A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

  FABRE D’ÉGLANTINE WAS BARELY IN HIS GRAVE WHEN BLIGHT FELL on his vision of a metropolitan France ruled in accordance with nature and the seasons.

  Its centerpiece had been Floréal, the second month of spring, beginning on April 20 and ending on May 19. As the flower to signify its first day he naturally chose the rose, emblem of his own erratic career.

  In doing so, he betrayed an ignorance of botany. Few roses bloom so early in the year, nor survive the often blustery weather. As Shakespeare wrote, “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.” The season is more appropriately celebrated by Floréal 7, our April 26, a day when traditionally one presents a posy of the modest muguet, or lily of the valley, to a loved one. Sellers with baskets of the flower appear on street corners across France, encouraged by a long-standing convention that any money they make is tax-free.

  When Louis Lafitte painted the image representing Floréal for the illustrated edition of the Republican calendar, he knew better than to include a rose. Instead he framed his demure brunette with muguet and another early bloomer, lilac.

  His painting is more fashion plate than pinup. The model’s white dress, in the so-called Empire style, falls in soft folds from a band under her breasts. It recalls the shepherdess chemise dress so scandalously worn by Juliette Récamier in the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.

  To promote Paris as the capital of a new world state as mighty as Greece or Rome, Madame Récamier posed reclining in a faux-Roman interior, wearing a gown similar to the one shown by Lafitte but with her feet shockingly bare. To Britons, these filmy, semitransparent gowns, equivalents of the modern nightdress, were yet more evidence of France’s depravity.

  For all the promise of green shoots pushing out of the ground and babies, conceived in the long winter nights, fidgeting to be born, as many factors in May hint at disasters to come. T. S. Eliot would stigmatize April as “the cruellest month,” but May is the better candidate, particularly as far as France is concerned. Historically, politically, culturally, agriculturally, May has traditionally meant bad news.

  For those on the land, May was filled with foreboding. What if grain stored since the harvest had become damp and spoiled, as happened in 1787? What if the weather brought hail, a late frost, even a hurricane? Would the young crops survive?

  Many seeds that germinate in May are social rather than agricultural. They betray a sense of the month as troubled, portentous with hints of incipient violence. Communists and socialists celebrate May 1, May Day, as a workers’ holiday, a pretext for protests and demonstrations. It has also historically been the month when armies come back to life and old conflicts are reaffirmed. Officers shake out their uniforms and load their weapons, ready to march when the ground thaws. Wives and lovers are sent back to the kitchen. “Silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies,” wrote Shakespeare in Henry V. “Now thrive the armourers.”

  A recital of French disasters that took place in May makes sobering reading:

  In May 1789 the peasantry and middle class first demanded a voice in government. By July, France was in flames.

  In May 1815 Napoléon, having escaped from Elba, raged across Europe in a rampage that ended at Waterloo in June. In May 1821, he would die in exile on Saint Helena.

  In May 1871 mass slaughter ended the brief anarchist uprising known as the Paris Commune.

  And in May 1968 the students of Paris erupted into the streets.

  Would these events have taken place in August or November? Almost certainly not. In May, the blood is hot. Testosterone is in the air. But as the season changes, so does the resolve. Napoléon’s return lasted a mere hundred days, the Commune only twenty-eight. The événements de ’68 began on May 3 but petered out by June 23.

  In the half century following the death of Napoléon, liberty, equality, and fraternity were eclipsed by wine, women, and song. Paris became the courtesan of Europe. To illustrate the month of Floréal in a calendar published in the 1880s, the artist Lucien Métivet showed two dandies bantering with a couple of flower girls selling much more than violets. In another almanac image of 1896, a pretty Jacobin shows shapely ankles as she pounds a revolutionary drum.

  Even after the Republican calendar was discontinued, echoes remained. Political commentators used the old names for the months to remind those listening of what the English call “the bad old days” and modern Germans, in speaking of the Nazi era, call “in früheren Zeiten” (former times). Historians refer to the coup d’état that brought Napoléon to power by its Republican date, Brumaire 18, Year VIII (November 9, 1799), while because Robespierre was overthrown on Thermidor 9 of Year II (July 27, 1794), any such upheaval within a revolution is called a Thermidorean reaction and its prime movers Thermidoreans.

  Yet “Thermidor” survives today mainly as a culinary term. In 1896, chef Auguste Escoffier was in charge of the kitchen at Maison Maire, a restaurant near the newly opened Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris. Among his signature dishes was a concoction of lobster in a cream-and-cognac sauce. Since the theater had recently had a success with a revival of Victorien Sardou’s play Thermidor, about the fall of Robespierre, Escoffier renamed the dish lobster thermidor in its honor.

  The almanac format could be adapted to even less creditable ends. In 1929 the Paris surrealists, in order to raise money for their embattled Dadaist colleagues in Brussels, published an erotic almanac. Called simply 1929, it included salacious poetry by André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Louis Aragon and was illustrated with four photographs by Man Ray. They show an anonymous but still recognizable Ray and his companion Alice Prin, aka Kiki, engaged in sexual intercourse. Almost all the copies were seized by French Customs, making this one of the most sought-after surrealist items.

  And Fabre d’Églantine? He wasn’t entirely erased from history. In 1888 Paris assigned him at least a toehold on immortality. A street in the twelfth arrondissement, near the Picpus convent where so many victims of the Terror lie buried, was named in his honor.

  37

  Gleaners

  Bermondsey, London SE1. February 1978. 4 a.m. 8°C. From midnight, the ancient square fills with taciturn men unloading the contents of unmarked vans onto the paving slabs that give the market its name, the Stones. Hissing pressure lamps shed blue-white light on silver pitchers and crystal wineglasses. Other men squat furtively against the walls next to a few monogrammed knives and forks, frayed scraps of Elizabethan embroidery, a saucerless Georgian coffee cup: not so much stock as loot.

  FOR A SMALL BUT DETERMINED GROUP OF PARISIANS, MAY DAY IS mainly interesting as the start of the season for the secondhand street markets known as brocantes.

  Frustrated after having been penned inside during the winter months, sellers, both amateur and professional, load the contents of attics or garages into their vans and head for the streets and squares designated by local councils as sites for sales.

  They’ve been doing so for centuries. Only the terminology changes. These days, a health-conscious society less accommodating of vermin shuns the term marché aux puces (flea market). They prefer vide-grenier (literally “attic emptier”), grand balai (big sweep-out), or marché pour tous (market for everyone), but most use the all-purpose term brocante. In the trade, sellers identify themselves with the old term for rag picking, chineur.

  Serious chineurs avoid any event using the words antiquaire or antique. Antiquaires, rating themselves above mere brocanteurs, hope to attract the carriage trade. Some erect tentlike canvas pavilions and fit them out like shops. Brewing some coffee, they seat themselves at a Louis XVI desk of dubious provenance, and open Le Monde. Despite this impression of indifference, they are as alert as any spider to the punter who strays close to their web. In an instant they’re at their side, inviting them to “just feel that embroidery, all original, I assure you. And try this chair. What princes, even kings, have sat here? American Express? Naturellement, monsieur. And of course we can ship it to South Dakota.”

  The first temperate weekend of t
he year sang the same siren song to me as to the chineurs of Paris. Of the five or six serious brocantes (those with two hundred sellers or more) scattered across the city, the most promising was in the fourteenth arrondissement. The farthest south of Paris districts, jammed between Montparnasse and the Périphérique, it combines nineteenth-century workers’ housing with light industry and the characterless high-rise blocks of rent-controlled apartments known as HLMs: habitation à loyer modéré.

  Paris brocante, or junk market.

  Hemard, Joseph. Brocante. In Le Grand Clapier de Paris, editions de la Tournelle, 1946.

  When I arrived, about a hundred trestle tables had colonized a small square and a few side streets. Sellers, bundled up against a wind that still carried an edge of winter, sat behind them, hands shoved in pockets, wearing the expression of slightly pained boredom that comes with the territory.

  Unlike antiquaires, chineurs don’t encourage you to buy. If anything, they imply that you are an unwelcome interruption to their day. If you hold up an object and inquire, “Combien?” they will stare at it as if they’ve never seen it before, then shrug and mumble an amount, often turning their back as they do so, a classic gesture of “take it or leave it” that has one reaching guiltily for one’s wallet.

  I was shuffling through a pile of the 1930s picture magazine Vu, hoping to find one with a cover by Man Ray, when someone called my name from the opposite side of the alley.

  “Might have known you’d be here,” said Harry Callaghan, holding out a meaty paw enclosed in a fingerless mitten knitted from gray wool.

  Harry was that rarity, an Anglo chineur. From his accent I’d guess East Coast USA, but it was so overlaid with the residue of places he’d lived and worked that the original was lost forever. He was probably tall, but years of browsing, hands in pockets, through junk markets and squatting to rummage in cardboard boxes half-hidden under competitors’ stalls had given him a permanent slouch.

  His white beard blended with a mop of gray hair, neither trimmed since the Reagan administration, if then. Both exploded like stuffing from a gutted mattress, topped by a large felt hat he kept permanently jammed just above his ears.

  “I never thought I’d see you go retail,” I said, glancing at his table.

  For Harry to set up shop, even one so temporary as this brocante stall, was as unexpected as finding a peacock roosting on your back fence. I knew him only as what’s called a “runner” or “scout.” Finding a salable item, these freelancers agree on a price with the dealer and sell it on immediately.

  He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah . . . well . . . you know . . . Stuff was piling up, and the old lady . . .”

  I looked around. “Clytie not here?”

  Harry’s consort was about twenty years younger than him, and certainly prettier. Allowing for the feral expression that comes with the brocante life, she could have passed for Leslie Caron’s younger sister. Having been christened Clytemnestra made her a street fighter since kindergarten. Each time we met, I remembered the advice of one Virginian about a Southern lady of his acquaintance. “Lay a hand on her,” he warned, “and you’ll draw back a bloody stump.”

  “No,” Harry said. “Sunday. Lunch with the marraine. Marie-Dominique with you?”

  I shook my head. “Same thing.” Sunday lunch with mother, godmother, grandmother, or favorite aunt was a ritual hardwired into French female DNA.

  “So . . . what are you working on?” he asked.

  I told him. Somewhere inside that jungle of hair, eyes lit up.

  “Ah. I might have something for you.”

  Rummaging under his table, he dragged out a cardboard carton and made room for it on the table.

  “Got this in a house sale the other day. Haven’t had a chance to go through it.”

  Something as heavy as a brick thudded onto his table. Roughly cubic, cut from pale gray stone, it measured about twelve centimeters on each side. I recognized a cobblestone, identical with the millions paving French streets.

  “Guaranteed to have been used in ’68,” he said. “Imagine getting one of those up the back of your head.”

  I hefted it. Some stones weighed three or four kilos. This one belonged to the smaller variety and tipped the scales at about a kilo. Still more than enough to give someone a nasty headache. Some unlucky members of the police and militia at whom they were flung in May 1968 suffered shattered limbs and fractured skulls.

  May ’68 made the paving stone a signature object, as emblematic as Marianne’s Phrygian cap in 1789. The first students to dig up the stones were surprised to find they weren’t cemented, just bedded loose in an inch of sand to allow a little play when traffic passed over. The sand provided just that edge of fantasy that stimulated creativity. Overnight, a new graffito appeared on the walls of Paris: “Sous le pavé, la plage” (under the paving, there’s a beach).

  Harry hefted the stone. “What do you reckon it’s worth?”

  “Why should it be worth anything?” I said. “You can pick them up anyplace they’re mending the roads.”

  “Yeah, that’s you. What about someone in . . .” He gave a wave that encompassed everything from the next arrondissement to outer Mongolia.

  “No idea.” I looked at the carton. “Anything else in there?”

  He rummaged deeper, unearthing yellowing copies of Le Figaro and Le Soir with photographs of baton charges and burning cars. There were faded manifestos forecasting the demise of democracy in general and General de Gaulle in particular, preceded by that of the police, the universities, the Ministry of Culture, the church, the press, and God, that had been run off on office duplicators normally used for school circulars and lunch menus. But all revolutions are by their nature amateur, made up as the principals go along.

  Australia had never experienced a revolution. Everything came easily to “the lucky country,” as we complacently called it. But I could remember the racing of the blood that came with reading of internal strife in other cultures.

  1789 . . . 1871 . . . 1968 . . . Revolutions were like the seasons. Always another one along in a minute, with each upheaval igniting the same passions. The issues changed, but not the rhetoric, nor the wardrobe. The crowds harangued by Danton in his red surcoat shared the elation of those listening to Louise Michel, the “Red Virgin” of the Commune, and that of the students in May 1968 who gathered in the Théâtre de l’Odéon to cheer a carrot-topped rabble-rouser named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, aka “Danny the Red.”

  “Ah, here’s something.”

  From the carton, Harry took a tattered, rolled poster. A stark and bloodstained face glared at me, surrounded by a message in block capitals: “Bourgeois. Vous n’Avez Rien Compris” (Middle class, you have understood nothing). As if the students understood any better.

  Despite its yellowing paper and frayed edges, the poster conserved an unignorable energy. More professional design and printing would have maximized the effect but dulled the edge of its indignation.

  “How much?”

  He overcharged me, but in the best traditions of the brocante I didn’t haggle.

  Meanwhile, the market for memorabilia of les événements remains healthy. Even for cobblestones. Recently an entrepreneur bought up a few hundred of them, cleaned them off, numbered them sequentially, and sold them as art objects. For €150, you could even have one gold-plated. As for the poster, restored and framed, it hangs in the front hall of our apartment. People tell me it’s worth a lot more than I paid.

  Revolution has not only its seasons but a price as well.

  38

  Something Fishy

  Sydney Stadium. August 1968. A packed house for the folk trio of Peter, Paul and Mary. As a change from white-bread protest (“If I had a hammer”? Seriously?), Peter Yarrow introduces Boris Vian’s “Le Déserteur.” “I’m sure I don’t need to explain its message,” he says. People look puzzled, even more so when the trio begins the song in French. Barely a handful understand the words, but perhaps that’s the point. With
our troops fighting beside the United States in Vietnam, it’s a brave man who would proclaim in any language, as Vian does, “And I will say to people / Refuse to obey / Refuse to do it / Don’t go to war.”

  “ARE YOU GOING TO THE FESTIVAL OF SAINT JACQUES?” ASKED our American friends the O’Days.

  Praise be for visitors. Without them, we would never hear about most seasonal events taking place outside our corner of Paris. The arrondissements can be as intellectually isolated from one another as villages were physically remote in medieval times.

  “Who was Saint Jacques, anyway?” asked Bob O’Day. “Jacques—what’s that in English? James?”

  Another thing about visitors: They’re inquisitive. They assume we’re as interested in Paris as they are. In fact, we mostly take the city for granted. Maybe Sarah Bernhardt did live in this building, but to us it’s where our dentist has his office.

  “Yes, Jacques is the same as James,” I said. “But I don’t know what he has to do with seafood.”

  “Seafood?” They looked surprised.

  “Saint Jacques is a kind of shellfish. You call them scallops. I guess this festival is some sort of promotion.”

  “Not religious, then?” They looked disappointed. All that expensive camera equipment, and no colorful folkloric rituals to record.

  We agreed to accompany them anyway, and planned to meet the following Saturday afternoon on what turned out to be one of the windiest corners of Montmartre, just opposite the cemetery. Arriving ten minutes early, I took refuge in a café, a gesture as automatic to Parisians as sheltering under a tree.

  Tourists enter cafés to drink coffee and scribble postcards that begin, “Writing this in the cutest café.” To Parisians, they’re an amenity: somewhere to get out of the rain, use the toilet, make a phone call, or kill time before a rendezvous. Any coffee one buys is rent. Historians of the Lost Generation will tell you that writers and artists hung out in cafés for the conversation. More likely it was because the toilets were clean.