The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  It won’t last, it can’t last, it has to come to an end. One moment we’re mounting the barricades, our breasts heaving with passion, our vision blurred and our mouths jabbering slogans. The missiles fly to and fro, another tear-gas bomb explodes, the truncheon falls on head and shoulder, across the body and viciously up between the legs. The speeches falter and give way to the increasingly hollow harangue. Doubt corrodes all but the most fatally convinced, lost to revolution as to a drug. But the great wave of uprising has spent itself, it’s dribbling out into rivulets, dispersing its momentum into ever more minor, contradictory factions. Then comes the short, sharp crackdown of authority, the rule of law imposed by soldiers and police, that stops everything in its tracks. All celebration ceases, and a terrible sobriety darkens the air. Erstwhile revolutionaries look as if they have been caught at a wild party that has suddenly been declared the scene of a crime: they slope guiltily, furtively, away. Even people who were not involved in any direct way in the madness walk round the streets like lost souls, ghosts in their own city.

  But that’s not the half of it. Come mid-July and the hot midsummer and the dusty Paris streets, the lure of the sea suddenly takes over. Of all the insurrectionary heroes of May and June, who can resist the siren call of the sea? Maman didn’t nor did Papa, just like grand-père and generations before him. In August no normal individual would be caught dead in Paris, particularly now that a sense of curfew hangs so heavily in the air and the streets themselves are in tatters. Under the cobblestones, the beach indeed!

  And Anne and I follow suit, quite without guilt, she because she was never interested anyhow, I because it wasn’t my quarrel even if I had got caught up in it, and why should I be more Catholic than the Pope when everyone else seems to be heading off. For several weeks we pound through the breakers in Brittany, then plunge into the wine-dark Mediterranean as though the salt water will wash us clean of the revolution. The chants die away in the waves and the clenched fist loosens as it lies idly filtering sand through its fingers under the sun. Summer becomes an act of forgetfulness. Was it real, you wonder, as you close your eyes and listen to the sea? Did the government nearly fall? As the whole country ground to a halt, what did that strange, crazed moment mean, and what does it mean now that it lies in ruins, fading into the recent, irrecoverable past?

  The oysters eaten on the promontory where the Atlantic meets the sky, the figs warming into ripeness on the branch and the passion consummated in the pine forest are moments of escape, all the more precious because we know they will not last or return. In Provence, in a farewell to summer, I burnt armfuls of gnarled old vines, tamping them down until they became a mass of glowing embers, threw handfuls of thyme and some leftover Gigondas onto the pyre like a priest, anointed the sirloin with olive oil, salt and more thyme, then chargrilled it for our farewell meal over the fragrant, lava-like flames. We ate and drank and turned our faces to the sun, settling into an uneasy oblivion.

  When we returned Paris was still there, fearful and strangely diminished, as if the city had shrunk after its outpouring of emotion. Confusion and doubt hung in the air like the last lingering whiff of tear gas, and nobody’s version of what had actually happened seemed to tally with anybody else’s, as if we had all been in different combats, different realities and dreams. In this lull after the storm, now that everyone was going through the motions of going about their business as before, how could we be really sure that at one point a good two million workers had been on strike or that the Bourse had gone up in flames? But the feeling of deflation had seeped in everywhere, and with it a peculiar sense of submission, as if from the quest for total freedom we now had to bow our heads in the face of all and any authority.

  This was brought home just the other evening, when I was late in getting over to the Closerie des Lilas to do an interview with the writer and Tel Quel founder, Philippe Sollers, for The Times. I’m pleased and relieved they’ve started throwing me the odd commission again, and I went to some pains setting up this meeting, thinking that however avant-garde he is Sollers would certainly know that Hemingway wrote most of The Sun Also Rises here. But now I’m late and desperately casting around for a taxi, waving my arms at the traffic until a sleek, black Citroën DS stops beside me and I clamber in, curtly announcing my destination. It’s only when we are halfway there that the driver turns round timorously to explain that, although he understood my mistake, given that the Citroën DS has become the Parisian taxi par excellence, he wasn’t a taxi at all but an orthopaedic specialist on his way home.

  The only person I’ve come across that doesn’t seem to have had the utopian fervour knocked out of him is Montel, who stayed the whole summer in Paris working on the new issue of Change. He tells me that bourgeois literary factions, with their sordid commercialism and self-serving system of big prizes and best-sellers, have regrouped all over the city, and that the Union des Ecrivains is preparing to strike back. We’ve been knocked down and counted out, I want to protest, there’s no way we can make a stand again. But I like and admire Montel, who’s never flinched from action and never boasted about the risks he’s taken. And in truth I have another motive, even though I can’t fully admit to myself, for continuing a struggle I never really believed in. I haven’t seen Danielle since we met at our victorious, and now already half-forgotten, occupation of the Hôtel de Massa, but I have retained the image of her through all the swimming and laughter of the summer, falling steadily more in love with her each day until it’s become like an illness I can’t shake off. I have to see her again, if only in the perverse hope that I will be disillusioned – or, perhaps better still, that she will spurn me for the faint-hearted revolutionary and superficial journalist I am.

  So I begin to go regularly to the Union meetings, taking time out of my routine at Réalités, where we continue to extol the art of the past and the châteaux of France as if nothing whatsoever had happened, and where I begin to feel increasingly disaffected, more out of boredom than from any specific political conviction. All our Union writers’ meetings take place in the strictest secrecy, as if we were Resistance fighters during the Occupation, with each of us taking exaggerated precautions to ensure we are not followed, which reawakens the terror that has dogged me since my brush with the Living Theatre of being taken in and examined by the authorities. But it gives me the chance to see Danielle again and, as if there had never been a question about it in her mind, we draw immediately together, which overjoys me but increases the paranoia that has already set in and makes me move round the city like a doubly marked man.

  Most of our group discussions centre on the possibility of further action, or ‘retaliation’, as most camarades call it. We have Maoists and Trotskyists of every stripe and a few more alarming members, unaligned urban guerrillas, who call for extreme action whenever the opportunity arises. The threatened demolition of Les Halles, ‘the belly of Paris’ as Zola called it, leads them immediately to proclaim that they will retaliate for any such action by blowing up the Sainte-Chapelle. I am sometimes aghast and sometimes merely irritated by the tenor of the discussions that veer wildly from naivety to fanaticism, even when less incendiary subjects like the forthcoming literary prizes are brought up. Mostly I stay silent, watching Danielle and thinking of the few snatched moments we will spend together. But I’m brought up short, right in the middle of an erotic reverie, by a camarade reminding the others that my press pass as a Times correspondent (a position which had initially counted against me when I joined the Union) would allow access to the awards ceremony that would soon take place for the prestigious, if abominably bourgeois, Prix Goncourt.

  With Montel looking at me eagerly and Danielle holding my shifty demeanour in her steadfast gaze, there is no way I can protest and say that their plan to have several of them infiltrate the event as my photographers, then, as the prizes are announced, to give prize-winner and jurors a resounding, revolutionary slap across the face, was not only doomed to look pathetic but also certain to have me
deported just as I was beginning to find my feet in Paris. So the motion is carried, and within days, after a few botched rehearsals, half a dozen of us, long-haired, bearded and plainly out of place, are standing round the Drouant restaurant’s plush space, where the ceremony is about to begin, and I am close to passing out from the tension that’s holding my innards in its vice, waiting for the fatal moment when the television cameras begin to close in and whirr. Then just as the jurors take their place at the top table to announce the winner, the camarades go into a brief huddle and come over to inform me that they have decided that this is not the right moment to act: ‘Ce n’est pas le bon moment,’ they say off-handedly. I am so outraged to have been put through this ordeal for nothing that it takes all my remaining willpower not to give them and everyone else in sight a resounding, revolutionary slap. If I refrain, it is in the dawning delight that not only am I free both of revolution and repression but that the only radical changes that will take place are not in society, over which I have no sway, but in my life and in me.

  Illusions are falling faster than the late autumn leaves, I say to myself with a dramatically hollow laugh as I come up the Métro steps at my home stop on place Monge. The overarching trees that have formed a welcoming green canopy for so long are now standing almost bare. This morning I remembered to ask my concierge, who went back into her sulky, monosyllabic mode the moment the ‘events’ had been quelled, whether she knew of a Monsieur Marcel Duchamp who had lived in the building, and she looked totally blank. So I went to the Bibliothèque d’art Jacques Doucet, the fashion designer whose collection of art books forms the nucleus of the library, just behind the Luxembourg Gardens, to do some research on Duchamp’s life; and it didn’t take me long to establish that, during his first, short-lived marriage to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, Duchamp had indeed rented a small flat in rue Larrey, creating his famous door there, yet not at number 12, as I had been told, but in the building opposite, at number 11.

  So the little glamour his supposed presence gave our dull, grey, Hausmannian building is now quite discredited, even though, I reason wryly, the deception we laboured under could probably be found to have something Duchampian about it. At all events, this has accelerated a decision that I have been mulling over for a while, particularly when I find out that Duchamp, who never played much of a role in my life before, has just died in Neuilly. If the city as a whole seems subdued since the recent crackdown, then the Latin Quarter feels positively in mourning, as well as depressingly evocative of a whole generation’s crushed hopes.

  Ever since I arrived, I’ve been exploring as many areas of Paris as possible, criss-crossing the city from every vantage. But there is one area I return to all the time because I can never get enough of it, even though most people I know wouldn’t set foot there. It has a haunted, forgotten atmosphere because it is thronged with extraordinary, classical palaces left to rack and ruin, with their façades blackened by centuries of soot, their courtyards colonised by makeshift artisans’ shacks, and their once manicured, formal gardens now jungles where feral cats, originally introduced to keep the rats down, prowl about in angry, yowling packs.

  It’s called the Marais because it was once just that: an extensive marsh lying just outside the city walls that was reclaimed and farmed during the early Middle Ages. The Knights Templar eventually established their headquarters there in a fortified enclosure (with watchtower and drawbridge), a state within a state from which they administered their wealthy, powerful order throughout Europe. As Paris grew, it absorbed the Marais, which gradually became so prestigious an area that the kings of France and their nobles vied with each other to create ever more splendid town palaces and residences there. Having been the aristocratic centre of Paris for several centuries, the Marais’ death knell was sounded by the Revolution, and it sank so far into dereliction that by the turn of the twentieth century, the place des Vosges, once the cynosure of the whole city, was deemed a slum – as the art market correspondent at Réalités, Gérald Schurr, who was born there, once confirmed to me, adding ‘and a mostly Jewish slum’, since waves of Jewish immigrants had settled in the area. But of course the change affected the whole of the Marais. One by one, all the grand aristocratic houses, with their proud escutcheons and triumphant colonnades, were invaded by droves of labourers and artisans who settled down to ply their humble, messy, smelly trades in what had been the most magnificent town houses of France.

  It was just this decayed grandeur of the Marais that fascinated me. Had it been restored and turned into museums or residences for the very rich, I would not have been so attracted. But like some ancient beauty who had fallen on hard times, I found the Marais’ plight irresistible, just as I found the grand staircases cluttered with an indescribable variety of artisanal junk and the frescoes left to deteriorate in grand salons more meaningful than if everything had been ‘restored’, as they say in the guidebooks, ‘to their former splendour’.

  Having fallen in love with the Marais, I started asking round in the local cafés and bistros if anyone knew of an apartment for rent. The regulars, who were either craftsmen or stallholders in the market, laughed at first at this young foreigner with his halting French wanting to live in the area they had made their own, but in the end they pointed me in the right direction. Anne was dubious about the idea at first, but my desire to move there had become an article of faith; also we both knew, even though we had never so much as mentioned it, that if our relationship was to continue it urgently needed a renewal. Anne put up a token fight, making much of the large number of shoes and clothes that she would have to pack up and move, but her protests fall away when I take her to see the apartment that we would be sharing.

  Rue de Poitou runs roughly parallel to rue de Bretagne in the northern section of the Marais and crosses over rue Vieille-du-Temple, which originally led to the extensive market gardens that the Knights Templar established in the richly cultivable marshlands, providing much of Paris with its fresh produce: because of that, it was originally called rue de la Culture du Temple. Many of the neighbouring streets, rues de Normandie, de Picardie and de Beauce, are also named like rue de Poitou after French provinces, which is all that remains of an ambitious plan that Henri IV, Paris’s first great town-planner, put forward in 1610 to build a magnificent ‘square de France’, from which each street radiating off it would evoke one of the kingdom’s great regions. This square would have quite outshone another of Henri’s grand projects that did see the light of day, the place des Vosges, and right from the start I detected an undercurrent on the rue de Poitou that it felt destined for greater things.

  As it stands, it is a relatively modest street compared to many in the Marais in that it is made up of smallish, narrowish houses and cannot boast of a single major palace. Until Anne and I arrived here, we had been used to either the dull, late nineteenth-century architecture of rue Larrey and its immediate environs or the narrow, twisting, medieval lanes of the Latin Quarter; the latter was by now a geography that had imprinted itself on my brain, and sometimes I played games with myself, walking through the maze of little streets off boulevard Saint-Michel with eyes closed, simply smelling my way towards the Saint-Séverin church: past the roasting lamb of the Greek tavernas and the harissa-spiced broths of Tunis and Rabat to the cold-stone odour unleavened by incense of an apartment building in the shadows of the ancient flying buttresses.

  Like several other venerable areas of the city, the Marais had in its time been the up-and-coming area, the place to be and to build, in Paris. It went through several long mutations, from swamp to cultivated lots, from isolated Templar tower to crenellated fortress headquarters of the Templar empire, from the early royal residences to its unquestioned status as the centre of aristocratic privilege and power: and, of course, its slow demise, from the late eighteenth century when the nobility moved over the river to the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank, followed by the Revolution and the whole area’s spiralling descent during the next couple of centuri
es until it was considered derelict.

  Anne is still unimpressed by the Marais, which like most Parisians she considers as somewhere between a rough, working-class neighbourhood and an outright no-go area. But when she sees that we can have a much larger flat, far more conveniently situated on the building’s first floor, with high ceilings and lots of daylight from the three tall windows overlooking the street, she wavers, particularly since the rent is markedly less than what we are paying for rue Larrey. What carries the day as far as she is concerned, however, is the elegance with which the present occupants, a stylish and apparently well-off couple about our age called Bensimon, have decorated the interior. Where we painted our walls in clashing, psychedelic orange and green, the Bensimons have opted for cool blues and pale greys to set off the lozenge-shaped, black and white stone tiles on the floor. One detail won us both over: the Bensimons had chosen marbled paper of the kind normally used as endpapers in expensively bound books to cover all the walls of the smaller bedroom (which I have already earmarked as my study, a luxury I have never had before). They also agreed, for a small extra payment, to leave us part of the furniture, notably the heavy, chocolate-brown curtains, which delighted Anne, and a neatly proportioned table in dark red lacquer, which I could already see as the writing desk in my new, private quarters.

  Now that Anne has been won over, she demonstrates real flair in giving the décor a new direction with a trestle table to dine on with six film directors’ canvas chairs positioned around it. Although our pooled resources are meagre, they provide for a profusion of brightly coloured cushions and throws – ‘the feminine touch’, Anne calls it, although she allows me to keep my study decidedly ‘masculine’ with subdued colours and no decorative frills. Somehow our budget also extends to new sheets and towels, plates and cutlery, and where I might normally have tried to restrain this flurry of outgoings, I am so delighted with our new surroundings, as well as the new lease it appears to have brought to our relationship, that I also become uncharacteristically spendthrift, coming back from the Puces flea market with a battered but extremely comfortable ‘club’ armchair one day (I’ve already noted an artisan in our new area who specialises in leather upholstery), and the next, a sturdy oak side-table that the seller assures me is from the Vosges mountains and probably early seventeenth century.