Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  “Yes, this is Paris after all,” I said as I took her hand.

  * * *

  . . .

  The next afternoon, a Saturday, after a brunch of mushroom omelettes and smoked salmon at the Café de Flore, only a short walk away, we went to the Gare d’Austerlitz and took a train an hour south to Orléans, where we met Paul Bontemps, his son Benjamin, and the other riders at a hotel. There were eleven of them, all German, Swiss, or Austrian except for one American woman from Colorado who had given herself this trip for her fortieth birthday. At dinner, Tracy and I tried our French, but we dropped it soon enough, since most of the other riders spoke English well, and young Benjamin spoke halting, schoolboy English. Paul didn’t speak a word. Someone or another would translate his instructions for us. They were a good-looking group, all about our age, fit, and happily anticipating the five days of riding together.

  Such rides are called “randonnées,” and they’re a popular way to spend a holiday in France. There are randonnées à pied (on foot), à vélo (by bicycle), à ski, and à cheval (on horseback). Typically, the group gathers on Saturday evening at an inn in a village in the countryside. They set out the next morning behind a leader. Meanwhile, an assistant loads all the luggage in a van and drives to set up a picnic lunch at a place along the way. After lunch, the ride proceeds, and the assistant cleans up the lunch and drives on to the hotel where everyone will spend the night.

  That morning, we all rode in the van out to the farm where the horses had been stabled for the night. My mount was named Ulette. She was a powerfully built bay with four spotted socks and a long body. She was so tall that when I stood beside her to saddle up, I could barely see over her withers. She seemed entirely unconcerned as I buckled on the saddle and a pair of saddlebags Paul had given me.

  The gig turned out to be little more than a thick plank on two wheels. Barbara, the German woman who would ride with Tracy in the gig, was well into her seventies. She had been an English teacher all her life before retiring. She was sunny and smiling. Every now and then she would drop in some unexpected English expression such as “See you later, alligator.” Tracy liked Barbara immediately when they met at dinner.

  The sky was gray and overcast when we all mounted up Sunday morning and started out in one direction behind Paul. The gig, with Benjamin sitting in the middle, between Barbara and Tracy, set off in the opposite direction. We walked for a while along the edge of cultivated fields and then entered a forest. Paul rose in his saddle and turned to look at us. Then he raised his hand and kicked his horse. We all took off at a gallop out of the forest and across open country, a new experience for me. I balanced in my stirrups, told myself to look forward and not down, and tried to keep my heart from rising into my throat. You can feel a horse shifting into high gear when it begins to gallop. The body seems to lengthen, and the ride is actually smoother than at any other gait once the rider learns to relax. I did learn, but it took me a while.

  When we stopped for lunch, I was ready to get off Ulette and try to pull myself together, although she had been nothing but easy and obedient. I was really in a mild daze, which felt worse because Tracy and the gig had not yet arrived. Paul seemed unconcerned as we all began bringing buckets full of water from a canal for the horses. Then I thought I heard singing in the distance—“Home, home on the range, / Where the deer and the antelope play.” In a few moments, the gig appeared, coming out at the edge of a forest. They were late because they had gotten lost. They had decided to pass the time by singing songs from their native lands, and it was Tracy’s turn as they came up to join us.

  Tracy had enjoyed the morning, even though riding along in the gig could become boring, and she continued to enjoy the ride during the rest of the week. My afternoon was much better than my morning. I was more confident at a gallop and could enjoy racing across open country or along the edge of a wheat field. I had brought a water bottle to carry with me. By the third day, I was having wine with lunch and putting some in the water bottle, too. One day at lunch Paul said we were going to spend the night at a different hotel from the one his groups usually stayed in. In the middle of the afternoon, as we emerged from a forest, Paul turned to the right. Ulette wanted to turn left. Only when I insisted did she reluctantly go to the right. I learned later that the hotel Paul usually stayed in was to the left. After several days of riding across many miles of countryside, Ulette knew exactly where she was.

  Paul was well aware that I was there to write an article. He always gave Tracy and me the best rooms at the hotels where we stopped for the night, and, for that matter, I think Ulette might well have been the best mount in his herd. Usually, we stayed at three- or four-star country inns; one night, we stopped at a château with a moat and a drawbridge. Since it doesn’t get dark in the summer in France until ten or so, dinner was always late. Tracy and I spent the late afternoon and the evening luxuriating in our fancy room. We took long baths and spent our time together well and then dressed up a little for dinner. The food was always local specialties made with meats and produce from the area. The wine was from the region, too. We were always relaxed and happy, satiated even, when we slipped into bed near midnight.

  After five idyllic days of riding and dining together, we were a happy but also somewhat melancholy band on Friday, our last evening at a hotel, in Tours. The next morning, Tracy and I took a train to Paris, where we had reserved a room for three nights at the Hôtel des Deux-Iles, on the Île Saint-Louis. Tracy had thought that staying on the island would be a quiet, romantic experience, away from the bustle of the rest of Paris, allowing us to relax contentedly after the ride. Unfortunately, swarms of revelers clogged the streets around the hotel at night, and their whoops and general din intruded mightily on our little love nest.

  But, by a happy accident, my mother and two sisters were going to be in Paris at the same time. When we arrived, they were about to embark on a tour of Normandy. They were staying at the Hôtel Scribe, on the Right Bank, across a broad avenue from the Opera. Tracy and I visited them there the first afternoon we were back in Paris. Once the Germans were driven from Paris toward the end of World War II, the Scribe became the gathering place for journalists and photographers covering the war. There’s a famous illustration painted by Floyd Davis of Ernest Hemingway, Janet Flanner, Robert Capa, A. J. Liebling, and many others, all drinking at the bar in the Scribe. The Scribe turned out still to be a rather grand place; the imposing lobby had black-and-white marble floors, tall marble vases, and marble side tables all around, and a peaked glass ceiling high above. My sisters were sharing a room, so we met in my mother’s room, which had a separate bedroom and a large sitting area with a couch and several stuffed chairs.

  My family all adored Tracy, and she was always at the height of her charm when she was with them. She talked about singing cowboy songs as she rode on the gig through the countryside with her two companions: “And then Barbara sang German songs and Benjamin sang French songs and we would take turns driving.” My mother asked her if it was hard to drive the gig. “No, no, not at all. To go right you pull on the right rein. To go left, you pull on the left. To go straight, which is ninety percent of the time, you don’t do anything. You just think of another cowboy song to sing.”

  Tracy and I had brought a good bottle of red wine with us, which we all decided to drink right then. But there were no wineglasses. I called down to room service. Showing off, I spoke in French to the man who answered. “Bonjour, monsieur. Pourriez-vous apporter cinq tasses à la chambre 2077?”

  “Cinq tasses, monsieur?”

  “Oui.”

  He hesitated before saying, “D’accord, monsieur.”

  In a few moments there was a knock at the door, which I opened in a grand gesture. There stood a confused waiter balancing a round tray with five coffee cups. Oh yes, I remembered too late—“une tasse” means a cup; a glass is “un verre.”

  My mother loved
to laugh and was a good storyteller when she was in the mood and had the right audience. I could see that this embarrassing little scene was going right into her repertoire. Her face was red from laughter, and my sisters and Tracy were also laughing. Fortunately for me, the waiter thought it was funny, too, and said he would gladly return with five wineglasses. He did, and I gave him the generous tip that he deserved. I poured the wine. Tracy held up her glass. “To my bilingual husband,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dancing to the Mamou Playboys

  The following year, 1995, we took our two children to Paris. In fact, we did more than that. Tracy and I planned to spend all of June in France with Vivian and Ben. Vivian and I would go on a horseback ride for a week; then we would meet Ben and Tracy in Lyon, and all four of us would go to an intensive language and cooking school in the country for two weeks. After that, we would spend a week in an apartment in Paris that we had rented. Tracy and I were convinced that all four of us would be speaking French fluently after a month in France and our two weeks of intensive study.

  This trip was an irrational extravagance. Not only would I miss work, I would be far away and out of touch with my office for four weeks. That meant I would miss both sending one issue of the magazine to the printer and getting the next issue under way. I did as much advance planning as I could, but I knew that there was no substitute for being in the office, especially if problems arose. No one on the staff said anything to me; they didn’t have to. I knew that being gone that long was just on the edge of being irresponsible. And, also irresponsibly, I had to borrow money from my 401(k) account to pay for it all, which I knew was a poor financial decision. Tracy also knew that taking the trip was a foolish indulgence, but we kept quietly planning. We whispered between ourselves like conspirators preparing to confront authority. We both wanted to take the trip, no matter what.

  I found a ride for Vivian and me to take in the Dordogne, and in an attempt to justify what we were going to do anyway, I persuaded The New York Times’ Travel Section to let me write an article about our ride. Vivian and I said goodbye to Tracy and Ben and flew to Paris. After the plane landed, I realized that I was supposed to know what I was doing there. We took a bus into Paris from the airport, and then the Métro from the bus stop to our hotel. On the way to the Métro station, I cashed a two-hundred-dollar traveler’s check and carelessly put the wad of bills in my front pants pocket.

  I think the combination of jet lag and the need to look assured in front of Vivian didn’t leave me at my best. Somehow, I got the wrong tickets or went to the wrong entrance to the Métro or something. At any rate, the turnstile at the entrance refused our tickets and wouldn’t turn. Stymied, Vivian and I tossed our bags over the turnstile and then climbed over it ourselves. We got away with it—no one arrived to question us. We lugged our bags down the steps to the train. It arrived quickly, and we got on. Vivian sat down, but I stood by our bags. I was vaguely aware of a man standing rather close to me, but I didn’t want to miss our stop and was looking for it, so I didn’t pay too much attention to him. We got off at the proper station and climbed out of the Métro. On the way to our hotel, I decided to stop for coffee and a croissant, a rough approximation for Vivian of that first breakfast in Paris that Tracy and I had shared. Although I didn’t think this breakfast in the restaurant was as transcendent an experience for Vivian as it had been for Tracy and me, she did like it. That was a small victory, though. She was sixteen and not easily pleased. When the bill came, I reached into my front pants pocket for my money. It wasn’t there, not even a single bill. The man in the Métro had picked my pocket on the train. I glumly cashed another check. The cost of our month in France had just gone up by two hundred dollars. The following day, we did get to the proper train station for our trip south. We managed to catch the right train, and arrived on time in Bergerac, at the rendezvous for the ride.

  On the ride to Bergerac, I’d mulled over the experience of getting robbed. I wasn’t happy about the theft, but it had less effect on me than I would have thought. I was to blame; I had been heedless and stupid. The man might have been prowling near the currency exchange, hoping to find an easy prey like me. More likely, he was watching in the Métro, where I think I must have pulled out my wad of francs while paying for our tickets. Then he followed Vivian and me onto the train. He sidled next to me, did what he did, and got off at the next stop, the richer by two hundred dollars’ worth of francs. At least he hadn’t gotten my wallet, with my driver’s license and credit cards, or my passport, all of which would have created horrible bureaucratic nightmares to cancel and replace. Even as I resolved to be more careful in the future, as I have been, I had a slight admiration for the smoothness with which he practiced his métier.

  For at least two centuries, every travel guide to Paris has warned against pickpockets. Robert Bresson’s masterpiece Pickpocket from 1959 is one of several iconic films from that era about Paris. In museums, in the Métro, and in many tourist destinations, it’s common to hear warnings about pickpockets in several languages over the public address system. Usually, the warnings are given when the authorities spot gangs of teenaged girls. I learned this one afternoon at the Louvre, when a guard who had gotten on an elevator with Tracy and me wouldn’t let a group of three or four girls on with us. She not only blocked the door but forcibly shoved one of the girls away. When the guard saw that I was astonished, she shook her head with her mouth turned down and an air of disgust. “They will rob you,” she said in English.

  Tracy and I had seen a gang of eight to ten such girls on the train to Chantilly in 1982. They roamed from car to car, shrieking and laughing and generally creating a disturbance. We didn’t understand what they were at the time, but we knew instinctively to be wary. Not long after that, as we got on a Métro train at the La Motte–Picquet station in Paris, a girl’s hand reached through the closing doors behind us and into Tracy’s purse. I saw what was happening and grabbed the girl’s wrist. The train’s doors closed on her arm, bounced back open, and then closed and opened again, causing alarms to ring and horns to honk insistently. Two elderly Frenchwomen beat on the girl’s arm with their fists until she opened her hand, letting Tracy’s wallet fall back into her purse, and I let go of the girl’s wrist. She snatched back her arm, the sliding doors closed, the train started moving, and one of the Frenchwomen hissed, “Répugnante. Répugnante.” And just this May, in 2019, I saw a gang of girls working the crowd in front of the Musée d’Orsay. One had a clipboard holding papers she was asking people to sign, to petition to help “the orphans,” while her accomplices lurked nearby, hoping some mark would be distracted while signing the papers on the clipboard.

  But these girls are far from the only pickpockets working in Paris. Since being robbed that day in the Métro with Vivian, I’ve been careful, especially in crowds. On April 16, the morning after the fire in Notre-Dame, I walked down Boulevard Saint-Michel to see the cathedral. I carefully stashed my wallet in the left front pocket of my jeans and kept my left thumb hooked over the wallet. The crowd that had assembled along the south bank of the Seine to see the cathedral was so thick that at times you couldn’t move at all. During such a stall, I considered it a private victory when I felt a hand go into my back pocket and quickly pull out, empty. I spun around, but the crowd was so thick there was no obvious suspect and too many obvious suspects all at the same time.

  * * *

  . . .

  At the train station in Bergerac, Vivian and I got into a van and rode to a large country lodge next to stables where the ride would begin. The other eight or ten riders were all German or Dutch. I can’t say that while we were there I learned a single word of either German or Dutch, but I did learn to recognize which one was being spoken. The owner of the lodge, a brooding, quiet man, said that he could trace his family in this area back to the sixteenth century.

  As it turned out, most of the other riders were staying in the lodge for the
whole week while they took daily excursions out and back on horseback. But Annabelle, the wife of the owner, would lead Vivian and me and a German couple for a randonnée of several days across the countryside. The Germans, Hubertus and Hilda, were both gynecologists, a fact that Vivian and I found curious. We were all mounted on good, strong, trustworthy Andalusian horses. The countryside of rolling hills, forests, and swift rivers was beautiful, and the weather was perfect. We even jumped the horses a time or two, when tree trunks had fallen across our path in the forest. Vivian was thrilled to find that one hotel where we spent the night had ketchup. Once, she was served a whole trout, its head intact. One large eye stared from the plate directly at her. I could tell it was making her uncomfortable. She discreetly covered the eye with a napkin, and then had no appetite for the fish.

  During the morning of the second day, we dismounted at the foot of a steep hill and began walking the horses up. It was a little precarious. Hilda had trouble with her horse, which was a recurring theme during the ride. She let it slide back too close to Vivian, who was following behind her. The horse kicked Vivian just above the knee. It hurt, swelled, and stiffened. Fortunately, in the country inn where we stopped for lunch, Madame la Propriétaire showed great concern. She took Vivian into her bedroom and rubbed an analgesic oil called Synthol into the spot by her knee where a bruise was forming. It worked. The pain and the stiffness never got worse. Vivian was walking without trouble the next day, and she was perfumed with a wonderful aroma of camphor from the oil. Synthol isn’t sold in the United States. At the end of this trip, and during later trips, Tracy and I always bought several bottles to take back home, where it has eased many minor aches and sore muscles.