The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Sometimes I think of Paris as a series of courtyards opening into each other if you have the right key or, if you don’t, lying adjacent, unexplored, cut off. These courtyards take you up or down, like a game of snakes and ladders, from a grand cour d’honneur to a little, weed-filled garden full of thrushes. I see them, above all in the Marais, as a sequence of courts in a vast palace without a king where we citizens now have the right to roam. I notice that, having found my feet again in this enchanted labyrinth, I am drawn more and more to silent spaces, forgotten courtyards, secret gardens. The square Léopold-Achille beside rue du Parc Royal (the original, much larger royal park where François 1er kept his pet camels and ostriches) is a favourite haunt because of its mixture of pretty flowerbeds and preserved architectural oddities that include a pair of sculpted salamanders, the mythic animals that lived in fire and that the same François 1er took as the symbol of his power. Square Saint-Gilles Grand Veneur, off rue des Arquebusiers, is another quiet garden with luxuriant rosebeds where I sometimes snatch a moment to dream that I live in one of the seventeenth-century buildings that surround it and have this scented haven as my view.

  But there is also a very extensive public garden, only five minutes from rue Michel le Comte, where I go and walk every day. It consists of four interconnected gardens, each overlooked by the façade of an early eighteenth-century palace and joined by one of the most ancient streets of Paris, ruelle de la Roche, which now exists only as a humble, gravelled pathway. Together the gardens and the buildings form the Archives Nationales, and until a few years ago (when I, for instance, was living in their shadow on rue de Braque) they were closed to the general public.

  The gardens have everything from formal French parterres and an alley bordered by aromatic shrubs and bushes to huge rosebeds, rare trees (including a catalpa and the only Indian horse chestnut in Paris), small fountains, and a tiny river that snakes through a maze of subtly juxtaposed plants. I discovered the gardens in the first few days after we returned to Paris and they have now become an essential part of my daily routine. However well or badly my work is going, I stop in the late afternoon and walk several times around the entire area, pacing up and down the huge portico of the Hôtel de Soubise if it’s raining, but otherwise plunging into the tightly packed, winding labyrinth of flowers, breathing in their perfume and breathing out the petty irritations or minor triumphs of the day; or striding around the formal lawns, gazing up at the Hôtel de Rohan’s array of columns and pilasters that mark the nine bays of its powerfully sober façade. All these sites have been host to remarkable families and outstanding houses since Olivier de Clisson built his home here in 1371 (its fortified entrance and little pepperpot towers still overlook rue des Archives), and the sense of an unbroken human presence, with its wars and ennoblements, marriages and offspring, diseases and deaths, gives me a sense of perspective where I can take the measure of my own transience.

  On summer evenings, the gardens are at their most beautiful, the magnificent trees clothed in bright, fresh leaves and the plants in full flower as the swallows dive and loop across the sky. The excited chatter of the birds gives way slowly to the sound of bells rising, tolling all over the city, faintly at first, a sea of sound rising and falling, one fresh note in counterpoint to the reverberations already fracturing and extending the golden light. From various key points on both banks, Notre-Dame, Saint-Eustache, Saint-Sulpice, Paris, that ‘city of a hundred belfries’, comes alive and calls out, resonating, in this other dimension. The sound grows symphonic, with a single peal merging and disappearing into another, repeated and suspended until it is once more absorbed into the greater mass of music filling the Archives gardens like a distant concert and held for an instant as if in a secret hollow before it disperses on the warm, scented air.

  I sit beside a broken Doric column and two maritime pines, caught up intently in the rise and fall of the bells, listening to their story of the city and of everyone who has ever lived here. The peals start out as sharp and querulous at times, quivering for an instant on the air before they dissolve into the overall harmony. I listen entranced, as if I am hearing my whole life in Paris being played out like a pattern on this rich thunder of music gathering in the sky. Like never before I feel I am now at the centre of my life, just as I am at the centre of this ancient place that I know so well. It is a timeless moment in which I can summon up all the prevailing tones and timbres of my past, the laughter and tears of the lost years where so many hopes and illusions were shed. I sit here, a single residue of experience, content at last to be who and what I am, accepting all the mistakes and mirages because the journey has at last brought me to this calm celebration of truth.

  The blue of the sky is darkening, and the shadows of the trees reach over the gravelled paths like roots seeking to sink back into the black earth. Overhead the swallows are swooping higher and higher in a frenzy of despair, as if this evening will be their last and they will never dive through the dying light and sing again. For all of us in this twilight, it will be time soon to go.

  The bells toll more faintly with the fading of the light. The attendants begin to lock up the small wrought-iron gates that lead to the densest part of the garden where the trees hide the trickling stream. One by one the bells fall silent, but their reverberations hang on, trembling in the metal, trembling in the air. It’s time now to go. I can no longer distinguish the sound of the bells from the silence that has absorbed them. The silence is a tolling of silence, ringing in my ears, perhaps my ears alone, because I can see no one else. The few others who might have shared this instant are perhaps at home already, sitting under lamplight, or on a café terrace waiting for the full darkness of evening to close about them.

  The attendants blow their whistles to signal that the main gates are about to be bolted for the night. I savour this final moment in the Archives Gardens, thinking of all the history that was pealed out across the city this evening and all the documents of the past that lie buried in the buildings that surround me. The attendants give one last, impatient blast on their whistles. It’s time to go.

  Acknowledgements

  My editor, Michael Fishwick, not only helped shape this book but also pinned down its elusive title. My warmest thanks to him and to the whole team at Bloomsbury, notably Alexandra Pringle, Sarah Ruddick, Holly Ovenden, Hetty Touquet, Hannah Paget and Lilidh Kendrick.

  My agent, Rebecca Carter at Janklow & Nesbit, has once again been as invaluable for her advice on the text as on every other aspect of the book.

  Charles Campbell, Patrice Cotensin and Frank Slattery read the manuscript and made numerous valuable suggestions.

  My greatest debt, as ever, is to my wife, Jill Lloyd, whose talents, generosity and love have sustained me throughout.

  I should like to take this opportunity to thank the following people for their help, their encouragement and their friendship: Fiamma Arditi, Frank Auerbach, the late Ida Barbarigo, Oliver Barker, Peter Beard, Luc Bellier, André Bello, Alice Bellony, Philippe Bern, Tony and Glenys Bevan, Peter Blake, David Blow, Peter Bogdanovich, Anne and Yves Bonavero, Viscount and Viscountess Bridgeman, Adam Brown, Ben and Louisa Brown, Richard Bucht, Marlene Burston, Natasha Campbell, Neil and Narisa Chakra Thompson, Pauline Choi, Charles Cholmondely, Mala Cotensin, Monique Couperie, Casimiro di Crescenzo, Stéphane Custot, Sir Howard and Lady Davies, Barbara Deimling-Ostrinsky, Adrian and Jamie Dicks, Mark Eastment, Christopher Eykyn, Lord and Lady Norman Foster, Colin and Sophie Gleadell, John Gordon, Nicholas Goulandris, Catherine Grenier, Cyrille de Gunzburg, Claude-Bernard Haïm, Nadine Haïm, Robin and Rupert Hambro, Barrie Hoar, David Hockney, Richard and Christina Ives, Bill and Janet Jacklin, Jeanne Job, Sam Keller, Ulf Küster, Andrew Lambirth, Lee Mingwei, Mark and Lucy Lefanu, Jim and Sally Lightburn, Magnus Linklater, Nicholas Maclean, Gillian Malpass, Sandro Manzo, Richard Mason, Henry and Alison Meyric Hughes, Lucy Mitchell-Innes, Bona Montagu, Serena Morton, Martin and Smita Murphy-Davé, David Nash, Lynn Nesbit, Thomas Neurath, Sophie Neve, Hu
ghie and Clare O’Donoghue, Francis Outred, Clara Pastor, Edmund Peel, Alex Peppiatt, Clio Peppiatt, Kate Pool, Elliott Power, Renée Price, Tomaso Radaelli, John Rivett, Piers Russell-Cobb, Frédéric and Carole de Sénarclens, Christopher and Carmel Shirley, Philippe Sollers, Lynne Spencer, Arturo di Stefano, Ian and Mercedes Stoutzker, Sophy Thompson, Thérèse Tigretti Berthoud, Stanley Tucci, Jorge Virgili, Diana Watson, Thomas West, Ortrud Westheider, Thomas Williams, Clive and Catherine Wilson.

  Notes

  Part one, chapter 3: ‘The expression that there is nothing to express…’, Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, ‘Three Dialogues’ in transition (magazine) 49. Paris, 1949

  Part two, chapter 7: ‘The world of a deaf child…’ Louis Aragon, ‘An Open letter to André Breton on Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance’ in Les Lettres françaises, 2–8 June 1971

  Index

  Académie Française here, here

  Adzak (Royston Wright) here, here, here

  Aeschylus here

  African art here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Aga Khan here

  Agnelli, Gianni here

  Ahmed here, here

  AIDS epidemic here

  Alex, Monsieur here

  Althusser, Louis here

  Andrews, Michael here

  Apollinaire, Guillaume here, here, here

  Aragon, Louis here, here, here, here, here

  Arikha, Avigdor here, here, here

  Aristophanes here

  Arletty here

  Arrabal, Fernando here

  Art International here, here, here, here, here ceases publication here

  relaunched under Peppiatt here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Art News here

  Artaud, Antonin here, here, here, here, here

  ARTforum here

  artists’ studios see Imagination’s Chamber

  Artnews here, here

  Auden, W. H. here, here, here

  Auerbach, Frank here, here, here

  Aulenti, Gae here

  Averroes here, here

  Avicenna here, here

  Bach, J. S. here, here

  Bacon, Francis here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Art International here, here, here

  biography here

  and champagne here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  and Dado here

  and David Hockney here

  David Sylvester interviews here, here, here

  death here, here

  friendships here

  and Giacometti here, here, here

  and Jasper Johns here, here

  Paris retrospective here, here, here

  and Peppiatt’s book here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  and Peppiatt’s child here

  and Picasso here, here

  prices for lithographs here

  proposed German exhibition here

  and Raymond Mason here

  and ‘School of London’ here

  and Sonia Orwell here, here

  his studio here, here, here

  and Susan Sontag here

  Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard here, here, here

  Three Studies of the Male Back here

  visits Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Balajo nightclub here

  Baldwin, James here

  Balthus here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Barbarigo, Ida here, here, here

  Barnes, Djuna here, here, here, here, here

  Barnes, Julian here

  Barney, Natalie here, here, here, here, here

  Barral, Carlos here

  Barrault, Jean-Louis here, here

  Bataille, Georges here, here

  Baudelaire, Charles here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Baudrillard, Jean here

  Beach, Sylvia here, here

  Beardsley, Aubrey here, here

  Beat Generation here, here

  Beauvoir, Simone de here

  Beck, Julian here, here

  Beckett, Samuel here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Foirades here

  Molloy here

  Waiting for Godot here

  Beckmann, Max here

  Beethoven, Ludwig van here

  Beistegui, Carlos de here, here

  Belcher, Muriel here

  Bellmer, Hans here

  Benjamin, Walter here

  Benoist, Jean-Marie here

  Berès, Pierre here

  Bergen, Candice here

  Berggruen, Heinz here

  Bergson, Henri here, here

  Bernard, Claude here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Bernhardt, Sarah here, here, here

  Bernheim, André and Claude here, here

  Berryman, John here

  Beston, Valerie here, here, here

  Bibliothèque Polonaise here

  Birague, Cardinal here

  Black Panthers here

  Blake, William here

  Bogart, Humphrey here

  Bogdanovich, Borislav here

  Bogdanovich, Peter here, here

  Bonnard, Pierre here, here, here

  Bonnefoy, Yves here

  Borges, Jorge Luis here, here, here, here

  Boulez, Pierre here

  Bowles, Patrick here

  Brancusi, Constantin here

  Braque, Arnoul de here

  Braque, Georges here

  Brassaï here, here

  Brasserie Lipp here, here, here, here

  Bray, Barabara here

  Breton, André here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Breuer, Lee here

  Brook, Peter here

  Brookner, Anita here

  Brooks, Romaine here, here

  Buffon, Comte de here, here

  Buñuel, Luis here, here

  Burroughs, William here

  Byron, Lord here

  Cage, John here

  Cahiers d’art here, here

  Calder, Alexander here, here, here

  Camus, Albert here, here, here, here

  can-can here

  Caravaggio here

  Carême, Marie-Antoine here

  Carolus-Duran here

  Cartier-Bresson, Henri here, here, here, here, here, here

  Casals, Pablo here

  Casarès, Maria here

  Castaing, Madeleine here

  Castro, Fidel here

  Centre Georges Pompidou here, here, here

  Cézanne, Paul here, here

  Chabaud, Louis-Félix here

  Chanel, Coco here, here

  Change here, here, here, here

  Chants de Maldoror here

  Chardin, Jean-Baptiste here, here

  Chareau, Pierre here

  Charlemagne, Emperor here

  Charles VI, King here

  Chastel, André here

  Chateaubriand, Vicomte de here

  Chez Goldenberg here, here

  Chirac, Jacques here

  Choquet, Victor here

  Christo here

  Cimabue here

  Cimémathèque here, here, here, here, here

  Clair, Jean here

  Claude (le Lorrain) here

  Clermont-Tonnerre, Comtesse de here

  Clisson, Olivier de here

  Cloetta, Yvonne here

  Clouet, Jean here

  Clouzot, Henri-Georges here

  Club de la Chasse here

  Cocteau, Jean here, here, here, here

  Colet, Louise here

  Colette here

  Collège de France here, here, here

  Collobert, Danielle here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cahiers here

  Meurtre here, here

  suicide here, here

  Colony Room here, here

  Connaissance de
s Arts here, here, here, here

  Connolly, Cyril here, here

  Cooper, Duff here

  Cooper, Gary here

  Corneille, Pierre here

  Corti, José here

  Coward, Noël here

  Cravan, Arthur here

  Crevel, René here, here

  Crommelynck, Aldo here

  Crown of Thorns here

  CRS here, here, here

  Cubists here, here

  Dado, (Miodrag Đurić) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Dalí, Salvador here

  D’Annunzio, Gabriele here

  Dante here, here

  Daumier, Honoré here

  David, Jacques-Louis here

  de Chirico, Giorgio here

  de Gaulle, General Charles here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Debray, Rosine here

  Dédé here

  Degas, Edgar here, here, here, here, here, here, here

  Delacroix, Eugène here, here

  Delaunay, Sonia here, here

  Deleuze, Gilles here, here

  Delon, Alain here

  Deneuve, Catherine here, here, here

  Derain, André here

  Derrida, Jacques here

  Descartes, René here, here

  Desert Rose here

  Desportes, Madame here

  Deyrolle taxidermy here

  Dickens, Charles here

  Dietrich, Marlene here, here, here

  Diva here

  Doisneau, Robert here

  Downing, Joe here, here

  Dubuffet, Jean here, here, here, here, here

  Duchamp, Marcel here, here, here, here

  Duchamp, Teeny here

  Dupin, Jacques here, here, here

  Duras, Marguerite here, here

  Durrell, Lawrence here, here

  Duthuit, Claude here

  Dyer, George here, here, here, here, here, here

  Dylan, Bob here

  Ecole Normale Supérieure here, here, here, here, here, here

  Eiffel Tower here