It was, in fact, through some ostensibly respectable contact met through the Pierre-Solanges that her life changed once again, though later she could never recall just what the tenuous social links had been.
She remembered an agreed meeting in a dark bar off St Germain des Prés. She remembered a rapid drive westwards out of Paris in a car crowded with three men and two other women. She remembered a strange house, with music and laughter and a great deal to drink, and then finding herself alone in a bedroom with one of the men. Rescued just in time by the most resourceful of the women, she was eventually driven back to Paris by another of the men, who seemed to have constituted himself her protector. He was young, though a good deal older than her, since everyone then was older than she was. He was short and muscular, big-nosed, with curling dark hair. He seemed to her over-voluble; he made jokes she could not follow. His name was Serge. She liked him simply because he had been kind to her.
The next morning he sent her an affectionate pneumatique, asking her to meet him that evening for dinner and go with him to the Théâtre de la Huchette. She accepted readily. More nice food. Oh, good.
Three days later it was the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, when traditionally Parisians take to the squares and crossroads for evening dancing. The blast of amplified rock music that would fill the night skies of Paris on that fête by the end of the century lay in the unguessed future. The music then was provided, as it had been for the previous hundred years, by firemen’s brass bands or by accordions. Waltzing far into the summer night in Serge’s arms, to the perpetual shuffle of shoes around them on the cobbled ground, Julia was conscious of participating in a very long-standing Parisian ritual, probably far older than the Revolution it ostensibly commemorated. Serge assured her, with jokey solemnity, that it would continue long after they were both dead and gone. She liked being included in this way, by him.
That same night, just up the hill in Montparnasse, something occurred that was unknown to Serge at the time and hence to Julia. This was the death of Henri Calet, the writer who had taken his particular personal square mile of Paris to represent the entire world. He was only fifty-two but his heart gave out, quietly and all at once, as the beat of the band went gaily on in the street below.
It was three in the morning when, after a long walk to the Halles district and back for night-time onion soup, Julia finally convinced Serge to take her back to the Hôtel des Carmes. At that late hour the street door was shut, something Julia had not expected. At midnight, at one o’clock, even, when the last Metro was running, she had always found it open, but now … .
She did not have the experience to know that, had she pressed the bell, a somnolent member of the manager’s family would have aroused himself enough to buzz the door open for her. Serge did not tell her. So she went helplessly back with him to his flat in Montparnasse and yet another new life began for her.
Some time after, Serge was to say to her, in a tone of faint but honest apology:
‘I thought, tu vois, that if it wasn’t me it would very soon be someone else, so it might as well be me.’
Each had got the other wrong, as they were to agree years afterwards, meeting again for lunch. Serge had initially taken her to be yet another sweet but rather silly girl, fine for a brief liaison but nothing more. Julia, on her side, had grabbed unthinkingly at the chance – as she had grabbed at any chance in her makeshift life – to experience in Serge’s company a socially grander, more lavish and more interesting Paris life than she had been able to find so far on her own. Each was surprised, and a little disorientated, as they were forced to know one another better. Beneath the surface, their separate insecurities reached out to each other.
More than ten years after the Liberation of Paris, Serge, under a man-about-town air, was still fragile from the fear and humiliations that had haunted his Wartime teens. The family’s flight to Lyons, the assumed name and the false identity cards, the veiled taunts and glances, the elder brother deported for forced labour in Germany, the aunts and uncles who disappeared never to be seen again … All these things had marked him, indeed were to mark him, faintly and indelibly, for the rest of his long life.
One day, having learnt the little of Julia’s recent past that she could bring herself to tell him, he said in genuine puzzlement:
‘But, ma chérie, didn’t your father want you to stay at home with him, after what he has lived through?’ (après tout qu’il a vécu).
Julia’s throat constricted. How to explain that the answer was No? She had no ready explanation, either for herself or for anyone else, for the way in which her mother’s ending had managed to complete its destruction by blowing her father and herself apart. She had fetched up in this strange, alternative life. And of the little brother, abandoned to boarding school, she hardly dared think.
* * *
Not very long after, however, she received a summons home. She had been half agreeing to go with Serge to Brittany, where his parents, to whom he seemed much attached, had rented a house. But apparently exile was now suddenly over and she must return to London. Apparently a simulacrum of family life there was about to be arbitrarily resumed. In a new form and with a new member of the cast.
A rather hastily chosen newcomer, one might think, and it seemed that some people did think. ‘You see, dear,’ one relative wrote nervously to Julia, ‘your father has had such a rotten time for years, poor boy … And after all, he’s still quite a young man …’
Young man-in-love. It was a role in which Tom had always readily seen himself, ever since his idyll in Germany at eighteen. Clearly, it would be useless for Julia to stake any claim in that department herself. The map of Paris that she had been constructing for months as her new country of the mind and heart was to be rolled up again.
More literally, an eighteenth-century map was to be rolled up, one by Boisseau, which she had bought (with Serge’s encouragement) from one of the dealers’ stalls on the quays. It was her very first purchase of a kind of which, later in life, she was to make many more.
AFTERWARDS
Julia was to come back often to Paris, and to live there again for most of a year in her early twenties, but although Paris gave her much it was never, quite, the same. She had grown up, and seen other places and known other people.
Paris was changing too. The shanty towns at Clignancourt and Vanves were removed. The years passed, and in place of the huts made of tarpaulin and old petrol drums there was eventually built a roaring, raised, circular motorway, as much of a visual barrier round Paris as the old fortifs had been. Meanwhile the North African families who had made some sort of life for themselves in the huts had been deported further out, to the same serried ranks of slab buildings that were housing the dispossessed Parisian poor – an architecture that, in the worst tradition of French grandeur, despises the human scale. Metro lines were extended, and by and by once-pretty suburbs like Châtillon were invaded by shopping complexes and high-rise office blocks.
Serge’s elderly parents had long since migrated from Châtillon back to central Paris; his brother and sister had abandoned France for good in favour of America, for reasons not hard to understand. The promise of the three young children in the flowery garden at Châtillon had not, after all, been fulfilled in France where their parents had settled with so much hope. Was it really for lost Châtillon that Serge felt a momentary pang when he discovered an old photograph? Or for the loss of the future that had once been planned.
Within Paris the Halles, the one-time central markets with their wrought-iron pavilions, were summarily demolished in 1971 under the Grand Plan, in spite of many protests. The Halle aux Vins, the wholesale wine market that had been built on the Left Bank by the first Napoleon between the Maubert Quarter and the Jardin des Plantes, was replaced by a complex of wind-trapping skyscrapers housing the university’s science faculty. Another new tower, enormously high and black, rose on the site of the old Gare Montparnasse, where the famous locomotive had crashed through
the buffers in 1895. Soon other huge blocks and towers began to rise further west, filling the open view beyond the Arc de Triomphe at the top of Paris’s grandest boulevard. Motorways usurped the ancient river quays.
There were many larger schemes at this time to transform Paris into a version of New York, but President Pompidou, the chief enthusiast for this implausible project, died prematurely in 1974. Indignation by this time was loud, and was expressed not just by architectural historians but by large numbers of ordinary Parisians. Haussmann Paris, that had once appeared so alarming and modern in itself, had over the past century and more acquired a patina and become loved for its own sake. One of the first acts of Pompidou’s successor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, was to decree that no more skyscrapers should be built within Paris proper. At the same time, public opinion was so overwhelmingly opposed to the loss of any more of the beloved back-street fabric that at last a number of long-maintained schemes were finally abandoned. These included a particularly noxious one for the entire Latin Quarter that would have gouged out an extension of the Rue de Rennes as far as the Seine, obliterating the Rue Bonaparte. It would have eviscerated with a huge criss-cross road system the remaining old streets between there and the Boulevard St Michel, and (of course) destroyed the Maubert area. So, fully reprieved for the first time in almost two hundred years, the Rue St André des Arts, the Rues Hautefeuille, Huchette, St Séverin, Maître Albert and all the others began to be rehabilitated.
It was probably inevitable that this rehabilitation should involve the stones and timbers of the buildings rather than the lives of those who had been living there. Paris was at last, for better or worse, largely liberated from rent control. Market forces took over, and the whole nature of the Maubert area began to change. Gone were the playing children, the old women in broken-down shoes who fed stray cats, the cafés that sold wood and coal as well as wine and working-class cigarettes in yellow papier maïs. Accreted layers of old plaster, cement and pebble-dash were removed from façades, exposing to the light of a new day great seamed oak beams, hardened through their load-bearing centuries to the consistency of rock. Actual rocks, hand cut to size by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century workmen, were discovered round doors and windows, cleaned up and set off by fresh rendering in buttery hues. Carved street names and niches for tiny saints were disinterred. Meanwhile, inside the buildings, total transformations were taking place, as partitions, false ceilings, shaky glass-paned doors, flights of iron steps, obsolete sinks in dark corners, enamel pails, floor tiles, washing lines, dangerous loops of amateur electric wiring, corroded bird cages, flower pots with the dry ghosts of geraniums, collections of dusty bottles, the paraphernalia of a hundred different minor trades and all the rest of the humble clutter of past habitation was flung down into skips. By the 1980s, President François Mitterrand himself had a pied-à-terre in the Rue de Bièvre.
* * *
Julia lived for half a year in the Rue Bonaparte, and it was to this address that her grandfather wrote and told her of his own stay in the Quarter. She did not then realise, however, that the antiquarian book-dealers at no. 12, with a particular line in medical volumes, was the very business where he had worked. She used to look in its windows as she pattered homeward from the noisy cafés of St Germain des Prés. Sometimes, in addition to the books, there were objects for sale. For several weeks, on top of a pile of gold-embossed medical encyclopaedias, was an ivory woman about twenty centimetres long, in a loose gown, lying on a plinth. She had a pretty, rather chinless eighteenth-century face surrounded by beautifully sculpted tendrils of curling hair. She lay supine, her stomach protruding upwards, for she was nine months pregnant. The arch of her stomach, shaped like a tea-pot lid, had been lifted off, to display within a complete set of exquisitely carved reproductive organs and a baby ready in position to be born: tiny hands and feet, rope-like cord, spongy placenta. The expression of infantile confidence and docility on its miniature face matched the smug contentment on its mother’s. No apprehension of the biblical Great Pain and Peril of Childbirth was to be suggested here.
Julia was very tempted to buy this artefact but did not, for it was expensive and what (she said to herself) would she do with it? She realised that it was intended to serve as a medical illustration and teaching aid, from an era when such things were works of art constructed with loving skill, but she herself had embarked on a career as a writer, not a doctor.
Most of a lifetime was to pass before she was to see that unbought, lost ivory lady as something that had stretched out from the past and touched her. It had been a message from the Paris world of her great-great grandfather, Arthur Jacob, there in the window of her grandfather’s place of work, silently calling to her as she followed unknowingly in his tracks.
The years accumulated. Julia settled back in England, married, and created the family home she had missed in childhood; but France, as the archetypal Other Place, the point of reference and the parallel other existence she might have had, intermittently haunted her work. For many years she was visited by the fantasy that an alternative self was continuing its own existence somewhere on the Left Bank.
This was not like her mother’s fantasy of a lovely ‘real life’ continuing elsewhere. Julia did not envy her own doppelgänger. She was wary of her, and inclined to think that she had chosen a false path, but the increasingly alien ghost proved as resistant to oblivion as she apparently was to change. Passing through Paris, Julia would get sudden whiffs of her, almost-sightings. She apparently lived in one of those tiny apartments now being carved out of the old houses somewhere near St Germain des Prés – or, later, as the tide of gentrification moved eastwards, behind Place Maubert. She was not a writer, but perhaps worked in a publishing house, Julia thought. Or, this being Paris, more likely an art gallery. ‘Moving in creative circles’ rather than creating at first hand, as if her talent had been siphoned off into recreating herself. The actual nature of her work would not be as important to her as the sheer fact of being in Paris and having constructed a life there. She ‘knew interesting people’ and made a point of keeping up with cultural events. (‘This is the penalty of leaving your native land. It means transferring your roots into a shallower soil …’) She gave carefully planned little dinner parties, beautifully cooked. She dressed well, this ghost, more expensively than her English equivalent, hair nicely cut, make-up attended to, always the right scarf. No children, of course. And no husbands, or none that lasted …
Julia would sometimes think with guilty amusement that she was being unfair to the ghost, whose life might in practice have led her into paths of which she, Julia, was ignorant. But no more unfair than the ghost was to her. For ghost-Julia (Julia was sure) had based her life in Paris very substantially on the idea of having had a lucky escape from England, which to her remained a land of fog and custard and hypocrisy and drearily garish clothes and people who moaned on about depression … Huh, said Julia unkindly to the helpless ghost, you’d better watch it! What will you do with your cherished, interesting, cultured Left Bank life when all the people you’ve been despising in England have been dead and gone for years, and your assorted lovers are dead too, or rendered inoperative by age, or retired to places like Meung-sur-Loing with their wives? If depression should one day catch up with you after all, ma semblable, ma sœur … But this line of unforgiving fantasy seemed so dark that Julia retreated from it in shame. On one occasion, the pathos of this fossilised creature that she had invented almost overwhelmed her.
In any case, in the real world the real Julia had shifted her personal French territory away from Paris, to the still older rural France that many Parisians continue to carry within them. She adopted as her country of the mind a small segment of this deeply traditional France, whose only constant change was that of the seasons with their constant renewal. Putting down roots into this compost, she began to work on the history of the area and its people, and so, in a back-to-front way, constructed a French setting for herself. The child, who had tru
dged in the rain across Ashdown Forest and had been given a lift in a cart, witnessing an ancient way of life then on the verge of extinction, surfaced in her in another guise. She found that she had the capacity to offer back to the people of France their own vulnerable, receding pasts, and that they were grateful for this. The moment in the Hôtel des Carmes, when the populated past had first touched her with some intimation of her own future and what her task might be, had been a true one.
And in the day-to-day world, too, the Latin Quarter was changing. Spared now the external devastation that was visited on some less famous quarters, internally it was subject to a huge dismantling. By the 1990s streets that had, for centuries, sheltered workshops and small laundries, grocers and bakers, and still did when Julia lived in the Rue Bonaparte, gradually filled with businesses selling pictures, objets d’art and expensive clothes. The premises on the corner of the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue de l’Abbaye, which in Bertie’s day had housed an employment agency for servants and a florist (‘Wreaths a speciality’), was by the end of the twentieth century a retail outlet for Dior. Lemoigne’s old book-dealing premises long remained in the same trade, but today its forlorn windows offer minimalist designer furniture. In the Rue Maître Albert, at the other end of the Latin Quarter, a grocer’s survives, run by Vietnamese, but in place of the wine shop and the old clothes dealer there is an art gallery and a house-agent advertising flats for sums approaching a million euros.
For the first time in the thousand-year history of the Quarter, the students at its institutions of learning can no longer afford its rents, and nor even can the teachers. A pity, when general awareness of its long history of scholarship has never been higher. In the hot summer of 2005 some wit went round the Maubert area in the steps of Abelard, Agrippa and Dante, neatly pasting blue-and-white alternative street signs over existing ones. Via Anglicorum (Rue des Anglais), they read, Vicus Beveris (Place of the Beavers – the supposed origin of Rue de Bièvre). And Vicus Romanus – Latin Quarter. Because the sites chosen were high up, and because the labels were designed to look, at a glance, like standard street names, it took the municipality a while to notice them all and remove them.
Footprints in Paris Page 28
