Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  The French government own and subsidize this model of enlightened factory building, and I had a very strong feeling of an established group isolated from the outside world. In return for cocooning these talented people, the government is able to have the plates missing from the Sèvres services belonging to friendly despots replaced. These patient experts have been painting spring flowers from one generation to the next, never writing down the steps they take, but rather working with an apprentice till he (or she) is ready to start on his own. Probably the thing that impressed me most in this fascinating place was the engraver who was doing a design for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, using a design which he had just been to collect from the archives of 1793. I very much doubt whether any upheaval in the outside world makes the slightest difference to this Shangri-la in the suburbs of Paris. I watched a girl with red hair and pretty ankles climb a ladder in the paint store to collect a jar of powder that had been mixed in 1906. When I asked what she painted at the weekend, after five days of flowers, she replied sweetly that she painted more flowers. She said she liked flowers.

  When I got back to the boat, I found Ray, who had stayed there to wait for an electrician to arrive, having a fierce argument with the man. Ray did not speak French and the electrician, who was installing an electrical supply for the Super Boeuf, spoke no English. The electrician had brought his teenage nephew along to assist him, however; the boy was acting as the go-between, and, I suspect, slanting the translation to favour his irascible uncle’s position. The electrician had told Ray that he thought that the British Navy had just been lucky and were really not all they were cracked up to be; the French on the other hand were tactically superior. He had read a great deal on this subject and we were no match for him, except that from our insular point of view all that he was saying was clearly tosh.

  I reminded Ray of his colleague Reggie on the Thames who had a passion for geographical place names, pointing out that this man was of a similar type: we would never persuade him that his point of view was simply not correct. I suggested to Ray that he make a cup of British tea all round, hoping that this would not provoke another argument about the origin and superiority of various forms of tea. Later, with a hot mugful cooling his temper, the electrician demonstrated his work, and the Super Boeuf bellowed satisfactorily. He certainly knew his negative from his positive, even if he was not so hot on his history.

  That night we moored at Port Levallois which has a very large Algerian population. The bars were full of dangerous-looking men, with flashing gold teeth and brilliantined hair, their women discreetly apart and dressed for some kind of Arabian Come Dancing festival. Ray and I had a beer and were eyed with a great deal of suspicion while we drank. We were the only Northern Europeans in this crowded bar: I had forgotten how much Paris is split up into its quartiers. Many people I know feel very strange outside their own little world in Paris, and I suppose the same is true of London. Cab drivers have often cautioned me, when I have taken a cab home to Rotherhithe, that I had better look out down there because the place is only inhabited by rogues and villains.

  After a little shopping in the garish Arab shops, we clambered back over an enormous barge which a wiry lady psychiatrist appeared to be converting single-handed. She had moored her barge on the right bank of the river because during the floods of the previous winter, the water level had risen so much that her barge had been in danger of being marooned on the towpath like a huge beached whale. The flood water rises quite alarmingly quickly on the Seine and, these days, almost always catches the houseboat population unawares, as many of the barges are owned by well-heeled jetsetters who leave them unattended while on holiday in the sun. I had an animated conversation with the psychiatrist’s daughter who had just taken her finals in medicine and was very keen to go on to a career in medical research. She had a revulsion for actually coming into contact with the sick, which I found very odd. She said that she felt she could honour her Hippocratic oath perfectly well without laying hands on live patients, and I suppose in today’s medicine it is a very good thing that there are people who only want to work in laboratories.

  The morning that we entered Paris was brilliant. As we chugged up the river past the Bois de Boulogne, we saw a display of the most fanciful houseboats and floating restaurants. Designers and individualists have had a field day with some of these hulls; it would be too much to call them boats. There are men-of-war from the eighteenth century, enormous modern gravel barges converted into palaces with swimming pools, even a submarine’s conning-tower section with the end cut off. On the other side of these strange craft, I could see the cars slowing to have a closer look at the girls parading themselves for custom along the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Then suddenly, over the trees, we saw the Eiffel Tower – that everlasting symbol of Paris – towering over the city like a great giraffe. We had arrived.

  Chapter Six

  Paris

  Arriving in the heart of Paris by river after a journey of six weeks must surely be one of the most exciting things that I have ever done. By the time we had passed the Eiffel Tower, the sun was already setting and there was a golden glow on the Pont Alexandre III. All the familiar buildings were, somehow surprisingly, still there. I could see the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, the Gare d’Orsay (now a museum). Behind the Leo the sun was shining through the glass roof of the Grand Palais, making it look as though it were on fire. The last determined sunbathers were rolling up their towels on the quais, lights from the pleasure boats, or bateaux mouches, were starting to pick out the stonework under the arches, and everywhere was the unique sound of Parisian traffic which, from the river, was reduced to a muffled roar.

  I was rather anxious about where to moor. It is usually possible to find a mooring on the rivers of France, but here we were in the capital, and though I did not have any clear idea where I could tie up, I did know where I wanted to. I have always been very fond of the Pont des Arts, a footbridge which crosses the Seine from the Louvre to the bottom of the Rue de Seine on the Left Bank. The bridge, which has been recently rebuilt after a barge smashed one of its piers, is just where I like to be in Paris. As luck would have it there was a space right underneath the bridge itself, alongside some neat sandstone steps. When we had tied up I remember Ray went to the stern of the Leo and just sat and watched the last moments of the sunset. I sat on the hatch on the barge and wondered how it was that I had been lucky enough to fetch up in a place like this.

  Ray was leaving the boat in the morning for a few days with his girl in an hotel, so I left him to go for a walk round la rive gauche. I crossed the quai, walked up the Rue de Seine, and peered into the shops. On my way I passed the house at No. 1 where my friend Louis Fleury lived in his prime, when he was the man to whom all American and English film companies went if they wanted to make films in France.

  Fleury arranged permissions and that sort of thing, but he was an unofficial ambassador for France. A huge man with enormous charm, it was quite impossible to get down to the boring part of business with him because he was always recounting some amusing incident on a film he had handled. The polish with which he could handle the cross executive who had just flown the Atlantic to get to the bottom of a financial matter from a past film location was wonderful to see. His apartment was in a house which belonged to the Ville de Paris and he paid very little rent but had furnished it well. He had a wife who always kept in the background on these occasions in the upstairs kitchen. When the visiting fireman panted to the top of the stairs, Louis would begin his performance by offering a cup of hot bouillon which was probably the very last thing the visitor expected. I do not know what was in that soup but I remember watching it calm the angry, get-to-the-bottom-of-it-all type many times. Because the soup was hot and served in a drinking bowl its consumption required a lot of concentration, and this was when Louis started his solo. I never saw him fail: whatever the financial outrages from the past, they were polished away with the ease and speed of
a professional waiter wiping the table tops outside a Parisian café.

  A few doors further up the street, I passed the house where the English bookshop had been. It was run by the Olympia Press and was famous for selling books banned at that time in Britain, like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and, for the less literary-minded who had strayed into the tiny shop, straight pornographic novels. It was here that I first met a man who has since become one of London’s leading film critics, but at that time was penniless in Paris and making ends meet by writing these steamy novels for the Olympia Press. I remember asking him what it was like to have to write blue books. He said that the sheer repetitiousness of the sexual act, and the need to have a torrid scene every two or three pages to warm the readers up, was what got him down.

  Paris is a city that seems to renew itself from time to time in the most dramatic ways. Haussmann, in the nineteenth century, tore out the heart of the medieval city and replaced it with the great boulevards everyone knows today. In the 1970s Les Halles, the romantic food markets, were destroyed and replaced by one of the most offensive buildings in the Western world. The reasons for this destruction were reported to be traffic problems and vermin in the old markets. The traffic problems have not been improved and the vermin in the myriad restaurants that have sprung up in their place literally live off the fat of the land. The Left Bank, apart from the monstrous Tour de Montparnasse, has been renewed in another way which is more insidious. All the character that made it the intellectual heart of the city has been eroded by expensive shops and tourists who have come to experience the Paris of Hemingway; but behind the great doors of the houses on the boulevards there are still sleepy courtyards which have a whiff of the old Paris.

  As I walked I wondered why I liked this city so much. The first time I had gone to Paris as a very young man I can remember being more lonely there than at any other time in my life. I had flown there in the fifties for a holiday after a long location in a dismal part of the world. I made all the tourist trips but, knowing no one in Paris, I decided to return to London earlier than I had planned. In those days, when there was bad weather, air passengers were sent back to London on a train – and first class at that. In the corner of my compartment was a soignée middle-aged woman, who for no apparent reason told me why she was going to London. She had been a nurse for the Free French Forces in Cairo during the war and had fallen madly in love with a handsome British officer. A coup de foudre, she said, and she told me of the romance of the pyramids in the moonlight as we rattled through the valley of the Somme.

  I was wondering where this conversation was leading when she told me that she had met the same Englishman at a party in Paris a few years before and, though both were married, they’d started an affair, perhaps meeting once a year. She was travelling to London for a rendezvous which, they had planned, was to decide whether they were going to leave their respective spouses and go off together. He was leaving for the States that evening and they were to have had the day together to decide whether she would simply leave with him, but the fog had put an end to all that. While I had trundled round the world quite a lot for a 23-year-old, I found this story very French, immensely grown-up and therefore fascinating. I made her promise to let me know how things ended for her in London. As I had suspected it ended badly: he had left a huge bunch of flowers in her hotel room with a note telling her that he could not leave his wife and had gone off to America alone. She went back to her scientist husband, and I felt I had a friend in Paris: from that moment I have always loved the city. It was like seeing that answering flash in a woman’s eyes, when you decide whether you are going to like each other or not.

  Mornings in Paris in June are a wonderful time. I bought a croissant for the gentleman of the road, or clochard, who was sleeping under the Pont des Arts alongside the boat. When he woke, I gave him a cup of coffee and asked him about his life. I had half expected some philosopher of the road but he was more concerned with minutiae of his day-to-day existence. He had been on the road sleeping rough for eight years (twelve years is about the average time for sleeping rough, after which the bronchitis kills). He had started when he was twenty when, as the eldest of eight children, he had left his widowed mother in Strasbourg unable, he said, to face the responsibility. Friday morning was the time to avoid under the Pont des Arts, he told me, because the authorities washed the slatted walkways on the bridge above and any gentlemen of the road got a thorough soaking if they were sleeping below. He managed to get by from day to day by helping load and unload in the market at the top of the Rue de Seine, and it had made him enough to be really quite smartly dressed, which he said was essential for keeping out of the clutches of the police who were always searching his colleagues for drugs. He clearly had quite serious problems with his chest and wheezed and coughed all the time I spoke with him. When I asked him why he did not get himself fixed up with a room somewhere, he pointed to the Seine in the beautiful morning light, which had pulled a fine theatrical gauze over the river and the city, and asked where he could find a room with a view like this.

  I saw that he had a copy of ‘Tintin’ which was his favourite reading, and he told me how much he liked Milou the dog. I asked him why and he told me it was because Milou never shat. One of the great problems of riparian life in any city is that river walkways are a favourite place for people to take their dogs to evacuate themselves, and consequently they are over-endowed with droppings. I do not think he liked dogs much: I suppose that they are an enemy of tramps everywhere. I noticed though, when he opened his book, that when Milou barked the speech-bubble read ‘Waouf, waouf’, whereas all our dogs in Britain make a more manly ‘Woof, woof’. How can we possibly have a truly Common Market when such fundamental divisions exist, I asked myself (‘Je me demande’ as the French would say. An excellent name for a gangster I have always thought: Jimmy Demand). The clochard left, as he saw a couple of policemen coming, carefully hiding the bit of cardboard he had been sleeping on behind a buttress, and told me he would be back later.

  I went back to the barge and as I did so the police arrived and asked me whether the clochard had been bothering me and then, like all policemen, started to ask me what I was doing and whether I had permission to be here at all. I have always believed that if you reply with sufficient authority more often than not the police will give up, and in this case they clearly felt that they were out of their depth and that if there was a problem it was definitely the responsibility of some other department.

  I locked up and went to see a musician friend of mine, who lived in the Marais, a district of Paris that had once been marsh ground. Paris has the best urban transportation system of any great city that I know, the métro and the buses run regularly and they go very close to your destination. In years of making big-budget films, I had always taken taxis in Paris, but it was Michel who explained the subtleties of the system. As a leading expert on medieval music, he is constantly travelling round Paris and the world with his three-man group, and has a vast experience of waiting at airports for cultural attachés who do not turn up. He has therefore developed a knowledge of speedy urban transport systems which is second to none, and has convincingly proved to me that the transport provided by the city of Paris is quicker than taxis.

  To arrive at your destination in Paris is one thing but unless you have the mind of a mathematical genius, it is vital to have written down the door codes that all Parisian houses seem to have these days. Most large houses which have been split up into flats have concierges (who are almost entirely Portuguese), which means that during the day the gates to the courtyards are open, but at night or at the weekends the only way to get in is to have the door code, as none of the entry systems have talk buttons. I had forgotten the code, of course, and had to wait like a cat until someone came back from their shopping, and slip in with them. Like many old houses in Paris, it has a superb staircase made from oak and marble – the kind of construction that has sto
od the test of time for four centuries, but would not be passed by any local district surveyor in Britain today on the grounds that it would be unsafe in case of fire.

  A delicious meal of broccoli and spaghetti was waiting, cooked by my friend’s wife, a talented designer from Marseilles. The French have a talent, I believe, for being able to cook almost anything and make it taste delicious. They are, surprisingly, extremely precise in the way they prepare their food. All this domestic knowledge was suddenly becoming very important to me, for before I started on this voyage I had always had someone to look after me. While I had cooked the occasional meal I had never had to look after a household on a day-to-day basis, or to wash my clothes. Even when I had first moved to London and lived in a chummery in Pont Street, there had been someone to mastermind the household shopping. Before the days of launderettes, the laundry was delivered once a week in hard cardboard containers which were swapped for similar ones stuffed full of dirty washing. Heaven help you if you missed a week. Middle age is not usually the time to start being concerned about such things, but life on board in a confined space was very much conditioned by mess and planning.

  In the second week in June, everyone who can play a note of music and quite a few who cannot, practise in the streets for the recently inaugurated ‘night of music’, which the city fathers have decided should fall on the shortest night of the year, the summer solstice, 21 June. As I walked back to the boat I passed every possible type of musician, from a fine chamber group playing Mozart in the Place des Vosges, to a young English trombonist with his jazz band, tearing it off on the Île St Louis bridge with an excellent rendition of ‘After You’ve Gone’.