by Baxter, John
In her novel Foreign Relations, Alison Lurie suggests that when we visit a foreign country, we retain full use of only two senses. “Sight is permitted—hence the term ‘sight-seeing.’ The sense of taste is also encouraged, and even takes on a weird, almost sexual importance: consumption of the native food and drink becomes a highly charged event; a proof that you were ‘really there.’ ” But sound, smell, and touch are all muffled or blocked.
She’s quite right. Visitors to France suffer more than most. The language, even if you have some vocabulary, is often spoken with an incomprehensible accent and an even less penetrable argot. Why is a nectarine called a brugnon? Why is the Centre Pompidou known as Le Beaubourg? How heavy is a livre? Signage is the worst of all. Who but a local would know that DÉFENSE D’AFFICHER—LOI DU 21 JUILLET 1889 means NO POSTERS? Or that a restaurant that “offers” something is giving it away, but you’ll have to pay for anything “proposed”?
In summer, these effects intensify. On any warm day, you can see the do-not-touch rule in action in the Luxembourg. The southernmost part of the park, running up to boulevard Saint-Michel, and known as the “Little Luxembourg,” consists of two identical stretches of lawn, flanked by avenues of geometrically trimmed trees. To protect the grass, use of the lawns is strictly alternated. Each summer’s day, however, a few sweating back-packers, staggering off the boulevard into the shade, glimpse the two stretches of grass, one crowded with picnickers and playing children, the other empty, and throw themselves down gratefully on the unoccupied one—only to be rousted in a minute by the indignant garden police.
As it gets hotter, energy drains out of pedestrians. Their most grievous error is to walk too fast. Begin strolling with a new arrival, and within half a block you’re talking to their back. Fortunately in summer they slow down until they barely seem to move. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant, who, unfashionably, spends August in Paris when everyone else flees to the seaside or the mountains, described the effect precisely in her story “August.”
The movement of Paris was running down. The avenues were white and dusty, full of blowing flags and papers and torn posters, and under traffic signals there were busily aimless people, sore-footed, dressed for heat, trying to decide whether or not to cross that particular street, wondering whether Paris would be better once the street was crossed. The city’s minute hand had begun to lag; in August it would stop.
In summer and winter both, walking around Paris requires recalibration—not only a new way of walking but a different way of looking.
When I walk in New York, I look up. Manhattan is its buildings—as continually startling as the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. As much as the pyramids, they speak of the possibilities of power, the belief in perfectability, the promise of a future. In London, on the other hand, I look around. Nowhere are the social dissonances more startling, the range of physical types as varied, the languages, visual and aural, more labile. London seethes with change.
But in Paris, I look down.
(“And just as well,” a cynic might say, “given what you’re likely to step in.” This is unfair. Though the number of dogs in Paris hasn’t decreased, the amount of discarded doo-doo has definitely diminished. The city has discontinued the service known derisively as le motocrotte, which sent young men out on motorbikes fitted with vacuum cleaners to suck up the more obnoxious evidence. One even sees dog owners scooping up poo in plastic bags—as unimaginable a decade ago as a Frenchman ordering un Coca in a café.)
The great Paris flood of 1910
No, Parisians look down because the city’s story is underfoot. Though asphalt covers the larger streets and boulevards, underneath you’ll find the original cubical stone cobbles: large and rough-hewn for older streets, smaller and more precisely cut where the surface is new. For a while in the late nineteenth century, the city economized by putting down brick-sized wood blocks, a cruder version of the parquet common in apartments. That ended when the Seine broke its banks in 1910. As streets flooded, the blocks swelled and riverside roads erupted into an irreparable jumble.
After that, granite cubes, bedded in sand, became standard. Often arranged in fanlike patterns, they look innocuous, but only so long as nobody pries one up and throws it, as rioting students did in 1968. The sand under the blocks was an added bonus; all over Paris, a new graffito appeared: “Sous les Paves, la plage.” Under the stones, there’s a beach. A flic knocked senseless when a block hit his helmet didn’t share their elation, but bruises heal, and what remains of those days is the exhilaration of remembered passion, crystallized for me by one of the anonymous posters of soixante-huit: the image of a wild-haired girl, coattails flying, caught in the instant of flinging a stone, and the defiant delight of its black block capitals—LA BEAUTÉ EST DANS LA RUE. Beauty is in the street!
“Beauty Is in the Streets!” 1968 poster
But the students illuminated an ancient truth. If, as the flaneurs claimed, walking around Paris is an art, then the city itself is the surface on which they create. And since Paris is ancient, that surface is not blank. Artists paint over their old work or that of others, just as medieval scholars scraped back the surface of vellum or parchment to use it again. Such a sheet, called a palimpsest, bears faintly, however often it’s reused, the words of earlier hands. And we who walk in Paris write a new history with each step. The city we leave behind will never be quite the same again.
Chapter 20
Looking for Matisse
How oddly the light suffuses the covered arcades which abound in Paris in the vicinity of the main boulevards and which are rather disturbingly named passages, as though no one had the right to linger for more than an instant in those sunless corridors. A glaucous gleam, seemingly filtered through deep water, with the special quality of pale brilliance of a leg suddenly revealed under a lifted skirt.
LOUIS ARAGON, Paris Peasant
We don’t know enough millionaires, but Tim is one. An easygoing Australian, he had the good sense in the 1960s to look around a sleepy beach resort on the far north coast of New South Wales and realize that with a coat of paint and a little light carpentry, those bungalows would make ideal holiday homes. Nor did he lack buyers. People from Sydney and Brisbane were drawn to the area. Some enjoyed the climate and the proximity of the ocean, where whales swung into the bay on their way north to breed. Others were attracted by the potent weed cultivated in nearby bushland. Within a decade, Tim had three offices selling and leasing real estate and could afford to spend his spare time globe-trotting.
One Saturday, his last in Paris for this trip, we were eating breakfast on the terrace.
“I was thinking,” he said, “of taking something back for the wife.”
I dunked the corner of my pain chocolat and thought about what kind of gift a millionaire’s wife might like but not already have.
“Hermès scarf? Chanel handbag?”
“Got those,” he said, confirming my suspicions.
We gave it more thought as I topped up our cups and admired the sheen of the roofs of Paris in the morning sun.
“She’s quite interested in painting.”
“Plenty of good art-book shops around,” I said. “Or we could check out the one in the Musée d’Orsay. Big stock.”
He nodded thoughtfully. Then he said, “Listen—can you just buy a Matisse?”
An odalisque by Henri Matisse
There may be more agreeable ways to spend a warm Parisian Saturday than strolling from gallery to gallery, seeking the graceful drawings and lithographs of Henri Matisse. None, however, immediately comes to mind.
We began in the arcades, or passages, that, starting behind the Louvre, trace a crooked path almost to the foot of the butte of Montmartre.
Passages Vero-Dodat, Vivienne, Panoramas, Jouffroy, and Verdeau date from the first half of the nineteenth century and share a common air of antique calm. Louis Aragon called them human aquariums. I’d rather say vivariums—those glass enclosures without water where slow-blooded
lizards and frogs lounge in an artificial landscape, feeling no necessity to exert themselves, content merely to observe and be observed.
Slim cast-iron columns support glass roofs through which filters a soft, golden light. It encourages a slower pace, the saunter that marks a real flaneur. Underfoot, marble floors, ancient and occasionally uneven, match the tiny shops, an eccentric mix of hobbyism—rare books, antique postcards and stamps, movie memorabilia, dolls—with cafés, pâtisseries, and here and there a discreet hotel. The parents of Luis Buñuel spent their honeymoon in one such hotel. Buñuel himself, when he came to live in Paris, sought it out and slept there, in the bed where he was conceived—just the whimsical act one would expect from the director of Un Chien Andalou. Half hypnotized by the light, one’s mind spins fantasies. During his stay, did he visit the nearby Musée Grevin, Paris’s equivalent of Madame Tussaud’s? Wax effigies of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marilyn Monroe, and home-grown celebrities like rocker Johnny Hallyday share space with tableaux of Napoleon brooding outside his tent during the invasion of Egypt and the family of Louis XVI awaiting the guillotine. Might they have given him the idea for The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, whose hero conceives a passion for a shop-window dummy that he eventually incinerates?
More to the point of what Tim and I were looking for, the passages also include a scatter of dealers in modestly priced paintings and prints.
Almost immediately, we found our first Matisse. The pen-and-ink head of a woman, it sat among dozens of mediocre sketches and watercolors in the window of a gallery near the complex of auction rooms known as the Hôtel Drouot. Despite the bold signature, I wasn’t entirely convinced it was authentic. Besides, the gallery was closed, and our lady was imprisoned behind the steel grilles that barred all the windows.
I used my mobile to ring the off-hours number painted on the door.
The owner didn’t sound happy. In the background, a family chattered—and was that the rattle of plates, the clink of glasses? A late breakfast or an early lunch?
“We’re closed till next week,” he said. “Can’t your friend come back then?”
“He’s leaving for Australia on Monday.”
“I don’t know . . . I’m down in Bourgogne . . .”
“He’s a serious buyer,” I coaxed. “And he particularly wants a Matisse.”
On the phone, someone in the background yelled “A table!”—the summons to eat that no French person can resist. If the dealer had been wavering, this decided him.
“Really, I can’t,” he said. “I have to go. Come back when I’m open.” And he rang off.
Tim looked aggrieved. “Funny way to do business. Wouldn’t work back home.”
“There are plenty more,” I said.
But there weren’t—not immediately, at least. This was partly our fault. So many side passages led to interesting little impasses that we frequently stopped to explore. In a shop selling postcards, I found an image of the African American dancer Josephine Baker, cheekily nude but for the skirt of velvet bananas made for her by fashion designer Paul Poiret. A few doors along, the proprietor of a tiny North African café served us coffee and an almond biscuit. Squint your eyes, and we might almost be in some Moroccan souk. . .
Our search ended back on the Left Bank, in a small gallery only a few meters from the Seine. Unlike a number we’d passed, it was open and the owner was more than happy to do business.
“Matisse? Certainly!” he said. “Please, take a seat! Coffee? A tisane? A glass of wine?”
Armchairs appeared. An easel was set up. From the back room, a stately assistant carried a succession of large flat boxes. Her white-gloved hands placed an etching on the easel. A woman, bare-breasted above diaphanous silk pantalons, lounged on an intricately patterned rug, as indifferent to her beauty as a cat. She was an odalisque, a harem girl, the pampered prisoner of some wealthy North African. Her impassive, dreamy face, almond-eyed, tangled in sinuous strands of hair—it could only be Matisse.
“Now that”—Tim rummaged through Australia’s meager stock of superlatives, and selected its ultimate expression of transcendent delight—“is all right.”
“Picasso said,” remarked the gallery owner, “that when Matisse died, his odalisques were his bequest to us. Picasso never saw North Africa, you know—never even left Europe—but he said he didn’t need to: he could experience it through the eyes of Matisse.”
Nothing sells a picture like a plug from Picasso. Tim produced a credit card of a sort I’d seen only once before. My actor friend, Don Davis, who’d lucked into a continuing role in the TV series Stargate SG-1, once took me to lunch at Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysées. The staff, already impressed by a famous face, almost genuflected at the sight of “The Card.”
“The green I know,” I said to Don. “Also the gold. I’ve seen the platinum gray,” I said, “and, just once, a centurion black. But this one’s a first.”
“Plutonium,” he grinned. “No limit.” He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling, a gesture that encompassed the high-priced real estate above it. “I could buy the building.”
The gallery owner, to his credit, accepted Tim’s card without even a raised eyebrow. After a transaction that concluded with Tim the poorer by approximately the cost of a compact car, we left his odalisque to be wrapped and packed.
“That was fun,” he said. “Let’s have some lunch.”
Chapter 21
Fish Story
The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes à l’huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes à l’huile were gone I ordered another serving of cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce. I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and finished it and ordered a demi.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, on lunching at Brasserie Lipp
For lunch, we went to Brasserie Lipp. Nobody who comes to Paris should miss Lipp.
Brasserie means “brewery,” and beer used to be brewed in the basement of the narrow building just a few hundred meters from the church of Saint-Germain des Près. Some of that spirit persists. The floors are still wood, the decor nineteenth-century mirrors and brass, the menu based on robust stick-to-your-ribs dishes. The primary beer served is one it makes itself. Between the wars, Lipp attracted artists more interested in good, cheap food than atmosphere. Hemingway was a regular. He particularly enjoyed its boiled cervelas sausage, served on cold sliced potatoes, dressed with oil.
Every important restaurant has its bijou spot, the table where you can see and be seen. For Lipp, it’s the glassed-in terrace, on either side of the front door, a shop window reserved for film stars and winners of the Prix Goncourt. Tim and I were exiled to the back, which, in any event, we preferred, since the noise of conversation, reverberating across the bare floor, makes it so loud that one can’t talk.
With thoughts of Hemingway, I ordered his preferred meal: cervelas with potato salad, washed down with a demi—a “half”—of the house beer, served in a large-stemmed goblet holding about half a liter.
“I’ll have the sardines,” Tim said—understandable for someone who lives by the Indian Ocean and routinely dines off fresh fish.
A few minutes later, our waiter returned, not with our food but with its accompaniments. First, a small glass jug of dark green olive oil. He placed it next to Tim’s plate, along with a dish of slivered green onions (which the French insist on calling “white onion”). With it came half a lemon, wrapped in muslin, and clenched in metal grips to aid squeezing. A few minutes later, he returned with a metal dish holding thin dry rye toast wrapped in a linen napkin.
At last, our food arrived. My sausage and potatoes were plonked down with the lack of ceremony they deserved. But Tim had clearly or
dered something out of the ordinary, which deserved the appropriate presentation. Producing a plate on which lay a napkin-covered object, the waiter whipped it off to reveal—a can of sardines.
Displaying the label to a startled Tim as he would a bottle of wine, he unrolled the lid, upended the contents onto a plate, and, with a cheery “Bon appétit!,” retired.
I should have noticed Tim’s astonishment. He’d been expecting fresh grilled sardines—a commonplace in Australian restaurants. It never occurred to me to explain that, to the French, certain canned sardines are of such quality that they achieve vintage status. The best are caught in the spring when the fish are fattest, and are reserved for “gourmet” use. Some canners roast or sauté the fish before canning. A connoisseur described their flavor as “complex, almost a non-fish thing, very nutty, deep, and enthralling.” “Label rouge” sardines are even more specialized. Guaranteed to have been landed no more than twelve hours after being caught, and arriving at the factory within four hours of landing, they are cleaned the same day, fried in sunflower oil, stored for four months before sale, and then issued with a label that lists not only the day of catch but the name of the boat that caught them. One of the main processors, Connetable, produces a “vintage” sardine that retails at $14 a can. Buyers are advised to “put down” these like wine for a few years, turning them occasionally to spread the flavor.
“What really threw me,” Tim said later, “was the fact that you didn’t bat an eyelash. I thought it was some sort of practical joke.”
He should have realized that the French, serious at the best of times, become positively reverent when it comes to food.
Animators at the Walt Disney studios in the 1930s thought it would be amusing to make a porno cartoon of Mickey Mouse.
Walt laughed as much as everyone else—then fired them all. Word soon got round: Rule number 1 at Disney was “Don’t fuck with the mouse.”
