by Oliver Gee
It was here that I’d meet Mary, a curly-haired middle-aged French woman who didn’t seem too impressed with me. I told her we were looking for a place to stay and she seemed incredulous. She asked how old Eddie was and I said 12. She asked if we had a signed document proving I was his guardian and I said no. She asked why I hadn’t booked something ahead considering it was peak tourist season. I didn’t have an answer. Mary didn’t look impressed.
“It’s the middle of summer, your brother is underage, you don’t have a signed document from your parents saying that you’re his guardian,” she summarized. Then she shrugged her shoulders and added: “I suggest you find a park bench for the night.”
Mary wasn’t kidding. It was my first true encounter with a French person and I’m ashamed to admit that, like many other tourists, I decided that the stereotype was true. French people were rude, after all. We left Mary in the booth and went to sit on a nearby bench. I needed time to think and I wondered if we could sleep on a bench, really. I wondered how my parents would react. My Dad’s warning played back in my mind: “Look after your brother”. I felt I’d already let him down. I wondered how Eddie would react. I looked at his little 12-year-old face. His freckled cheeks. His tired and hopeful eyes.
“Are we really going to sleep on the bench, Ol?” he asked, using the nickname that only my closest friends and family ever use, especially in times of tenderness or trouble. “I’ll do it if you ask me, you know what’s best for me after all.”
By God, that boy knew how to make me feel guilty.
“Don’t worry, Eddie, I’ll figure out something,” I said. “You just lay down on the bench there and rest those sleepy little eyes.”
While I waited to see if Eddie would fall asleep, I went through all my options. Now it might not sound like such a tricky situation to you, but let’s get this in perspective. It was apparently forbidden to stay anywhere with Eddie without the legal consent from my parents, which I wasn’t going to get. They were off in Morocco celebrating their wedding anniversary. I couldn’t call them - none of us had cell phones, at that time and the internet wasn’t even a remote possibility (for us, or for them!). I thought about forging something but then remembered that everything was apparently booked. Everything cheap, anyway, and I certainly couldn’t afford anything expensive. And no, I couldn’t whip out a credit card because I didn’t have one - and Eddie didn’t either. Nowadays it would be easy, I’m sure. But at that moment I didn’t know what to do.
I looked over at Eddie, laying on the green bench, dozing off as the last rays of sunlight filtered through the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. I thought of my parents and how disappointed they’d be with me for making Eddie sleep on a bench. Night was starting to set in and there was a rat-like rustle coming from a nearby bush. Several rat-like rustles, in fact. I was astonished to see the first rat, poking its head out of the foliage and apparently sizing up Eddie’s ankle - then retreating to wait for nightfall. I don’t know what prompted my next act, and it may well have been the rats, but I gave up. I went back to Mary at the booth and brought Eddie along.
“Eddie, we have two options,” I said before we approached. “Option one: you turn those doe-eyes up a notch and we charm this lady into helping us somehow. I don’t know what she can do, but she’s our only hope.”
“And what’s option two, Ol?” he said, his lip quivering.
“We sleep on the bench and get eaten alive by the Paris street rats.”
We went back to the booth and I went through the options again. And to my dismay, Mary made it all sound even harder than she had at first.
After I’d all but exhausted my list of questions, I asked the last one I had.
“What would you do if you were me?”
She looked at Eddie, sweet Eddie, with dirt on his cheeks and what appeared to be a tear in his eye.
“How old is the boy again?”
“The boy is 12,” I said. “And a young 12 at that.”
She looked from Eddie to me and then back to Eddie again. She sighed. It was a long sigh. Then there was a long pause. Time stood still. It felt like the traffic on the Champs-Elysées disappeared. It was just me and Eddie and Mary as she decided what to tell us. It felt like she had the keys to the city, the insight, the context. Whatever she would say next would be our fate - and I was hoping she wouldn’t repeat her line about the park bench. The sun had set by this point and Eddie, my beloved little brother, let out a little shiver. I put my arm around him.
I feel like it might have been that little shiver that changed everything, creating ripples that radiated despair and hopelessness through the air, reaching Mary and warming up her Parisian heart.
“Alors,” she said, shaking her head. “My son is 12 and I wouldn’t want him sleeping on a bench in Paris.” Another pause. “I suppose you two will have to sleep at my house. Come along, I’m closing up anyway.”
What? Her house? Good lord, what a gesture! Here I was thinking she had some connection with a hotel or backpackers and would put in a good word for us. We couldn’t believe our luck. Mary, who at first had seemed like the most heartless woman in Paris, had transformed into our guardian angel. She locked up the tourist booth and led us through the cobbled roads of the 8th arrondissement. We rode a train to the western suburbs, where we spent the night with Mary and her lovely family, in their wonderful home overlooking Paris. Her husband was delighted to meet two Australians, and we traded stories about life on our respective sides of the world. The 12-year-old French boy gave Eddie comic books while I drank wine with the adults. We got a true insight into Parisian family life, maybe better than any I’ve had in the years that I’ve lived here since.
In the morning, Mary sat down with us and pulled out a map of the city.
“Now, you’ve only got one day here so here’s how to spend it,” she said, marking with a pen the exact routes we should take and the sites we should see to maximise our time.
It was clear that this was her job, and she knew all the secrets. It was the perfect mix of tourist attractions and hidden gems. She told us how to avoid the queues at the Eiffel Tower and the best bateau mouche barge from which to see the city. And as a last surprise, she took us to the local bakery and plied us with pastry treats to take with us, then sent us on our way. It was amazing: we were well fed, well rested, and had the itinerary of an expert to lead us on our way. And so that second day was even more wonderful than the first. It was like a movie montage, with Eddie and I ducking and diving, smiling and laughing, riding boats and climbing towers until it was time to head back to London, drunk on the magic of Paris.
It was to be my first lesson in Paris know-how. Mary taught me that Paris doesn’t have to be daunting and unmanageable. All you need is a few tips (and a place to sleep, of course). Funnily enough, years later, giving tips about Paris and helping tourists ended up being my own job. I sometimes wonder if I’ll pay back the accommodation favour somewhere down the road to another pair of underprepared travellers. As for me and Eddie, when we got back to England, our family sat dumbstruck when we told the story. But my favourite part of it didn’t happen for another ten years.
One decade later Eddie visited me in Paris. We were reminiscing about that fateful weekend, Mary, and the City of Light. We hadn’t discussed the story for years and something about being in Paris together brought the memories flooding back.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing to find Mary again?” Eddie said, shaking his head with a smile and wiping croissant crumbs from his chin.
“That’s it! What an idea, let’s do it!” I responded.
I was always on the hunt for a good story and we had one in our lap. We decided that we had to make it our mission to find Mary, one decade on, and to thank her for her hospitality, not to mention for giving us both a story we’d retold endlessly over the years. And what better way to document the journey than to record it as a podcast episode
?
We didn’t have her contact details, however, and we spent four days retracing our steps, looking for clues, and searching all over the internet for the elusive Mary. I emailed every account that seemed to be tied to her, reached out on every social media profile, but to no avail. The French are notoriously private online; many of my own French friends have fake names on Facebook. Maybe Mary had a fake profile too… We enlisted the help of a beginner tarot card reader and almost hired a private detective until he told us his astronomical fees. It was a cracking ride, and eventually, by looking at old blog entries and photos we traced the story from the Champs-Elysées to the Paris suburb of Courbevoie, right up to the exact apartment building we’d spent the night. We even rode all the way out there on the scooter. But there was no Mary in sight. The lobby was open and we scoured the names on the intercom dials; nothing seemed to match.
As a last resort, we stood out on the street and looked to the balcony on the top floor, the balcony that featured in our photographs all those years ago, and we saw an open door. It was our last hope. I asked Eddie to yell out for Mary, to call her name into the Paris skies like a young Australian Romeo. A hail Mary, if you will. And, just like ten years before, he looked into my eyes and said “You know what’s best Ol, I’ll do it.” I fed him the lines.
“MARYYYY!” he called, with me whispering in his ears as he went. He continued to yell.
“We’re the two people you looked after ten years ago! Here, seeking salvation.”
I admit, I got carried away with the last bit, but it was clear that Mary wasn’t there. She’d probably long since moved away. We were on a wild goose chase. And while it made for a fun podcast episode, the hunt for Mary ended in failure. Eddie was despondent, but I told him that Mary would have been happy anyway. In our search for her we’d scooted across the whole city, and in a roundabout way had experienced the true Paris. We’d met the locals, passed countless tourist hotspots, and even dared to cross the Paris ring road to get a taste of suburban life. I released the episode about our journey, and judging by the response, I disappointed a lot of listeners by the fact that we never found Mary. It was disappointing for me too, I’d always hoped to be reconnected with her.
Many months later, I got an unexpected email from a woman called Mary. The Mary. Our Mary. She’d checked her old email account, seen my messages, followed the links and she had found our podcast episode. She’d listened with her whole family, the same family who’d taken us in a decade earlier. As I read her message I was terrified that she would be unhappy or uncomfortable with being the subject of an episode, but it was rather the opposite.
“Oh, it was wonderful!” she wrote, adding how pleased she was to get her 15 minutes of fame, or as she called it, her fameux quart d’heure de gloire, which I much prefer.
“We sometimes talk about you two, too,” she added. “You can’t imagine what a delight you were to have around. I’m so happy you came by the tourism office that day and didn’t sleep in the wild.”
She added that she had left Paris for a quieter life in the south of France. A life where she didn’t feel like she had to take pity on orphaned tourists, no doubt. I’ve never made it to her corner of France and she hasn’t been back to Paris, but I hope one day to meet Mary once more and to thank her for one of my most memorable nights in Paris.
6.5 The cheese
It was a warm April night in Paris and I was sitting in a pool of what may have been someone else’s sweat. I’d just finished another basketball game in the secret Marais league and was hanging out courtside with two guys from Normandy.
“So are you guys gonna play next week?” I asked.
“Ah, next week is a mois de Gruyère, there won’t be much basketball,” responded Mathieu, a gentle giant of a Frenchman.
I gave him a blank look.
“A mois de Gruyère?” I asked.
“Yes, a Gruyère month,” he said with a chuckle. “There are so many public holidays in May that it’s like a Gruyère cheese - full of holes!”
Ah. I apologized that my knowledge of French cheese still wasn’t at the level where I used it to describe calendar months.
“Mais non, Oliver,” he said. “Gruyère isn’t a French cheese. It’s Swiss. Don’t tell me you don’t know your French cheeses?”
Arnaud, the other basketballer, leaned in, eyeing me up with suspicion. No point lying, I figured, and admitted that I was more or less clueless.
“So what do you buy when you go to the fromageur?” asked Arnaud, the slightly-less-towering Norman.
I told the truth. Ever since my humiliating failure at the fromagerie when I first moved to Paris, I’d been too scared to venture inside another cheese shop again. If I wanted cheese, I got it from the supermarket.
It was almost as if I’d offended them personally. They threw their hands in the air and scoffed loudly.
“Think of what you’ve been missing out on! For two years! This won’t do, you can’t live in France without knowing French cheese. Soon you’ll tell us you don’t know French wine.”
I let my silence do the talking. And it wasn’t long before it was decided. The mammoth Norman basketballers would be my culinary gurus. If you’re going to live in France, they said, you need to have a good grasp of the cheese and wine. And they were going to teach me.
On Tuesday the next week, there was a knock on my front door and the Normans lumbered in, arms laden with heavy bags. I was ready with a few glasses of cider from Normandy, which they took with great pleasure. In an attempt to make them feel at home, I pointed out that I’d even brought back a bottle of Calvados, an apple brandy, after a recent trip to their region. They beamed with pride.
They cleared our kitchen table, a small square-shaped island in the middle of the room, and took to laying out various cheeses and bottles of wine with great care. All the while they were particular about me and Lina staying out of the way and leaving them to it. They argued between themselves in angry whispers, apparently about where some of the cheeses should go on the table. Eventually, they invited Lina and I to join them. What they’d done was incredible. The table was covered with cheeses of every shape, size, and colour imaginable. But I still couldn’t figure out why they’d been so careful with the placements. It seemed haphazard, unusual.
“Alors, mes amis, welcome to the cheese and wine map of France,” said Mathieu with a grin. “This table is France, yes? We’re here, in Paris,” he said, pointing vaguely to the top middle section of the table.
“This is north, this is south, yes?” Arnaud chimed in.
“Right. Now, listen carefully, we’re about to teach you all you need to know about cheese, and we’re going to explain your dinner.”
With great pride, the two Normans picked up each piece of cheese, told us its name, explained the region it was from, made us smell it, then placed it back on the table. They took special pride as they showed the Camembert, which is perhaps the most famous cheese from their beloved Normandy region.
Then they did the same thing with the wine, with some familiar names, like Bordeaux and Burgundy, set clearly in their geographical homes on the table, alongside other red wines with names I’d not heard before.
“Now, let’s get started.”
We then proceeded to eat the entire table full of cheese. They taught us how to slice it, the stories behind the cheeses, and for what occasions we should buy them. It was fascinating. Some of the cheeses I’d heard about before, but most were new to me and wildly exotic. There was a Tomme de Savoie, a mild Alpine cheese that became an instant favourite. There was a Timanoix from Brittany, a cow’s milk cheese made by monks. There was a Crottin de Chavignol, a tasty goat cheese from the Loire Valley, and a semi-hard blue cheese from Auvergne called Fourme d’Ambert. The most visually impressive was the Coeur Neufchatel, which was shaped like a heart and is said to be one of the oldest cheeses in France. There was
also a particularly stinky Munster Ferme from Alsace, so soft that it was almost a liquid. The basketballers took great care to explain exactly how to order the cheese too - there’s nothing to be scared of, they said. Don’t hesitate to tell the fromageur if you only want a little, and don’t be afraid to ask questions, because it will often lead to a free tasting sample.
Now, this lesson, as you may imagine, wasn’t rushed. My friends went into great detail; they truly wanted me to understand and appreciate this integral part of life in France. And as the hours passed, we also managed to drink all the wine. Let me tell you, those Normans could drink. And as a grateful host, I did my best to keep up with these monstrous Obelixes, and I’d done pretty well, if I’m honest. But I must admit, as my bedtime approached I was glad when the last bottle was emptied. I couldn’t have managed another drop. All on a Tuesday too.
It was around this point that Mathieu’s eyes started scanning the room.
“Now, what were you telling us about that bottle of Calvados?”
Merde.
6.6 Faking French
When I was a boy, my mum convinced me and my brothers that she could speak French. With the fluency of a Parisienne she would burst into a dramatic flurry of what sounded to us like perfect French. How did she learn it? Why did she learn it? We never thought to ask. We were just impressed by this amazing talent.
It wasn’t until many years later that we learned she had been… gasp… faking French. I suppose for us children the idea that someone could fake a language by imitating the sounds was a foreign concept, for the want of a better word. But she fooled us alright. Looking back, I can still remember the noises she made. A lot of zhe sounds, as in the je in je m’appelle. There were also a lot of soft p sounds, like the pom in the word pomp. I suppose it was a lot of je pom pom, la la la and so on. She was quite convincing; she even had the shrug and the hand gestures.
I sometimes wonder if it was my mum’s impression that got me hooked on French, or at least on fake French. At the very least, I’m certain she got me into my fascination with languages and accents. And believe me, I am fascinated by accents. When we drove across America my biggest pleasure was hearing how people’s accents seemed to change with every state. I still wish I’d documented it somehow.
