Travelers' Tales Paris (7 page)

The daughters of the lovely, vicious green-skinned girls of pre-beatnik Paris, the girls of the postwar
zazou
persuasion—such as Juliette Greco when she sang of dead leaves,
Les Feuilles Mortes
—now look out for their health, take vitamins and have learned to stride along more like Americans and less like foot-bound Chinese maidens. There are Zen, Encounter, yogurt, and tennis
and mountain-climbing shops. Well, let's not exaggerate. You can find a few runners along the Seine, watching out for the loose bricks, the winos and the fishermen, but they are likely to be Americans or laborers in the giant UNESCO complex, infected by contemporary ways of relieving world-historical anxiety. Today's Left Bank beauties have better teeth, cleaner hair, longer legs than they used to. This is not really a regression, unless one is hopelessly sentimental about the old garret, hot-plate, no-heating days of Paris bohemia, when changing residences meant throwing one's books out the window in the night while the landlord, to whom one owed rent, was busy sleeping off her day's wine.

Wine is more expensive now.

The concierge doesn't always dress in the black of grief and gloom.

My old concierge now has a daughter who is a ballet dancer, a
rat d'opéra
.

Cheap living and feudal luxury still exist side by side. The Faubourg St-Germain, traditional resort of the rich and aristocratic, also rents rooms to students and artists; great restaurants look only a bit more discreet than the neighborhood
brasseries
. Although the medieval walls of Paris are down, replaced by speedways, there is still a sense of concentration within limits, of a continuing dense urban unit. On the same brief turn up one of the streets off St-Germain-des-Prés—the rue des Ciseaux, say—rank smells and delicious whiffs struggle for control of the stroller's nose. The Left Bank is a place of lazy enjoyment and of irritability; coffee, wine, garlic, bread, fruit, spices. The open-air market at rue de Buci lacks only Gene Kelly to tap-dance his way past the cheeses and apples. If it's April, this must be Paris.

In the old days, I would buy my lunch at an open-air market and eat it on a bench along the Seine, or in the garden of the little Ukrainian church at the corner of the rue des Sts-Pères and the Boulevard St-Germain. Now I often do the same thing, joining other picnickers in the Place de Fürstemberg, outside the Delacroix Museum, and then sitting over an espresso or a
citron pressé
at the Deux Magots or the Flore, the Bonaparte or the Old
Navy, watching the ghosts of both the past and the future. No matter how loafingly the body coils or uncoils on wire or wicker chairs, Rive Gauche Present invites contemplation of Left Bank Past.

Symbolic of both the change and the sameness is the adventure of the St-Germain-des-Prés wino called
P'tit Louis
, or Little Louie. He was selected as a photographic model by Timberland Shoes, which had decided that the one thing a Left Bank hobo needs is a sturdy, long-lasting pair of American boots. After auditioning more than 50 “personalities of the sidewalk,” the advertising agency chose P'tit Louis because of his authentic hat, nose, overcoat, and grizzled style.

The day I read about this in the morning
Figaro
, I happened to meet Little Louie on the steps of the philosophical and geographical institute located between the Café aux Deux Magots and the Café Bonaparte, where he was being asked about his views of the world by a French television team with the usual tense and worn international media faces. He was earnestly discoursing on the life of a
clochard
(a word that means one who sleeps under bridges and clocks) while occasionally taking a deep puff on his cigar or an even deeper drag on his bottle of Gros Rouge—for inspirational purposes only, of course. He was wearing The Shoes. He was not wearing socks. Today he was, as everyone is supposed to be for fifteen minutes of a lifetime, a Star.

Later that day I had lunch at
chez
Lipp, the
brasserie
of politicians,
littéraires
, filmmakers, the famous, and those who want to look at the famous, and I failed to recognize Leslie Caron at the next table. I too have grown older. Nearby, poodles were yipping in the laps of their lovely mistresses, who were feeding them morsels of sausage. (Poodles don't develop cellulite.) My friend at lunch, a journalist who has lived most of his life in Paris, a man who ranks high in the Café-sitting Olympics, stipulated that the Left Bank isn't what it used to be, and nothing is, but it is still “agreeable.” The pickpockets and the arrogant waiters are more fun than elsewhere, the people are still humble and modest (and proud of it, in that French way), and the rusty treasure of a place is still a
treasure, even polished up for display in a living museum of impacted time. If a person can be entertained anywhere, or bemused by the nearness of history, he can be bemused and entertained here.

“Let's search the Left Bank,” I proposed to a friend. “Let's try to find a bad meal.”

We succeeded. It was in an Algerian restaurant on the rue Xavier Privas, because we wanted couscous, that North African specialty of grains and vegetables and spices and various meats. But we cheated: it was a restaurant aimed like a missile at tourists, with a barker outside; and even here the food was merely mediocre, perhaps even
interesting, which
of course is not a word of highest commendation for food. One can eat poorly only with the greatest difficulty in the myriad small restaurants of the Rive Gauche.

Paris is still Paris, portions of the Left Bank are still something of the bohemian nation, but of course elements of
Bon Chic, Bon Genre
—the French version of gentrification, yuppification—have turned many of the former attic rooms into pretty studios. When I was a poor student and would-bee buzzing around St-Germain-des-Prés, Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter, I knew a little hotel in the rue de l'Odéon where other would-bees stayed for 50 or 60 cents a night. The “facility” was between each two floors. There was no shower or bath, so part of our social life consisted of meeting at public bath houses, carrying our towels. (“We always knew Paris would be like this!”)

Now I was paying several hundred times as much to stay in the same hotel, but an elevator had taken the space once given to the water closets, there was a neat little bathroom in each room, and strategic antique beams had been exposed. All over the Left Bank, the little boardinghouses that recalled Balzac and Wilde and the Existentialists and waves of foreigners washing up on the shores of bohemia have become pretty and clean and healthy: “Nostalgia,” as Simone Signoret wrote, “is not what it used to be.” Yet the shadows of the lovers and philosophers and wine drinkers remain in corporeal new lovers, thinkers, flirters, café sitters. There are still plane trees and cobblestones and little squares like the Place de
Fürstemberg, where I heard a flamenco group howling magnificently of jealousy and loss. There are still international beatniks and hippies in the Place de la Contrescarpe; even a few French ones. The Rive Gauche is still a country of the mind, a nation of smoke in the head, the republic of imagination, the place of strict welcome to the amusing from everywhere, a purgatory of hanging loose.

“Money can't buy happiness,” admitted my friend Claude Roy, a writer who lives on the rue Dauphine, but a person can use it well and happily here to buy his fruit, cheese and wine at the rue de Buci street market, books at Le Divan or La Hune, paintings in the dozens of galleries, all within a few minutes' stroll of his apartment. In a shop on the rue de Tournon that sells toy soldiers of ancient breed—Napoleon, Lafayette, Joan of Arc—I saw a newer toy soldier, of painted lead, in a black hat and cape. It was one of the heroic battlers in the wars of the Left Bank circa 1930, a tall, thin, Irish toy soldier—James Joyce. The pen can be both as mighty and as leaden as the sword.

Without going out of its way to welcome the stranger, the Rive Gauche has evolved an immense traditional hospitality. Hardly anyone rejects her embrace—although, as anyone who has been
the victim of Parisian impatience can attest, sometimes the embrace is pretty cool. It requires an ability to fight back, which was lacking in the tourist I saw desperately shouting. “Diet pop! All I want is a diet pop! Why can't I get a diet pop!” on the terrace of La Palette, on the rue de Seine, near various art schools. This is one of my favorite cafés, but the burly waiter, who must have attended Berlitz Anti-Charm School, kept asking, “
Champagne? Cognac? Faites un bel effort, monsieur!
” (“Make a beautiful effort, sir!”), as if he didn't understand. Of course the waiter understood the tourist's wish. Of course he likes to play his games. Of course the art students and Rive Gauche locals—including an African prince in his robes, Swedish explorers, tousled philosophers, and me—were sadistically entertained by this unwinnable battle.

One of the special pleasures of the Left Bank is browsing the different bookstores specializing in English and American books. First among equals is the famous Shakespeare and Company of George Whitman, who used to hint that he was descended from Walt Whitman. His shop on the rue de la Bûcherie, a few steps from the Seine, has been a hangout for poets and college kids since it was called Le Mistral many years ago, before George adopted the name of Sylvia Beach's bookstore-publishing company, which first printed James Joyce. He keeps open late at night and has frequent mass Sunday teas for visiting geniuses. He is, as e. e. cummings once said about
someone else, a delectable mountain, albeit a skinny and irascible one.

The Rive Gauche is a swamp filled with birds and giants, a continent of fantasy, a very lazy but agitated ancient kingdom in the midst of the 20th century,
a flâneur
among the world's earnest, a place to miss nothing but also to do nothing, a silence surrounded by noise, a sausage, a beer, a giggle, a dream of the past for those who have a shrug for the future, a baguette, a bottle of red, a bevy of students, a guitar jangle, a festive street orchestra that—I actually saw this—could not pass the hat because they had left it at home. In other words, the Left Bank is a delirious confusion and fantasy.

Like the rest of Paris, the Left Bank really used to be what we still think it is. It is heading toward being a Rive Gauche Museum. That's the truth and should be accepted. But the flower and bird markets still exist; so do the café sitters and their crises of exhilaration (call it inspiration, call it
joie de vivre), and
, in that magic light of the Ile de France, so does their gracious melancholy (call it pensive, call it acceptance of the mysteries of being).

One night on the rue de la Huchette, I came upon a group of buskers singing a stirring version of “Let It Be,” that anthem of the late Sixties. They sounded exactly like the Beatles, except that they were singing in Korean. My French friends, a novelist and a psychiatrist who live upstairs from this year-round music festival, said they sometimes couldn't decide whether to drop coins or bags of water on the entertainers. A few years ago this pedestrian quarter, surfeited with Danish Joan Baezes and Israeli Bob Dylans, was blanketed with revolutionary posters proclaiming
a bas les gratteurs de guitares
! (Down With the Guitar-Scrapers!)

My personal law for survival and thriving on the Rive Gauche is to enjoy the monuments, parks, museums, churches and great public buildings, but pay attention first of all to the people. They are the distilled essence of France, essence of Paris—beautiful, ugly, surly, funny, greedy, generous, friendly, rude, seething with energetic complication. The best, useless and most fruitful occupation is to find a café terrace, buy a newspaper or a guidebook or any-book to prop against your cup or glass, and join the interlocking
dramas of the street and the little stage on which you sit—the scholars, the mumblers, the lovers, the brooders, the debaters, those looking deeply into their liquids or into each other's eyes. Now you're there. This was the place.