A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

  All fourteen died on April 5, 1794—Germinal 16 in the new calendar. (The plant chosen to signify that day was the lettuce.) Fabre d’Églantine remained theatrical to the last. As the tumbrel carried him to the Place de la Révolution, today’s Place de la Concorde, he is said to have scribbled poetry on pieces of paper and thrown them to the crowd.

  Another anecdote has him singing “Il pleut, bergère” as he mounted the scaffold, and a third that he lamented the fact that he hadn’t finished the poem on which he was working. At this, Danton is supposed to have responded with a pun on the fact that vers could mean both “verse” and “worms.” “Don’t worry,” he said. “In a week, you’ll have vers by the thousands.” This story remains dubious, unlike Danton’s actual last words, which show his trademark braggadocio surviving to the end. “Hold up my head for everyone to see,” he ordered the executioner. “People will expect it.”

  Had Danton lived, he could have taken bitter satisfaction in the downfall of Robespierre a few months later. By then, the remaining members of the Convention had realized that if as great a man as Danton could be so easily purged, their own lives were even more at risk. Increasingly embattled, Robespierre was repeatedly shouted down in the Convention. When he lost his voice, someone called, “Is it the blood of Danton that chokes you?” Robespierre responded sullenly, “If you wanted Danton, why didn’t you vote for him?” It was a question none of those who betrayed their former hero cared to address.

  On July 28, as the National Guard arrived to arrest Robespierre and his followers, he tried to shoot himself but only shattered his jaw. A day later, he was guillotined without trial, as he had murdered so many. With its most charismatic figures dead, the revolution lost momentum, faltered, and came to a halt.

  30

  Taking the Waters

  Balmain, Sydney. December 1998. 40°C. As I sit and read, Marie–Dominique swims laps on a rooftop pool. Louise, age eight, matches her stroke for stroke, dipping below her, surfacing ahead, effortless as a seal—being comfortable in her body, an attribute I lacked, was conferred on her at birth.

  FOR CENTURIES, THE CITY OF PARIS HAS TRIED TO MAKE SUMMER more bearable for those stranded there. In the 1990s, it spread tons of sand along a stretch of the stone–paved bank of the Seine next to the Pont Neuf. On this Paris plage (Paris beach) you could sunbathe, flirt, make sandcastles, dance, drink sodas, eat ice cream—just not swim, since nobody in their right mind would risk going into water described as far back as 1844 as “sale, troublé, souvent fétide et malsaine” (dirty, turbid, often foul smelling, and unhealthy.)

  Despite this, there were always a few people determined to swim. For them, generations of entrepreneurs have built public pools, or piscines. Often little more than half–sunken barges, they offered river water from which at least the larger pieces of debris and most dead animals had been removed. Better filtering had to wait until the mid–1930s, and it only became standard during the Nazi occupation, when German officers, for whom the pools were reserved, demanded it.

  Paris’s first piscines appeared late in the eighteenth century. At one time the Seine supported twenty, of which Piscine Deligny, next to the Place de la Concorde, was the most fashionable. Opened in 1785, it belonged to Barthélémy Turquin, who’s also credited with inventing the life jacket. In 1801, his son–in–law took over. A skilled self–promoter who styled himself “Maître–nageur Deligny” (master swimmer Deligny), he attached his surname to the until–then–anonymous pool.

  In 1840 the Burghs, two enterprising brothers, rebuilt Piscine Deligny. They used timber from the Dorade, the steamboat that carried Napoléon’s body up the Seine for reburial when it was returned from Saint Helena to Paris that year. Appropriate to such a patron, they surrounded the pool with oriental–style terraces and cafés to create a cigar divan, or Turkish café.

  During the Belle Epoque, men–about–town strolled there in the afternoon to smoke and take coffee, but mostly to admire the women in their clinging wool maillots de bain. Marcel Proust’s mother was among them. He remembered her “splashing and laughing there, blowing him kisses and climbing again ashore, looking so lovely in her dripping rubber helmet, he would not have felt surprised had he been told that he was the son of a goddess.”

  The Deligny offered private cabins, technically for changing clothes but often misused. One habitué reminisced, “American girls learning French at the Alliance Française, just three Metro stops away, would come down to the pool. They seemed to enjoy perfecting their French with me. Sometimes I would take the girls into my cabin to continue their French lessons. It was charming, if not altogether comfortable.”

  Piscine Deligny, 1954.

  Anonymous. Piscine Deligny. June 1954. Author’s collection.

  By the 1980s the Deligny was showing its age, and the clientele, in line with venues like the Astoria Baths in New York City, had become almost entirely gay. Its borrowed time ran out in August 1993 when, ignominiously and mysteriously, the ancient construction broke up one night, its rotted timbers settling to the mud of the Seine in what was probably the first example of a swimming pool destroyed by sinking.

  A new generation of pools had already supplanted the old wooden establishments. Its star was Piscine Molitor, a landlocked complex that opened in 1929. Olympic champion Johnny Weissmuller hosted the premiere, trained there, and acted as honorary lifeguard until Hollywood recruited him to play Tarzan.

  To Parisians, few of whom even had bathrooms, Piscine Molitor offered a taste of luxury. Designed in art deco style, it echoed the liners then plowing the Atlantic. Inside, it was easy to believe one was on the high seas. The city disappeared behind walls of changing cabins topped by cafés, sports shops, hairdressers, and an esplanade that supplanted the terrace of the Deligny as a pickup spot.

  In winter a retractable roof covered the space, and the water was frozen for ice skating. At other times it hosted fashion shows and beauty contests. In 1946, swimwear designer Louis Réard chose it to unveil the abbreviated two–piece swimsuit he named the “Bikini,” after the Pacific atoll where atomic weapons were tested. When every reputable mannequin refused to model the outfit—small enough, Réard boasted, to fit in a matchbox—he hired showgirl Micheline Bernardini, wife of entrepreneur Alain Bernardin, who would, shortly after, launch what became the city’s most famous erotic cabaret, the Crazy Horse Saloon.

  Homework at Piscine Molitor, 1966.

  Anonymous. Homework at Piscine Molitor. August 1966. Agence France–Presse.

  After years in decline, the Molitor was modernized in the early twenty–first century. It was incorporated into a hotel complex sufficiently chic to provide a location for the film Life of Pi, although critics complained that doors that once opened onto invitingly intimate changing rooms now hid only blank concrete.

  A few other public pools survive, including a floating creation in fiberglass in the thirteenth arrondissement, named, improbably, for dancer/singer Josephine Baker. Not notably aquatic, she may never even have set foot in such an unfashionable district, far from the clubs and cabarets of Montmartre.

  The city has persevered in trying to create a more permanent and accessible space for swimming. In 2016 it dredged a stretch of the Canal Saint–Martin, along which barges used to haul goods into the city. Some hundreds of rusty bicycles later, plus a few handguns and copious quantities of drug paraphernalia, this improvised lido opened—only to close almost immediately.

  Micheline Bernardini and the first bikini, small enough to fit in a matchbox.

  Anonymous. Micheline Bernardini at Piscine Molitor. July 5, 1946. Author’s collection.

  Oliver Gee, an Australian journalist friend, covered the cleanup. I asked him if he knew why the project failed.

  “Well, I have an idea . . .”

  It took some time to coax out the story, but it was worth the effort.

  Following up on a rumor that hinted the canal harbored some living inhabitants—specifically, a large beaver—Oliver ap
proached an elderly lady sitting by the water and asked if she’d ever seen such a beast.

  “Un castor?” She shook her head. “No, not a castor . . .”

  “Are you suggesting some other animal?” he prompted.

  (As he told me later, “I thought, you know, maybe rats. Even an otter. But not what came next.”)

  “The only animals I’m certain lived here,” she continued, “are crocodiles.”

  “Crocodiles?” Oliver said, startled. “How would crocodiles get into the Canal Saint–Martin?”

  She lowered her eyes in embarrassment. “I put them there.”

  Hearing this, I couldn’t help being skeptical. In New York, perhaps, but Paris?

  The existence of alligators and crocodiles under Manhattan was an urban myth of the 1980s. People who’d bought such animals as pets were alarmed when they became large enough to cast thoughtful glances at the family Chihuahua, if not the children. They dumped them down the nearest toilet or storm drain, from where they reached the sewers and thrived.

  Oliver had been just as skeptical. With commendable journalistic zeal, he pursued the story, pressing the lady on where she got the animals (from sanitation workers, she claimed, who found them under her house in the Marais, Paris’s oldest district) and why she dumped them in the canal (they were getting too big and aggressive to be kept as pets.)

  “So . . . did you believe her?” I asked.

  “Well, yes,” Oliver said. “Eventually. Because it’s happened before. Have you heard of Eleanore, the crocodile of the Pont Neuf?”

  I hadn’t, but an internet search brought me up to date. In March 1984, workers cleaning drains near the Pont Neuf, Paris’s oldest bridge, alerted the fire service to the presence of a small crocodile in the sewer.

  “She measured between two and three feet,” said one of the sapeurs–pompiers who trapped her. “We used a shovel and brooms to hold her down, then we tied her around the nose to stop her biting.”

  A marine biologist identified her as a female Crocodylus niloticus, or Nile crocodile, and none the worse for her ordeal.

  “Is it likely,” I asked Marie–Dominique after I found this article, “that a crocodile could live in the Seine near the Pont Neuf?”

  “Well, if any animal could, it’d be a crocodile. And,” she added thoughtfully, “it is right next to the Quai de la Mégisserie.”

  The pet shops that line that stretch of boulevard running above the river have long been suspected of consigning unsalable animals to the Seine. If it could swallow puppies and kittens that had outgrown their cuteness, why not a crocodile?

  The story even has a happy ending. Having been in the papers, the escapee of 1984 became a celebrity and could not be allowed to disappear. At Vannes, along the Atlantic coast of Brittany, an aquarium adopted her and christened her Eleanore.

  Today, ten feet long and weighing more than five hundred pounds, she luxuriates in her own ocean–side condo. It replicates in gray cement the corner of les égouts where she was captured, complete with a traditional blue enamel plaque identifying her address as Pont Neuf. Elements of a sewer worker’s outfit hang on the wall, though visitors willing to put on the helmet and boots to pay her a visit are few and far between. This suits Eleanore. Like most stars, she values her privacy.

  Now, crossing the Pont Neuf, I occasionally pause and look down into the roiling water, alert for the glint of a saurian eye, the flick of a scaly tail. If I needed another excuse not to swim in the Seine, memories of Eleanore would serve very well.

  31

  Enter Napoléon

  Tuileries Palace, Paris. December 1804. Court jeweler Martin–Guillaume Biennais places the wreath of fifty solid–gold laurel leaves on the balding head of Europe’s most powerful ruler. Napoléon frowns and glances upward, as if to see the object encircling his forehead. “Too heavy.” “But, Your Imperial Highness . . .” “I said, ‘Too heavy!’” Back in his workshop, Biennais snips off six leaves. They remind him of his six daughters, each in need of a dowry if she’s to marry well. Hmmm . . .

  IN DOING AWAY WITH THE CHURCH, THE REVOLUTION ALSO DISCARDED the ceremonies that offered consolation to those left to mourn. Piled into carts, the corpses of the guillotined were taken by night to any place where pits existed large enough to accommodate them. Existing cemeteries such as the Madeleine were soon overwhelmed. The bodies of those imprisoned at the convent of Picpus were buried in mass graves dug on its grounds. Others were dumped in an ancient opencast gypsum mine, later to become the Cimetière de Montmartre.

  A new cemetery, the Cimetière des Errancis, or “cemetery of the wandering,” was hurriedly opened in March 1793. Situated in northern Paris’s eighth arrondissement, on what was then the city’s outer edge but is near today’s Parc Monceau, it is reputed to have displayed over the entrance the sign “Dormir. Enfin!” (To sleep. At last!) Within two years it closed, having absorbed the bodies of 1,119 victims.

  Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d’Églantine were buried there in April 1794, followed in July by Robespierre and Saint–Just. They were joined by Charles–Gilbert Romme, colorless chairman of the calendar commission. Condemned in May 1795, he committed suicide before he could be guillotined. When an expanding city reached the cemetery in 1848, their skeletons were transferred to the underground ossuary known as the Catacombs, where they lie, unmarked, with thousands of other anonymous dead.

  For four years after the death of Robespierre, a five–man committee known as the Directoire, or Directorate, ruled France.

  Since the revolution was still technically in progress, the state stuck to Fabre’s calendar. Nobody had time to think about revising it. In one of the most corrupt periods in France’s history, abstractions took second place to profiteering.

  With the young Napoléon Bonaparte as its muscle, the Directoire created satellite states all over Europe and looted them to keep the French economy afloat. If a state couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the exorbitant taxes demanded, artworks were plundered from its museums and stately homes and sent to augment the Louvre’s collection.

  Outside France, the Republican calendar was comprehensively mocked. American president John Quincy Adams called it an “incongruous composition of profound learning and superficial frivolity, of irreligion and morality, of delicate imagination and coarse vulgarity.” British poet George Ellis, tongue in cheek, published his suggestion for an English version in which the months would be called Snowy, Flowy, Blowy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy, Breezy, Sneezy, and Freezy.

  In the French countryside, life remained so arduous that Fabre’s calendar was simply ignored, though the few who gave it serious thought found plenty to criticize.

  Its Paris–centricity, for a start. Language and imagery both were based on the weather its framers saw out their own windows. A southerner like Fabre should have been aware that snow and frost were almost unknown in Provence and along the Riviera. Who in those areas could relate to the wintry imagery of Pluviôse, Frimaire, and Brumaire?

  As for Lafitte’s illustrations, they bore as little relationship to the women of rural France as the models in a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue do to the average woman on any American or British beach.

  More important, Fabre and his team, in their urge to make everything new, had ignored the degree to which the Gregorian calendar not only imposed a way of life but also reflected one. Over centuries, the church and those ordinary French men and women who worked on the land had developed a relationship with which, for good or ill, both were comfortable.

  The traditional religious feasts may have been dictated by the church, but people welcomed them as an excuse to relieve the monotony of their lives. Celebrating the saint’s day of a loved one had become second nature in most families. Wishing them “Happy Manure Monday” wasn’t the same. And having to wait nine days for Sunday made the week intolerably long. Some frivolously misinterpreted this rule. Told that every tenth day was now a day of rest, they put down their too
ls on the new “Sunday” as well as the old one. After numerous complaints, the fifth day of each décade was made a half holiday, with work finishing at noon.

  Worst of all, those who created the calendar knew nothing of running a farm. The treatment of two autumn feasts, Michaelmas and Martinmas, was a prime illustration.

  The Feast of Saint Michael on September 29, known as Michaelmas, loomed large in the French farming year. Traditionally the conclusion of the harvest, it was the day from which all leases were dated and on which land rents were paid and workers hired. It also inaugurated the legal year, marking the beginning of tenure for magistrates and other holders of high office. At one time, the church thought it so important that they declared it a holy day of obligation, on which all Catholics were required to attend mass under pain of mortal sin.

  At this time of year, geese, hatched in the spring and fed through the summer and fall, were at their fattest. Rather than keep all of them through the winter, farmers killed one and enjoyed a rare roasted bird, a change from the stews and soups on which they existed the rest of the year. A few birds were kept for Christmas, a cheap substitute for the more exotic and expensive turkey. Any geese not eaten were cooked, cut up, and conserved in their own fat for later use in such winter dishes as the unctuous mixture of white haricot beans, sausage, salted pork, and preserved goose known as cassoulet. Nothing of the bird was wasted. Wing feathers provided quills for writing, and the soft down of the breast made an ideal filling for pillows and quilts.

  Michaelmas was also the last day on which blackberries could be picked. By tradition, Lucifer, ejected from heaven, fell onto a blackberry bush and cursed the fruit, making it poisonous. The legend disguised a practical lesson: once they became ripe, the berries, if left unpicked, could develop a poisonous fungus. Also, as they ripened and hung low to the ground, foxes and wild dogs urinated on them to mark their territory. Wise wives picked the berries early and used them to make a Michaelmas pie, mixing the still–tart fruit with sweeter apples and a touch of nutmeg and clove.