A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

  When it ended I let myself be led, reeling, ears ringing, half–conscious, into another room. In the center sat a galvanized tank the size of a dumpster. Shakily, I ascended a set of steel steps and, too numb to resist, sank into the warm water. It was just about neck deep, but by grabbing straps attached to the edge of the tank I could keep my head above the surface.

  Somewhere out of sight, a motor started up and the water began to churn. At the same time, an attendant decanted a coffee can full of ashlike powder into the bath.

  “Hey! What’s that?”

  She shrugged. “L’algue, m’sieur.”

  Seaweed? Buoyed up by the roiling water, I watched the powder dissolve. It left behind an odor both medicinal and culinary, somewhere between bronchial inhalation and chicken broth. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant. I began to drowse. Did they add some special ingredients to the seaweed soup? A spoonful or two of cannabis, or a little hashish?

  After an indeterminate time someone helped me out of the bath and led me into a shower, where I washed off the slightly slimy residue of my immersion. Just as I finished, a second door opened and a pretty woman looked in. Her short white coat didn’t look the least bit medical.

  “Nous sommes prêts, m’sieur?”

  Was I ready? What for? Beyond her, I saw a small room unfurnished except for a thin mattress on the floor. Was I to be offered, in best Houellebecqian fashion, what the massage trade termed a “happy ending”?

  In fact, what I received was a decidedly unerotic and probably therapeutic rubdown from the young masseuse, who obviously knew her job. As she worked, we chatted. She had actually been to Australia and had happy memories of, among other places, Bendigo. I let my mind roam the wide streets of this entirely unexceptional Victorian country town. Nothing could have been more calming, or less erotic.

  On slightly wobbly legs, I joined Marie–Dominique on one of the daybeds in the solarium.

  “So how was it?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know. Relaxing.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy it,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure that “enjoy” was the mot juste. And nothing I’d experienced compared with the pleasures described by Houellebecq. But I’d entered only a few of the clinic’s many rooms. Perhaps, as in life, it was a question of knowing on which doors to knock.

  17

  Enter Fabre, Pursued by a Bear

  Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris 6me. February 1996. 2°C. The air hushed and still with the promise of snow. Beginning above Montparnasse and rolling downhill in a wave, all color bleeds out of the landscape, anticipating by a few seconds the white flakes soon sifting down, turning what had been pastel Monet to a monochrome Brassaï.

  BEING AN ACTOR OR ACTRESS AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH century was not what every mother would wish for her child.

  Owning money or land was the only serious test of a person’s worth. They signified that the owner need do nothing in life but enjoy it. For those forced to work, there were the professions: medicine, law, the army or navy, the church—followed by the last, worst choice, trade: making and selling things. After that, nothing much remained but crime and show business. People didn’t take up the stage so much as descend to it.

  Philippe Fabre was born in 1750 in Carcassonne, in the far south. His father, a wool merchant, worked for his wife’s father and hated it, a resentment he took out on his son, the only child of six to survive to adulthood. “I was raised by a father who detested me and a mother I detested,” Philippe wrote.

  Local schools educated boys only to age twelve, after which they were deemed old enough to work. (Women were seldom educated at all. Their mothers taught them to cook and sew.) Promising male students continued their studies in church schools. Philippe was sent to the Jesuits in nearby Limoux. From its priests, the church’s intellectual elite, he learned to speak Greek and Latin, to draw and write. Since he possessed an exceptional voice, with a range from bass to countertenor, they also taught him to read music and sing.

  At twenty Fabre was tall for the time, with a mass of brown hair and a face unmarked by the smallpox that scarred so many. Unlikely to flourish in either the wool trade or the priesthood, he was saved from having to choose by the arrival in Limoux of a traveling theater troupe. He left with it.

  Wandering companies under an actor/manager were a feature of life in Europe. Marlowe and Molière learned their trade on the road; as did Shakespeare, who put such a company into Hamlet. But people of their talent were the exception. Most troupes, grumbled one magistrate, were “little better than traveling brothels.” He didn’t exaggerate. “Actress” was synonymous with “prostitute,” and the average actor was a rootless vagabond who strutted in ragged costumes, clowning and declaiming as he debated whether to pick your pocket or ravish your wife.

  Fabre soon made himself useful. His voice and musical skill helped in writing and performing the one–act playlets with music known as “operas,” and he could dash off rhyming verse almost to order. Perhaps it wasn’t top quality, but a road company wasn’t the Comédie–Française.

  He also upheld the profession’s reputation for bad behavior with women. “A good talker,” conceded a colleague, before observing sourly that “his seductions were conducted with a certain brutality.”

  A letter to Fabre from a woman named Sophie Proudhon, dated September 29, 1776, has survived. “My dear friend,” she wrote, “how happy I am. I could die of joy. What a charming letter, to tell me that before the Feast of Saint John, my friend, my tender friend, will be with me. How I will count the hours.”

  If Sophie hoped to marry her “dear friend,” she was out of luck. So were Jeanette in Grenoble, Marie in Versailles, an anonymous brunette in Bordeaux, and a blonde in Troyes. Fabre jilted them all in favor of his latest conquest, Catherine Desremond, known affectionately as Catiche.

  The attraction of Catiche was that of forbidden fruit. Only fifteen, she was the daughter of the couple who managed the troupe. The more her parents discouraged it, the stronger the attachment became, until in 1777 when the company was playing at Namur, Belgium, under the patronage of the local archbishop, they eloped.

  The constabulary caught them and brought them back. Fabre, who had deflowered Catiche and, what was worse, tried to deprive her parents of her services as an actress, was charged with theft and condemned to hang. His fellow performers appealed for clemency, and the conviction was reduced to lifetime banishment from Belgium.

  Fleeing back to his native south, Fabre didn’t show his face in the north until 1787. That year, now styling himself Philippe Fabre d’Églantine, with a florid new signature to go with it, he turned up in Paris with a wife, the actress Marie Nicole Godin–Lesage, and a valise full of unperformed plays. Having flirted in the meantime with running his own theatrical troupe and also managing a couple of regional theaters, he was heavily in debt.

  News traveled slowly in those days, so details of his past took some time to catch up with him. They may have arrived with the soldiers of the south who made their way from Marseilles to join the revolution in 1789.

  In peacetime, these rural clods would not have voyaged any farther than the next village, but a pike and a uniform of sorts—sometimes no more than a blue, white, and red cockade or sash—could carry you a long way. As they marched, they sang a belligerent new song that its composer, Rouget de Lisle, named “La Marseillaise” in their honor. It would be adopted in 1795 as the anthem of the new French state.

  Someone in these new arrivals may have recognized Fabre and confided over a bottle of wine that the former actor was a fraud. In coming to Paris, he was fleeing from a mountain of debt, not to mention numerous jilted young women. As for winning the golden rose at Toulouse, he had in fact received only second prize, the silver lily. The same men hooted at the claim that Clémence Isaure had presented it. Clémence Isaure didn’t exist. She was a character created to personify the festival—a synthetic figure, like Marianne, the symbol of the revolution.

 
If anyone confronted him with his lies, Fabre probably argued that lilies were the emblem of the disgraced Bourbon monarchy and therefore to be shunned. Also, “Fabre d’Églantine” had a nicer ring. The debts and the women he just shrugged off. He could afford to do so, since he had become one of the overnight sensations of prerevolutionary Paris.

  He owed his new reputation to a song for which he wrote the words. “Il pleut, bergère” (It’s raining, shepherdess) appeared in a one–act comic opera, Laure et Pétrarque, written in 1780, with music by Louis–Victor Simon. The show flopped, but the tune flourished. It was even taken up as a marching song by the National Guard, the revolutionary force that replaced the royalist army, and it is still sung by schoolchildren more than two centuries later.

  Anyone raised in a rural society would have recognized the story told by the song.

  Il pleut, il pleut, bergère

  Rentre tes blancs moutons

  Allons sous ma chaumière

  Bergère, vite allons.

  J’entends sous le feuillage.

  L’eau qui tombe à grand bruit.

  Voici, venir l’orage.

  Voici l’éclair qui luit.

  (It’s raining, shepherdess. / Round up your white sheep. / Shelter in my cottage. / Shepherdess, come quickly. / I’m waiting under the thatch. / The rain is falling loudly. / See the lightning flash.)

  By the sixth verse, the singer has maneuvered the shepherdess into bed with the promise that once the storm subsides, he will ask her father for her hand in marriage.

  If one didn’t have to sit outside in all weathers, constantly rounding up the flock, fending off predators, and extricating the animals from bogs and thornbushes, the life of a shepherdess might seem idyllic. Marie Antoinette, at least, thought so. In the Hameau de la Reine, a stylized village on the grounds of Versailles, she and her ladies played at being peasants, grooming animals chosen for their pulchritude and milking cows into pails of porcelain made to order at the Sèvres factory.

  Marie Antoinette must have heard “Il pleut, bergère” and may have taken the song as a kind of tribute. This would help explain why, on February 22, 1789, her husband, the king, signed a surprising document that, literally at the stroke of a pen, made Fabre’s financial problems disappear. It read, “His Majesty, wishing to give to ’sieur Fabre d’Églantine the means to order his affairs, gives him safe conduct for the period of six months, during which His Majesty forbids his creditors to exercise any claims against him; likewise also all bailiffs and sergeants to arrest or trouble him.” By the time this amnesty ran out, the revolution had begun, and with it a new way of life for Fabre.

  18

  Saying Less, Meaning More

  Hot night. Lightning flares.

  Gasp of wind. Thunder cracks.

  Downpour. Ah, so cool!

  IF YOU WANT A WINDY PARIS, MARCH IS YOUR MONTH. BRISK breezes sweep away those clouds that build up on February afternoons and furnish the gaudy sunsets beloved of Rubens. By contrast, April’s pale, cloudless skies look as well scrubbed as a Vermeer.

  Rounding the corner onto avenue Winston Churchill, I was buffeted by an eddy of air solid as a shoulder. Big buildings created wind tunnels, and this corner of the right bank had two of the largest.

  The block–long Grand Palais, or Great Palace, sufficiently long and high to house a 767, stands as grandiose as a moored ocean liner in the heart of the right bank. Its domed glass roof makes it the preferred setting for blockbuster art shows and displays of everything from equitation to farm machinery.

  Across the street, the Petit Palais, or Little Palace, tries but fails not to be upstaged. Neither building was ever a palace. Dating from the late nineteenth century, they were built to house the expositions at which France boasted its expertise in industry, design, and art—in the case of the Petit Palais, the Universal Exposition of 1900. Once the fashion for such displays of excess declined, the Petit Palais became the City of Paris Fine Arts Museum, a cousin to the national collection housed in the former Gare d’Orsay railway terminal, just visible on the other side of the Seine.

  Statuary groups of writhing naked figures populated the building’s exterior, making the ancient world look more exciting than it had been in real life. Admirers of excess found the result enchanting. One was Leopold II of Belgium, the tyrant of the Belgian Congo who, in the process of looting its natural resources, killed more than ten million of its inhabitants. The Petit Palais so impressed him that he kept its architect in work for decades. (Not surprisingly, Leopold isn’t mentioned on the palace’s website.)

  The website is, in fact, notably short on detail, which was why on entering the museum’s entry hall I headed for a uniformed guard, a rare speck of humanity in a cavern of murals and white marble.

  “Je cherche Le Vent,” I told him.

  He peered at me as if I had uttered some obscure African war cry. “Comment?”

  “Er . . . Le Vent?”

  I gave the pronunciation my best shot, complete with an attempt at the moue, that disposition of the mouth in which one pushes out the lower lip and presses the upper lip against the teeth to produce the “eeuw” sound without which certain French words make no sense. Judging by the blank look on the face of the gardien, I didn’t succeed. All those hours watching Maurice Chevalier movies, wasted.

  Maybe I had the name wrong. If the work I was looking for wasn’t called The Wind, perhaps it was The Storm.

  “L’Orage?” I suggested.

  Inside the blue serge uniform, his shoulders began to assume that configuration, as characteristic as the moue, that we call a shrug. The French know it as un haussement d’épaules, a term that, like “passing gas,” describes an act but omits any suggestion of its significance. If you press a Frenchman to be more precise, the best you’ll get is another shrug.

  From behind me a man said quietly in English, “Perhaps I can help.”

  My savior was, unexpectedly, Japanese. He looked to be about my age, gray haired, bespectacled, and dressed in a dark suit.

  He spoke in rapid French to the guard, who responded with equal speed. The former embodiment of ignorance became a fount of information.

  “I believe the figure you’re looking for,” said the Japanese gentleman, once he had finished, “is Tempête et ses nuées by François–Raoul Larche.”

  His moue on “nuées” was faultless. If one doesn’t understand a language, the next best thing is to pronounce it well. I put this belief into practice immediately.

  “Arigatou gozaimasu,” I said and bowed.

  “Douitashimashite.” He followed his responding bow with a torrent of Japanese, which I halted by holding up my hand, palm out, like a traffic cop.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But that’s almost the only phrase I know. Except . . .” I took a breath. “. . . Onako ga suite imasu.”

  “Ah, yes.” He nodded. “Very good. But perhaps you mean Onoka ga suite imasu, ‘I am hungry,’ yes?”

  “Forgive my pronunciation. I’ve only visited Japan a few times.”

  “No, your accent is excellent,” he lied diplomatically. “But by all means, let us continue in English.” He held out his hand. “Yamada Minosuke. So you are interested in Tempête et ses nuées?”

  “If it’s the piece I’m thinking of,” I said. “I’ve only seen photographs. Is it a statue, or rather a sculpture, of a storm, represented by a female . . .”

  I stopped myself from miming her pose. One look at my impression of a naked woman, eyes wide, arms spread, mouth howling as she flung herself out of a sort of bronze waterspout, and the guard would have thrown me down the front steps.

  Fortunately I didn’t need to. “I know this piece,” Minosuke said. “The title translates as ‘storm and its clouds.’ I believe it’s in the permanent collection. Shall we see if we can find it?”

  He led me confidently up the curving marble staircase.

  “You must come here a lot,” I said. “Are you an art historian?”

  H
e sighed. “No. Sadly, excuse me. I am a tour guide. I often bring groups here.”

  Tempête et ses nuées by François–Raoul Larche. Photograph by the author.

  I didn’t volunteer that I too dabbled in the dark art of the guided tour. Instead, I told him why the sculpture interested me. He was immediately intrigued.

  “In Japan, we are also most interested in the weather. It has inspired some of our greatest poetry.”

  “Oh, you mean haiku?”

  The five–seven–five syllable pattern of these little poems seldom adapts perfectly to other languages, but experimenting with it can be as absorbing as completing the Times crossword puzzle.

  Traditionally, a haiku refers to something in nature. The springtime cherry blossoms in Tokyo’s Ueno Park and the crowds who walk there, intoxicated by the pink storm, have inspired thousands. I quoted one of the most famous:

  “Wind through cherry trees

  Fragile petals shaken loose

  Drifting like pink snow.”

  Minosuke pursed his lips. “Yes . . . not quite like the great Bashō. But most interesting. Do you know . . .

  “Hatsu shigure

  Sarumo komino o

  hoshido nari

  “In English, you might say:

  “The first cold shower.

  Even the monkey seems to want

  A little coat of straw.”

  “That’s not the version I know,” I said, “but there’s another:

  “Winter downpour;

  Even the monkey

  Needs a raincoat.”

  Minosuke actually giggled. “Oh, yes. This is most clever. Speaking of haiku and rain . . .”

  I didn’t get to see Tempête et ses nuées, at least not that day. Instead, we sat in the Palais café for an hour, emptying pot after pot of tea and talking haiku, or rather, as my new friend corrected me, its plural, haïkaï.