Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  So again they let the Sansons go. Soon afterwards Charles-Henri became so busy and also so essential that he was never bothered again.

  There were not even recriminations once the Terror finally ended. Outraged or grief-stricken relatives might have come forward. None did. There might have been cries for revenge, but if there were no one heard them. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials Sanson would certainly have been arrested and prosecuted as a war criminal. But this was not 1945. He was a government functionary. He had obeyed orders. He had done his job. He died in bed in 1806.

  By then he had been succeeded by his son. Later came his grandson, sixth and last in the line, who got himself fired. He lost his job, and his descendants lost their jobs at the same time. Between 1840 and 1847 this last Sanson guillotined only eighteen people. He was supposed to be a tenderhearted executioner too, and this is offered as the reason he gave himself to gambling and fast women. He felt an intense revulsion for who he was and what he did that could be assuaged in no other way. But the result was unfortunate: he went heavily into debt and faced debtor’s prison.

  He pawned the guillotine for the sum he needed, 3,800 francs. He was hoping to be able to redeem it in time.

  But someone took a shot at the King (for France had kings again now). The would-be assassin was caught, and the authorities went looking for the executioner. Then they went looking for the guillotine. At first they couldn’t find either. Finally Sanson came back. He was 48 years old. The authorities redeemed the guillotine for him, the execution took place, and then they sacked him, and the family dynasty, after just under 200 years, was over.

  A new one promptly started. Louis Deibler became Monsieur de Paris. In 1870 the number of executioners was reduced to one, whose jurisdiction encompassed the entire country. There was only one guillotine too, plus a spare, of course; he and it moved about the roads as needed. Monsieur de Paris had become Monsieur de France. Louis Deibler was succeeded by his nephew Anatole Deibler, who was succeeded by his nephew Henri Desfourneaux, and then by André Obrecht, another nephew of Anatole, who performed the last public execution in 1939 and who later was credited with having “perfected” the guillotine—he put ball bearings instead of grease in the grooves. The great blade still weighed seventy pounds—now it dropped more quickly. When it spoke, people listened. With it Obrecht executed 387 criminals to 1977. He was something of a natty dresser. That is, he became famous for wearing his hat while he worked. There was perhaps something subliminal there—his clients had nothing to wear hats on. He kept going until he was 78 years old, then retired in favor of his nephew by marriage, Marcel Chevalier, the present incumbent and perhaps the last in history, for France abolished the death penalty in 1981.

  Every country has its “traditional” method of execution. The Spaniards garrote, the English hang, the Americans electrocute, and the French guillotine; and although the result is the same in all cases, it is the last-named that has so fascinated the world. The very thought of it, it is said, is enough to make a man feel a chill on the back of his neck. No method is “nice,” nor are they always instantaneous. Men in electric chairs jerk and sometimes fry. Men hanged sometimes squirm, strangling, for some time. However, the sensibilities of onlookers are not assaulted. The mess is self-contained. Hanging, garroting, electrocution—these can seem almost euphemisms for killing. The guillotine, by contrast, is graphic, noisy, bloody—the real thing.

  And so to a good many people, though not to the French, who remained married to it for so long, it has seemed by far the most horrible method of judicial death. The condemned man, philosophically speaking, is more than executed. His arteries fountain after he is dead, and he goes into his coffin mutilated, his head under his arm, retribution having been carried out seemingly even on his corpse. He will remain both killed and mutilated until the end of time. This is a heavy notion, and everyone who ever pondered the guillotine as a method of execution (condemned men in their cells have tended to ponder it a lot) has had to come to grips with it.

  Robert Daley’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Esquire, Playboy, Vogue, Reader’s Digest, and Paris Match. He has served as a New York City deputy police commissioner and gone hunting for sunken treasure in the Caribbean. He is the author of many books, including Prince of the City and Portraits of France, from which this story was excerpted. He lives with his wife in Connecticut and Nice.

  Another off-season treat was a visit to one of the Marché aux puces (Market of Fleas). The largest Paris flea market, open on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, is on the edge of the city in a grimy, no-frills town called Saint-Ouen. On a Saturday morning, it attracts lovers of the second-hand, the rare, and the unusual. In October or November there are few tourists to clutter the stalls and few pickpockets, and normally taciturn dealers have more time to talk.

  This Market of Fleas is the best-known market of its kind in the world, with more than three thousand separate stalls in various buildings, under tarpaulins, and along rambling alley-ways covered with tin roofs. There is china, porcelain, furniture, postcards, posters, lamps, rugs, silverware, toys, and objets d’art. There is, in short, little that cannot be unearthed here.

  The market was founded in 1885, when the city fathers banished the junkmen and ragpickers of Paris to this neighborhood near Porte de Clignancourt, just beyond the Paris city limits. The “market of fleas” was no doubt an apt description of conditions at that time and for years after. It became a weekend market that took advantage of the large numbers of Parisians passing through Saint-Ouen to flee the city for a day in the country. Most of the dealers here are specialists and the chances of unearthing a Matisse are virtually nil. But there are savings of fifteen percent to twenty percent off city prices.

  —Everett Potter, “Paris in Winter,” Relax

  CORI KENICER

  La Photo

  Your life can change in a flash.

  OFF TO A ROMANTIC DINNER AT LE PRE CATELAN, A SWANKY restaurant nestled in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, we settled into the roomy back seat of a luxurious Mercedes taxi. Trees in the dense woods took on shadowy forms as darkness descended early on this cool October evening. As traffic slowed down, we began to notice striking figures strategically positioned under certain trees, posing for passing motorists. We gazed in amazement as gorgeous women with long flowing hair sensuously opened skimpy kimonos to reveal curvaceous bodies clad only in minuscule G-strings.

  “They must be freezing!” I said, while my husband gazed raptly at this cornucopia of delights, here a redhead, there a brunette, opening and closing their short kimonos with tantalizing slowness. With a photographer’s zeal, he grabbed his trusty Nikon to record the scene. The brief flash lit up the crisp night air. Once past the site, we wondered if we had seen a mirage, but our thoughts quickly turned to the three-star dinner that awaited us.

  Moments later we heard a horrendous clattering on the sidewalk, rapidly approaching. In fact, it was the sound of six pairs of high heels in hot pursuit of our taxi. Traffic was only inching along, so we were almost stopped when the back door was yanked open by the fastest runner, who screamed in our faces, “La photo! Nous demandons la photo!” Our shock at the forceful demand was overshadowed by the realization that this was no Folies showgirl! Instead, we were confronted with a heavily made-up male face—bright red lipstick, eye-shadow and rouge thickly applied to jowly rough skin. This apparition screamed French obscenities in a deep, angry voice, while banging on the taxi with a huge, hairy fist. The sheer kimono barely covered the male transsexual’s voluptuous breasts so recently bared.

  Momentarily stunned, I shrank into the deep recesses of the seat while my husband argued valiantly in broken French. By this time they had all arrived. Any attempt at feminine allure was cast aside. No more preening for the voyeurs. Now they were guys and they were mad, swaggering, yelling, and threatening. The makeup and peek-a-boo outfits notwithstanding, we knew they were serious.

  Somehow my husband managed to wres
t the car door away and slam it hard, imploring the taxi driver to “Go quickly!” All he got in reply was a blank stare until he repeated in French, “Allez, vite, vite!” A quick getaway was impossible, given the situation, but the car pulled away and had picked up a little speed when we heard outraged squealing and loud protestations that someone’s hand was caught in the door. I had visions of our taxi “dragging a drag queen” through the Bois de Boulogne. Would our insurance cover the lawsuit?

  The French law is very clear and strict about impromptu street encounters. Regardless of fault, in the case of a dispute, the person who touches the other first is wrong.

  —William Wharton,

  Houseboat on the Seine

  We had no choice but to stop, realizing too late that they were faking the hand-caught-in-the-door routine. Now they were really mad. Brawny fists pounded on the taxi while the driver held his head, lamenting “mon taxi, mon taxi,” and the car came dangerously close to rolling over with us in it.

  Why didn’t we simply hand over the film? It was one of the last shots on a roll of 36 which we had taken over the course of a week. My husband had won a free trip to Paris for six people, and we shared his prize with my sister and her family. It was a rare opportunity for us to spend a week in Paris together, and that film had captured many magical moments.

  However, strongly outnumbered, we had few options left. With great reluctance, my husband opened the camera and surrendered the film to the menacing horde, who snatched it up and scrutinized it under the street lamp, muttering to themselves. As the taxi carried us slowly away, we trembled with residual fear and the beginnings of relief. During dinner, fortified with good French wine, we heatedly discussed what we should have done, could have done, and would do next time.

  Parisian friends to whom we related this incident nodded knowingly to hear of the parading transsexuals but threw their hands up in horror when we mentioned taking “la photo.” How gauche! After all, as one Parisian reminded me with a shrug, “this is Paris.”

  Cori Kenicer is a travel and golf writer who lives near San Francisco. She has teed it up in the King of Morocco’s golf tournament, wielded her putter in Aruba, and shared the greens with the wild elk in Banff. This is her first published work that has nothing whatsoever to do with golf.

  I found Henri Beyle, for one, he who was known, among some three hundred other names, as Stendhal. Protean Henri introduced the word “tourist” into the French language. This was fitting, as he lived his early 18th century life at a distance, as a sort of tourist, an original romantic, a prototypical modern man. In him, as in his English contemporary William Blake, the period’s insistence upon rationality—upon thinking making the man—took its fuller dimension: a preference for the self-created universe, for the world within. “How many precautions,” wrote miserable Henri, whom I knew as I knew myself, “how many precautions are necessary to keep oneself from lying.”

  —Jim Paul, What’s Called Love: A Real Romance

  INA CARO

  Fleeing the Splendor

  A visitor finds fault with the abode of the Sun King.

  BOB AND I VISITED VERSAILLES ON OUR FIRST TRIP TO FRANCE. I suppose everyone does. We visited it again eleven years later, in 1985. Both visits had exhausted my supply of superlatives. We had taken the guided tour, which I thought wonderful. We had seen the king’s antechamber, where, we were informed, Louis XIV dined alone while 24 violins played. We were taken to his bedchamber, where 100 courtiers were given the honor of attending the morning ritual of lever and another 100 the evening ritual of coucher. When these descendants of fighting knights donned their armor, they were probably heading off not to battle but to one of the innumerable costume parties that set the immense palace glittering in the evenings.

  In the Hall of Mirrors, the Galerie des Glaces, we saw busts of Roman emperors in porphyry and marble, antique statues of Greek gods—and, under a vaulted ceiling painted by Le Brun, crystal-and-silver chandeliers, and gilt-and-crystal candelabra reflected in seventeen arched mirrors. Now, in 1991, fondly remembering the hall—and Versailles as a whole—as I planned this journey through France’s history, I felt it would be the perfect prism through which to see the Age of Louis XIV. The silver furniture that once sparkled in the light of four thousand candles may have been melted down to pay for Louis’s wars—and Louis’s vases of gold, inlaid with diamonds, agate, emeralds, turquoise, jade, and pearls, may have been transferred to the Louvre—but, remembering my earlier visits, I felt that the splendor and magnificence of this hall encapsulate for the tourist France’s Golden Age. The arcade of seventeen arched mirrors reflects more than the seventeen arched windows, more than the chandeliers and candelabra or the splendor of the Grand Siècle; it illuminates also the socioeconomic foundation that lay beneath the gilt. For example, the mirrors at Versailles were manufactured in France. Previously, fine mirrors had been imported from Italy, because no one in France knew how to make them properly. Louis XIV and his minister Colbert were determined that France be economically self sufficient, but they could not simply begin to manufacture mirrors. Venice made the finest glass in the world, so Venetian artisans were enticed to France by extravagant salaries and perquisites to teach the art; then Venetian foremen were recruited to set up a factory in Paris. Economic competition in the seventeenth century was not taken lightly, and when Italian authorities learned that two of the best mirror artisans had been lured to France, the authorities had them poisoned before they were able to teach their secrets to French apprentices. As soon as the industry was in place, the tariff on imported mirrors was doubled, thereby discouraging imports. By the end of Louis’s reign the finest mirrors in the world were made in France, and Voltaire could write, “The fine mirrors made in our own factories, which now decorate our houses, cost far less than did the little ones that used to be imported from Venice.” Louis and Colbert did the same for other industries, encouraging high quality by awarding prizes to the French master craftsmen who produced the finest quality products (or “master pieces”). “We have beautiful and ornamental materials that are both cheaper and better than those brought from abroad,” Voltaire wrote.

  Other incentives were used. “In order to establish the manufacture of tar in France,” Colbert later recalled, “the king brought from Sweden a certain Elias Hal. This man, after three or four years’ work, informed me of his desire to settle in France. His Majesty ordered me to take the trouble of arranging marriage for him—he gave him 2,000 écus for use at his marriage and disposed 2,000 livres of appointments for him annually, which has always been regularly paid. I found a girl at Bordeaux who brought him a very honorable marriage.”

  Colbert desired not merely to limit imports but to increase exports, so Versailles was designed in part as a showcase, displaying to ambassadors and foreign visitors French products of such excellent quality and taste that they returned home wanting to buy the products themselves and singing their praises throughout the world. Foreign dignitaries attending state functions held at night in the Hall of Mirrors could hardly help being impressed by the reflected glow of 4,000 candles—and by the silver furniture, the Savonnerie carpets, the Gobelin tapestries, and by the vases, the laces, the marble from Languedoc used throughout the palace.

  Look up at the ceiling painted by Le Brun for the Hall of Mirrors. It glorifies Louis’s victories in a war with Holland, the upon hearing the country most competitive with France. If normal means of commercial competition proved inadequate, Louis and Colbert went to war. Descartes, the French philosopher, who lived in Holland, wrote that “everybody but myself is in business and so engrossed with his profits that I could live here all my life without being noticed by anyone.... All their toil helps to adorn the place of my abode, and supplies all my wants...the vessels arrive which bring an abundance of all the produce of the Indies and all that is rare in Europe.” Louis said the Dutch “absorb nearly all profits of trade in all parts of the world and leave only a very small portion to the other natio
ns.” The last straw was an embargo that the Dutch placed on French wine and brandy. Louis declared war on them in 1672.

  “Has God forgotten all I have done for him?”

  —Louis XIV, upon hearing the news of the

  French defeat at Malaquet

  In planning this journey through French history, I had expected, when we reached the Age of Louis XIV, to recommend Versailles as a magical place to visit the pinnacle of monarchy. I had felt, moreover, that the 20th-century visitor, viewing the Sun King’s bedroom, visualizing there the crowd of dukes and counts—men who once were independent masters of fiefdoms like Carcassonne, Beynac, and Castelnaud, but who now filled their hours with useless court functions, waiting around to watch the king get into or out of bed, helping him put on his clothes—would see how under Louis the king’s favor had become the sole source of power in France.

  And a visit to Versailles, I had felt, would reveal the tyranny of Louis XIV not only over his courtiers but over the arts as well. The function of art, to Louis, was simple: his glorification. He was being quite candid when he told the members of the French Academy, “I entrust to you the most precious thing on earth—my fame.” (The artists proved faithful trustees—not that they had much choice. Molière may have mocked the rest of society, but he never mocked Louis XIV. One gentleman who ventured to criticize the length of a prologue praising Louis XIV promptly found himself in jail.) For twenty years Louis XIV was the primary patron of the arts, and for twenty years, Le Brun, director of the French Academy, saw to it that the arts were devoted to enhancing the splendor of Louis XIV’s palace and glorifying his image. It was Le Brun’s identification of Louis XIV with Apollo—an identification evident throughout Versailles—that created for posterity the image of the Sun King that Louis desired.