I walked along the Seine, cut through the streets to Saint-Sulplice, where I planned to have a drink in the Café de la Mairie, the place where Perec may have written the book I’d just purchased. By the time I arrived, I was sweating, my feet black with dirt. There were no chairs available outside, so I headed to the Jardin du Luxembourg, to Boulevard Montparnasse and to the cemetery where I spent forty-five minutes looking for Cioran’s grave.
The next day was hotter. I caught the train and went to the Pompidou Centre. Bored after three hours, I walked along the Seine to Galignani, where I looked for the Tao Lin book, but couldn’t find it. I crossed the Pont Royal and walked along the Boulevard Raspail down to the cemetery, where I spent thirty minutes looking for Cioran’s grave. I even asked someone, but they pointed in the direction where I’d already spent hours searching.
The final day was hotter. I was meeting someone for a drink. I caught the train. I was early and didn’t feel like visiting another gallery or bookshop, so I headed through the Latin Quarter and stopped in the Taverne de Cluny for a pre-beer beer. I looked at my notes from eight years ago: “Père Lachaise — we saw the graves of Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Paul Éluard, Guillaume Apollinaire, Raymond Roussel and others I have already forgotten. Later, we sat outside the Taverne de Cluny reading our books, drinking beer. The sacred is enacted in bars, in pubs, in the compulsive community of friends and strangers”. Imbrication. Cioran: “The only moments I think of with relief are those when I sought to be nothing for anyone, when I blushed at the notion of leaving the slightest trace in the memory of a single human being”.
At a Remove
Cody Delistraty
Few nations are obsessed with the past quite like France. I think back frequently, for instance, to 2002, when one of the far-right National Front’s favored rally cries was, “Martel 732, Le Pen 2002!” which attempted to link Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-Muslim immigration policies to Charles Martel, the Duke and Prince of the Franks in the mid-eighth century, who was known for halting an Islamic advance into Western Europe. The facts aren’t exactly correct — these lepénistes were probably referring to the Umayyad invasion of Gaul, which was likely not exactly in 732 CE but rather sometime between 719–759 — but the fact that even in racism, the French insist on a knowledgeable weaponization of the past helps attest to the truism that there is no single French memory; there are only politicized interpretations, myths constructed ex-post for use as present and future justifications.
Today, French intellectuals continue to argue about the lives and proper symbolism of figures going as far back as Joan of Arc. The first Revolution likewise continues to be a central historical moment leveraged by both the left and the right. Every French political party, wrote the historian Robert Gildea in The Past in French History, has tried “to develop an interpretation of the Revolution that sustained its goals, and to universalize that interpretation while attacking the legitimacy of rival interpretations”. More generally, said the historian Robert Darnton, “History has always been a battleground in France”.
The French attention to the past goes beyond even the cerebral and intellectual as it is a country that is, for one, markedly behind the rest of the Western world in its lack of technology; its elites tend toward Catholicism; its art world pushes against the contemporary, tending toward the traditional, sometimes the ancient. A sense of grandeur, regionalism, a fetishization of the farmer, of la France profonde, of hyper-designed gardens and urban spaces — in all of this, France seems not so much stuck in its past, as, in fact, preferring to live in it.
This life in the past — this removal from so much of the rest of the world — is, to someone living there, at once freeing and stultifying. I have lived in Paris, off and on, since I was eighteen. I was there first to study at a satellite campus of my American university in a small schoolhouse tucked behind huge blue doors in the sixteenth arrondissement, which has since, regrettably, been converted into a chichi private British high school. I returned to Paris most summers, then did my graduate dissertation research there, before — having worked for a year in New York — returning to Paris for a few more years.
I often wonder why I come and go so frequently, as I still do, but I think it largely comes from this feeling of living at a remove. Paris has always been a place, for me at least, to recharge and to reflect, but rarely has it been a place for me to move forward, in jobs, in relationships, in what is so often called “life”. Perhaps that will change. A part of me hopes it doesn’t. There is something increasingly rare, increasingly sacred about a place that does not move in lockstep with all of the others. French society might, in many ways, be imprisoned by its allegiance to ideas of resistance, of a paradoxical kind of revolution that has workers taking to the streets to maintain the status quo; but this apparent imprisonment is also a kind of self-exile onto an ideological island. And the allure of that island is a certain freedom. Freedom from the rush toward power and wealth, from the day-to-day, minute-to-minute ethos that says productivity is the only legitimate measurement of oneself, as it so often is in New York and London. Freedom from the obligations of checking the marks of what tends toward that definition of “a normal life”: an office job, a significant other, a movement toward marriage, toward retirement, toward property ownership and its ilk. There are romantic Parisian images of taking a coffee at the sidewalk café, but such an image serves best to highlight the most brutal of fallacies of life elsewhere — that is, if a “life” is defined only by a progression toward marriage and up a career ladder, one might as well quit living. What a bore! What a lark!
But working toward freedom takes its toll. Trying to be free is tiring business, and whenever I finally do leave Paris after staying there for a few days, a few months, a few years, when I look out my airplane window, the capital moving fast away from me, I have the distinct feeling of finally being free from trying to be free.
With President Emmanuel Macron, some changes have already arrived — from funded technology incubators in Paris to corporate tax cuts — but as the rest of the world dips into a nationalist, isolationist politics, France also persists in its commitment to liberal democracy1. Even in its modernity, France is still running behind. Indeed, often that is for the best.
It’s difficult to say if Paris, if France, will continue to be a holdout from so much of the rest of the West. Much has been written on national histories and constructed stories, so while it would be foolish to ask whether France will continue to romanticize its revolts against its monarchs just as we Americans romanticize our own revolt from the Brits (the answer: yes, of course), one wonders whether France should throw itself into the future, into the technologies and politics and a more clear-eyed self-historicizing. But I worry. The world needs its places that remain at a remove, that live especially in their constructed pasts even as they manipulate them for present purposes. Without a place like Paris, we’re all too often blindly moving forward, able to look up, down, and ahead but rarely inward, where, after all, change must originate. To offer itself up as an ideological island, as a place of existential remove to which to escape is one of Paris’ greatest gifts, whether or not it knows that’s what it has long provided.
1 This piece was written shortly before the rise of the gilets jaunes movement (ed.).
The Private Life of Quasimodo
H.P. Tinker
Quasimodo is sitting in the window of an Art Deco café decorated in the style of an American diner. Leaning on an Arne Jacobsen chair in a silver polo neck. Sipping from a bowl of beetroot soup. Quixotic eyes. Prominent cheekbones. Unusually retroussé nose.
Where is Esmeralda? he wonders, glancing around.
Suddenly Dahlia appears like a turn-of-the-century tarot card reader — black silk scarf, long gold necklace, red lipstick, thick black mascara…
“I’m looking for a handsome older gentleman,” she says, extending a bunch of ethically-farmed tulips.
(Warm applause undulates around the otherwis
e empty room.)
“I’m not old,” complains Quasimodo.
(Silence.)
“What are you going to call the baby?” he asks, strolling through a bustling, malodorous quarter of the city populated by horse-driven carriages and middle-aged academics dressed in medieval attire.
“Sometimes I want to call the baby Amantine Lucile Aurore,” Dahlia says. “Other days I prefer Dido Belle. Mostly though I’d like to call the baby Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven…”
“Not all babies are the same,” Quasimodo warns her.
“They can change things, cause great disruption. Some have personalities of their own.”
“Not mine,” says Dahlia.
Dahlia is twenty-nine and speaks of her friends and her friends’ babies for some minutes. At the Père Lachaise cemetery she regales him with unlikely facts gleaned from watching late-night documentaries late at night.
“You have a lovely chest,” Quasimodo says.
“So do you,” says Dahlia.
Quasimodo’s new apartment on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs smells of newspaper ink, fresh car exhaust, experimental cinema. Tall men in uniforms build beds and wardrobes as he unpacks a pile of brown Gothic paperbacks: Voltaire’s Candide, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, Georges Perec’s A Void, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised…
Next morning a neighbour arrives on the doorstep in a cavalier hat.
“I’m d’Artagnan,” he says, thrusting a hand into the space between them.
His trademark goatee wispier than in days of yore, d’Artagnan reminisces about the Ancien Régime while Quasimodo makes herbal tea in the kitchen. “We thought we knew it all,” he says. “Dining on pâtés, mousses, truffles. Fighting wars, shooting heroin, sleeping with countesses. We thought we could change the world with a lick of eyeliner and a dash of rouge. How wrong we were. Those muskets were useless too. They could blow up in your face and you had to clean them between shots. The accuracy wasn’t great either.”
D’Artagnan strokes his chin, rubs his face, makes deep, soulful riffs on the importance of personal hygiene late into the afternoon…
Tuesday. Quasimodo doesn’t call his brother again. He opens a bottle of Château Latour even though it’s only 3:30pm, a time of day generally considered too early for the traditional opening of a bottle of Château Latour. After several glasses he’s convinced his mother and father will come back to life, visit the apartment, dispense kind words and wisdom, straighten him out a little.
Instead, yellowy leaves throw themselves down from the trees outside.
Pretty soon the trees outside are practically naked.
“I think the baby’s on the way,” Dahlia informs him grimly.
Sitting in the Café de Flore, Quasimodo worries about Dahlia and the baby. A team of student documentary makers are here filming a lengthy close-up of his coffee cup. “Art has become too serious,” Quasimodo declares. “Nobody whistles any more. But the time for action has passed. We’ve all grown older. The time for reflection is upon us…”
Quickly, a colloquial crowd gathers around him. Poets. Models. Dope peddlers. Pimps. Literary agents. The air turning blue with the kind of language many contemporary readers find offensive; the atmosphere bristling with displaced sexuality.
Not mine though, Quasimodo thinks. Everybody else’s.
Quasimodo already has a baby of his own, nearly fully grown and causing all sorts of trouble. He recalls standing in the suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye years before, watching Esmeralda unleash her almighty fury upon him and anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity. One afternoon, declaring herself Emperor of France, she grabbed a knife, cut off her hair, and left for a Hungarian pianist. That was on Rue Bonaparte where they made the first baby. There was another baby too, Quasimodo remembers, one never quite born.
December. “Hope you’re having a good day!” Dahlia says. “I’ve had the baby now though it was somewhat traumatic getting him here…”
Walking along Boulevard Saint-Michel there’s a new smell in town, hot and metallic. Throughout the Latin Quarter, a pandemonium of shouts. Discordant cries. Situationists dancing the Madison. Immigrants being bitchslapped and punched.
“What is this?” Quasimodo asks a beatnik in black.
“Some lame political shit,” the beatnik explains.
Streets swept by machine-gun fire, Quasimodo ducks into La Rotonde. Inside, everything very red: red walls, red drapes, red roses, red wine, red faces.
“I’m worried about Marguerite,” says Esmeralda.
“What are you worried about?” asks Quasimodo.
“I’m worried she’s going to end up like you.”
“Would that really be so bad?”
“Oh, yes. Can you have a word?”
Green crêpes hurtle expeditiously towards them. “Why do you have such appalling taste in men?” Quasimodo asks.
“How does that explain you?” Esmeralda replies. “Anybody can get lucky once.”
“Well, I fell for your public image. You were never what anyone would call a good-looking man…”
In the courtyard behind his apartment the trees seem to have grown inexplicably overnight. Quasimodo closes his eyes, tries to picture the future, but can’t quite see himself in it. Marguerite is on the sofa sickening with something, having watched The Man in the High Castle on Netflix. Quasimodo is sickening too, genuine beads of sweat sliding down his forehead.
Marguerite is sixteen and disdainful of almost everything he says and does.
“Thursdays are my worst days of the week,” says Marguerite.
“Why’s that?” asks Quasimodo.
“Because I come here,” she says, glaring at his gold-embroidered breeches.
“Well, your mother wanted me to have a chat…”
“She talks crap, dad,” says Marguerite.
“I know,” says Quasimodo. “God knows I know.”
Quasimodo retreats into the kitchen, contemplates a drink. Am I just a common or garden alcoholic? he wonders, nearly out loud.
Saturday night on the Rue de la Gaîté. Leaning against a zinc bar in a voluminous necktie and velvet three-piece suit. An unshaven philosopher ordering two large cognacs, both for himself. “Monsieur Quasimodo,” he says in a mid-Atlantic accent, rather like Cary Grant. “The days come along one after the other. Then a year is gone. Then ten years are gone. Then everything is gone. Then you’re gone. It’s a cliché, but you think it’s going to be all right — and, of course, it never is…’
“In terms of wrestling with your own psyche, I’ve been there,” says Quasimodo. “After guesting in Bardot’s New Year special, I quit bellringing and moved to Hollywood. I met Linda Ronstadt, Henry Winkler, Carole King, Ringo Starr. Hung out with Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson. Played Charlie Laughton in a biopic. But my career never took off. There was no place for a charismatic hunchback. I lacked the requisite chutzpah. People like Burt Reynolds and Terry Stamp had the charm and the chat, but I saw things in myself I didn’t like. I was living a louche life, having a great time. But I was fifteen pounds heavier and looked like Henry James. Anyway, after two decades in exile, countless lovers, a short prison sentence, several religions and a divorce, finally I came home…”
Quasimodo scrunches his face, thinking, thinking, thinking.
“I must have been quite an ass to leave Paris,” he says, ruefully downing a Hemingway mojito, a Faulkner mint julep, a Kerouac margarita, a Fitzgerald gin rickey…
Stepping into the night, the more sequestered streets uncannily resemble a dystopian tourist attraction. Flying cars, elevated walkways, gargantuan palaces of steel and glass. Quasimodo suddenly feeling inspired to cook some of his favourite meals again. Maybe his pumpkin polenta. His tofu tagine. Perhaps his crispy kale.
January will be different, Quasimodo thinks.
Soon it is March.
Quasimodo sitting at his antique writing desk, not writing. By now
the book industry is undergoing another crisis of identity and popular music is steeped in all kinds of queer introspection. Unexpectedly an old friend invites him over, greeting him barefoot at the door wearing a long white hooded garment similar to the monk’s cowl worn by Honoré de Balzac. Petite with cropped hair and feline features, Aphrodite is a visual artist known for running around the Canal Saint-Martin cigar in hand. Her apartment a maze of books, birdcages, half-finished canvases of herself, walls adorned with pages torn from the erotica collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
“Let’s not talk gender theory or Hélène Cixous,” says Aphrodite.
“Okay,” says Quasimodo.
“Would you like to put your penis inside me instead?” says Aphrodite.
“Okay,” says Quasimodo.
Back at his apartment, Quasimodo sips Château Latour in a bright red Eames chair while Jacques Dutronc sings “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans”, “September of My Years”, “Once Upon a Time”, “It Gets Lonely Early”, “There’s a Flaw in My Flue”, “Somewhere Along the Way,” “When the World Was Young”, “These Foolish Things”…
Christ, thinks Quasimodo, slicing an onion. Soon I’ll be fifty.
Stabbed in the heart by a thousand tiny memories he crumples to the floor, wine-dark blood cells spilling from his dangling thumb, flowing through the apartment, dampening his once singular resolve.
“What do you think is causing these wounds?” asks Doctor Polanski.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 30
