Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  It was four o’clock on this Sunday afternoon in Belleville, and streets were busy with conversation or the game of boule. The photographer paused to chat with an elderly stranger, in an easy yet detached manner.

  The older man, like most people, but particularly those with memories of desolation of wars and celebrations of peace, gushed with so many stories to tell, and so few to tell them to. But the young man listened with a distracted ear.

  Discretion and respect for privacy always got the better of my yearning to ask, and perhaps it should not have. Unexpressed empathy remains invisible, after all. Earlier that year, in the little town of Terrasson, in the valley of Dordogne, which still openly bears war’s ravages, a woman cried as she told of the courageous lives lost during the Resistance, and of the terrible division between French and French. And not just the old, as it turned out, but many young lives as well who need to share theirs.

  Down a narrow alley, about a dozen African children aged perhaps from two to ten passed away their time in a small, treeless inner courtyard surrounded by four stories of windows, presumably behind which some elder would keep a watchful eye. They greeted us gently, without wariness; the boys resumed playing soccer, and I kicked the ball a couple of times with them. The man started shooting away with his Nikon, and the girls rushed to me with curiosity and warmth.

  In this society where each is still defined by his role, it didn’t take long to realize that mine was to keep the children occupied. A role not only assigned by the photographer, but unintentionally as well by the children’s parents, whom I never met. In no time I became their big sister, as we hugged and chatted, huddled on the ground, against a wall. Two of them eagerly rushed back to their ground floor homes and gave me their prized possessions, colorful paintings they had done in school.

  Rarely in my travels to the ends of the world have I encountered such sensitive, spontaneously trusting, but affection-starved, tender young souls. The girls said their mothers were busy working, sharing the same husband who seemed to return often to Africa. They were thus pretty much left to their own devices. They were so many, yet so lonely.

  As I debated whether to photograph them, the same doubts nagged at me, compounded by the additional sense of betraying a child’s trust, in spite of their apparent obliviousness to the photographer. And there was also the question of the act of photography, by which I was backing away, consciously or not, instead of surrendering my heart to them as they had to me. Perhaps I unconsciously knew what would eventually transpire.

  Photography by its very nature creates a distance, establishing the relationship of subject and object through the intermediary of the lens, a safe but disengaged sort of distance. Perhaps both through this detached yet faithful capturing and reflection of object, and subjective sentiment, true photography is nostalgic in essence.

  But I refused the role of caretaker and companion which was assigned to me, all the more readily, it seemed, because of the Oriental stereotypes which preceded me. I saw shapes, texture; I sensed reflections of mood, theirs and mine.

  There is a photograph of hands, theirs, one atop another. I reflect with a certain sadness that my hand could not have been one of them. There is another of the eldest beaming proudly with her painting, which almost overwhelms her.

  In yet another, in the blinding sun, against dirty white-washed walls, a little boy who did not take to soccer to fill his void, sits with sad, expressive eyes, looking at nothing in particular. This vision transported me to a certain Africa where perhaps his dreams are not strangers.

  In Paris, this apparent dislocation is not more or less unusual than that of the regal West African woman coifed with her brilliant headdress riding the Métro with the black-on-black Parisian sophisticate; or, on that same Métro, the long-robed Senegalese Muslim (much like the one who sold me an exquisite sculpture from Mali), next to the dignified, humble gentleman wearing the same formal tweed jacket he has owned for the last 30 years, in a careful life without waste.

  I hoped to redress the imbalance between subject and object by letting the children take a turn at the camera. But the sweetest, youngest, and the most sensitive girl finally asked me to put it away. So I did.

  I did not fully grasp the meaning of this encounter until it was time to leave, after two hours. The same little one would simply not let go of me. Between her tearful pleadings and my attempts at reassurances, the only way I could leave without traumatizing her on the spot was to promise to return. It was then that the eldest explained that the man brought different female companions each time, and this was difficult for the younger children who would get attached—this time, they wished I would stay.

  On the way home, I was very pensive and heartsick—not only about the means to obtain photographs of people, but also of the casual human contacts which may not be so “casual” to some. Usually particularly careful with children, I had not foreseen this. Or had I?

  My flight had been dictated by my hope that I could find myself in a place where I would be treated more personal, and my fate less austerely sealed. And Paris had done this for me by leaving me completely alone. I lived in Paris for a long time without making a single French friend, and even longer before I saw the inside of a French home. This did not really upset me, either, for Henry James had been there before me and had had the generosity to clue me in. Furthermore, for a black boy who had grown up on welfare and the chicken-shit goodwill of American liberals, this total indifference came as a total relief and even as a mark of respect. If I could make it, I could make it—so much the better. And if I couldn’t, I couldn’t—so much the worse. I didn’t want any help, and the French certainly didn’t give me any. They let me do it myself and for that reason, even knowing what I know, and unromantic as I am, there will always be a kind of love story between myself and that odd, unpredictable collection of bourgeois chauvinists who call themselves la France.

  —James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

  On one hand, isn’t it better to give a little than not at all? On the other, how much can one give if it is without long-term commitment? What could really be a substitute for a parent’s love? The boys, who did not cry, emitted a certain sadness and perhaps repressed bitterness at being lightly befriended as objects of photographs the man will sell.

  I was torn between the desire to return for the children, and the inevitably daunting task of filling the maternal, or paternal, void in their emotional lives. With time, it became increasingly difficult to go back, and I’d hope they would forget so as to soothe my guilt, even though experience had already taught me children never forget promises.

  Was this not best after all than to re-open an ever-growing wound? I was only a transient myself, far from entrenched and stabilized in life. I couldn’t assume responsibility over fragile lives for which I could do little but offer unattainable dreams.

  I still don’t know. As I write, I wish to see them again, and offer a painting or photograph in return, a piece of my soul they could keep when I’m gone.

  But I won’t be able to look up rue Watt anymore. Even Robert Doisneau could not save his beloved street as it was literally obliterated from the map, another sacrifice to the Bibliothèque and its underground parking. In ancient places like Paris, one routinely treads upon the past. History and the unseen always catch up in surprisingly mundane ways, such as the time commuter train renovation work encountered possibly live bombs from the two World Wars, immobilizing circulation for a few days. On a brighter note, Louvre excavations yielded a nearly structurally complete medieval version under the one we now know.

  I did not want to know whether the street was just buried for future archeology, or bulldozed through. The lives it touched threw a boisterous farewell street party, complete with live bands, street art and street artists, to this inert object whose soul and brief existence remains enshrined by the camera, as the light was slowly banished.

  As for the photographer, his ulterior motives became transparent when he cal
led me the following weekend for a houseboat party on the Seine. I gently turned down his offer, while expressing willingness to see the children again, but he hung up.

  Much later, a friend related to me his experience as a naïve amateur photographer venturing onto a houseboat party with his model. It had been advertised as a photographic opportunity, and turned out to be a shocking promotion of sexual voyeurism. Apparently this is quite common, and in banal coexistence with the great French camera tradition, many newsstand “photography” magazines sell erotic female nudes and other less provocative photographs of “charm.” This was not necessarily the kind of party I had been invited to, but it was a reminder of a certain type of exploitation for strictly personal interest, in the name of art.

  Inside a crate, in the hull of a ship which left Le Havre several months ago on its way to the New World, lie a drawing and a dozen photographs of the girls to whom I can no longer attach names, whose melancholy and thirst for love and life still haunt me.

  Thérèse Lung is a software engineer who travels as often as she can. She has lived in Taiwan, Geneva, New York, and Boston and currently calls San Francisco home.

  Nothing is more relaxing than to live among people who let you be yourself—not as a favor to you, but because they want the same freedom for themselves. The French have the virtue of their vice: an individuality so fierce it has produced a dozen political parties and made France almost impossible to govern, yet, at the same time, has produced Paris, the most civilized of cities, and made France the second home of all civilized men. If you personally assume the mission of straightening out your neighbor’s morals, behavior, and non-conformist politics, you might as well forget your peace of mind.

  —Joseph Barry, “La Relaxe and French Skepticism”

  ROBERT DALEY

  Monsieur de Paris

  Who will execute the executioner?

  BEHIND THIS WALL AT 35, RUE DE PICPUS THERE COME TOGETHER a number of strands of French history, and some of American history as well. It is a plain address on a plain street in the working-class 12th arrondissement. It is not mentioned in guidebooks. There are no tourist buses pulled up outside. The first time I came here I wasn’t sure it was the place, because from the sidewalk nothing shows. I had been round and round the block searching. I kept coming upon two great wooden doors in the wall with a smaller wooden door inset into one of them, and finally I opened the small door and peered inside. I saw a large gravel courtyard surrounded by buildings, including a church. The concierge’s loge was off to the right, together with a sign: “Visits permitted only from two o’clock to four.”

  A woman of about 60 answered my knock. This was the right place, she said, but it was now five past four and closed.

  I gave her a smile. I was late by only five minutes, I said, and actually I had been here on time, but I couldn’t find it—

  “Je regrette, monsieur.”

  I don’t know why I persisted, for I knew Parisian concierges. But I had come all the way from America, I told her. I was going home tomorrow. I was only five minutes late. This was my last chance to see something important to me.

  “Je regrette, monsieur.”

  It occurred to me to slip her 50 francs. But to succeed at bribing people takes a certain grace. “Perhaps if I give you something you could make an exception,” I said. Instead of just doing it I had had to announce it first. Beautiful.

  Her manner became haughty. She said “Je regrette” again and closed the door on me.

  There was an iron door in the wall beside the church. It was locked. I knew what was behind it. I wanted to go through it, and couldn’t.

  I went into the church. The usual gloomy church, lit principally by candles. About a dozen nuns wearing the elaborate white habits of my youth knelt in pews in prayer, keeping a permanent vigil there. They worked around the clock in relays. That’s what they did for a living. They belonged to the Order of the Sacred Heart and were semicloistered. I watched one or two new ones come in and others go out. I had forgotten there were nuns who still dressed in such habits, that prayer vigils still existed.

  In the lateral chapels, immense white marble plaques bordered in black were fixed to the walls. On them were inscribed the names, ages, professions, and dates of each of the victims out in the garden. I walked over and peered up at the names, first in one chapel, then in the other. Some were familiar to me. The nuns on their knees paid no notice. There were about 1,500 names in all. For a moment 1,500 living people marched through my head. The impression it made was overpowering, and I resolved to make one more try at the garden.

  A side door up by the altar rail might lead out into the garden. I went through it. The worst that could happen was that I would run into some nun; if so, I would bluff my way past her. I had gone through grade school with nuns like this. I was not afraid of nuns.

  But I had come out into a corridor, not the garden, and I met not one nun but three. The first two gave me a startled look. The third said sharply. “Monsieur, vous désirez quelque chose?” And she pointed, exactly in the manner of my grade-school teachers, back in the direction I had come.

  Thoroughly humiliated, I went back into the church, out the front door, and back to my hotel.

  Today I knock again on the concierge’s loge. Some months have passed. This time she is all smiles. I am acquainted with few important people in France, but one is the Count de Chambrun, a descendant of Lafayette, who has called her on my behalf. Normally, she tells me with a smile, visitors are not permitted at this hour. However, she’s always happy to make an exception for a guest from America like me. I smile right back. Clearly she does not remember me. I remember her well enough. She hands me a heavy bunch of keys and points to the gate to the garden. I tip her 50 francs. It would seem churlish not to. The money disappears into her apron and she thanks me profusely.

  The keys are as big as the keys to a jail, and I open the iron door and go through.

  The garden is much bigger than I had thought: about 300 yards long, about 60 wide. It is bigger than some parks, an enclave of greenery entirely surrounded by buildings. There are long alleys of trees, mostly horse chestnuts and lindens, and flat sweeps of lawn. The cemetery is in the far right corner. Its gate is locked too—the French lock up everything. But one of my keys opens it, and I go in.

  Lafayette’s grave is easy enough to find, for over it flies an American flag. I don’t know when the flag was first put up, but it has never come down. It flew all during the German occupation, which surprises me less than it evidently does some people. Probably, like most modern tourists, the Germans didn’t know it was there, nor the tomb, not even the garden. Lafayette’s wife Adrienne lies beside him, I note, and George Washington de Lafayette behind them both. Just beyond these tombs under the trees, stones mark the place where are buried almost 1,500 headless corpses.

  At the start of the Revolution this was a convent, as it is now, but the nuns were forced out, their sacred vessels, paintings, and stained glass confiscated, their chapel demolished and its stones sold to builders. A man named Riedain rented the property from the State, lived in one of the buildings, and in partnership with another man ran what was called a maison de santé et de détention—a euphemism for a kind of prison hospital. Actually what they ran was a profitable extortion. “Enemies of the nation” (a great many euphemisms were in vogue at this time) could claim to be sick, get themselves sent here, and, for as long as their money or their relatives’ money held out, avoid the guillotine. Usually they did not stay long. As more and more goods and property got confiscated, as relatives got arrested too, they were dumped back into the mainstream, en route towards what the men in charge called the Sword-Blade of the Law—the populace, being less pious, called it the National Razor.

  By the summer of 1794 the guillotine and the nauseating odor that went with it had been moved several times. Death by decapitation was incredibly messy. The blood pooled on the paving stones underneath. The executioner had a hose and at
the end of each day’s work would hose off the scaffold, the blade, washing more blood down among the stones. In the summer heat it decomposed rapidly, attracted flies, and gave off a stench. Whole neighborhoods first stank, then protested.

  The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs.

  —Alphonse de Lamartine Count d’Orsay

  In June of 1794 the instrument was moved again, just in time for the start of the Revolution’s busiest summer. Over 1,300 men, women, and children were executed in a month and a half at the new site, the Place du Trône, today’s Place de la Nation, which is four or five blocks from where I stand. Thirty-eight heads were lopped off on the first day, including 26 belonging to members of the Toulouse parliament, 42 heads two days later, and 61 the day after that. The record seems to have been 68 on July 7, including the 80-year-old Abbé de Salignac Fénélon (some accounts say he was 69), who had founded a home for the small orphan boys who were the chimney sweeps of Paris. A detachment of weeping boys followed the tumbrel to the scaffold, where the priest asked that his hands be unbound so he could give them a final blessing. The entire mob went to its knees as he traced the cross in the air. Ten days later, singing hymns, a convent of Carmelite nuns, about whom Poulenc later wrote an opera, genuflected to their Mother Superior, climbed the steps one by one, and were decapitated. There were sixteen of them in all. One was a novice. Two were 78 years old.