Travelers' Tales Paris (4 page)

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.

Cemeteries always attract. My wife and I first drove to Père Lachaise in the 20th
arrondissement
with our daughter, who wanted to see the putative grave of rock-and-roll legend Jim Morrison. She was then fourteen, convinced that Morrison was alive and living in the Philippines. If he's in the Philippines, we asked, then who's buried in his plot at Père Lachaise? Logic did not prevail; she obviously viewed our reasoning as heresy. I wondered how we would find the grave, but I needn't have worried. Whitewashed on various crypts was the single word “Jim” and, under the name, an arrow pointing visitors through the cemetery toward Morrison's monument. Lounging around the grave, draped over the adjoining stones, were denizens of what must have been the last hippie enclaves from around the world; the smell of their marijuana gave an immediate contact high. The monument, topped by a bust of the singer with a head of curls that would have done credit to Louis XIV, was covered with graffiti “Antonio, Stefano, Giulio, Paolo, Fabio—12/8/82. Music Is Your Only Friend Until the
End.” We left our daughter to commune with the living dead and went to pay our respects to Oscar Wilde.

Having driven in Paris for more than 30 years, I know the city even better than Manhattan, where I live and where I rarely ever drive except to get out of town on weekends. New York's outer boroughs are
terra incognita
to me, as Pantin and St-Denis are not. Parking in Paris is easy: you can pull up anyplace, sometimes even on the sidewalks. At night I always leave my car on the street, without worrying as I do in New York that I will find it in the morning absent tires and radio. Years ago, hopelessly lost in the cobweb of streets high in Montmartre, I came upon a launderette near the basilica of Sacré-Coeur. I still take my washing up there, lugging it out to my rental car, past the concierge's desk and the steely eyes of assistant managers in morning dress, who I know are wondering why I bother to stay at the Ritz or the Plaza Athénée if I choose not to pay $75 to get some socks and underwear done by the hotel laundry.

There are closer self-service places, but speed is not the point. How I get there depends on my mood. I might go by way of the Jardin des Plantes. Or the Bois de Vincennes. Or the Place des Vosges in the Marais. Or the apartment house where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas resided on the rue de Fleurus. Or the hotel on Boulevard des Batignolles where Josephine Baker lived with a lover, a parrot, two rabbits, a snake, and a pig. It is perhaps not your way to see Paris, but in 30 years, there is very little that I have missed.

I'd been in Paris five days. I'd walked around in my sensible shoes—that is, a pair of sneakers that made my feet feel as if they were in clouds. Five
days in Paris, watching gorgeous French women with thin legs and highly fashionable shoes stride seductively around the city.

On Day 6, I looked at my own highly fashionable shoes, which were sitting untouched in the hotel closet. “Wear us,” they called.

“Why not?” I thought. I'd worn said shoes for ten-hour workdays. Marched to and from parking lots, up and down stairs, into offices, even for a couple of spins around a mall. Never a problem. Never a rub. Never a blister. I strapped them on.

My husband looked at my feet. “You wearing those?” he asked, tremulously.

“Sure. They're comfortable,” I assured him.

Two hours later, there I was in Père Lachaise cemetery, wandering among the illustrious dead, my feet weeping silently. Two gravediggers stood waist-high in a newly dug hole. I considered lying down.

—Jill Schensul, “The Splendor and the Pain: Touring Paris in Heels,”

The Bergen Record

JOSEPH DIEDRICH

T
HAT
M
ARCH WAS A BAD TIME TO BE IN
P
ARIS.
A
HARD, UNPLEAS
ant wind whipped the branches of the bare trees and drove gusts of cold rain through the streets. Heavy traffic splashed through pools of standing water. Huddled pedestrians ducked into doorways. The taxis had all gone to wherever taxis go when it rains.

I had come to Paris to meet my wife to try to revive a marriage already broken by a year of separation, and it wasn't working. Our favorite little hotel was damp and underheated. Our favorite little restaurant had lost its Michelin star and deserved to lose it. My wife and I had changed as well. Too much had been said and done in the past year. We just couldn't put it together again. Humpty Dumpty.

To avoid another evening of strained conversation at a table for two we arranged to have dinner with some old friends who lived in the 6th
arrondissement
, an Englishman and his delightful American wife. I had heard that she was having some trouble with leukemia but I hadn't known how bad it was. At dinner we realized two things: that Peggy was dying and that she was someone whom we both would miss very much. We all tried to keep the evening light and happy, and we almost succeeded.