by James Jones
Of course, on the Friday of the 24th I did not really know what to expect.
It had already been a pretty rough day, according to my transistor radio. The day had been full of demonstrations in cities all over France. Even the farmers out in the countryside were coming into the towns to demonstrate for more Government protection of the small farmer and higher prices for French products. In Nantes, in Brittany, a mob of 3,000 farmers and students had attacked a police headquarters, first with stones and bottles, and then had cut down trees around it and tried to burn it down.
And in Paris people were out all over the place, and demonstrations were going on everywhere. After le Général’s speech which was heralded with great boos and jeering, mobs had collected at the Place de la Bourse and set fire to the Bourse itself, France’s sacred Money Mart and Stock Exchange.
It all looked pretty grim. But I felt I had to go, and I wanted to see what the kids thought about it all now.
As I was leaving the Gallaghers’ apartment, Ferenc asked me to take him with me. He wanted to see it too, he said.
I was a little taken aback. I already felt that it was dangerous enough for me myself to go out. I didn’t relish having the added responsibility of Ferenc. Besides that, it had finally begun to rain somewhere along in there, making everything slipperier and more evil-seeming. The May rains which the police officials had waited for so hopefully in the beginning of the month had finally come—much too late to do anything about the Revolution, now, except to make everything worse.
So I hesitated. But the crestfallen look on Ferenc’s face was too much for me. “Okay,” I said. “Come on, if you want to. But you have to follow me and follow my lead without any arguments. If we get separated, you’re on your own.” The big grin that came over his large face was almost worth the decision.
“I suppose I better take off my monocle? And put on my glasses?” he said thoughtfully.
“If I were you, I’d leave the monocle here,” I said.
He nodded. “I’ll do just that.” And took it off with its black cord and laid it carefully on top of Louisa’s fireplace mantel.
“One mustn’t go around looking like a bloody executive or aristocrat on a night like this,” he said.
“What about me?” Louisa said.
“You’re staying here,” I said positively. “There’s no question about that.”
“I think he’s absolutely right, dear Louisa,” Ferenc said gently.
“I suppose so,” she said gloomily.
“For God’s sake, think about McKenna,” I said as we went to the door.
I had been worrying about my marvelous little Goddaughter ever since I had learned for sure what had happened to Harry in Cannes. In the fact McKenna, who after all was only in the third grade, had, after the Sorbonne revolt, organized and created her own tiny Revolution in her class at school (a bilingual school which taught both English and French) Louisa had told me. At this school, in a staggered sort of fashion, each class spent one day a week out at Meudon, a woodsy sort of suburb just up the hill from Sèvres, for some kind of vague outdoor health reasons, I suppose. Somehow they had got the use, cheaply, of some old quonset huts out there. Well, McKenna had canvassed her class, collected more than 50 per cent of them behind her, and had got up in class and made I gather a rather lengthy speech about the inadequate facilities of the Meudon installation. There was not enough heat, the children were always freezing cold, and the food served them at lunch was so bad that none of the children could eat it. When the teacher canvassed the class herself, face to face, only about 40 per cent stood up to back up McKenna. Although over 50 per cent had promised that they would. In any case it was still enough of a revolution for the teacher (a rather dislikeable sort I gathered) to take it to the Headmistress of the school, one of those exceedingly formidable woman educators, whom McKenna staunchly confronted in her office, and who then called up Louisa. Louisa and Harry naturally backed McKenna up all the way. But though promises of rectification had been made by the Headmistress with a harassed laugh (she was having a hard time, they said, just keeping the school running) so far nothing had been done, but it was supposed to be.
Also, on the day of the failed vote of censure against M. Pompidou’s Government, the Wednesday of May 22nd, McKenna had organized her own little demonstration. I’ve often thought she would have made a hell of a General. Getting three little French kids that she played with on the block to help her, she had got hold of a set of red towels Louisa had and tied them to mop and broom handles. With the adults engrossed in the debate on the TV, the four children under McKenna’s direction had rushed across the living room and begun waving their improvised red flags back and forth out on the little balcony above the quai crying “À bas le Gouvernement! À bas le Gouvernement!” The island was crawling with cops at the time, and those of us nearest them grabbed them back in as quickly as we could, afraid the police below would think it was an adult-organized thing. But when I stepped out onto the little balcony and looked down, smiling what I hoped was a confidently amused smile, all the flics below were roaring with laughter.
She was really such a precious, brilliant little thing. I would have given anything to have had one like her of my own, and sometimes when I thought of her I positively hated my ex-wife. And now, with Harry off on his irresponsible junket in Cannes, I dreaded the thought of something bad happening to the family that might injure McKenna.
Of course by now McKenna had long since been put to bed. But Louisa had not answered my last remark. However when I looked back at her from the door, with Hofmann-Beck close on my heels like an eager mastiff, she looked up from the mantelpiece, where she appeared to be studying Ferenc’s monocle, and smiled and nodded at me.
“Well, come on, Ferenc,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s get with it.”
“I’m right with you, buddy,” Ferenc said, a term he would never have used to anyone before meeting the Gallaghers and us.
I nodded. “Don’t forget your raincoat, now.”
“I think I had better leave my bowler here, and take one of Harry’s caps in the entry,” he said.
We went out of the apartment and down out onto the quai in the drizzle. It looked as though it might be letting up.
Well, I sure need not have worried about Ferenc. Underneath his layers of fat and hypochondria he had a pair of legs at least four times as strong as mine. And when he raised up and showed forth that chest of his, instead of letting it droop on his belly as he usually did, it had a girth half again as large as mine, which was not small. He was as strong as a lion, that young man, and as brave as a fighting bull at least.
We crossed by the Pont de la Tournelle and started up rue Cardinal Lemoine. When we reached Boulevard St.-Germain, I turned up it toward the Place Maubert. We made our way up toward the Place, past shops and restaurants which were all carefully shuttered and closed. The French knew how to take care of their trade goods and property. Things like this had been happening to them since the beginning of the Middle Ages. It appeared the drizzle was stopping.
But the goddamned French had something else about them, too. As we sauntered up the half-dark Boulevard toward the Place, the inhabitants of the apartments of the four- and five-story buildings above the ground-floor shops were out burning their uncollected garbage and trash in the center of the street. By a sort of common consent, not led by generals or even by civic leaders, they had got together with their brooms and mops and rakes and squeegees or whatever, and had swept all the mountain of uncollected trash out into a row in the middle of the Boulevard and were methodically and carefully burning it up. Somebody had figured out that the center of the Boulevard would be the best place to do it in order to do the least damage to the leafage of the flowering trees that lined the boulevards on both sides and helped to make Paris the Paris they loved and liked to live in. A 100 yards up the way you could hear the fighting and shouting, but back here here they were, all out helping to preserve themselves and their heal
th and at the same time not destroy the beauty of their city, Paris. Old Paris. God, the things it had not seen were few. There was not any possibility of traffic now on the boulevards anyway. And all the way up to the Place Maubert there was a long line of burning crates, cartons, old wet lettuce leaves, rotten tomatoes and fruit rinds and garbage, all of it being tended with old pushbrooms or sweepbrooms by the little bourgeois who inhabited the area. It was enough to almost make me weep. For them. For all of us.
When we got to the Place, it did not take long to see that the police had invested it. Beyond the Place Maubert the police were lined up three or four deep in their black fighting raincoats, helmets, goggles and shields. They had worked down from the Carrefour St.-Michel, and established a cutoff line here all across the Boulevard. They were not doing anything at all, just standing there.
Some distance away there was a mob of citizens, on our downhill side of the street. They kept a respectful distance, 50 yards say, and hurled insults at the cops.
There were no students, now. Mainly, they were all dark Algerians. There was not one student involved that I could see. Of course the area between Maubert and the river was all an Algerian quarter—which had been hurt hard during the time of the Algerian War. We sifted our way through them until we were out in the no-man’s-land between rue Monge where the mob was and the police lines beyond the end of the Place. We were alone out there in the middle of the Place.
“Aren’t we rather vulnerable out here?” Ferenc said from behind me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Really. I mean, look at them. They’re not trying to hurt anybody.”
“But we are very presentable targets,” Ferenc said in his best King’s English accent.
“Cut the shit,” I growled, and then something strange happened to me. I discovered I had made up my mind to cross the Place, the no-man’s-land, and pass peacefully through the police lines. Was I showing off for Ferenc? Was I proving that I was an old hand at the Revolution? Was I testing my own rather doubtful courage in some crazy way? In any case I absolutely knew suddenly that those police over there would not do us any damage if we walked toward them calmly and sanely, clearly unarmed with bottles or stones, and said to them “Excuse me, but I live up there.” I knew they would not touch us. I just knew it. And I kind of wanted to walk up the rest of the poor old torn-up busted Boulevard. Just to see what had happened to it in the last 24 hours.
I really do not know what it was came over me. Anyway I forged ahead, out into the middle of the deserted Place and past the high stone pedestal from which the Germans had removed the metal statue of some unknown notable during the War to melt it down, and on toward the police line across the Boulevard. Ferenc was right behind me. I could hear his footsteps and there was not one sign of falter in them.
Then, suddenly, at the sharp corner of the rue Lagrange after the Place, just at the little café-tabac there, two young Algerians in dark clothes leaped out of the dark straight in front of me, shouting some insult, and one of them heaved a paving stone at the police line. Then they leaped back, and ran around the sharp corner onto rue Lagrange.
I did not see where the pavé landed. It either fell short or was blocked by a shield. A couple of the policemen shouted something back which I did not understand but the voices had a plaintive note to them, as if they might have been saying in English, “Come on! What are you doing, dumbass! We’re not bothering you, are we?” They threw no tear gas, or anything else, in retaliation.
But suddenly my whole feeling changed. I could not be sure the police did not think we were friends of the Algerians, and were coming on to attack them. Probably they didn’t. In any case, I did an abrupt aboutface, with Ferenc right alongside me, and started away, walking slowly.
“That was rather bad luck,” Ferenc said in an even voice at my side, matching his stride to my slow one. He was indeed following my lead as I had asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was. Come on, we’ll go up here.” And when we reached the pedestal, I took off across the empty Place toward the rue de la Montagne Ste.-Geneviève. Nobody contested us, or bothered us.
Rue de la Montagne Ste.-Geneviève is probably one of the most picturesque streets in all of Paris. It is full of tiny but very good restaurants, and mounts steeply and twisting from Place Maubert up to the Panthéon on top the hill. It is the street where Hemingway placed his bal-musette in the opening part of The Sun Also Rises, where Brett Ashley is introduced. I loved to walk it, and used to eat there a lot. But now the street was so absolutely full of crates and cartons and garbage from the restaurants and the apartments above that you could hardly see any of the groundfloor windows or the painted names of the restaurants above them. It looked as though if anyone carelessly dropped one match along it the whole street would go up in one great whoosh of flames.
We came out on the rue des Écoles halfway up. Now the rue des Écoles runs along the front of the Sorbonne itself. When I looked up that way, I could see that the place had been cordoned off by police units, and that the air was full of tear gas and smoke. I had a sudden fatigue reaction. “Let’s go the other way,” I said.
But at rue Monge we had the good fortune to witness how a Paris barricade is constructed, from its very beginning.
At the corner of rue Monge and rue des Écoles is a lovely little park called the Square Monge with big trees behind which are visible the handsome old buildings of the École Polytechnique. It is surrounded by a handsome fence of wrought iron, and has concrete benches both inside on the grass and outside on the sidewalk. When we arrived, a mob of people were just beginning to tear up the concrete benches and the handsome wrought-iron fence. Ferenc and I stood back against a building cattycorner across the street, and watched.
There was not one student involved in this barricade. These people were all Parisian workers of the lowest class. There were no Algerians among them. About one-sixth of them were women. And almost without exception they all had such badly rotting, mangled teeth that I felt sorry for them all and wondered how they could ever manage to eat their own fabled Parisian cooking.
They had crowbars with them and sledgehammers, and later we saw shovels. They shouted encouragement to each other in shrill voices as they tore up the lovely little park. The women were particularly good at the shouting part. But the women worked hard too. Whenever someone grinned at me, I grinned back. I advised Ferenc to do the same.
Directly in front of us, two men of about 24 began attacking the pavement with a crowbar, They were trying to force an initial opening between two paving stones. They kept at it with an intense concentration. Then a slender, gray-haired, partially bald man in a light-beige raincoat walked up to them.
Now, I do not know the mechanics of how the eyeball, all unwitting to the conscious mind, trains itself in an intelligent man to recognize a plainclothes cop. I have said elsewhere in these papers that my eyeball, all on its own, can recognize an Algerian man or a Chinese man a block away by the back of his head. And my eyeball, again all on its own, can recognize an American in the city of Paris as far away as I can see him, or her. It’s something about the stance, the way they walk, as if they felt guilty, and when they come closer some look on their faces that my eyeball knows but which I do not, confirms me. They are just American, that’s all. And I’ve never been wrong, to my knowledge. And, by the same token of eyeball judgement, I knew immediately that the man in the light-beige raincoat was a plainclothes cop.
Immediately I looked at Ferenc, and he nodded. I nodded back. This was interesting, and we strolled slowly over to where the two young men, now joined by a couple of others, were still trying intently to prise a paving stone from the tightly laid pavement. The man in the light raincoat had begun to remonstrate with them about why they wanted to do it. He talked calmly and objectively: There were no police around to fight; if they prised up the street, it would only bring the police; what was it they were after?
I do not think a soul there except us two knew he w
as a plain-clothesman. But a crowd began to collect. He was certainly a gutsy cop. Slowly the voices got louder. They were talking French so fast, all of them, that I couldn’t make out what forms the discussion was taking. But several citizens were taking the side of the man in the light raincoat. They did not prevail however, crowbars and youthful adrenalin prevailed, and when this became apparent the man in the light raincoat backed off, shrugged a typical Frenchman’s shrug, and sauntered away, probably to telephone headquarters about what was happening at rue Monge and rue des Écoles. Ferenc and I backed away and stood again back against the building.
It was a fascinating thing to watch. It took them quite a long time to get the first paving stone out. But after that it became easier. And got easier and easier the more of them they removed.
Once they had a foot or two of the square stones up off their bed of sand, there was a great cheer all across the place, and the shovels were brought in. And then it went fast. The men, and the women, formed human chains to pass the stones which the shovelers were now loosening almost faster than they could be passed along. They wanted to make a V-shaped double barricade, that would cut off rue Monge from Place Maubert downhill toward the river, and would also cut off rue des Écoles from the west toward the Sorbonne. God knows who they were, or why they were there, or what they expected to cause or gain from it all. They were just there, and they were just doing it. To have stopped them would have taken machineguns.
It was amazing how swiftly the barricades rose. The concrete benches from the lovely little park were stuck in amongst them, while the beautiful wrought-iron fence around the park was set in in sections along the face so that they stuck forth like spears in the direction—the two directions—from which the police were expected to come.
“I think it’s about time we moved on,” I said. I had not forgotten that gray-haired man in the light raincoat.