CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Le Bal Musette
It was a year later, in February 2019, when I returned to Paris to write this book, and moved into the same apartment on the Boulevard de Port-Royal where I had stayed in 2014, during my first extended stay in Paris. I was delighted to find that Paris is a very congenial place for getting work done. Each morning, I got up, had a little fruit and yogurt for breakfast, and started writing. The apartment was always completely silent. I was never aware of anyone else in the building, except on the rare occasions when I met someone going up or down the interior stairway. I worked at the same square glass table that I had worked at when I first attended the Sorbonne. A large casement window on my left looked onto a courtyard with a small garden. I soon became used to the comings and goings of the other residents of the compound, who had to pass under my window to get to the gate on the Boulevard de Port-Royal. Around eight-thirty, there would be the kindly-looking elderly woman with short white hair, going off to her work. She always had a large canvas bag slung over her right shoulder. Around nine-fifteen, I would see the lovely violinist, with her instrument in a case strapped to her back, and I might see her again when she returned in the middle of the afternoon. She had pale skin and beautiful wheat-colored hair that she coiled on top of her head. She wore glasses in a white frame that looked glamorous on her. When I first arrived, she was always walking hand in hand with a young man, both in the morning and in the afternoon. But one day she appeared alone, and I never saw the young man again. I wondered what had happened. Perhaps I was not the only man in Paris who had lost at love. I knew that contacting Céleste was pointless. She would respond with annoyance or not respond at all.
I was completely at home in this neighborhood that I knew well from staying in the apartment five years before. Everything I needed was just a short walk away, so shopping was easier and took much less time than it often did at home. I loved the small rituals of daily life in Paris, especially the greetings when you enter a store and the farewells when you leave. In my neighborhood, the people at the store counters soon recognized me. If no one else was waiting, we would engage in brief conversations. The Algerian man who ran the little grocery across the street asked me why I was in Paris. I told him I was a writer. He was immensely curious. When he wanted to know what I was writing, I told him a little bit about this book. After that, whenever I was in the grocery, he would ask me with an air of grave concern how my work was going. I liked it; it felt good having someone completely outside my normal world pulling for me. And when I had done my quota of work for the day and needed a change or some diversion, all I had to do was go out my door, and there were all the splendors and mysteries of Paris waiting for me.
There wasn’t a Métro station nearby, but there were plenty of convenient buses, which I preferred to the Metro anyway. The 21 bus stopped catty-corner from my apartment and took me right to the door of the Louvre. The 83 bus stopped directly in front of my apartment and went diagonally across the Left Bank to the river, where it stopped near the Musée d’Orsay. As an “adhèrent” of both museums, I visited each one often. At the Louvre, I always began by going directly to the Richelieu wing to see Milon de Croton by Pierre Puget, a monumental statue, almost ten feet tall, in an immense, bright marble gallery containing many glorious masterpieces of French sculpture. Once or twice, I was the only visitor in the gallery, but usually there was just a small handful of other people there. The presence of such glorious art in a spacious gallery, and the absence of any crowds, make this the most appealing place in the Louvre.
At the Musée d’Orsay, there are two paintings that I always seek out first. They are on opposite sides of the museum, almost directly across from one another. Painted twenty-two years apart, they also appear to me to represent the opposite sides of a man’s emotional life. The newer of the two, Le Veuf by Jean-Louis Forain, I’ve mentioned already. It is the portrait of a man in a particular moment. We see that he is a responsible man of honor, loyalty, respectability, who has felt the passion of an enduring love. The other, Olympia by Édouard Manet, was painted in 1863 and first shown publicly in the Salon of 1865, where it was considered an outrage. It is the portrait of a woman, but it implies a man’s passion as well. Here that passion is illicit, expensive, even shameful, but also irresistible and destructively obsessive.
The woman is reclining on an opulent couch with a drape embroidered with flowers. She has an orchid in her hair, small gold earrings, a black ribbon around her neck with a small cameo, a thick gold bracelet on her right wrist, and a pair of satin pumps with short heels dangling from her feet. Otherwise she is completely nude. She is a prostitute. She is regal, luxurious, magnificent, imperious, and completely confident, but a prostitute nonetheless. And she refuses to be seen as anything else. She looks directly out of the painting at you—the viewer—and you are forced into the role of the customer for whom she has been waiting. A black maid stands behind the couch, offering her a sumptuous and obviously expensive bouquet of flowers. Perhaps you have brought it for her yourself, or perhaps it comes from another admirer. At the foot of the couch, just beyond her satin slippers, a black kitten has raised its tail, arched its back, and puffed out its fur with defiant sexuality. Even more than Brigitte Bardot in her towel, Olympia represents the erotic and illicit Paris of my imagination. Perhaps the blonde woman I had seen on the street in the mink coat on a warm day was her contemporary incarnation.
* * *
. . .
I had been in Paris almost two months when my brother, one of my sisters, and her husband arrived in early April, at the beginning of a tour. I took them to see Saint-Eustache, the immense Gothic cathedral near Les Halles where, as I’ve mentioned, I occasionally liked to attend mass on Sunday morning. It was built across one hundred years, beginning in 1532. The soaring arches in the interior are thrilling. The many chapels that surround the sanctuary contain paintings by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters as well as intelligently curated works of modern artists. Among other powerful works, there is a sculpture by Raymond Mason from 1971 that recalls the Les Halles food markets of the past, and a metal triptych of the life of Christ created in 1990 by Keith Haring. And it pleases me to know that Molière was both baptized and married in Saint-Eustache.
As we four lingered near the entrance, looking up at the brilliant stained-glass windows, a woman in dark glasses came in. She was wearing a brown suede hat with a wide, round brim, and had a large leather bag over her shoulder. She eyed me curiously through her dark glasses for just a moment before going on. She looked very chic beneath her stylish hat and behind her dark glasses, and I had a strong impression that I knew her somehow.
As I walked around the church with my family, I saw that she had stopped next to a thin woman wearing a white smock who was sitting in the sanctuary, drawing on a sketch pad. The woman in the hat began making small corrections to the thin woman’s sketches. So she was an art instructor, like Céleste, and she was about Céleste’s height and age. Could she be Céleste? I wondered. Was that why she had looked at me so strangely and yet seemed so familiar?
She left her student and began walking toward another woman with a drawing pad, who was seated on the other side of the cathedral. I walked after her quickly, and when I got close enough I called out, “Céleste?”
The woman in the hat stopped and turned to look directly at me. She wasn’t Céleste. “Désolé,” I said. “Excusez-moi.” But even as my heart sagged and I turned away, knowing that she was someone else, I couldn’t give up my belief that she really was Céleste.
Meanwhile, my sister had begun talking to the thin woman, who could speak a little English. I asked the woman the name of her art instructor, the one who was wearing the hat. “Idelette,” she said. My heart sagged a second time. That tantalizing woman who had regarded me carefully for just a moment could not be Céleste after all. Or could she be? In that moment, and sometimes even now, I believe tha
t it must have been her. She was really there, speaking softly and shyly to her students, her untamed hair hidden beneath her chic hat.
* * *
. . .
May 26, 2019, which happened to be Mother’s Day in France, was my last Sunday in Paris before returning to Austin. My work had gone well. In addition to seeing my siblings, I had had two or three pleasant visits with friends who happened to be in Paris. I had been content living in my familiar neighborhood. But also, when I took off across some new neighborhood in Paris or revisited a museum or strolled through a familiar park, I always found something new, something unseen until then, something unexpected. My new discovery could be astonishing, or it could be simply quiet and comforting, like the chapel of perpetual adoration I found one day at the end of an obscure passageway. But my main purpose in coming to Paris had been fulfilled, and I was not sorry I was leaving. I missed my children and their families. I missed my friends. I missed my office at the university, and I missed my apartment, filled with books I loved and magic DVDs, some of which I had not yet seen. Like Tracy on her last night in Paris, I felt at last filled with Paris. I felt satiated and satisfied. I could put my arms around it all.
Fortunately, the weather that Sunday was cool and sunny with occasional gentle breezes. I walked west down the Boulevard de Port-Royal to the Luxembourg Gardens, where I turned north. With spring, the gardens had bloomed and were lush and colorful. The large pond in the north end reflected the blue sky. Children were using long sticks to push model sailboats out onto the pond. I continued on until about eleven o’clock, when I found a table at the Café de la Mairie on the Place Saint-Sulpice. Georges Thuillier, where two days before I had bought a santon for Tracy, was next door.
The Place Saint-Sulpice is dominated by a huge, hulking church, also named Saint-Sulpice. It is only slightly smaller than Notre-Dame. This church has a fraught history. Its two looming towers are mismatched, and over the main door you can still see traces of paint from the Revolution dedicating the church, not to Christianity, but to worship of a “Supreme Being.” Inside, there are magnificent murals by Delacroix in the first chapel on the right, but otherwise the church gives the impression of a large, cold basement. There is a fountain in the middle of the Place. Despite the gentle weather, there weren’t many people there, and even though it was Sunday, there was hardly any activity around the church.
I ordered white wine, and ham and cheese on a croissant. While I was eating, a group of about ten cyclists on the street between the café and the Place fell in line behind a leader. He shouted back to them in English, “We have only one rule.” But they disappeared around a corner, and I never got to hear what the rule was. Just across the street, on the edge of the Place, I saw a tall, slender woman, quite attractive, in tight black leather pants, holding the hand of a girl about six. She kissed the man with her on the lips. It was a long, lingering kiss. The moment she stopped kissing him, he shoved a cigarette into his mouth. This deeply offended me.
On the top floor of a building on the west side of the square, on the rue Bonaparte, I could see a wall of tall windows. I’d been told at different times by several different people that Catherine Deneuve lived there. I wondered if that was true. I also began to wonder how long I would have to wait here in the café before I saw someone I knew. It could be a long time or it could be five minutes, but it wouldn’t be forever. Sooner or later, someone would happen by. I thought of Marina Abramović. In 1988, she began walking from the east end of the Great Wall of China and Ulay, her lover and artistic partner of many years, began walking from the west end. By the time they met in the middle, neither one wanted to marry as they had originally intended. Instead, they embraced, and Marina cried, and then they went on in separate directions to lead separate lives. I thought that was what I should do if I passed Céleste on the street—stop, perhaps embrace, perhaps let a tear fall, and then walk on without a word.
I ordered another glass of wine, but by the time I finished I had grown restless. I left the café and walked across the Latin Quarter. I passed behind the Panthéon and followed the rue Clovis by Saint-Étienne-du-Mont to the rue Descartes, where I turned south until it became the rue Mouffetard. I walked by the Place de la Contrescarpe, which Hemingway describes in the opening paragraphs of A Moveable Feast. I went around the corner to see once again the building where he and his wife, Hadley, had had their apartment when they first arrived in Paris, in December 1921. It’s a featureless but nevertheless still comfortable-looking building, and undoubtedly expensive today. However, in Hemingway’s time, now almost one hundred years ago, this was a working-class quarter. In those days, a man came down the street every morning, selling milk from a goat he led by a halter.
I continued down the rue Mouffetard and passed the restaurant where the students had raised their glasses for Tracy and me, and the thrill of feeling filled by Paris came over her. I paused there a moment to let the memory fill out and take me back in time. I felt a nostalgic, muted happiness for what once was. Alone but not lonely, I walked on to the foot of the rue Mouffetard, by the square Saint-Médard, where every Sunday there is a bal musette. The musicians may change a little from week to week, but there is always an accordion. A man and a woman sing, while another woman hands out sheets of paper with the lyrics of popular French songs from the past. A crowd comes to watch and sing, while many couples dance. A few of the couples are older. In fact, some are quite old, but, long accustomed to holding each other, they still move gracefully to the music.
I took a place at the edge of the crowd, where I could see the dancers. I wished that we had known about this tradition when Tracy and I were in Paris together. We didn’t dance well or often, but when we did dance we enjoyed it, especially that night at the school in Roanne with the couple from Louisiana. We would have joined the dancers here. They were all about our age, and we would have blended right in. The last time we danced together was at Vivian’s wedding, in April 2010. Everyone who was there danced, too. Afterward, I thanked the band effusively as I paid them and the leader said, “At a wedding you always play for the grandparents. That way, everyone dances.” And that is exactly what had happened.
There were plenty of grandparents dancing now on the Square Saint-Médard. My muted, happy, nostalgic mood continued, and I was glad to be in Paris, listening to the music and watching the dancers on a sunny afternoon. They made me think of 2010, our last good year, when there was Vivian’s wedding and the month in Provincetown and our driving back and forth between Massachusetts and Texas. We stopped along the way in Memphis, to see Graceland and to attend Al Green’s church, and in Philadelphia to see the Barnes Collection, then still in Dr. Barnes’s house, as he had intended. And then Tracy’s cancer was diagnosed, and the last good year disintegrated into the last year.
I took a sheet of song lyrics when the woman came by and sang very softly as I watched the dancers and sank deeper into my reverie about Tracy and dancing and weddings and driving. In 2011, during the summer after her death, I drove from Austin to Provincetown again, alone this time, and did the same thing in 2012. That year, while I was driving across Ohio on my way home, I saw a sign on the road for barbecue. It was almost noon, and my stomach was empty. A few miles down the road, I saw another sign for the barbecue restaurant, pointing down a side road. I turned off. The place turned out to be farther off the highway than I had expected or wanted, but I finally saw it on the right. I parked in the dirt lot and was inside the restaurant before I realized that this was a place where Tracy and I had stopped two years before. It was bizarre and spooky, but also comforting, to be drawn blindly into this one place in a journey of a thousand miles, as if Tracy were there waiting for me.
The accordion player began a lovely waltz, and I sang along with everyone else in the square:
“Sous le ciel de Paris
Marchent des amoureux.”
With no will of my own, but led by an inv
isible presence, I left the crowd, moved in among the dancers, and began to waltz by myself. My left hand was raised and my right arm was crooked, as if I were holding Tracy. Effortlessly, we stepped and swirled, stepped and swirled, stepped and swirled. When the song ended, the presence led me back into the crowd.
The musicians stopped playing at two. The dancing and singing stopped as well, and the crowd drifted away. There is a large Algerian green grocery on the square that I liked. I bought some dattes sauvages—wild dates—and ate them as I walked back to my apartment. My route led me along the rue Claude-Bernard, past the building where the young couple and their toddler had lived when, in May 2013, I first heard about the language school at the Sorbonne. I stopped and looked through the locked metal grill that covered the door to their building. Six years ago, I had walked through that door and climbed five flights of stairs to the apartment of strangers. There, without expecting it and without knowing at the time what was happening, I picked up my life again and filled it—as I had that morning in Saint-Sulpice and that afternoon at the bal musette—with Paris.
Acknowledgments
I owe debts, both great and small, to everyone mentioned in this book, and to my family in particular. Thank you, one and all.
But I am also grateful to several people who are not mentioned. My close friends Stephen Harrigan and William Broyles were encouraging from the moment I first admitted that I was thinking about writing a book about Paris. It was Steve who gave me the title. Having that question settled early on guided me as I thought through what the book would be. Both Steve and Bill read and commented on my original proposal, and then both of them read my completed manuscript and made extensive valuable comments and suggestions. Their help made this a better book. My agent, David McCormick, was enthusiastic from the beginning and handled placing the book with his usual skill and efficiency. Ann Close at Knopf has been my editor since 2000. Here, as with my previous books, her guidance and belief in my work have been essential, and I am eternally grateful.
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