A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

Paul and I each represented a national response to the weather. Britons defied it. Australians like me—and Americans, come to that—ignored it until some hurricane or flood or bushfire overwhelmed them. And the French?

  Contradicting Mark Twain, who, among many others, said that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, the French embraced it.

  Assessing how it might be most agreeably enjoyed, or at least endured, they created rituals to extract the maximum satisfaction from the climate and its seasonal variations. Weather was woven into the culture in a manner that made even minute variations a pretext for reflection, celebration, and delight.

  Once, driven by ambition and misplaced patriotism, some men even tried to redesign the year to fit France’s idea of the seasons. How that came about, what grandiose individuals were behind it, and what became of them and their project says a lot about the nation where I’d decided to make my home.

  3

  Dog Days

  Paris 16me. August 1976. 26°C. Dust as fine as talcum sifts through shutters closed against the sun. It films the black lacquer of the Bechstein grand, makes even more slick the waxed wooden blocks of the parquet floor, coats the cream–and–green enamel of the kitchen’s antique refrigerator and stove, grits between the teeth in the aftermath of a kiss.

  I FIRST HEARD OF THE REPUBLICAN CALENDAR IN THE 1970S, WHEN I lived in London. The year is irrelevant, but men were wearing their hair long, women theirs short. Flowered shirts and beads were the rage, and everyone seemed to be playing Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.”

  Céline and I hooked up at a party in Chelsea, London’s equivalent of Greenwich Village, Trastevere, Montparnasse. The hostess was her daughter, Kissy, a bosomy twentysomething with pretensions to art. But her real talent lay in having her cake and eating it, a skill she’d exploited to score a show at one of the pop–up galleries that sprouted around East London like mushrooms after rain and expired just as speedily.

  Her apartment showed more flair than her canvases. In a style best described as “Moorish whorehouse,” she’d draped filmy fabric from the ceilings, turning every room into a tent under which incense blended with cannabis smoke in an exotic miasma.

  Céline, slim and pale with short dark hair, belonged to that segment of women diplomatically described by the French as femmes d’un certain âge. Her black silk trouser suit sometimes masked the shape of her body, at other times clung to it, evidence for the suggestion that silk was invented in order that women could go naked while still clothed. What won me, however, was her voice. If French is the language of diplomacy, English spoken with a French accent must be the language of seduction.

  A friend once confided to me a preference for “older women with a Past.” I responded with a line spoken by Brigitte Auber in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, in which she plays a hot young Frenchwoman. Mocking Cary Grant’s preference for Grace Kelly over her, she asks, “Why buy an old car if you can get a new one cheaper? It will run better and last longer.”

  If I had ever harbored such prejudices against age, Céline demolished them. So this was why Charles Swann in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) could moan of his attraction to Odette de Crécy, “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”

  Some relationships fly in air so thin that any conventional attraction would fall of its own weight. Ours justified the use of words like “enchantment.” After the party, we walked back in silence through the empty streets and climbed the six floors to my apartment.

  “So bare,” she said, looking around my living room. “No pictures?”

  Bare? I’d aimed for minimalist.

  She strolled into the bedroom and shrugged off her jacket. A slither of silk.

  “You do not like a big bed?”

  Queen–size had always seemed large enough, but now I wondered.

  She began to undress. Lingerie to die for. Coffee silk, with lace along the hems.

  “You have candles? No?”

  She draped her scarf over the lamp. What I’d taken for black was deep purple. Shadows took on the soft bloom of a bruise.

  Our affair ignited that night. Once she went home, I slipped across to Paris every few weeks to spend a weekend in her sprawling apartment in the seizième.

  Kissy kept a room there but never visited, at least not when I was around, and though a femme de ménage came twice a week to clean, all I ever saw of her was a fresh wax shine on the parquet and new linen on the bed. Woven so densely it felt heavy, as though soaked in water, each sheet was embroidered with an incomprehensible monogram, signifying Céline’s marriage to a husband even less evident than Kissy, barely more than a phantom presence somewhere on the far side of the world.

  Years later, I saw my experience with Céline mirrored in Le Divorce, a novel by the American writer Diane Johnson. Her main character is an American woman who takes a much older Frenchman as a lover. Reveling in the way he instructs her in the intricacies of life in Paris, she muses, “If you didn’t know where to look, you could pass your whole life with no sense of what you were missing.” As far as France was concerned, Céline was as much teacher as lover.

  That was when I first heard of Philippe–François–Nazaire Fabre d’Églantine—“Fabre of the Wild Rose”—and his plan to redesign the year, cutting and shaping the seasons as a couturier tailors a gown to show off the best points of his client.

  It was August, a month that descends on Paris like a curse. Empty streets echo with the clatter of jackhammers as café owners rush through renovations before their clientele floods back in early September. By noon it was too hot to move, to eat, certainly to make love, so we read and dozed, pressing to our foreheads the glasses of homemade limeade, beaded with moisture, that we drank by the liter.

  In another room a radio was tuned almost inaudibly to a jazz station. After a few bars of one tune, Céline opened her violet eyes and murmured a few words:

  “Balayé par septembre, notre amour d’un été . . .”

  They meant nothing to me, but I thought I recognized the singer’s husky baritone.

  “Is that Aznavour?”

  “Yes. ‘Paris au mois d’août.’ ‘Paris in the Month of August.’”

  At the time, I caught only the sense of the song. Later I looked up the words, and their translation.

  Swept away by September

  Our summertime love

  Sadly comes apart

  And dies, in the past tense.

  Even though I expected it,

  My heart empties itself of everything.

  It could even be mistaken

  For Paris in the month of August.

  The words caught the lassitude of what the French call le canicule, so much more evocative than our “heat wave.” Canicule because these are the “dog days,” when Sirius, the Dog Star, is in the ascendant. The languorous despair evoked by the song was almost pleasurable. As Noël Coward said, “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

  “Comme il est triste,” Céline sighed as she listened. “Just right for Thermidor.”

  “Thermidor?” I said. “Like lobster thermidor?”

  She punched my arm, but playfully. “No! Not like the lobster—or not only like the lobster, at least. Why is it always food with you? Or films.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  She let her book fall and leaned back on the cushions of the couch.

  “Very well. But first you must kiss me.”

  Breathlessly, I obeyed her.

  Distributing hats for horses during a Paris heat wave, 1890s.

  Unknown. La Chaleur de Paris. Chapeaux pour chevaux. In Le Petit Parisien.

  4

  On an Island in the Seine

  Place Dauphine, Paris 6me. July 2002. 9 a.m. 29°C. Fine red dust blankets the city. Settling overnight, the coppery powder films windscreens an
d dulls the hue of flowers. In sidewalk cafés people rub their fingertips together, sniff them like a spice, and nod as if in appreciation. No need to mention the Sahara; it is in their eyes.

  IT WAS MORE THAN TEN YEARS BEFORE I MOVED PERMANENTLY TO Paris. The identity of my companion changed, but Paris remained much the same.

  Born on the world’s largest island, I struggled to adjust to life on one of the smallest.

  The Île de la Cité, a sliver of land in the middle of the river Seine, would have made a roomy but not ostentatiously large Australian backyard. But differences in size were dwarfed by the cultural abyss between my old life and the new. Speaking little French and knowing not a soul in France, I had nevertheless followed a woman halfway across the world to share her tiny studio within sight of the Louvre. No Robinson Crusoe was ever more comprehensively marooned.

  The Île de la Cité.

  Unknown. Île de la Cité. Service photo, Mairie de Paris.

  And yet I’d seldom been happier—a bliss that only increased when a few months later, Marie–Dominique became pregnant. Occasionally, a fragment of verse from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” drifted through my mind: “I sang in my chains like the sea.”

  If one had to be beached in France, there were worse places than the Île de la Cité. Imagine an ocean liner of stone, moored in the very heart of Paris. Its prow points north, toward where, almost two hundred kilometers away, the Seine joins the English Channel at Le Havre. Dominating the stern of this vessel is the cathedral of Notre Dame, the bells of which—Quasimodo’s bells!—toll over the city each Sunday.

  Clustered at the other end are the Sainte–Chapelle, with its soaring Gothic arches and stained glass; the Conciergerie, where Louis XVI and his family languished before their execution; and France’s high court, the Palais de Justice. And beyond these, at the very bow of this vessel, is Place Dauphine.

  Triangular and no larger than a couple of tennis courts, this had once been the kitchen garden of what is now the Palais de Justice. None of that vegetation remained. The surface, like that of many public places in Paris, was coarse beige grit, hard packed. And though there were trees—about twenty chestnuts—they existed only on sufferance. Every few years they disappeared, unplugged like so many light bulbs, to be replaced with saplings that by the summer had come into leaf and provided a fresh canopy of shade. It was my introduction to the variety of Paris and a culture that, like an art gallery, periodically closed, to reemerge displaying new images, insights, and experiences.

  From the moment Henry IV laid it out in the 1600s, Place Dauphine was a select address, and a magnet for celebrities. Four centuries had not changed that. Most days, portly stage actor and occasional film star Jean Desailly walked his Saint Bernard here. Standing by in approval, he’d watch as this massive pooch, with the casual condescension of someone signing an autograph, deposited a turd the size of a torpedo. Movie actor and singer Yves Montand, another neighbor, gave interviews on a bench just below our window. Later, we inherited his housekeeper. I’m still enough of a fan to be pleased that my shirts were ironed with the expertise once lavished on a man who’d slept with both Édith Piaf and Marilyn Monroe.

  In 1928, André Breton, founder of surrealism, conferred immortality on Place Dauphine by using it in his novel Nadja as the home of its mysterious eponymous heroine. Calling it “one of the most profoundly secluded places I know of,” he continued, “I confess that this place frightens me,” but he overcame his disquiet to further observe that the three–cornered space deserved its description as “the pubic triangle of Paris.”

  It’s in the nature of pubic triangles to be discreet. Every pedestrian crossing the Pont Neuf passed the narrow lane that gives access, but few turned aside to enter. A seventeenth–century hauteur in its buildings discouraged loitering. Even dogs attempting to irrigate the trees were defeated by the metal grilles that enclosed them. Finding no soft spot in the gritty sand, they made a desultory swipe or two with their back feet and got the hell out.

  In Nadja, Breton implied that his heroine knew of other mysteries in Place Dauphine, even beyond those that were visible. “She is certain that an underground tunnel passes under our feet,” he wrote, “[and] is disturbed by the thought of what has already occurred in this square and will occur here in the future.”

  Like many of his pronouncements, this was prescient. Just after I arrived, the city excavated a vast pit under the square to construct a subterranean parking lot. Sand, trees, benches, and streetlamps were then put back in place, leaving, aside from a discreet pedestrian entrance, barely a sign of the garage’s existence. Nadja got her tunnel—just sixty years late.

  Time robbed Breton of an arresting postscript to this piece of civic improvement. During the first rainstorm after the opening, water failed to drain away, turning the pubic triangle into a pond. For a city as house–proud as Paris, which spends more per head on sanitation than does any other conurbation in the world, such a fault could not be allowed to survive. Resignedly, the public works department ripped up the work, rebuilt the drainage system, and restored our square to its former state.

  By the spring, I was coming to terms with France. Those months of isolation, physical and intellectual, had saved me. Instead of letting me choke on a cultural feast, Paris put me on a diet, spoon–feeding me its riches sip by sip.

  Formerly incomprehensible objects and events became subjects of study. On my way to the boulanger for an early–morning baguette, I would pause to browse the day’s supplies piled in front of the restaurant next door, their changes reflecting the passing of the seasons: green–gold olive oil from Provence; butter from Guérande, gritty with sea salt; oysters from the Atlantic coast, not—as in Australia—jumbled in sodden burlap bags but packed in boxes woven from paper–thin shavings of white wood. A few weeks later there would be the first yellow–red Napoléon cherries, prunes from Agen, and wheels of Saint–Nectaire cheese from the Auvergne region, their gray rind scumbled like the skin of a elephant.

  Later in the morning, skirting the men from La Monnaie (the Mint) who congregated here every day to play boules, I would take a coffee at the café opposite.

  On one such day, a couple holding a folded map stopped by me. The young man said, in halting French, “Excusez–moi, monsieur . . . the Sainte–Chapelle?”

  I nodded toward the Palais de Justice. “It’s on the other side. Take a left and the next right. You’ll see the queue.”

  Just then the waiter brought my express, with the customary tumbler of water and sugar cubes wrapped in paper. Hand on hip, he looked after the walkers.

  “Tourists!” he said, not unkindly.

  I shrugged, as neighbors do, but I felt like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, a stranger until someone even more out of his depth asked for directions: “I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.”

  5

  Christmas with Kangaroos

  Batemans Bay, New South Wales, Australia. December 1956. 34°C. Trailed around a wilting tree, Christmas lights blink wanly, paled to near invisibility by the sun that streams through curtains helpless to mute its glare. As flies circle, pine needles abandon the effort of attachment and drift down to join others littered on the sun–faded carpet.

  ONE AUTUMN SOON AFTER I MOVED TO FRANCE, MARIE–DOMINIQUE and I took the car ferry to England. On the road to Calais we passed scores of people along the roadside, plastic bags in hand. They were scouring the grass for snails lured out by the moist, warm weather. Back home, the catch would be set out on beds of flour for a few days to cleanse their digestive systems, then baked with garlic, parsley, and butter to create a traditional dish of French cuisine.

  Later that morning, we rolled off the ferry and headed for London. Around us, the landscape, the weather, and presumably the snails were identical with those of Picardy. Yet the verges of Kent were deserted.

 
The same would have been true had we driven into Germany, Switzerland, Italy, or Spain. Only Portugal rivaled France in appreciation of the delectable gastropod. And when it came to scouring the countryside for the freshest examples, the field was left largely to the French.

  With the move to France I acquired a kind of double vision, an ability, sometimes troublesome but more often enlightening, to see and appreciate both the Gallic and Anglo ways of life. For the first time, the weather and the seasons, to which until then I’d barely given a thought, became elements in almost every decision I made, social, domestic, or professional.

  In California, we had mostly ignored them. Cars were air–conditioned, as were the malls, cinemas, and offices to which we drove. An intimacy with parking facilities was a key to survival, and “Do you validate?” our mantra.

  In food, seasonality didn’t apply. Refrigeration meant that avocados, mangoes, and cherries, once available for only a few weeks each year, could be enjoyed anytime, and oysters eaten even in months without an “r” in them, traditionally off–limits as the period when they spawned.

  For Australians, a lack of seasonal variation was nothing new. Weather there was largely academic. Sometimes it was hot, at other times hotter. Very occasionally, it was cold. Even less often, it rained. But except for the periodic bushfires, variations were minute. When the American writer Poe Ballantine characterized rural Nebraska as having only two seasons, “merciless summer and a fairly pleasant fall,” he might have been talking about the corner of the outback where I was raised.

  To further complicate things, the Australian seasons are reversed. But even in high summer, most people observed the holiday traditions of a wintry Europe. In 1980, eyebrows were collectively raised when Rolf Harris released “Six White Boomers,” a song that proposed an Aussie Santa in a sleigh pulled not by reindeer but by kangaroos. No Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, let alone red–nosed Rudolph? Unthinkable.

  There was more than custom in our discomfort with a sunlit Christmas. Something deep in our cultural DNA revolted against the idea. British comedian David Mitchell wrote recently: