Travelers' Tales Paris (15 page)

In the Musée d'Orsay eight very, very small children sit on the floor around one of Gauguin's Tahiti paintings. They are addressed with an exquisite lack of condescension by their teacher, who explains in detail the
composition of the picture, the flow of its colours, the relationship between its characters, human and animal. What fortunate infants, I think as I eavesdrop, to be born in such a city, to live among such beauties, to be treated with such courtesy! They listen with intense intelligence, their eyes shifting from teacher to painting and back again; but when they take up their drawing boards to copy the masterpiece, starting with an oblong frame to set the proportions, hastily I move on in case they one and all prove to be without talent
.

I am agitated by the timelessly emblematic quality of Paris. It is not like other capitals, living for the moment and the cash. It is as though the whole place consciously stands for something or other, so that almost nothing is simply itself. Just as in Mao's China every single action, public or personal, had to fall into a political category, so in Paris I sometimes feel that every street, every event, every gesture is dedicated to some aspect of Parisness.

Elsewhere civic generalizations are generally out of date, overtaken by shifting styles and standards. Here they remain almost disconcertingly valid. The plan of the
arrondissements
still provides a sociological and aesthetic index to the city, and here as almost nowhere else the idea of a city quarter is not obsolete. There really are whores around Pigalle, there really are tramps beside the river, there really are Breton cafés around the Gare de Montparnasse, you really can buy a live common-or-garden hen on the Quai de la Mégisserie. Publishers visibly frequent St-Germain-des-Prés, and hardly had I read in my guidebook that the Café Floré, where I had stopped for a cup of chocolate, had lately become a homosexual rendezvous than I was greeted by an eminent gay novelist of my acquaintance.

Clichés come true, too. Parisian chic exists, Parisian live-and-let-live lives on—where but in this capital would the layabouts be left in peace on the warm floors of Beaubourg? Black people walk about Paris with such elegance, such panache of cape and flaunt of fur, that they might be living models of negritude. The Lebanese, the Vietnamese and the North Africans, however intrusive they may seem to the more racist of the
indigènes
, to an eye from across La Manche truly do appear to have been gracefully assimilated.

Just over the hill from Place du Tertre, I found myself wandering through a district which appeared so entirely and authentically petit bourgeois that girls still played hopscotch in its streets and neighbours actually talked to each other—I saw it!—out of their windows; and on the Sunday morning I walked from the Arénes de Lutece, where elderly gents were playing
boules
in the pale sunshine, to Place de la Contrescarpe, where the butcher and the baker faced each other in almost rural intimacy, where pigeons and drop-outs lazed bucolically around the square, and where I could hear from far down rue Mouffetard the strains of an ebullient brass band.

How is it done? By a natural conservatism, perhaps a cautious view of change, and possibly not least of all by a serious acceptance of surprise as a constructive element of municipal style. The surprise indeed often seems as deliberate as everything else. The Métro is purposefully impregnated with variety, to dispel the sense of menace that other subways have; and when one morning I saw a small fire on the track down there, extinguished not with extinguishers (none of which could be made to work) but by a man jumping off the platform and stamping it out, I really thought it might have been specifically arranged for our distraction.

I helped a blind woman over a street-crossing near the Gare de Lyon. She looked particularly irritable, cross, and demanding, but though born and bred in the 12th Arrondissement, turned out to be diffidently gentle. It was a lesson to me not to misjudge the hard-mouthed, sharp-eyed, fast-shoving, middle-aged Parisian housewife, who may well be sweeter than she allows. I took the blind lady first to the post office, then to the pharmacy, and when I left her she said: “Now I give you back your liberty.”

Sometimes it seems to me that Paris is marking time. Emerging from a recent past without, not to put too fine a point upon it, all that much honour, it is girding itself for a future to which it already seems much better attuned than most of its peers. Perhaps the Centre Pompidou digital clock, ticking away the seconds towards the end of the century, is counting down for the city itself; perhaps the escalators, elevators, and walkways, which already move faster here than they do elsewhere in the world, are being
imperceptibly speeded up, year by year, to accustom Parisians to the pace of the millennium. The ideas, it appears, are on hold—one hears of no successors to Existentialism or Structuralism—and French films, books and plays also seem to be holding their fire.

But then they are in the wrong language. That's the underlying reason, I dare say, why Paris gives me this watching, waiting, plotting impression. The most obvious anomaly of the city today, the most obvious cause for civic neurosis, is the fact that the French language has lost its cachet. Except among captive cultures like the Gabonese, I would guess that Spanish, German, Russian, even Chinese, and Japanese, are all more in demand in the language classes of the world. Not to mention, of course, English. The Parisian complex about the English language must hit every stranger in the eye. Walking down the short arcade which connects the Centre Pompidou with the new Quartier de l'Horloge, I noted the following shop signs: Paris Basket, Tie Break, New York New York, Scoop, Blue Way, Award's Academy, Yellow, Bubblegum, and Lady—all in 100 metres of Parisian shopping! The graffiti of Paris, if they are not of the mindless Manhattan sort which disfigure the Métro trains, frequently indulge themselves in Anglicisms such as Fuck Off Skinheads, Kill The Cops, or Crack Snack; as for Richard Branson's Virgin Megastore on the Champs-Elysées, it is like a people's temple, before whose alien gods all young Paris dances.

Nevertheless I still get the sensation that Paris may be stealing a march on us all. Cities do not think or conspire, of course, and one should not think of them anthropomorphically, but sometimes one senses that a profound historical instinct animates the spirit of a place, and I sense it about Paris now. I feel that it aspires to be, not the political capital, but the most resplendent and influential metropolis of the terrific new Europe. Figuratively, those skyscrapers are held at a distance only while the future they represent is assessed and prepared for. The Centre Pompidou, the Pei Pyramid, the Montparnasse Tower have been allowed in as one might permit double agents into the halls of chancery, and the plan that won the competition for the new Seine bridge is, I note, the most insidiously
Modernist of the entries. Technically, Paris seems to me more ready than any other European capital for the opportunities of a 21st-century federal continent; only the language, only the magnificent language, preys on its mind, inhibits its manners, and breaks out in Franglais.

Wandering into Notre-Dame on a Sunday night, I found a choir and orchestra celestially performing Bach's
Christmas Oratorio.
The cathedral was full, a reverent multitude of young people sitting on the floor, if they could not get a seat in the nave, or simply milling about like me. It was magical. All Paris seemed to be there, singing its heart out or half-lost in the marvel of it all. When I discovered that the choir and orchestra came from Germany, and realized that half the listeners were as foreign as I was, it only seemed more magical still
.

So I left Paris as I came, in an ambiguous frame of mind. More clearly than ever I realized it to be one member of the supreme metropolitan trinity, with New York and London, one of the three cities where anything can happen, anything can be found, anything can be done, everyone comes. “Drop a plumb-line into Paris,” Balzac said, “and you would never find bottom.” It is an impertinence even to try to gauge the condition or the intention of such a prodigy.

Yet whether it be out of historicism or out of the collective unconscious of my own people, the city still leaves me uneasy. Just as I think I have exorcized my prejudices, new ones materialize. I feel that Paris, though patently more clever than most of its peers, is not necessarily more wise. I feel that given the chance, more readily than most capitals it would impose its will upon the rest of us. It seems to me somehow too harmonious for our times, without its natural element of chaos. I miss the unpremeditated clash of styles and patterns, and of all the street musicians who entertained
me during my visit, the ones that beguiled me most were an unkempt English rock group—somehow they seemed more spontaneously outrageous than the rest.

For it is a humourless city at heart, I cannot help feeling; grand, of course, beautiful, brilliant, inexhaustible, indestructible, in many ways incomparable, but short on natural fun or fantasy. Perhaps that's why, when I drive by on the Périphérique, superstition keeps me out.

The Parisians have been very good at creating visual delights. They have managed it partly by cunningly enhancing what was there already—the river especially—but partly by the most brilliant and inventive creation. One of their fertile techniques has been to use or if necessary invent forms that are not merely striking in themselves but have a double role: for example, things that can be seen
through
—the Arc de Triomphe or the Carrousel or the Porte Saint-Denis or the transparent Pei Pyramid—or seen
around
—the Vendôme column, the Concorde obelisk—or seen
between
—the long lines of clipped trees in the Palais Royal, the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg Gardens—or seen
underneath
—the pretty bridges, the great arch of the Eiffel Tower or the new Défense arch. I have seen no other city where such devices have been so widely and so skillfully deployed. It is this combination of imagination and ruthlessness that gives Paris its unique character.

—David Gentleman,
David Gentleman's Paris