by John Baxter
ONE THING ON WHICH I ASSUMED EVERYONE COULD AGREE: IF there was a worst month to visit Paris, it was surely August.
That was the month when anyone with the most feeble pretext locked the office and left town. In resorts all over France, seaside hotels, apartment buildings, and even campsites came to life, filled with people fleeing the cities.
Lying like a musty quilt across its roofs, the heat of August stifled every quality in which Paris in particular took pride. Cafés and restaurants closed, museums went on half–time, and in the few shops that remained open, languid vendeuses made no secret of longing to join their friends in Le Touquet or Antibes. The essentials of daily life disappeared. “On the last day of July,” confided a friend, “everyone forced to remain in Paris buys ten fresh baguettes and puts them in the freezer. It’s the last edible bread they’ll see for a month.”
Until refrigeration made cold drinks commonplace, street sellers flourished, in particular those offering Coco, a concoction of lemon juice and water flavored with licorice. At guinguettes, open–air bars, thirsty men guzzled liters of beer, then collapsed under the nearest tree to sleep through the stifling afternoon.
Heat induced the apathy known as cafard. One could medicate it—with sex, for instance—but the result was often self–defeating. As temperatures climbed, relationships were stretched to the breaking point.
Paris emptied by degrees. People with children slipped away in July, when school holidays began. Others delayed, but never beyond mid–August. “Tomorrow is the Feast of the Assumption,” wrote Canadian writer and longtime Parisian expat Mavis Gallant, “and the whole of Catholic Europe will shut down its cities and make for mountains and beaches. Any tourist caught in Madrid, Vienna, Rome, or Paris on the 15th of August can vouch for what ‘empty city’ means.”
In her attitude to Paris in August, as in much else, Gallant was the exception. She relished the emptiness, and—particularly after arthritis left her bent, shuffling, and mostly housebound—she often chose to remain right through August in her little apartment on rue Jean Ferrandi. She wrote about it in 1993 for the online magazine Slate:
Coco soft–drink seller in the Paris streets, 1900s.
Anonymous. La Chaleur à Paris. Un marchand de Coco. 1900s. Studio Meurisse.
Keep the beer coming, 1890s caricature.
Guillaume, Albert. En Canicule. 1897. Author’s collection.
“It bothers people—friends, I mean—that I spend every August in Paris. They think it is unhealthy, surely lonely, probably eccentric. The truth is that I prefer being in a city, all the time, more and more, and ‘city’ means Paris. I am frequently offered an airy room in a country house, in Normandy, in Brittany, and sometimes the house itself. I am assured that I would be able to work in peace, that no one would ever bother me, that I could just turn up for meals. Thank you, no. . . .”
To equate anonymity with freedom is a particularly Parisian trait. At the bals musettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dancers behaved like neighbors who nod to one another in the street but never introduce themselves. Even at the small neighborhood bals, which could simply be at cafés with the owner playing an accordion for dancing, one never revealed one’s name. Clinging to total strangers, body grinding against body in the jigging dance known as the java, they still remained silent. In 1922 Ernest and Hadley Hemingway danced at such a neighborhood bal, the rule of silence a convenience for new arrivals like them who spoke no French.
Not that Paris in August is without its pleasures, but those that exist are, like those of the bal musette, perfumed with decadence. Many Parisians don’t bother with curtains, preferring to control heat and light with shutters. When, at morning or evening, these are folded back to admit cooler air, both voyeurs and exhibitionists are spoiled for choice, a taste that helps explain the popularity among the French of Alfred Hitchcock’s films Rear Window and Vertigo, celebrations of the watchers and the watched.
Mavis Gallant used this time to exercise a slightly perverse pleasure in observing the oddities of her neighbors. One incident would not have been out of place in one of her acerbic short stories. Kept awake all night by a barking poodle in another apartment, she reported it to the police, who found that the seventeen–year–old son of the family, alone in Paris while the family was on holiday, would leave the dog unattended all night while he went out to party. “Yesterday I met them both, boy and dog, in the street,” Gallant wrote. “Nothing was said, but he stopped, pointed to the poodle, raised the leash, as if it were evidence in a trial, and gave me a look that conveyed apology, bewilderment, and gloom.”
25
Re–enter Fabre
Cambridge, England. April 1971. 3 p.m. 14°C. The punt glides downstream, a friend standing on the stern and casually manipulating the two–meter pole. The college buildings of honey stone that we pass seem to embody intellectual superiority. Nothing here but ideas has any real importance. The river implies otherwise, its languid flow evoking Rupert Brooke’s “stream mysterious . . . / Green as a dream and deep as Death.”
ONCE FABRE D’ÉGLANTINE BECAME KNOWN AS A POLITICIAN AND speculator, he discarded the image of a poet, rebranding himself as a man–about–town. His open shirt and casual jacket gave way to a silk cravat, surcoat, and vest. A coiffeur fluffed his hair into a bouffant. He also took to carrying a lorgnette, a pair of eyeglasses on a handle, through which he would peer at the proceedings of the Convention and the Club des Cordeliers as if they were stage comedies performed for his amusement, a habit that irritated his fellow members.
He had his portrait painted by the aging but fashionable Jean–Baptiste Greuze, and promptly parodied the painter in one of his verse comedies. His last work, The Proud Fool, presented in August 1792, went even further—mocking the revolution, or at least its more pompous poseurs. Few were amused.
Fabre had already begun accumulating a personal fortune by speculating in shares of the Compagnie Française des Indes Orientales. Inspired by the British and Dutch East India Companies, which gave those nations access to the wealth of India and East Asia, Louis XIV started this French equivalent to build trading posts on the subcontinent and import its spices and fabrics. The revolution’s leaders planned to stamp out such survivals from the bad old days of the monarchy, but until they got around to it the company continued to generate a healthy income for its stockholders.
Danton helped Fabre gain a place on the commission charged with supplying the army, a notorious pork barrel that Fabre exploited recklessly. By buying inferior goods but billing the government at top price, he pocketed 40,000 livres, a small fortune. A disgusted Robespierre claimed that the boots supplied to the troops were of such poor quality that they barely lasted half a day before falling to pieces.
For the moment, Fabre’s association with Danton protected him, but his mentor was also under attack, suspected of skimming from the fortunes of those aristocrats sent to the guillotine. Each time Danton rose in the Convention to speak, opponents shouted, “The accounts, the accounts!”
Busy with business deals, Fabre didn’t have time to publicize his involvement in the calendar project. Instead, he had others do it for him. At his instigation, Michel de Cubières, a prolific self–styled poète de la révolution, composed an eleven–page ode celebrating the new calendar and hinting broadly that all involved, but in particular Fabre, deserved some honor and even a little profit:
The illustrious citizen deserves his reward.
Kings offer gold, popes forgiveness,
But the ordinary citizen, recognizing victory,
Places laurel on the warrior’s brow.
This true brightness puts crowns to shade.
On September 23, 1793, Charles–Gilbert Romme, technically head of the calendar commission, formally presented it to the Convention. After some perfunctory debate, it was adopted on October 24.
Barely anyone took any notice. That year had become the first annus horribilis of the new France. In May and June,
the Jacobins, supporters of Robespierre and opponents of Danton, won a majority in the Convention. On July 13, Jean–Paul Marat, a leader of the Montagnards and one of Danton’s most effective colleagues, was murdered, stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a supporter of the moderate Girondin party.
Marat’s tirades in his newspaper, L’Ami du peuple, had fanned a growing sense of desperation throughout France as foreign armies threatened its borders. With almost unlimited powers to convict and execute without trial, the Committee of Public Safety crushed even the slightest expressions of dissent.
Fabre had been one of those who supported Marat in denouncing a “foreign plot” against the Republic. The denunciation set off a barrage of accusations that heightened the prevailing paranoia and accelerated the frequency of public executions, now a daily occurrence across the country.
Fabre continued to speculate in East India Company shares. When in 1793 the Committee of Public Safety finally got around to banning all joint–stock companies, he smelled an even greater profit in winding up its affairs. Officials, their palms well greased, allowed its directors, rather than the government, to liquidate the company. In this fire sale of assets, the insiders cleaned up.
This was a swindle too far. When Robespierre made the details public, a heckler at the Club des Cordeliers pointed at Fabre and shouted, “To the guillotine with him!” Paling, Fabre dropped his lorgnette. For the first time he realized that his influential friends didn’t make him immune. He hurriedly resigned his seat in the Convention, but it was too late. Robespierre launched a campaign to discredit him and the other so–called indulgents who urged an end to revolutionary extremism. The stage was set for the last act not only of the life of Fabre d’Églantine but also of the revolution itself.
26
Singin’ in the Rain
Studio Babelsberg, Potsdam, Germany. February 2006. 2 p.m. 2 degrees below zero C. On the back lot, set designers have meticulously re–created a city street in middle Europe, c. 1920. A beat after the director waves “Action,” wet flakes of snow begin to fall. This is, after all, the studio that made Metropolis, The Blue Angel, and M. As Conrad Veidt’s Nazi colonel purrs in Casablanca, “I expected no less.”
IT’S ONE OF THOSE MILESTONE MOMENTS IN CINEMA HISTORY. GENE Kelly, delirious with newfound love for Debbie Reynolds, stomps and splashes around Los Angeles in the pouring rain, even pausing under a drainpipe to let water gush over his head. Maurice Chevalier had done much the same with Ann Sothern in the “Rhythm of the Rain” number for a 1935 film called Folies Bergère de Paris, but Kelly’s version put that to shame.
Few of us have such happy memories of being caught in a downpour. An instinct as ancient as the cave dweller drives us to seek shelter, however insubstantial, leaving the world of water to the fish, snails, and frogs. A traditional yardstick of intelligence decrees of the stupid, “Didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.”
This was what I mused, anyway, as I retreated deeper into a doorway in Montparnasse, the better to take advantage of its minimal shelter. It was February 14—Pluviôse 26 in the Republican calendar, in a month well named for its rain. Finding that the plant of the day was guède contributed to an overall sense of dankness. When Britain was largely bogs and rocks, my Celtic ancestors daubed their bodies with the blue dye it produced. They called it “woad.”
From across the street a youngish man sprinted toward me, sheltering something bulky under a voluminous coat. A tenant of this building? If so, he could probably buzz both of us into the vestibule, where I could wait out the storm in comfort. But his imploring look signaled that he was just another pedestrian, so I shuffled aside to make room.
To shake the rain from his coat, he had to let go of what he’d been protecting. With a hollow bong, a battered acoustic guitar dropped a few centimeters to the stone step. Almost certainly he was a street musician, a busker.
“Singin’ in the rain?” I said.
He looked blank. “Comment?”
I scrabbled for the translation. “Er, chantons sous la pluie?”
Clearly baffled, he peered at the rainy sky, then at me, and screwed up his brow to mime bafflement. Had I struck the one young Parisien who wasn’t into movies?
“C’est pas important,” I said.
We stood in silence for a few moments, until a lull in the shower cued him to pick up the guitar again and, with a nod, sprint off downhill toward the Jardins du Luxembourg.
I was in no hurry. And rain was still sufficiently exotic for me, after years of Australian and Californian summers, to be enjoyable in itself. It wasn’t until I went to live in Los Angeles that “Singin’ in the Rain” made sense. To dance under a Californian downpour was simply to celebrate its novelty.
Once the guitarist left, I realized my guess about him being a busker was probably wrong. He was French, while almost all buskers, in common with people writing in cafés or shopping at Louis Vuitton, are foreign.
Blame this on the complex relationship between Parisians and the street. Where in other cities the distinction between At Home and In Public is clearly defined, in Paris the nature of public and private space is a matter of constant redefinition.
Most of us look on the streets as dead ground, to be passed through as quickly as possible on our way to our true destination. In Los Angeles, I had barely put foot to pavement. To the French, however, the street is a destination in itself. Parisians dress to go out, even if just to the supermarket. Entering a shop, a café, even a bus, they greet the proprietor or driver as if visiting a friend in his home. Conversations of startling intimacy take place in the hearing of other pedestrians or passengers, and there is no city in the world where a more intimate relationship can be initiated by eyes meeting eyes in that glance of mutual interest.
Buskers in Paris, 1870s.
Daumier, Honoré. Les Musiciens de Paris. In La Caricature, November 11, 1874.
Few Frenchmen would insinuate a guitar or accordion into this intricate cultural exchange. Instead, metro passengers are serenaded by octets of Peruvians warbling on panpipes and pickup bands of American students doing upbeat versions of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.”
Neil Hornick and the Sidewalkers in Copenhagen.
Hart, Bruce. Neil Hornick and Sidewalkers in Copenhagen.
If Parisians sing in the street, it’s generally a form of advertising. Édith Piaf became a pavement vocalist to attract spectators for her father, a street acrobat and contortionist. In the 1920s, song pluggers cruised working–class suburbs. Selecting a courtyard with good acoustics, they sang a few choruses of the latest ballad to coax people to their windows, then sold them a copy of the sheet music. Albert Préjean played such a person in René Clair’s film Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris). Many Paris buskers today follow the tradition, selling CDs of their work.
The voices of street performers seldom lasted long. Singing in all weathers and at maximum volume strained the untrained voice, battering it into a grating growl well suited to the songs of poverty and despair written and performed by Aristide Bruant and Jehan Rictus, both of whom wrote of the streets but found their audience in the cabarets of Montmartre. Édith Piaf too was fortunate. A passing club owner recognized her talent, rescued her, disciplined her voice, coaxed her into her trademark little black dress, and made her famous.
These days, busking in Paris is strictly controlled. The city issues only three hundred permits each year, and these only after applicants have passed an audition in front of three fellow performers, the least sympathetic of judges.
It’s no game for the faint of heart. Britain’s Henry VIII swore to “whip unlicensed minstrels and players, fortune–tellers, pardoners and fencers, as well as beggars.” In Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris, the street performer Esmerelda is about to be hanged as a witch when she’s rescued by the bell ringer Quasimodo. More recently, when Édith Piaf’s mentor refused to sell her contract to some old friends from her street–singing days, the
y murdered him, possibly with her connivance.
Once on the street, modern buskers face a variety of risks, including being hassled and robbed by rivals and mocked and abused by drunken football fans, not to mention having the gendarmerie arrest them for performing outside their assigned location.
Despite this, the tradition has survived and flourished, even creating its own mythology. London buskers traditionally work the movie queues on Leicester Square or those for theaters on nearby Saint Martin’s Lane. A 1938 film, Sidewalks of London (also known as Saint Martin’s Lane), suggested that some might be stars waiting to be discovered—easy to believe when one of them is a young Vivien Leigh.
But most buskers are less interested in a theatrical career than in exploiting a modest talent for cash. My friend Neil busked across Europe in the 1960s, including a few turns on the trottoirs of Paris. I asked him what he recalled of the experience. Inevitably, his memories involved the weather.
“Paris in sunshine has a luster of its own. I lived close to the Luxembourg Gardens and loved strolling there, as well as dawdling and browsing at the book and postcard stalls along the Seine. Clearly there was no point in busking when the weather was bad—always disappointing, that—though punters queuing under an awning on la rive gauche in the drizzle in order to see the latest nouvelle vague movie appreciated a bit of live entertainment, even if on the raucous side.
“Otherwise, my only other weather–tinged memory concerns the beautiful German girl who took a fancy to me singing by the Seine and soon became my live–in girlfriend (in her chambre de bonne). One sunny, if windy, day we joined a group of friends on a picnic excursion. At one point during this déjeuner sur l’herbe, we covered ourselves from waist to toe with a light blanket, beneath which Ulrike contrived, to my surprise, to bring me to climax with her bare feet while our friends continued unknowingly to eat, drink, and chatter.”