A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

  When the O’Days and Marie-Dominique arrived, we walked with them down twisting rue Lepic. As we passed the Café des Deux Moulins, where Amélie Poulain worked in the famous film, the keening sound of bagpipes floated up the hill.

  At the next corner, a crowd had gathered around six pipers and a drummer playing on the sidewalk. After the drone of Scottish pipes, the Breton variety can sound shrill, but these players were experts. So were the women in long blue dresses, arms over one another’s shoulders, who danced in the street, their white lace bonnets nodding. Both pipers and dancers were well costumed, almost professionally so. I looked past them to a large open-front fish shop, where men were busy shoveling the orange fan-shaped shells of Saint Jacques into plastic bags. Business looked good. The presence of the pipers and dancers wasn’t exactly coincidental.

  Two men left the crowd to spontaneously link arms with the ladies and join their dance, if you could call it a dance: one step left, slide the other foot next to it, hop, and stamp, then repeat—slide . . . hop . . . stamp . . .

  Something about the movement looked familiar. There was something of Greek dancing in it, but I’d seen Hopi and Navajo people dancing like this too, shuffling and stamping, deerskin moccasins raising the soft dust. Australian aboriginals too, in corroboree . . .

  This was ur-dance, the irreducible minimum of calculated movement, the seed from which would germinate Pavlova, Balanchine, Nureyev—and Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre du printemps.

  “You don’t want to join in?” Bob joked.

  With a little encouragement, he probably would have done so. That’s another thing about visitors: they participate.

  We continued down rue Lepic. It narrowed as café tables and chairs crowded onto the sidewalk, then it widened into Place des Abbesses.

  Saint Denis, the patron saint of Paris, was decapitated by Roman soldiers at the foot of the hill. Legend says he rose to his feet and continued the climb toward Montmartre, carrying his head, which all the while continued to deliver a sermon about forgiveness.

  He was supposed to have paused near this square and washed his face at a spring before pressing on for another five kilometers. It may be an index of Parisian skepticism about Denis and his headless perambulation that there’s no church on the site. Only a modest subterranean chapel marks the spot.

  Instead, the attractive little square shamelessly celebrates the bohemian lifestyle of Montmartre. Most weekends, the antique manège (carousel) keeps kids occupied snatching for the dangling tassel, the French equivalent of the brass ring. A green-painted Wallace water fountain with its four caryatids offers fresh water next to the art nouveau glass-and-iron metro entrance by Hector Guimard, rescued from the busier station at Hôtel de Ville and reerected here in 1974, out of harm’s way.

  Today, the carousel and fountain were inaccessible. Instead, white tents crowded every corner of the square. Men and women in aprons and caps shelled and shucked oysters, grilled skewers of Saint Jacques, and ladled cups of soup. There was no room for dancing, even that shuffling step we’d seen earlier, but under an awning six men with impressive beards were harmonizing, more or less, on one of those folkish tunes beloved of pub bands around the world.

  Couples bundled up against the cold strolled by, drinking from flutes. Bob disappeared, to return with a bottle of champagne and a handful of glasses. By then Deidre had also drifted away, but returned equally loaded down with a plate of mini–hamburger buns, in each of which was sandwiched a slice of jambon cru and a whole fat Saint Jacques.

  As we juggled glasses and paper plates, a complete stranger standing next to us, glass in hand, turned and announced in French, “Isn’t this wonderful? Wine, food, a beautiful day. Who could ask for more?”

  We raised our glasses in agreement. No place like Paris. No place at all.

  Since our conversation about the Republican calendar on the balcony overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin, I’d become more friendly with Adrian de Grandpré, the historian priest.

  I wish I’d encountered someone like him during my Catholic boyhood instead of our beery Irish pastors, most of whom, we assumed, had been exiled to rural Australia in punishment for some unmentionable transgression. His straightforward manner was the best possible advertisement for his beliefs. The less he talked about religion, the more interesting it became.

  Author with musicians at the Saint Jacques festival.

  Montel, Marie-Dominique. Author with Musicians at Saint Jacques Festival.

  He was also refreshingly unfussy when it came to Catholic dogma. Just the man to clarify the religious connections, if any, between Saint Jacques and the shellfish that bears his name.

  It was typical of him that we met in a Starbucks in Montparnasse, where he had set up his laptop. This wasn’t as incongruous as it sounds. France is the only country with a bishop of the internet. His name is Jacques Gaillot. When the church, because of his radical politics, fired him as bishop of Évreux, the pope placed him in charge of Parthenia, a defunct see in North Africa that expired in the fifth century. Gaillot announced mischievously that he regarded himself as a “virtual bishop,” responsible for the moral well-being of that other incorporeal world, cyberspace.

  “Is Saint Jacques the patron saint of Brittany?” I asked.

  “Where did you see that?”

  “Wikipedia.”

  Adrian sighed and shut his Mac. “Another reason not to trust the internet.”

  “So he isn’t a patron? Or isn’t a saint?”

  “This ‘patron saint’ business is misleading. Saints aren’t allocated to particular districts or trades. It’s more that people with special interests select a saint as someone to pray to, since he or she might understand their specific difficulties.”

  “Like Denis and headaches?” Asking the decapitated Denis for relief from headache had always seemed to me one of the least likely opportunities for saintly intervention. “Or Saint Jude?” As the patron saint of lost causes, Jude is frequently invoked in the film business, a profession overendowed with desperation.

  “Jude isn’t a good example, actually,” Adrian said. “He wrote in one of his letters that we should persevere in difficult circumstances. That’s about it. I’m sure plenty of other saints said the same thing.”

  “Well, Saint Christopher, then?”

  “Patron saint of travelers?” He shook his head. “There’s some doubt that there even was such a person. The first reference appears in a thirteenth-century legend that reads like Harry Potter. He was dropped from the church calendar in 1969. That should tell you something.”

  “But Jacques—or rather James—really existed?”

  “Oh, yes. There were two of them, actually. But neither went anywhere near Brittany. And neither was a fisherman.”

  “So how did he get to be the saint of a shellfish?”

  “You’ll laugh. Best theory? Boats carrying pilgrims from Britain on their way to the shrine of Saint James at Compostela in Spain would berth in Breton ports. Maybe some merchant put up a sign saying, ‘Pilgrims of Saint Jacques Welcome Here.’ You can see how it might happen.”

  I remembered the pipers and dancers outside the fish shop on rue Lepic. Yes, I could see very well.

  39

  Vive Le Mistral!

  Vert-Galant, Paris 1ere. 12:30 a.m. 15°C. Dark as death, the Seine sucks at the ancient stones edging this tiny park. A willow trails fronds in the water, like a curtain sometimes obscuring and sometimes revealing the lights of the Louvre on the opposite bank. Rats scuttle by the water line, indifferent to both history and art. When all this has sunk back to the ooze, they will survive.

  WHEN I FIRST VISITED PARIS IN THE 1970S, BUSKERS WERE OUT NUMBERED by mimes. On weekends, individually or in troupes, they congregated in particular on the sloping plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou, where crowds waiting to enter the exhibitions provided a captive audience.

  Marcel Marceau and Bip, his chalk-faced alter ego with the squashed top hat surmounted by a
flower, were at the peak of their fame, and some ambitious performers came to Paris to study with him, or with competitors such as Étienne Decroux. Among those doggedly climbing imaginary stairs and struggling to escape from glass cages was future Hollywood star Jessica Lange. She may even have participated in a group mime popular at the time, one I always remembered because of its association with the weather.

  In this variation on the slow-motion walk, another mime standby, performers—sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs—battled an imaginary gale. Dressed uniformly in jumpsuits of metallized fabric, they struggled, head down and bent almost double, to advance in the face of a nonexistent hurricane, slogging a few painful steps only to be driven inexorably backward.

  Hoping to refresh my memory, I combed the internet for a single image or film of this performance but found nothing. Nor have experts on mime ever heard of it. The phantom wind battled by these performers had swept the pavements clean, leaving no sign of their struggles.

  Occasionally, such gaps in information intrigue the science-fiction writer in me. Perhaps they were not mimes at all but travelers from another time, briefly visible to us as they flickered in and out of this universe, only to slip back into an eternal gale howling in another. And why not? I never spoke to those people, nor did they communicate with their audience. Because to do so would offend against the mime’s code? Or because they were not really of our world?

  But anyone to whom I mentioned this speculation regarded me with amusement or incredulity, or both. (The surrealists would have understood. Where was André Breton when you needed him?)

  I’d put the whole question of imaginary gales out of my mind until chance and the seasons reminded me.

  In early January—on the twelfth night after Christmas, to be exact, and better known in the United States as the Epiphany—the French celebrate the Nuit des Rois, or Night of Kings, that day when the kings Gaspard, Melchior, and Balthazar arrived in Bethlehem with gifts for the baby Jesus of gold, frankincense, and myrrh (none of which, probably by intention, figures among the plants and minerals of the Calendrier républicain).

  The French celebrate this festival by sharing a rich, buttery cake known as the galette des rois, or “kings’ cake,” made from layers of puff pastry filled with almond paste.

  Like most things in France, the eating of the cake, customarily a family occasion, is accompanied by a ceremony. A gold paper crown is sold with each cake, and a tiny ceramic figure, or fève, about the size of a kidney bean is baked into every one.

  Once the group is assembled, the galette is cut into as many slices as there are guests and glasses are filled with wine, traditionally champagne. The person who finds the fève in his or her portion (almost invariably the youngest) receives the crown, chooses someone at the table as prince or princess, and drops the fève into their glass. Wine is then poured over it, and to cries of “La reine [or Le roi] boit”—“the queen [or king] drinks”—everyone toasts their health.

  After the last Nuit des Rois, Louise gave me a fève. “I got this in the galette at a party,” she said. “It’s more your kind of thing.”

  Usually fèves had a religious theme, but this one was decidedly secular: the tiny figure of a blond girl, her skirt blown high up her back, revealing a red thong. The plinth on which she stood was inscribed “Vive le Mistral!”

  Certain winds are characteristic of the districts where they occur, mostly because of the damage they cause.

  In Sydney the Southerly Buster, a cold squall, barrels out of the Indian Ocean at sunset to overturn yachts and drive the last sunbathers from the beach. In Switzerland the warm, dry wind called the Foehn rushes down the lee slopes of the Alps, inciting to irrational acts the normally staid citizens of such cities as Munich. And every resident of Los Angeles knows the atmospheric disturbances immortalized by Raymond Chandler: “those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”

  Southern France has the Mistral. The people of Provence, who companionably call it “le mistraou,” will tell you it doesn’t deserve its bad reputation. But they are used to it. To the visitor, this river of air, steady and cold, flowing for days at a time down the valleys of the Rhône, across the swamps of the Camargue, over the Alpes-Maritimes and the coast to the Mediterranean, is a curse, abrading the nerves, destroying the environment, chilling their very souls.

  “The Mistral wants you to defy it,” said the poet André Verdet. When it blows, most often as the seasons change, nothing exists between the high blue sky with its smears of cirrus and the fields cowering behind lines of cypresses and palisades of cane. Over millennia it has eroded the landscape, sandpapering the limestone peaks of the Alpilles into crags to which such towns as Les Baux cling like survivors from a medieval fable, inviting a sky filled with dragons.

  Caricature of the Mistral, 1905.

  Sager, Xavier. Caricature of the Mistral. 1905. Author’s collection.

  Watching film of pedestrians battling the Mistral, heads down, hands clutching hats or holding down skirts, reminded me of those mime artists fighting a phantom wind on the slope before the Centre Pompidou. Maybe the person who choreographed their performance didn’t come from anywhere as remote as another dimension—just from Arles or Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where resistance to an implacable wind was part of the way of life.

  Antique engraving of the Mistral.

  Anonymous. Des Vents; de la sphere. Figure LXIII. Woodcut of storm with lightning. Author’s collection.

  40

  One-Man Show

  Avignon, Vaucluse. July 1991. 11 p.m. 23°C. Late-night performance of Opéra équestre by the Bartabas theater group. Beneath indifferent stars, a woman’s voice rises in alien vocalese. Stepping out of the shadows, she circles the sanded ring. Her red-and-gold costume marks her as Berber, an Arab of the Sahara. She cradles a shrouded bundle, the object of her lament. A dead child? Kneeling, she unwraps the swaddling and, sobbing, shows us . . . the head of a white horse.

  EVERY FOREIGN RESIDENT OF PARIS BECOMES AT SOME TIME A guide, whether they like it or not. The city and its customs are so intricate, its history so complex, that to leave the visitor to his or her own devices can appear cruel, even inhuman.

  Even so, I resisted the role for more than a decade, and only surrendered when the literary event I helped run was in need of someone to lead a literary walk. Within a year, I was doing them two or three times a week during the warmer months—yet another Parisian adjusting to the weather and the seasons, fulfilling a duty that came with the territory.

  These walks were exhausting, not so much for the walking as for the performance that went with them. Untrained as an actor, I knew none of the techniques by which professionals conserved their energy. After three hours “onstage,” I needed a couple of hours lying down in a dark room.

  All of which made me more respectful of those performers who not only conducted audiences around a private world but also invented that world and the people who populated it.

  I don’t remember exactly when I met Hans Peter Litscher. He seems to have always been there, head and shoulders above the crowd at a party, deep in conversation with the most beautiful woman in the room. Tall, bespectacled, bearded, graying, in a ground-sweeping overcoat and with a thick scarf wrapped around his throat, he might have just stepped in from some high and chilly place. Even in summer, one would not be surprised to see him brush a snowflake from his shoulder or shake frost from his hair.

  Hans Peter was born in Switzerland but is at home everywhere. His eccentric theater pieces are so uncategorizable that they have a category of their own, Litscheriade. For an opera company with too many sopranos on the payroll he conceived a libretto in which a wandering dwarf stumbles on a community of seven Snow Whites. A German town in need of tourists paid him to transform a decaying hotel into an upmarket chamber of horrors, supposedly t
he inn where Alfred Hitchcock spent his honeymoon and which inspired his career of shock and suspense.

  Hans Peter Litscher and friend.

  Hans Peter Litscher. January 12, 2006. dpa picture alliance archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

  In each case Hans Peter appeared as part of the show, a critic and musicologist explaining the background to the piece, a curator conducting visitors through a museum of memorabilia.

  I learned not to be startled by his unannounced appearances at our door, a beribboned box in hand from the season’s trendiest patisserie and with a fund of stories about his latest project.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said during one such visit, “that you know where I can find a kangaroo costume?”

  Remembering an Australian film that used one, I loaned him the DVD. A few months later we were invited to the premiere of In Search of Eleonora Duse’s Red-Headed Boxing Kangaroo at the Swiss Cultural Center in Paris.

  After the few dozen spectators assembled in what looked like a small regional museum, the curator—Hans Peter, of course—descended from upstairs, greeted us, and proceeded to explain, with reference to the exhibits in the glass cases, how Italian actress Eleonora Duse, star of the late-nineteenth-century stage, had rescued a boxing kangaroo from a circus and taken it with her on her travels, smuggling it into the most fashionable hotels of Europe. For the second half of the show we moved to a small theater, where we heard further tales of Duse and Marcel Proust and Duse’s lover Gabriele D’Annunzio, spun by Hans Peter, now dressed as a kangaroo.

  His fantasizing was seductive. A few days after seeing him in the Duse show, I found a battered single volume of one novel from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The label of a lending library in Karachi showed it to have last been checked out in 1922. I sent it to Hans Peter with a long and rambling letter in a shaky hand, supposedly from a descendant of the man who caught and trained Duse’s kangaroo and, through her, became a friend of Proust’s. Next time the piece is staged, I fully expect to see both the book and letter included.