A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

In doing so, we reaffirmed an affinity between France and Japan, between literature and art, but, above all, between art and the seasons. Those roots were old and deep. Japanese ukiyo–e wood–block prints inspired the impressionists, in particular Claude Monet. The exercises in word and image Guillaume Apollinaire called “calligrammes” were a union of calligraphy and the haiku. Sept haïkaï is a signature work of the composer Olivier Messiaen.

  As the philosopher Heraclitus said in Hellenic Greek, “Panta rhei”: all things flow. And they often flow through Paris.

  19

  Tall Poppies

  Rue de l’Odéon, Paris 6me. December 2017. 10 a.m. 3°C. The doorbell rings in midmorning. It’s our post–lady with a sheaf of card–bound almanacs, one of which we purchase—our Christmas tip in polite disguise. The almanac includes a calendar, with the saints’ names for each day. Times of sunrise and moonrise. A map of France; another of our region, Île–de–France; Paris itself; and the Métro. The printer has shoehorned a few recipes into leftover space. Next to them, less interesting than baked pork chops and chicken en brochette, is a cramped map of the European Union.

  DANTON PROBABLY EXPECTED FABRE, HIS SPY ON THE COMMISSION, to do no more than keep his ears open and mouth shut. But he may not have been entirely surprised when his protégé emerged as the most vigorous champion of a Calendrier républicain.

  For someone with political ambitions, it was a dream project. The Gregorian calendar, conceived by a tyrant and modified by a pope, embodied everything the revolution abhorred. The man who substituted a republican alternative could expect the gratitude of the nation.

  The other members of the commission were not about to provoke someone as well–connected as Fabre. They decided to let him wear himself out. When he got bored and lost interest, his elders and betters could step in. Until then, they followed the instincts of generations of seat warmers and time servers, sending their apologies to most meetings and only turning up with sufficient frequency to justify their stipend. By default, Fabre was left in charge.

  Fabre had never held office, nor did his history suggest a fitness to do so. But knowledge and experience no longer counted. Paradoxically, ignorance was a survival characteristic. Egalitarian cultures often cut down to size those who dare lift their heads above the mob. In revolutionary France, the so–called tall poppy syndrome applied literally. Thousands of scholars and intellectuals would die on the guillotine for no better reason than that they knew more than the sans–culottes, and showed it.

  The theatrical flair with which Fabre approached the calendar project was typical. Sketching the parameters in broad strokes, he left others to fill in the gaps. Once they were done, he reemerged to become its public face. Any pronouncements or updates to the Convention were done by him.

  Some key decisions had already been made. It went without saying that any updated calendar must incorporate that avatar of republican France, the metric system, based on multiples of the number ten. As a first step, Fabre lengthened the hour from sixty to a hundred minutes. Ten such hours made up a day. As the new day was substantially shorter—1,000 minutes, compared to the old day’s 1,440—he extended the week from seven days to ten, called a décade, with the tenth a day of rest. Three décades made a month, and twelve months of equal length a year.

  Since they had their origin in ancient religious rituals, day names also had to go. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday became primidi (day one), duodi (day two), and tridi (day three), followed by quartidi, quintidi, sextidi, septidi, octidi, nonidi, and décadi.

  So far, so straightforward. This part of the scheme wasn’t even particularly novel. Others who had tried to rationalize the calendar had suggested similar changes. In 1788, poet, atheist, and anarchist Pierre–Sylvain Maréchal published his Honest Man’s Almanac, which substituted the names of famous men from history for those of saints. Ahead of his time, Maréchal suffered the full force of the church’s disapproval. He was imprisoned for four months and forbidden to ever publish again under his own name.

  With the architecture of the new year established, Fabre and his helpers made an even more sweeping change. The Republican year would not commence around the anniversary of Christ’s birth but rather with a date more significant for the Frenchman on the land—the end of the harvest. The first day of the year became the former October 6. But for symmetry, and with an eye to symbolism, Fabre backdated it to the autumnal equinox, September 22, one of only two occasions when day and night are equal in length.

  Each November, with the grapes and grain gathered in, farmers traditionally laid the dust of the harvest with a wine made from freshly pressed Gamay grapes and matured for just three weeks. They saw no reason to change this custom simply because some fool in Paris was fiddling with the calendar. As they drank their Beaujolais nouveau in the autumn of 1793, the more thoughtful among them might have intuited that the wine, young and fresh but with little character, reflected the nature of the new calendar, if not of the revolution itself.

  20

  If Winter Comes . . .

  Boulevard Saint–Germain. Paris 6me. November. 4°C. Outside the café Les Deux Magots, a whiff of burning charcoal signifies that the chestnut seller is back at his old pitch, tending his improvised oil–drum stove. A dozen nuts smolder and crack on the ash–dusted metal. He shovels some into a white paper bag, around which a woman cups her palms: no hand warmer more effective, nor more fragrant.

  I’D WATCHED THE SEASONS CHANGE ON FOUR CONTINENTS, BUT never as they did in Paris. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” Along the boulevards, one could sense the machinery meshing, cogs sliding into place as the engine of the year rotated into its final quarter.

  The change can occur in a few seconds—as long as it takes a clock to strike the hour—and when one least expects it.

  Crossing rue Bonaparte, beyond the tiny stall where a man cooks crepes to order on the hot plate—another winter smell: that of burnt sugar and Nutella chocolate–and–hazelnut paste—I spotted a further harbinger.

  Yaseen Khan had once again hung his artwork from the railings of the little garden behind the church of Saint–Germain–des–Prés, each smudgy abstract surrounded by text in spiky calligraphy. He’s as much a fixture of this corner as the chestnut seller or the crepe man, and I seldom stop to look. But that day I did pause, because he’d chosen texts from a favorite poem, Jacques Prévert’s “Les Feuilles mortes” (the dead leaves).

  To the corner of each stiff, parchmentlike paper was pinned a dead sycamore leaf. As much for the leaf as the poem I bought one, and, juggling it awkwardly as I fumbled for my ticket, only just managed to catch the 95 bus, direction Porte de Montmartre.

  Squeezing into a seat, I adjusted my mental almanac to the passing of a season. The date could not have been more precise or final had it been printed on a calendar. Not savagely, like a wolf, as the Russians see it, but in the French style, silently, secretly, as a rime of ice gathers on still water in the night, winter was upon us.

  Walking through the Jardins du Luxembourg an hour before, I’d seen the signs, just not recognized them. Instead, I was distracted by one of the twenty statues of France’s great women, larger than life, that surround the formal gardens of Marie de Médicis.

  All but one of these statues depict queens or saints. The exception is the figure of a woman who, despite the cross around her neck and the wreath of laurel in her hair, stands in the seductive hipshot pose we associate more with showgirls. Flowers and more laurel leaves line her cloak, suggestive of someone not unacquainted with sensual pleasure. She is Clémence Isaure, the imaginary doyenne of Toulouse from whom Fabre d’Églantine claimed to have received his fictitious golden rose.

  Yaseen Khan, artist of the Paris streets.

  Photograph by the author.

  Walking on, I didn’t notice that the tall date palms that had guarded Le Nôtre’s tranquil garden all summer were gone. Overnight, while the gates were shut (the
time when everything of importance happens in the most discreet of Paris’s parks), forklifts conveyed the trees in their green–painted wooden crates to a graveled space behind the Musée du Luxembourg, creating a transient oasis through which I’d walked without taking notice. By now the trees would be installed inside the lofty hall of the Orangerie, safe from the frosts, which the evergreens that replaced them would just shrug off.

  Then there were the leaves. Overnight, gardeners had corralled the fallen chestnut, plane, and sycamore leaves in the millions and heaped them in chicken–wire cages, each large enough to contain an automobile. Those that escaped made a carpet ankle–deep under the trees, or blew onto rue de Médicis to clog its gutters or plaster themselves to the sidewalks in a collage of beiges and browns.

  London had just as many deciduous trees as Paris, but I didn’t remember seeing leaves in such abundance along the Mall or in Regent’s Park. Did their staffs do a better job of raking? I doubted it. Rather, those who maintained the Luxembourg chose to let leaves accumulate. Far from being a problem, they were part of the show.

  At the end of my trip across the city, the bus deposited me in Montmartre. Busy, built up, high above Paris to the north, it’s a long way from the Luxembourg. As leaves don’t lie long in these windy streets, I wasn’t expecting to see any, which made what I found in La Souris Verte all the more surprising.

  Away from the tourist trails, cafés cease to be a subject of curiosity for visitors and revert to an amenity for the French—somewhere to dawdle over a coffee, read the paper, do business, meet friends, watch le foot, and argue about last night’s result over a glass of Stella.

  La Souris Verte (The Green Mouse) belongs in this category. The skylight over its high back room, the walls of unplastered brick, a bare–board floor unscrubbed since the de Gaulle administration, and some rugged stools and tables bolted together from balks of squared–off timber and looking suspiciously like recycled workbenches all suggest onetime industrial use—possibly as a sweatshop, a suspicion supported by a few tables adapted from old sewing–machine benches complete with foot treadles incorporating the Singer logo in wrought iron.

  Autumn leaves on the floor of La Souris Verte.

  Photograph by the author.

  Some nights there’s a band, but mostly the sound system mumbles music chosen by whomever is behind the bar: thumping techno one day, the next some Belle Epoque art songs by Reynaldo Hahn or the mournful contralto of Nina Simone.

  In the corner next to the bar, a stringless guitar and an ancient weighing machine with a broken glass emphasize that this is no branché boulevardier hangout. Hence my surprise that afternoon at finding its floor strewn with dead leaves.

  Had they blown in? Unlikely. The door was closed, the sidewalk clear, with not a tree in sight.

  I raised an eyebrow to the girl polishing glasses behind the bar. She shrugged.

  “C’est pour le Beaujolais nouveau.”

  The last cog meshed in the machinery of the changing season. Others more attuned to the seasons than I had seen the signs and, each in his own way, marked the occasion.

  That morning, on rue des Écoles, a café owner had scattered straw across the entrance and placed a bale by the door. It was a reminder of the harvest, but there was also a notice from one of the big wine merchants stuck to his window announcing, “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé” and urging us to sample it.

  Nothing signified the shift from autumn to winter so visibly, at least for city people, as the arrival of the new Beaujolais on the third Thursday of November.

  Strict rules govern what can be sold as Beaujolais nouveau. Only wine from the regions of Beaujolais and Beaujolais–Villages may use the term, and then only if the wine is pressed from Gamay grapes and matured by a process that produces fermentation in a mere twenty–one days.

  For a little wine, Beaujolais nouveau became big business. At one time, restaurateurs all over the world competed to be the first to offer the new vintage. Runners, rickshaws, trucks, helicopters, hot–air balloons, motorcycles, Concorde jets, even elephants were employed to rush a case from the vineyards north of Lyon in time for customers to open a bottle at one minute past midnight on that third Thursday.

  Today, the onetime rarity has become a cliché. Sixty–five million bottles are sold worldwide every year, mostly to people who can’t tell Cabernet from Kool–Aid. One critic dismissed the wine in its present state as “nothing more than pleasantly tart barroom swill.”

  But to write it off is to miss the point. If the Beaujolais nouveau had value, it lay in the idea behind it. Like the Romans who ceremonially spilled wine on the ground as an offering to the gods, we drank it as a libation, a sacrifice to the inevitability of change.

  Ahead lay hard months from which it would not be so easy to wring a wine as pleasant as this. But winter had its pleasures too. Long before I came here, I read Paul Bowles’s evocation of “the hushed, intense cold that lay over the Seine in the early morning, the lavender–gray daylight that filtered down from the damp sky at noon; even on clear days the useless, impossibly distant, small sun.” I was ready. Yaseen Khan and the chestnut seller and La Souris Verte and Beaujolais nouveau had prepared the way. And Fabre d’Églantine too, in his fashion. Send on Frimaire, Nivôse, and Pluviôse, and the days of granite, salt, and iron. We would deal with them together.

  21

  Bloody Days

  Acapulco, Mexico. Christmas 1975. 10 p.m. 15°C. In the dark of the hotel balcony overlooking the bay, three guitarists play as the waiter juggles cups and silverware. Lifting a ladle to chest height, he sets it alight and pours burning cognac in a stream of blue flame. The velvet night retreats for a few moments, then closes in once more.

  REVISING THE CALENDAR MIGHT HAVE ENDED WITH THE IMPOSITION of the metric system on the counting of day and years, but no revolution does things by halves. Powered by Fabre’s ambition, the project built up unstoppable momentum.

  More than internal disruption, revolutionary France feared invasion, particularly by Catholic Austria and Italy. The threat posed by the pope and the Vatican was more than ideological. France took seriously the possibility of an Italian army invading to free the imprisoned Catholic clergy. In July 1792, amid rumors of such a force headed for Paris, the mob slaughtered almost two hundred imprisoned priests, monks, nuns, and bishops.

  Even more were murdered the following September during further riots, ignited in part by Fabre’s rabble–rousing speeches to the Convention. Danton deprecated the killings in public, but rationalized in private that they had their favorable side; if there really was a fifth column within Paris, its members would now be too scared to act.

  The Reformation in Germany and England may have substituted a more rational style of belief, but in Italy and France the Roman church remained omnipotent. Backing its power was the threat of hellfire, illustrated in church paintings and emphasized repeatedly from the pulpit. Excommunication and the damnation that followed could bring kings crawling in rags to the pope, begging forgiveness for having challenged his omnipotence.

  Rooting out any lingering influence of the church came high on the list of revolutionary priorities. Purging the new calendar of all religious doctrine would demonstrate that the French farmer lived and died not according to some superstitious schedule conceived of by foreigners but in response to the turn of the seasons as experienced in his own fields and vineyards.

  Having renamed the days of the week to remove their associations with the Gregorian calendar, Fabre turned to the months. Discarding their names, all of which celebrated pagan festivals, he substituted others that evoked the countryside and nature.

  The months were given names ending in one of four syllables. Those of fall terminated in “aire,” winter months in “ôse,” spring months in “al,” and summer in “dor.”

  The first month of the revised calendar, Vendémiaire, coinciding with the grape harvest, or vendange, ran from the former September 22 to October 21. It was followed
by Brumaire, the month of mists, named for brume, the French word for “fog,” then by Frimaire, from frimas (frost).

  Nivôse was snowy, from the Latin for “snow,” nivosus. Pluviôse—from the Latin pluviosus—was rainy, and Ventôse windy, from the Latin ventosus.

  In Germinal, from the Latin germinis (bud), grain germinated. Floréal, from floreus, was the month of flowers, followed by Prairial, from prairie, the French word for “meadow,” which the first explorers gave to the grasslands of the American West.

  Finally, the months of high summer concluded with “dor,” from doron, the Greek word for “gift.” Grain was reaped in Messidor, from the Latin messis (harvest), while Thermidor, the former August, took its name from the Greek thermon (heat), and Fructidor from the Latin fructus (fruit), leading back to Vendémiaire.

  In the redistribution of days, weeks, and years, a day was left over at the end of each year. These became public holidays for the ordinary citizens, the sans–culottes. The consummate adman, Fabre labeled them sans–culottides, holidays for the trouserless ones.

  La Fête de la Vertu would celebrate good works. La Fête du Génie would recognize talent or skill, and La Fête du Travail honor labor. On La Fête des Récompenses, awards would be made and honors conferred, and a fifth day, La Fête de la Révolution, would honor the achievements of the revolution with solemn splendor and high ritual. On the last holiday, La Fête de l’Opinion, citizens would be permitted to say what they liked about any public figure without risk of prosecution for libel. (Unfortunately the calendar didn’t survive long enough for any of these festivals to be celebrated, least of all the last, which promised to be memorable.)

  At this point, Fabre and his helpers set down their pens, leaned back, and savored the sense of a task skillfully, even brilliantly completed. On every level, their creation appeared a total success. In offering to the people of France a means of relating their lives to the natural world, the calendar achieved a harmony of intellect and labor that the American poet Walt Whitman, writing nearly a century later of the American ideal, would call “something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night.”