Paris Times Eight

by Deirdre Kelly

  The children were unaware, but I had planned for our walk down the Champs-Élysées to end at the Place de la Concorde, where there was a giant Ferris wheel, a leftover from the city’s millennium celebrations seven years earlier. When they finally saw it, their eyes popped, and they did a little jig, asking me, please, oh please, could we take a ride.

  We lined up to buy our tickets, and when it was our turn to board the Roue de Paris, a worker with large arms hoisted my kids into one of the cars before offering me a hand to climb in myself. He clicked the bar shut, a slender piece of steel, and suddenly off we flew, fast into the air. I felt the jolt of liftoff and slid wildly, threatening to crush my children laughing loudly next to me. With a start I realized that there were no safety belts, no barriers other than that puny bar which I gripped, my knuckles turning white. In Canada this would never have been allowed! A lawsuit waiting to happen. But too late. “Hold on!” I screamed as I felt the mighty wheel turning. “Whatever you do, don’t fall off!”

  We went around and around, faster and faster. We sailed high above the treetops and floated momentarily in the air when the car stopped to allow others on and off on the ground far below. The wheel turned again, and we felt ourselves plummeting. I screamed. I was terrified, but giddy at the same time, whirling high above the treetops of Paris. The city looked like a giant jigsaw puzzle whose myriad pieces were the thousands of buildings squeezed tightly together to form a magnificent whole. With one hand I fumbled to open the lens cap on the camera hanging around my neck. It was such an extraordinary perspective. The copper rooftops. The snaking Seine and, directly below, the obelisk, the baroque fountains, and the Jardin des Tuileries with its manicured hedges and linear columns and motley groups of people sitting and reading and kissing and looking just fine amid the alleyways of artfully pruned trees—human nature and Mother Nature having found their life of harmony. The ground was the color of churned-up sand from all the people who had walked there before, over the centuries. But I didn’t take a picture of that. I took a picture of my children. Their faces were open and gleeful, their Chiclet teeth blazing white as the wind wrought havoc through their hair.

  When I got off, I felt the ground push up under me with a thump. My legs wobbly, I turned into the gardens, corralling the children to come with me. I headed toward some green metal chairs that encircled a large basin nestled in between the Jeu de Paume (the former royal tennis courts) and the Orangerie museum. I needed to catch my breath. As I sat, the children ran after some ducks, making them scud across the surface of the water. The sun was setting, the sky mottled orange and pink. It looked like a Pointillist painting made of an infinite number of colored dots. We walked only a few steps away and then saw, close to the Rue de Rivoli, a playground hidden beneath the boxwood trees. There was a gate, of course. But it was unlocked. I pushed it open, and the children shot inside, finding a series of large-scale spinning tops that they pushed and then jumped onto, blurring as they rapidly turned. As if the day hadn’t already been dizzying enough.

  From there we moved on, finding next giant red boxes on bouncy coils that the children rode like buckaroos. At the center of this serendipitous playground fantasy land was a large steel column, a kind of modern-day maypole, but dangling knotted lengths of rope instead of colored ribbon. The children each grabbed hold of a length and danced about, weaving them into a complex pattern of braids. After they tired of that game, they zigzagged through a maze of knee-high hedges before stumbling upon an enclosure where, buried in the ground, was a series of trampolines, inviting kids to get airborne on their own steam. It was all wondrously fantastic.

  I had been to Paris over so many years, but never knew such small-fry pleasures existed inside its famous gardens. It wasn’t a part of the Tuileries that was advertised. I supposed you just had to know where to go, and to do that, you had to be looking at Paris through a child’s eyes, as a place of hidden delights. I paid two euros to a lady, the keeper of the trampolines, who approached me with an outstretched palm. She instantly took charge. In a singsong voice she told the children to take off their boots, which they did after I translated her instructions. It was after dusk, and at that time of the day only one other child was playing on the trampolines, a dainty thing in a pompom hat whose lamblike whiteness matched the color of her gloves. My children bounced boldly past her like kangaroos. They tumbled wildly, trying out a variety of airborne maneuvers. Running, somersaulting, twirling. The little Parisian girl stared as she watched brother and sister collide with each other to fall flat on their faces. As soon as they were down, they bounced back up again.

  Their paid time was up. They put their boots back on and raced ahead. They said they heard music. I listened. A delicate tendril of sound. I followed behind and within seconds found myself standing, dazzled, in front of a merry-go-round inscribed with a gilt-edged “Carrousel la Belle Époque.” It was covered with a fading rose motif and strings of colored bulbs. It looked ancient, an old beauty, but I had never noticed it before. The ride was already turning by the time we reached it, but no one was on it. My children stood beside it, admiring the hand-carved steeds with long flowing horsehair for tails. I saw a booth with a man inside, dark-skinned with a stiff, grizzled mustache. He sat alone behind a grille, facing the spectacle of enchantment. I approached to buy two tickets. The box behind him was dark. He quietly took my money, then activated a lever that made the ride come to a halt. The children clambered on, hauling themselves into sherbet-colored saddles with real leather reins. “I’m a professional cowgirl,” shouted my daughter as the ride started up again. My son remained quiet, with a dreamy look on his face. “Good horsey,” he said, patting his horse as if it were alive. “Good horsey.”

  The ticket man called out to me. He asked where I was from. He had a brother in Toronto, he said after I answered, and then paused, looking suddenly melancholy. He said his brother drove a taxi, in a faraway place that was very cold. He said he hadn’t seen him in years. “Il y a longtemps,” he shrugged. I didn’t know what to say, so together we looked at the merry-go-round transporting my children inside their dream worlds. The ride slowed to a finish, the music dying. The man looked at me, his eyelids beating quickly over his sad-looking eyes. He hit the lever to start the ride up again, saying the next spin was on the house. I was beginning to think that maybe Paris was for children after all. Here was an angle I hadn’t considered before. In this unexpected act of empathy, I could see that what made Paris endlessly intriguing to me, and never the same city twice, were the people who inhabited it. Sure, the city was a treasure trove of things, captivatingly beautiful: statuary, paintings, magnificent architecture, and enchanting parks. So often on my travels to the city I had been overwhelmed by its surface grandeur, thinking Paris an ideal that I could scarcely live up to. But I was learning that beyond the gilded facade, Paris was a tight weave of interconnected stories, personal narratives engendered by chance encounters in a city where the only constant was change. In that way, Paris was like this painted carousel, spinning around and around in a multicolored blaze of lights. A city of endless possibilities, never quite grasped.

  Suddenly it was dark, night falling like a curtain. It had also started to rain. I popped open my umbrella and pulled down my children’s hats, zipping their coats up to their chins. The drizzle became a downpour as we walked up Rue de Castiglione, hugging the outsides of expensive jewelry boutiques to snatch whatever shelter we could. We forged on, through the Place Vendôme and on to the Rue de la Paix, in the direction of the Opéra. In the metro I had seen posters advertising the Christmas windows at the grands magasins, on Boulevard Haussmann. I would take them there as a treat. I asked if they could hang on, make the trek, as we’d be walking far. They nodded their heads.

  A glow rose from behind the Palais Garnier. The department stores were festooned with lights, a Las Vegas blaze of electric color spelling out the words Joyeux Noël in large twinkling letters. Beckoning us. I took the children by the hand and led t
hem across the rain-streaked boulevard, where a crowd had gathered in front of the Galeries Lafayette to see more than a thousand mechanical toys spinning through a winter wonderland made of crystal and mirrors. I gave them permission to squeeze through the wall of large-backed adults. Once through, they climbed onto wooden platforms erected outside on the sidewalk, enabling little ones a close-up view of the pageantry behind the store’s billboard-sized windows. Pressing their noses up against the glass, they stood transfixed by a spectacle depicting a band of saxophone-playing panda bears backed by a choir of snowy owls, boisterously heralding the joy of the season. My children stood there a long while, oblivious to the cold, lit up by thousands of bulbs designed to look like a snowflake shower. Eventually they moved on to the next window, featuring a herd of guffawing reindeer, and then on to another, where a posse of windup polar bears swung on chandeliers or else pickaxed the floor of what otherwise looked like a respectable holiday party. It made the children laugh out loud, uproariously.

  Watching them made me think of when I was small, standing in front of the Christmas windows at the Eaton’s department store in downtown Toronto. The Canadian windows were rooted in the Victorian era, and I had thought them beautiful. They might have lacked the carnival-like whimsy of the Paris windows, but they were still all about weaving fantasy. These were windows that showed the world as tiny and perfect, where families ate together around a dollhouse-sized dining-room table topped with food and sang together, sharing intimate glances. A dream world preserved behind glass. My favorite had been the window devoted to Santa’s toy shop, where mechanical bears clapped their cymbals, dolls in petticoats blew kisses, and silvery electric trains went round and round a familiar track.

  Santa Claus didn’t live in Paris. And the snow in the store’s window was ersatz. But I realized I had something better when my daughter slipped her wet mittened hand into mine, pulling me to look at something that had caught her eye. It was a mise-en-scène, equal parts poetic and absurd, a Paris specialty, and it boasted a horde of penguins blowing bubbles into the stratosphere. My son was there, drunk on the illusion. The bubbles rose above the candy-floss landscape and didn’t burst.

  ON THIS TRIP I had wanted to revisit some of my old haunts along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, with its Latin Quarter side streets of Rue de Seine, Rue de Buci and Rue Saint-André des Arts. This is where I used to sit for hours, lingering over a coffee or a glass of wine, my chair on a café terrasse affording me a front-row seat to some of the world’s best people-watching. I wanted to share the places I liked with my children, hoping that perhaps they would see what I found unique in Paris, a city whose old, narrow, and winding streets made it feel intimate and embracing. It was an illusion, of course, because Paris itself was hard to penetrate, remaining tantalizingly on the margins of my imagination as a city that teased but never lay itself down for conquest. Still, that boutique image of Paris resonated. It served as a bracing antidote to my own city, Toronto, created on a grid, and so cold and sprawling and impersonal by comparison. Paris was where I believed I could relish sensual pleasures as well as feed a craving for intellectual pursuits. It had suggested to me an opportunity for a more sophisticated standard of everyday living. I liked that in Paris I could walk into a bar with my kids and not be turned away, as I was in Toronto for cavalierly exposing minors to the horror of an aperitif-drinking mother. But that feeling of having my kids and a kir too was short-lived.

  When I took my children to the Café de Flore, they complained about the cigarette smell. In Paris people still smoke, unlike in Canada. My kids loudly declared it disgusting and plugged their noses. I dragged them over to the Jardin du Luxembourg, thinking to stick to where the wild things roamed. There, my terrible twosome gleefully rode a pair of old donkeys and another antique carousel, where an old man handed them wooden sticks with which to pole a brass ring. We also visited the less-well-trodden Jardin des Plantes and watched the doe-eyed wallabies misting in the rain. The natural history museum was nearby, and we ducked inside the glass-roofed Grande Galerie de l’Évolution to escape the incessant downpour. There, beneath the skeleton of a giant blue whale suspended from the ceiling, we wandered among a prodigious array of animals, slaughtered then stuffed in the name of science: hippopotamuses, giraffes, lions, zebras, narwhals, mother elephants with their trumpeting young, and butterflies, some as big as stingrays. It made me queasy walking through it, a graveyard built in pursuit of knowledge. But the kids loved looking at the kaleidoscope of creatures parading silently across an imagined savanna land, and so I persevered, climbing the old wooden stairs to study my likeness in the face of an ape. The most curious exhibit, at least to my mind, was that of the stuffed royal rhino—once a pet of Louis XV, that had come from the menagerie at Versailles. The information sheet said that it was brought to Paris as an object of public education. I saw the little hairs on its back, the funny way the mouth pulled sideways below the horn. A smile, or a grimace. I couldn’t tell which.

  After having tasted this museum, filled with curiosities older than the French Revolution, I was emboldened to find others that children would also effortlessly find thrilling. These included the Paris Doll Museum, located close to the Centre Pompidou, and Le Grand Rex, an art deco cinema on the Boulevard Poissonnière, where we took a backstage tour through an old movie set and became the stars of our own spaghetti western. Afterward, the three of us went front of house where, once more needing to wait out the December rains, we sat in large plush red velvet seats and watched a first-run screening of a French film called Le Renard et l’Enfant, based on an old French fairy tale about a little girl and her pet fox, who lives in a wood. When she forces the animal to come live with her in her house it runs wild, breaking dishes and nearly dying when it leaps for freedom out a glass window. It was in French, and the children didn’t comprehend a word. Yet they seemed visibly moved by this story about a love so strong it transcended all reason.

  We took the metro to Saint-Paul, in the Marais, and walked down Rue Saint-Antoine, the main drag in medieval times, past a jumble of old buildings and narrow passageways that my kids were eager to run into. We were looking for Number 11 Rue Saint-Paul, where the words Académie de Magie were painted over the arched doorway. We had to climb down a steep flight of stairs to reach the entrance. There the children encountered a disembodied hand that reached out to them to give their own hands a shake. But they quickly let go when a painted head popped from inside the box, giving them a fright.

  I bought our tickets and was told, vite! Hurry, the magic show was about to start. I rushed the children to take their places in the theater located down a narrow passageway, beneath a barrelled ceiling. The bleachers were full because of a school trip. Sylvain, as the man with a goatee introduced himself, took the tiny stage and, with a swirl of his satin cape, began his repertoire of tricks.

  The first involved a deck of cards, with the diamonds increasing and decreasing in number each time he waved it, un-deux-trois, in front of his ample tummy. The next involved a piece of string that with a dramatic roll of the wrist, Sylvain the magician transformed into three smaller strings of equal length. All the children “oohed” and “aahed,” mine included. They couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  I looked around us. We were sitting inside what seemed like an underground vault supported by elegant columns exploding upward into arches. Later, one of the magicians told me that we were in the cellar of a former royal palace. But when I got home and looked the museum up on the Internet, I read that it was actually the former home of the Marquis de Sade. In any event it seemed that tricks had been turning there for centuries.

  After the show was over, we wandered the claustrophobic corridors stuffed with curiosities, carnival relics, and the former belongings of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French illusionist born in 1805, said to be the father of modern magic and to whom the museum was dedicated. There were secret boxes, false doors, an automated fortune-teller
peering into a crystal ball, and a framed portrait of a dark-suited, bearded man that collapsed when I walked by, startling me.

  My children were in a back room howling with laughter. I followed the delirious sound and found them in front of a wall of fun-house mirrors, the kind that distort the body, making it seem dwarfish, supertall, or grotesquely fat. I stood behind them and regarded myself, chopped off at the knees and dwarfed by half my normal size. “Mommy’s a midget!” they squealed. “Mommy’s a midget!”

  Seeing how the mirror made multiples of them, I was reminded of how I had in a moment of weakness confided in my mother my desire to have many more children, even though time was quickly running out.

  “You don’t want that,” she scowled. “Children get in the way. They destroy ambition. Cramp your style. You don’t have a life of your own when you have children.”

  I realized then that she had regarded her own children that way. As a burden. And it was why she stayed away from my children, and rarely called. “Children get in the way.” In the midst of all my inwardly swirling fury, a light had gone off. It hadn’t been my fault that she was so distant, just as it wasn’t my children’s fault. It was her. It was how she viewed her world, distorted as it was. That’s when I recognized that she would never change. And that I was on my own, raising my own children, my precious children, with little to guide me but a need to be different—to be not like her.

  It was dusk when we left that museum’s sleight-of-hand world. I dragged the children on a cook’s tour of the district. The open courtyard of the 17th-century Hôtel de Sully. The arcade of Place des Vosges, where we stumbled upon a lineup of women and their children, patiently waiting to get inside a by-invitation-only designer children’s clothing sale.

  We pushed toward the Quai d’Orléans and stood on the bridge. The Seine sloshed under us, impetuous and dangerous. My daughter threw herself up the railing. “I want to see,” she said. “I want to see!” “Get down from there,” I shrieked. I thought she’d topple over the rail. My lashing tone had frightened her, and she started to cry. I knew the feeling and held her close.