The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Of course we have our own strange temple just at the end of rue Larrey. An unexpectedly modern-looking complex of white walls and roofs of green tile, the Great Mosque of Paris looks forbiddingly closed in on itself, with its main entrance flanked by stern-looking attendants in djellabas. I’ve been told that they’re actually very welcoming there, to Muslim and non-Muslim, and the glimpse you get of white, arcaded courtyards as you pass by is enticing; still, I feel uncomfortable about requesting entry into the shrine of a religion that overawes me – mainly, I suspect, because I know so little about it. But Anne and I are regularly drawn back to the Mosque because, at the back of the building, it also has a very popular, picturesque café serving mint tea and honey cakes, where the relaxed atmosphere is underlined by the clouds of chattering starlings that dart in and out from the nearby Jardin des Plantes. This non-religious aspect of the whole complex extends to a fully fledged restaurant with fretted sandalwood arcades and circular copper tables where you can order a variety of couscous and tagines. To my mind this gives our otherwise staid area a wonderfully exotic note, as does the marble-lined hammam where, according to a strictly segregated timetable, men or women can be slapped, lathered and scraped in chambers filled with purifying steam.

  If the Great Mosque itself remains a kind of ‘forbidden city’, the adjoining, tree-lined expanse of the Jardin des Plantes is wide open. With the sternly lugubrious museums of palaeontology and mineralogy and the verdigris-covered statues of famous past French naturalists set among beds of plants neatly categorised with their Latin names, the gardens come across at first as a kind of vast, illustrated encyclopaedia of the natural sciences laid out for public instruction. What originated in the seventeenth century as a physic garden for Louis XIII was turned in the nineteenth century into a comprehensive exposition divided into precise parterres within a grid of straight, dusty paths. I’m a bit taken aback because this is my first real encounter with the deep-seated French love of formal classification, with everything categorised as belonging to this or that genus or species. In England, of course, less emphasis would have been placed on a cut-and-dried, classical order, just as the actual layout of the gardens (pace the Chelsea Physic, of course) would have been looser, wilder and more romantic.

  The imposition of orderliness, from glasshouses devoted to tropical ferns to glass cabinets displaying numberless families of butterflies, troubled me, however much I enjoyed wandering around the gardens, and I didn’t realise why until the other afternoon when I went back to look at the amazing dinosaur skeletons which I knew by now Giacometti had sketched, since I’ve been collecting catalogues of his work. If Giacometti had been attracted to them, I thought, they and probably other such curiosities as Louis XIV’s reconstructed rhinoceros would have been well known to the Surrealists, whose flamboyant and radical movement interests me more than anything else in modern culture, precisely no doubt because it flies in the face of French classicism, whether in the form of the three unities of drama, the Parisienne’s strictly coordinated colours from handbag and gloves to shoes, or indeed a rectangular plot of precisely labelled plants. To ponder this weighty question, which seemed to me to go to the heart of what being French was, I returned to the Mosque café and ordered a glass of mint tea and a sticky cake. True, the eighteenth-century polymath, the Comte de Buffon (an odd name, a bit like Lord Buffoon), devised a labyrinth there, and for a moment that seemed to open a crack in this highly regulated world that the Surrealists might have exploited; but when I visited it I realised I had been hoping for a maze that you could get lost in rather than a labyrinth in which there was only one path leading you in and another leading you with implacable rationality out.

  The Jardin des Plantes’s little zoo offered another chink in this tight, taxonomic universe. Anne and I have been there several times to look at the animals and savour the antiquated charm of the pits and cages, but when the lions let out terrifying, full-throated roars, I wondered just how strong those spindly-looking bars keeping them in actually were. We have also lunched off the delicious omelettes a charming Breton lady cooks over slabs of salted Breton butter in the zoo’s tiny café. The smell of the animals massed around us wafted in at irregular intervals, but I didn’t find this put me off my food as much as Anne’s enthusiastic description of the terrible Prussian siege of Paris in 1870 when those who could afford it, having eaten all available horses, dogs, cats and rats, dined off elephant consommé and choice cuts of camel bought from the zoo and prepared at such celebrated restaurants of the day as Voisin.

  Perhaps this story, as well as the omnipresence of wildlife in this sanctuary, might have comforted André Breton and his followers in their belief in instinct and the unconscious, I muse over my mint tea, watching the starlings peck the floor for fragments of pastry. But then I also reflect that the very fact that this country has taken codification and Cartesian reasoning to an extreme must have made Surrealism necessary, as a violent antidote, just as the Revolution was sparked off by aristocratic decadence and disdain (surely eighteenth-century taste was so sublime because it reached an unsurpassable peak that could lead only to its own destruction). I finish my tea, sweep the remains of my baklava off the table for the birds and hurry home to make sure that, if needed, I am on hand to help Anne prepare our dinner.

  Being more or less settled in now at rue Larrey (named after Napoleon’s top army surgeon, our concierge proudly informs me) has made life at Réalités run more smoothly. I have less trouble getting up in time because Anne always puts her huge, loudly ticking alarm clock on, and I’ve grown to like the regular morning routine of a shower followed by a big cup of coffee with chicory, which is the way Anne says her family has always drunk it. I’m not so keen on going down into the Métro on place Monge because the air has such a strange, stale smell wafting up and enveloping you in billowing clouds the moment you start your descent; and I always look forward to the pleasure of the reverse journey, the return from the underworld, taking the escalator back up in the evening towards the fresh air and the trees arching over the dark sky. I also rather dread the brief contact with the bad-tempered denizens in uniforms, male and female, who stand in sentry boxes down below and grudgingly punch your ticket before you’re allowed onto the platform. I’ve never bought anything but second-class tickets, and it irks me to see people, self-important businessmen for the most part and elegant, snooty-looking women, getting in and out of the first-class carriage as if they actually belonged to some superior stratum of society. Every now and then I sneak into the first-class carriage to see if it’s any different, but I’m so nervous, aware that if an inspector gets on and catches me there’ll be a whopping fine, that I don’t really notice. Luckily I’ve never been caught but the last time I interloped in this way I realised I was still carrying the little bag of rubbish I’d taken down from the flat and forgotten to dispose of in the communal dustbin. This filled me with an odd sense of shame, as if I were doubly unfit to be travelling in first class, and by the time I got to the office I still hadn’t found anywhere to deposit my shameful little bag. And it became the office joke, which I joined in with gusto, adding details and emphasis about what a pariah I’d become as I tried to leave my rubbish under the bar of our local café but had been ordered by the stately patronne to retrieve it. The laughter grew so loud that Garith himself, his green trilby still jammed on the back of his head, popped out of his inner room to see what the merriment was about and roared with laughter, particularly when I said I’d been in first class, which he takes religiously.

  It’ll be some time before I live that one down, but I enjoy the easy, chatty atmosphere we have down in our basement office, which is not rendered any more attractive by the cooking smells that float in during the morning from the canteen further down the corridor – and this in turn prompts another game amongst us of guessing what they’ll be serving up as the dish of the day. We’ve all tried having lunch there, thinking it would be good to spend time with our French colleagues, who write
most of the articles we adapt and translate for our English-language edition, but they tend to stay in their own groups, and since the atmosphere is depressing and the food, while attractively cheap, varies between basic and downright bad, we tend to go our own way for lunch. David knows all the best places in the area but our regular bistro is Chez Renée, where Renée herself serves up egg mayonnaise, soups and salads usually followed by a reliable, inexpensive grilled steak or a slowly simmered stew. Giles, who’s a new junior editor like me, and Suzy, who’s American and more senior, often join us. I had the briefest of flings with Suzy when I first arrived, but it was as if we had absent-mindedly got into the wrong overcoats at the end of a boozy evening, realised our mistake and never referred to the incident again, so that now we continue to work together cheerfully, checking each other’s translations, particularly the recipes that our cookery correspondent, a batty-looking old dame with extravagant hats and an aristocratic French title, sends in every month. Our demurely self-possessed English secretary sometimes joins us, too, and I had my eye on her as well for a while, until over drinks one evening she opened up sufficiently to tell me she had a French boyfriend, adding that he had such a big, strong cock that when it was erect she could hook several dresses on hangers over it before deciding what to wear. Since this revelation, I have been handing her my texts to type with renewed deference.

  I can’t say I’m not lucky with the texts I get to do. David continues to tip me off as to what pieces are coming up, and it’s as if I’m doing a crash course in global art history, focusing on the perfectly preserved, gold ornaments of the Scythian tribes (‘The Art of the Steppes’) or African tribal sculpture (‘The Twilight of the Dark Gods’) one week, and what I hope is a new look at classical modern art (‘The Darker Side of Pierre Bonnard’ or ‘Gustav Klimt: The Swings of Fashion’) the next. I’ve even been sent to interview some living artists (‘Alexander Calder Sets All Forms Free’), and David says I might be asked to visit an up-and-coming French artist called Pierre Soulages, whom I’ve never heard of, as well as Balthus in Rome, whose name I recognise because Francis Bacon has commented on his work disparagingly to me from time to time. And there have been a few things in between, notably the ravishing Pisanello and the mysterious Patinir, about whom from nil knowledge I have become an overnight expert. I suppose I, rather than Giles or Suzy, get the plum art articles because I edited, fleetingly enough, an undergraduate magazine at Cambridge and reviewed the most interesting London gallery exhibitions I could find every week for The Observer.

  The friendship with Bacon can’t have hurt either, but he’s not really at all well-known in Paris, and Garith pretends never to have heard of him, possibly to annoy me, although he occasionally waxes indignant about what he calls my ‘getting blotto with that pansy chum of yours’, on the one occasion Francis has been to Paris recently, and the adverse effect this has on my work. I still haven’t really got the hang of Garith. He must be in his mid-fifties by now, and no one seems to know anything about him before he became the editor of the English edition of Réalités about fifteen years ago. Although he couldn’t be anything but English, with his bluff, jokey manner, he seems totally rooted in Paris, and he speaks French fluently while throwing in all sorts of odd expressions and making no attempt to sound French. He rarely leaves the city, except for solitary, rambling walks in Normandy over the weekend, and he hardly ever goes to London except to visit his tailor for a new, outlandish-looking suit. When he interviewed me for the job as junior editor, Garith told me that for years he’d been renting a garçonnière overlooking the very chic place du Palais Bourbon for a pittance, encouraging me, falsely, to imagine I could live anywhere I fancied in the city on my meagre salary. Now that I’m here, I realise that he can of course afford to live at a far smarter address than me. He also has an extensive circle of art-collecting and decorator friends, people like Charlie de Beistegui and Emilio Terry, who strike me as belonging to a bygone age. Another is Sacheverell Sitwell, whom Garith calls ‘Sachie’ and who, looking very much the tweedy English country gent, comes clod-hopping into the office for a chat occasionally, kicking our forthcoming edition that’s been carefully laid out page by page on the floor all over the shop. I tend to look down my nose at these refined old fogeys, even though they might have given fabled parties on the Grand Canal or written endless books on the Baroque. But Garith has just announced that he is going to take me into an even stranger world – one I didn’t know existed and which, even if I had known it existed, I could certainly never have got into by myself.

  I wasn’t too pleased at first when Garith asked me to write about an American painter called Romaine Brooks. He spoke her name as if it were Picasso or Matisse, the kind of famous and flamboyant artists I would have been much keener to discuss, and I looked at the mannered, Whistlerish portraits Garith handed me with measured disdain.

  ‘When did she die?’ I asked him in a subdued voice.

  ‘But that’s the point, dear boy,’ Garith exclaimed. ‘She’s not dead at all. Not at all, even though she’s into her nineties now. I’ve known her for simply ages, and we’ve been invited to go to tea with her and her great friend Natalie Barney who lives in an extraordinary set-up on rue Jacob and has a famous salon with all sorts of marvellous lesbians and poets visiting her every Friday afternoon.’

  Garith was visibly excited by the prospect, his ice-blue eyes flashing in a face permanently ruddied by his marathon walks against the Normandy winds.

  I tried to echo his enthusiasm as I took the exhibition catalogue of her work and promised dutifully to do some research at home before our tea.

  ‘I’m having tea with two old American ladies tomorrow!’ I announce to Anne once I’m back. ‘One’s a painter and the other a writer, and they’ve spent most of their lives living together as well as having affairs with every other lesbian in Paris and beyond.’

  ‘Ah, Amazons,’ Anne says knowingly. ‘At least I won’t have to worry that you’ll be lured away. I thought that women like that actually avoided any male company.’

  ‘All the men they see are probably queer,’ I counter airily. ‘I’m pretty sure Garith is, or at least was, even though he’s always got a young woman on his arm now. And I can certainly pass for queer – after all, I got a lot of practice at it when I was living in London!’

  Anne seems more preoccupied about what I’ll wear for the event and she makes sure my suit is pressed and the reefer jacket sponged. As I get ready for the office the morning after, I decide to ask Garith to be more forthcoming about all these old people and the closed, rarefied worlds they inhabit.

  ‘I thought you might find the idea intriguing,’ Garith says, teasingly. ‘After all, you seem to have met half the nancy boys and lesbians of London. But these, I have to say, are of a different class. Both Romaine and Natalie plainly belong to the lesbian aristocracy, most of whom at some time or another have lived in Paris since the French appear to be more broad-minded about these things. The two of them have been in a relationship longer than anyone can remember but they’ve also had affairs with all the others, so that everyone has slept with simply everyone. The place we’re going to is a kind of haut lieu, a Mecca, of Sapphism, and all those women – from Ida Rubinstein and the Comtesse de Clermont-Tonnerre to that famous English couple, Radclyffe Hall, who called herself “Johnnie”, and Una Troubridge – used to meet up there the whole time. And then of course it’s full of writers like Djuna Barnes.’

  We have left in good time since Garith has decided we can walk easily enough from rue Saint-Georges over the Seine to rue Jacob. It’s still quite cold and we’ve been keeping up a brisk pace. But the mention of Djuna Barnes stops me literally in my tracks.

  ‘Do you mean the author of Nightwood?’ I ask. I’d always thought of her as someone having a purely fictional existence, but now I was going to meet people who knew her, to a place where she went.

  ‘Probably. She wrote all sorts of rot about the loneliness of lesbian life or stuf
f to that effect. Can’t stand it myself,’ Garith replies, tilting his green trilby back to underline the point.

  ‘I thought it was an astonishing book,’ I say. ‘Francis Bacon gave it to me years ago. Strange and weirdly funny. Written in this amazingly rich prose.’

  ‘Right ho,’ says Garith pragmatically. ‘Well, I don’t think she’ll be there today, dear boy, but they are expecting Janet Flanner, who’s been writing an amazing “Letter from Paris” about everything that goes on here for donkey’s years for the New Yorker. I think she’s that way inclined, too, if you know what I mean. And there’s the French writer, Paul Morand, I can’t fill you in too much about him, except that he’s known everyone who was anyone from Wilde, Proust and Mallarmé to Sarah Bernhardt and Coco Chanel, not to say Jean Cocteau – though of course Cocteau put himself around so much that everyone knew Cocteau, even I knew poor old Jean. But Morand’s an odd bird. Rather too close to Vichy and the Germans during the war, I’d say. He used to have this very glamorous life, dining at the Ritz with princesses and all that sort of guff, and at his best he wrote like an angel. But now the Paris literary establishment has turned its back on him and he’s out in the cold. Anyway, don’t forget the main reason we’re going there, dear boy, is that you’re writing a piece about Romaine Brooks. I don’t think you can make too much of her lesbianism in the article but I suppose you might mention how infatuated D’Annunzio was with her.’

  Garith strides ahead and as I fall into his quickened pace I notice with dismay that the sharp creases in my trousers have already fallen out, leaving the familiar shapeless bags behind as we cut through the Louvre and over the Pont des Arts, barely pausing to look at the swollen, grey-green Seine or even the enticing objects and pictures on display in the antique shops along rue Bonaparte. Turning into rue Jacob (where, Garith tells me, ‘everyone from Sterne and Stendhal to Wagner has lived’), we stop abruptly in front of a plain classical façade, push a brass button and wait for the main door to open. There’s a forlorn, cobblestone courtyard with a small two-storey house on the left. I feel it’s a bit of a let-down, as if the enchanted realm I had been expecting has turned into just another rambling Paris abode with a cracked façade half-covered in ivy.