Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  My musician friend and I called in to a pastry shop called Charlotte de Ville and talk to the proprietress who was known for her eccentric chocolate cakes and her poems. We sat in a darkened room at the back of the shop as an out-of-work Argentinian actress recited some of the boss’s poetry, while she sat purring behind a large chocolate shoe with the Little Prince’s flower, also in chocolate, stuck into it on a stick. Here was a side of Paris that put me well out of my depth. This huge lady with her sweet smile and cottage-loaf bun, looking just like a culinary Madame Arcati, the clairvoyant from Blithe Spirit, and her friend – who was clearly an accomplished actress – must have had some secret which was completely lost on me. Perhaps my French is not what it should be.

  I left the cake shop alone and wandered back to the Pont des Arts, picking my way through the lovers and dogs. In Paris you must, apparently, have a lover or a dog. Walking either seems to follow approximately the same routine. The canine card-leaving occurs with approximately the same frequency as the osculatory pause. I need not have felt lonely, for when I reached the Leo she had become the centre of attention for a group of strollers. In no time at all I was answering all types of questions on our route so far, and where we were going. Most of the questioners found it hard to believe that we had crossed the Channel in such an unusual craft, but all said they would like to come along. I suppose the water is extremely romantic on a hot summer’s afternoon in a big city.

  A good-looking American girl-jogger brazenly asked if she could have a drink of water. I foolishly obliged. Within minutes she had uncoiled into the most ferocious bore – just like one of those Chinese flowers made of paper that expand when put in water. Why could she not come with us? Did I dislike women? ‘No, no, no,’ I almost screamed. I began to have a sinking feeling that I was not going to get rid of her unless I moved very fast. She had that terrible attitude which many foreigners have in France, that if you speak English then you must be their friend. Desperately I thought of what a Frenchman would do in such circumstances but the possibilities required a kind of sang-froid I could not muster. Thankfully I remembered that the owner of the beautiful old Dutch barge, the Souqui, which was moored a few metres up-stream, had told me to visit him any evening. I made a firm but final excuse, and almost pushing my visitor off the barge, locked up. It had been a lesson in how very careful one has to be about the occasional groupie: if she had stayed there a moment longer, I am quite sure that she would never have left.

  The difference between the little Leo and the other barges moored along the Left Bank was that the Leo was clearly a travelling barge rather than a sedate houseboat. The Souqui was the doyenne of the houseboat fleet. Built in 1890 in Holland, she had been beautifully repaired, and converted to the floating equivalent of an expensive house in Chelsea. She had been a sailing barge, and, according to her owner, an energetic art director from the movie world, had taken cargoes as far as Ceylon, though I suspect he had been reading too much Conrad. She had all her masts and deck furniture, and huge leeboards, and all were painted and varnished. Below decks had been furnished like a London club, with many leather armchairs and solid furniture.

  My host was struggling with the Achilles-heel of all boats, his lavatory. His son’s girlfriend had deposited some unmentionable in it and it had become blocked. I think the poor girl had been unfairly blamed, for in my opinion if there is a woman about when something goes wrong on board, she will automatically get the blame. In my more fanciful moments, I have wondered whether the jealous feminine spirit of a boat somehow plays tricks on certain female visitors in this way, because some do seem to me to be abnormally accident-prone. I attempted to help to clear the blockage by lending my dinghy and rowing it round to the side of the barge, so that the offending mass could be poked at from the outside. As it turned out, time and caustic soda would, it seemed, be the only solution for clearing the problem, so I found myself yarning with this putative mariner. He was full of plans for sailing away and doing what I was doing, but his problem was that he had just about the best mooring in any city in the world at No. 1 Paris. The most elegant of all Paris’s magnificent bridges, the Pont Neuf, lay a hundred metres upstream, he had water and electricity permanently plumbed in, telephones were everywhere. Even when he has made all the sails, I do not think that the Souqui will ever pass downstream under the Pont des Arts.

  The Leo had been in Paris now for nearly a week. Ray had returned and we were getting the urge to move our mooring. It is an affliction that I suppose all travellers suffer from, especially when all that is required for a change of view is to move one’s home, as it were, round the corner. We decided to see what the canals that pierce the heart of Paris were like, returning to the Pont des Arts in time for the night of music which, if the towpath practising was anything to go by, was going to be a noisy affair. We left early on a beautiful summer’s morning with a thick mist on the river which obligingly cleared enough for us to see the magnificent spires of Notre Dame silhouetted against a bright blue sky, as though perched on a bed of snowy white clouds. A child’s view of heaven, perhaps, but one that would do very well.

  Our first stop was to be the ‘village du vin’ near the Pont de Bercy. I had first been introduced to this sprawling Napoleonic compound, that stretches over many acres, in the 1960s, when I used to help a friend who was very conscious of the price of everything to bring a barrel of claret back to London. I soon found this procedure was more romantic than practical: the complication of corking the bottles once the wine had been decanted was simply not worth the effort. I decided it was better to drink less wine and buy a bottle when required. This time I decided I would buy a small barrel and draw off what we needed after a suitable period of time.

  We moored and walked to the wine village which is still remarkably unspoiled, but alas, as is so often the case with places that have retained a little charm and not been mauled by the developers, the place was being used as a film location. German soldiers of the Third Reich were everywhere, marching bands of presumably Free French through swirling clouds of man-made fog. The telltale signs of a film crew were everywhere. Polystyrene cups littered the moss-covered pavements, the gutters were lined with cables from a generator, groups of those special winsome children that are always used in films were being frightfully good, the caterers were already laying out the tables for lunch in an empty wine shed. I am afraid that film crews are a bit like the ravens in Zuleika Dobson, whose arrival is a portent of imminent disaster – in this case the developers who will surely smash this charming place and build some useless sports palace where performance drugs will replace nectar from Bordeaux.

  Ray and I did a great deal of tasting, spitting out the samples in the required manner. We decided on a Bordeaux which would have had a fancy label stuck on it in London and would have been sold for ten times the price we were paying – but we had forgotten the barrel itself which brought the price up substantially. Pleasantly reinforced by what we had imbibed, we set about trying to get our heavy barrel back to the Leo. I wished I had unloaded the car, but in the end we persuaded the gentleman who had filled our barrel to run us back in his van. He was rewarded with a pack of duty-free cigarettes, which I had great difficulty in making him accept.

  Getting the heavy barrel on to the boat was a job for the crane I had built. Without any design, its construction had been very much a question of trial and error. I had managed to get it to lift our little 2CV on and off, but it was a performance not lightly entered into. Ray, however, was able to demonstrate the barrel hitch, a knot rarely used in these days, and we had the barrel on board just in time, as a dock inspector came along and told us that loading merchandise required a licence. I am afraid that we both pretended that we did not understand French and he finally gave up with a good deal of sotto voce cursing. I could not feel guilty about this minuscule infringement of the rules.

  We left to go downstream to the entrance of the Canal St Martin, where we had to wait until the traffic lights turned in
our favour. The traffic is one way for twenty minutes every hour, a rule that is very strictly controlled by the river police, whose headquarters are just upstream of the Île St Louis. The barges, of course, know these rules, and if for some reasons the lights are held because some huge pusher barge is working its way upstream, they are able to time their arrival so they can go straight downstream as the lights change. I was not aware how difficult it would be to stop because of the current under us, and so we took a turn on a steel ring in a buttress under one of the bridges, to wait for the lights to change. Within seconds we were spotted by the river police. They leapt into an inflatable dinghy with an Alsatian in its bows, and roared up to us. We all growled at each other and before pencils could be licked we had let go and slipped into the lock at the Bassin d’Arsenal, which has been turned from a sand and gravel dock to a very smart marina full of expensive plastic boats. This was no place for the battered old Leo, and in any case there was no space for us. We made our way up through the marina, very much aware of what it feels like to be looked down the nose upon.

  In front of us lay a tunnel that passes under the column marking the storming of the Bastille. There were only seven prisoners there at the time, which must have been a great disappointment for the mob: six political prisoners and one old man of eighty, the reason for whose imprisonment no one, apparently, could remember. The interior of the tunnel is a magnificent sight. We went through in the early afternoon, when the cavernous darkness was lit by great slanting shafts of sunlight from ventilation holes in the Boulevard Richard Lenoir above. The canal had been covered in the nineteenth century in an attempt to ease the road-traffic problem: how optimistic mankind can be! In the days we were in Paris, the tabloid press had been full of lurid stories of how a band of cannibals had been discovered living in the darkness of the tunnel, but there was no evidence of any life at all with the exception of a few rats on the tow-path. The paths at either end have been blocked off to stop people walking through on their own, probably a very sensible precaution as otherwise it would become a muggers’ paradise.

  At the other end of the tunnel the canal opens into the heart of Paris, which forms a great contrast to the Seine. Tall buildings with shops and cafés are only a street’s width away from the canal. I stopped besides the Hôtel du Nord which Arletty had frequented in the film of that name. The building is uninhabited and derelict now, but the government, to their credit, have decided to call it a national monument, and so it will be preserved.

  Paris has always been a sanctuary for talented foreigners: exiles from repression of some sort, or people from other countries who have simply fallen in love with the city. I left Ray with the boat and went to see one of the most astonishing men that I have ever met: Rostislav Doboujinsky, an émigré Russian designer with whom I had worked long ago and who was my youngest daughter’s godfather.

  His studio lay not far from the canal up a dirty staircase in a rundown block of workshops catering for every type of trade, from printers to metal workers. Inside the door, in fact as you step through almost any front door in Paris, the world changes entirely: suddenly I found myself in theatrical Paris. ‘Tonton’, as everybody calls him, has spent his eighty-seven years never specializing in anything but having experience of just about everything. His father had been a designer for Diaghilev, and he himself had been brought up in prerevolutionary St Petersburg, only leaving Russia in 1925, by which time he had travelled extensively with his father – all over Europe and the States. His intimate knowledge of wildlife had made it possible for him to make the brilliant masks for the film I made with my wife, The Tales of Beatrix Potter. He was currently making vast chandeliers for some magnate in Madrid.

  I wanted to refresh my memory about edible fungi, about which, naturally, he knew a great deal, and in a very Russian way: he knew exactly which mushrooms were poisonous, and not those which were edible. This roundabout way of approaching a potentially dangerous problem was simple and easy, and revealed to me a kind of lateral thinking that has been extremely useful in my travels. Being a consummate artist, he drew me some clear sketches of the types we might encounter in Burgundy and further east on the banks of the Danube. He had learnt a lot about mushrooms when he was in the Russian boy scouts during the early days of the Revolution. Food was extremely scarce in St Petersburg and he and his troop had gone out into the woods to scour them for mushrooms. Whenever I have been hunting mushrooms with him, I have watched him bite off a very small bit of a possibly suspect one, then spit it out immediately. He says that all the ones that are not obviously poisonous, but doubtful, taste very peppery and should not be eaten. He also has a marvellous system for pickling mushrooms in vinegar, a little sugary syrup and herbs, thus preserving them in jars for many months.

  Our mooring near the Bassin de Villettes was quite peaceful and so far we had had no problems with ‘voyous’, the layabouts that we were always being warned about by the well-to-do. So, throwing caution to the winds, Ray and I set out for the Balajo, which lies in the Rue de la Harpe, a little street at the back of the Place de la Bastille. The Balajo is an old-time dance hall which still has a ‘bal musette’, the French equivalent to a tea dance, on Monday afternoons and Friday evenings. The significance of this particular timetable was not clear to us until later. In the eternal search for the real Mimi and Fifi, a non-tourist place like the Balajo seemed a good place to look, or so I thought. It was Friday evening and when we arrived the bal was in full swing. The entrance was well endowed with bouncers who told me firmly that I had to leave my camera in the cloakroom. The camera would not have worked inside, in any case, as it was almost pitch dark, but as our eyes grew accustomed to the level of light I was able to make out an extravagant, late-forties decor, with lots of leaning lamp-posts and tiny bulbs glinting through holes in painted plywood. The floor was packed with couples, while the band on the podium smashed out a spirited version of the ‘Sheikh of Araby’.

  After a few minutes, I plucked up enough courage to ask a neighbour why the management was so strict about photography. He shrugged his shoulders as though it was a childish question and explained that on Friday nights and Monday afternoons most of the small shopkeepers and businessmen had time off, and this was where they all came for an illicit fling, presumably with their Mimis and Fifis; or, in the case of the ladies, to dance with some of the professional gigolos who were sitting at the tables round us. There was a tremendous sense of cool, of people knowing just what was what. If the ladies wanted to dance with a particular man, the smallest smile or nod would be sufficient for the gentleman to cross the floor and ask the woman to dance. Most of these men would dance with the palm of the hand that would normally be pressed on the woman’s back folded outwards. Intimacy came later perhaps. There were hardly any smiles, but there was clearly a good deal of pleasure being had in a subdued sort of way. Fearful of putting my foot in it and perhaps being knifed by some furious charcutier because I had asked his vendeuse from a boutique near the Gare de Lyon to take a turn on the floor, and also because it was clear that our Mimi and Fifi were not here, Ray and I left, whistling a nostalgic tune or two from the Piaf selection that the band had been playing.

  The next day, we moved on a little through the Bassin de Villettes, through the locations where Les Enfants du Paradis was shot in the last days of the war, under constant harassment from the Nazis. I stopped at the nearest point to the Gare du Nord to visit another expatriate, Anthony Sidey, an Englishman who has been living in Paris for twenty-five years doing what he first dreamt of doing when he was eleven: making and playing harpsichords. His workshop, in a cul-de-sac overlooking the rail marshalling yard outside the Gare du Nord, was a jumble of bent and drying wood, mixed with old musical instruments that had been sent there for repair or that he had bought for restoration. When I arrived, Anthony was sitting at a beautiful harpsichord that he had built, practising for his own pleasure. It takes him seven years to build a harpsichord from the moment that he cuts the first bit of w
ood and shapes it the way he wants. When the instruments are finished they are quite magnificent, and Anthony, a Francophile par excellence, prefers not to export them but rather to keep them in France for visiting virtuosi to play on their tours. I think he does not really like to see these beautiful things go too far away. It is unusual for such a talented musician to be able to build such highly prized instruments.

  It was time now to end our perambulation round Paris and return to the Pont des Arts for the night of music, and rendezvous with my daughter Daisy and her husband Marcus. Luckily our mooring under the bridge was still free, but we only just pipped a hotel barge to the post. There was a certain amount of argument but in the end he agreed to drop back and tie up against one of the barges a little further down river. To celebrate the night of music and my daughter’s arrival, I had decided to have a dinner party on the deck of the barge and invite some friends. Bruno, a director of photography with more feel for the medium than most of his calling, was an excellent cook and prepared a very simple meal from leeks and a shin of veal. As it turned out, his reputation as a chef was guaranteed to remain safe, even had the meal not been delicious: no sooner had the musical celebrations started than all traffic came to a standstill, preventing the guests, with the exception of Daisy and Marcus, arriving. Moreover, our berth had become untenable because a really loud and astonishingly bad rock band had come to play no more than ten feet from the barge. While some of the smaller bands on the bridge above us were attracting large groups to hear them play, the band next to us seemed to have found the secret of actually repelling an audience. While all types of illegal substances were clearly being passed around, there was no sign of any reduction in the dreary decibels that were pumping from the vibrating but obviously robust loudspeakers. Ray and I decided to cast off and move up the river to tie up on the quai just below Notre Dame, which I am sure was illegal, but a crimette that we hoped would go unnoticed on a night such as this.