of the towers of Notre Dame, completed in 1345. From here grotesque gargoyles contemplate the changing world below them, bemused by the trails of queuing tourists, and puzzled by what they observe through the political windows around them at the heart of French government.

From the heights, the descent into the underworld can be awesome. The sewers and the catacombs attract the curious, but to traverse the city it is necessary to be swallowed by the earth.  

And then you are entombed within the system of tunnels and stations.  Flashing lights, clasping doors and whooshing trains blur continuously around you.

Some trains self-driven, zooming past each other with passengers at the wheel.....

Then, between the extremes, Paris at street level is a bustle of life, with a population of two and a quarter million in its administrative area (and with over twelve million in the metropolitan area it constitutes one of the largest centres of population in Europe). However, with the Seine coursing through the centre and plenty of parks there is always somewhere calm to light up une Gitane....

There is no shortage of sights to see, or of things to do, and there are still red lights, even if not as once famed around Le Moulin Rouge....

In the lull between the twentieth century world wars Paris was cheap for Americans, and the world literary scene was energised by the presence of philanthropists and benefactors like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach. James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway both benefited from the support they found, and others, such as Scott Fitzgerald, joined the party. Cafes such as Les Deux Magots became haunts of the literati. Brasserie Lipp, in St Germain, and La Closerie des Lilas, were favourites of the Hemingways, while the Joyces preferred the more expensive Michaud (now Le Comptoir des Saints Pères).  

Truth is that that was nearly a century ago, and though there are connections with those days, things have moved on. Truth is that Paris has not been cheap for decades, and even Hemingway (one of the last of that generation to pass on) has been dead for over fifty years.  But then the truth is, according to me at least, that there's something vaguely romantic about the scruffier bars of Paris, the ones without the glamorous histories.  Truth is alcohol is a universal truth in the City of Light, and there are any number of bars happy to accommodate the least promising of literary dreams.  Some will be romantic. if plain (though there's always someone reflecting in your glass).....

Others will be more public.....

And some will be more of un cauchemar....

While there are still plenty of places to treat yourself, pretending that the royalties will eventually come through...

Among the Americans who made something of Paris was Jack Kerouac, who hit town just a few years before me, attempting to track his French roots.  In Satori in Paris he records, in characteristic helter-skelter style, his arrival, and his brief sojourn. Like many before him, and since, there was a hint of alcohol about his experience. Towards the end of his stay he tries to see his editor in his French publishing house. 

"He's out to lunch too."  But the fact of the matter was, he was in New York that day but she couldn't care less to tell me and with me sitting in front of this imperious secretary who must've thought she was very Madame Defarge herself in Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities" sewing the names of potential guillotine victims into the printer's cloth, were a half dozen eager or worried writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves "Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I'll prove it with this here manuscript called 'Silence au Lips' all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh" 

...... Agh, all I feel like singing is Jimmy Lunceford's old tune:

"It ain't watcha do

It's the way atcha do it!"

Chartier, 2010

As Papa Hem said, This book is fiction but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact. Over the years I have had great times in Paris; I've met all the great painters, performed in all the theatres, written all the great novels, and drunk all the great wines.  I'm almost buried in all the cemeteries, and, like Mesrine, I have robbed all the great banks. Oh, and like Jean Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil, I have been in all the great films, mais....

Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule

Des troupeaux d'autobus mugissants près de toi roulent

Langoisse de l'amour te serre le gosier

Comme si tu ne devais jamais plus être aimé.....

(Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone)

The empty carousel turns....

Je suis seul ce soir avec mes rêves

Je suis seul ce soir sans ton amour

Le jour tombe, ma joie s'achève

Tout se brise dans mon coeur lourd

Je suis seul ce soir avec ma peine

J'ai perdu l'espoir de ton retour

Et pourtant je t'aime encor et pour toujours

Ne me laisse pas seul sans ton amour

(Jean Casanova et Rose Noël 1971)

Though the light may not always be perfect, and the rain may glisten the trottoirs, I love Paris - always have, and always will!

Doukipudonktan!

(Zazie dans le métro, Raymond Queneau, 1959)