A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

  He was equally moved by moonlight. In Clair de Lune, he wrote:

  The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,

  Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,

  And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming—

  Slender jet-fountains—sob their ecstasies.

  Fiction too found this new technique useful. Traditionally, novels relied on conversations, letters, or authorial musings to carry a story. Descriptions of landscape or weather were rare. During the last half of the nineteenth century, however, novelists began using nature to amplify a character or establish a mood, sometimes specifically evoking the Republican calendar. For his 1885 novel about a strike among coal miners in northern France, Émile Zola chose the title Germinal. It concluded, “Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth.”

  Filmmakers would seize on the symbolism of nature to augment often feeble stories and third-rate performers. Storms conveyed passion, flowers romance. Higher aspirations were suggested by sunrises and sunsets, or by the camera staring meaningfully at the sky. Images of flowers, insects, and nesting birds to illustrate procreation passed so quickly into the language that “the birds and the bees” became shorthand for sex education.

  To songwriters, the language of Fabre and Lafitte was likewise a gift. Jacques Prévert’s lyrics for one of the most popular of French chansons, Joseph Kosma’s “Les Feuilles mortes” (dead leaves), compares sad memories to leaves carried away by “the wind of forgetting.” Charles Trenet, writing of the sea in “La Mer,” suggests that the “love song” of the sea has “cradled my heart.”

  Both songs became even more successful in English versions, though in each case the new lyrics coarsened the message. Eva Cassidy’s reworking of Prévert’s song as “Autumn Leaves” compared dead leaves, obscurely, to “your lips, the summer kisses / The sunburned hands I used to hold.” In his version of “La Mer,” Bobby Darin turned Trenet’s paean to the waves and his clouds like sheep guarded by angelic shepherdesses into the finger-snapping “Beyond the Sea,” in which “somewhere, waiting for me, a lover stands on golden sands.”

  Having a new means of speaking of the seasons continues to tempt poets and lyricists. In the sixties, songwriter Hugues Aufray made the months of the Republican calendar into a love story:

  White is the snow in Nivôse,

  Gray is the rain in Pluviôse.

  Black is the wind in Ventôse.

  We met one another in Germinal,

  We fell in love in Floréal

  And got married in Prairial.

  The child was born in Messidor,

  He grew up in Thermidor

  And then left in Fructidor.

  Life is white in Vendémiaire,

  Life is gray in Brumaire,

  And then life is black in Frimaire.

  Using nature to mirror human feelings doesn’t appeal to everyone, least of all plain-speaking Anglo-Saxons. In 1856, art theorist John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy” to describe the belief that autumn might “sob” or birds “softly dream.” In his view, “Objects . . . derive their influence not from properties inherent in them . . . but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects.” As for weather, it was, he insisted, just weather: “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”

  The element of “Bah! Humbug!” in such comments found no sympathy across the Channel. Both Freud and Jung conceded that elements of the natural world can affect us deeply. How ironic if one of the most enduring legacies of the revolution should be not that of either Danton or Robespierre but of the fraudulent and swindling Fabre d’Églantine.

  44

  Night Creatures

  Reid Hall, Paris 6me. November 2017. 6°C. Hollins University of Roanoke, Virginia, has invited some distinguished expatriates to speak at a lunch for a group of visiting alumni. During a discussion onstage between Terrance Gelenter and Diane Johnson, a member of the audience asks, “What do you miss most about the United States?” Both reply in unison, “Mexican food.”

  “IT’S SAD,” SAID TERRANCE GELENTER.

  Across the table at the Chez Fernand, his bearded face, never notably cheerful, did look more than usually doleful.

  “Cheer up,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll pick up the check.”

  Normally this was enough to lighten his mood, but not today.

  “I didn’t mean I was sad,” he said. “Though I am. I meant SAD. Seasonal Affective Disorder. It always affects me at this time of year. Paris starts to get me down.”

  “Really?”

  SAD results in part from a lack of sunshine. I looked out at narrow, restaurant-lined rue Guisarde. Like most such streets in Saint-Germain, it only sees direct sunlight around midday, but the locals didn’t seem to mind. Living in perpetual shadow encourages a collective good humor, a sense of us-against-them that has seen them through tough times, much as the “Britain Can Take It” spirit sustained London through the Blitz.

  But Gelenter was from suburban New York, so allowances had to be made. As Thomas Wolfe suggested in one of his novels, only the dead know Brooklyn. A certain melancholy was to be expected.

  “What form does it take, this SAD?”

  “Oh, you know, anxiety, depression, sleeplessness . . . It’s a recognized condition. Say, do you think the girl heard you order the wine?”

  Just then, he looked past my shoulder and his eyes lit up. I guessed the waitress was heading in our direction.

  “Ah, ma jolie . . .” Half rising, he reached out his hand. I thought for a moment he might clamber over the table, and me as well, in his haste to get to her. Abruptly he had become the boulevardier par excellence.

  This was a performance polished to a gleam by repetition. He probably didn’t realize any longer that he was doing it. Seeing an attractive woman between the ages of fifteen and ninety—policewoman, nun, mother of eight: it didn’t matter—he was energized as if a switch had been thrown, and suddenly there was Terrance le Coquin (Naughty Terrance).

  Terrance Gelenter in repose.

  Bonneau, Francis. Terrance Gelenter.

  What would he do if one of these women said “OK” and hitched up her skirt? I suspected he would run a mile, but so far I’d never been around when this happened, if it ever did.

  To distract him, I took the pichet of Bordeaux and poured each of us a glass. For a moment he wavered, his barrage of double entendres challenged by the appeal of a drink. Eventually the bird (or rather, glass) in the hand won over the bird who remained beyond his grasp.

  “Salut,” he said, settling back into his chair and taking a swallow.

  “Salut,” I said. “So . . . you can’t sleep?”

  “Yeah. It’s a bêtise. The other night, it was so bad I got out of bed and went for a walk.”

  “What sort of time was this?”

  “I don’t know . . . two or three.”

  “You went walking at two or three a.m. because you were depressed?”

  “Sure. Why not?” He emptied his glass and reached for the pichet. “And to see who I could pick up, of course.” He opened the menu. “How’s the boeuf bourguignon here?”

  Walking the streets at 3 a.m. wasn’t as novel for me as I suggested. All my life I’ve worked best after dark, rising regularly at 4 a.m., brain humming with ideas. People like me relish the night’s peace and tranquility, its quality of repose. The English term “night owl” belittles us. Unlike that cruising predator of the woods and fields, we spend our nights in reflection, reading, writing, and, to facilitate the process, occasionally roaming empty streets. Acknowledging our affinity with the world of dream, the French call us noctambules (nightwalkers).

 
Woody Allen is the latest recruit to our group. In his film Midnight in Paris, a restless American screenwriter played by Owen Wilson gets lost during a late-night stroll and is picked up by a vintage car that carries him back to the Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kiki of Montparnasse.

  The film is charming enough, but others have done it better: Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris, Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, or Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy with photographs by another insomniac, Gyula Halász, alias Brassaï.

  The list of noctambules goes back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who found little to draw in Paris by day but ample material in the gloom and glare of Montmartre’s nights—which also hid his physical deformities. He didn’t lack company. Prostitutes and their clients came out as the sun went down. So did the men who pasted his posters to Montmartre’s walls—followed closely by collectors, who peeled his vivid paper masterpieces off the brickwork before the glue had time to set.

  Paris is no twenty-four-hour city like Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Los Angeles. You will look in vain for an all-night supermarket, cinema, or restaurant. The average Parisian returns home at night, eats dinner, watches TV, and goes to bed. That some people are of the day and others of the night is acknowledged, but not catered to. We noctambules must make our own arrangements.

  As a matter of form, the city administration discourages us. Sunset sees public parks locked. Restaurants close around midnight, cafés at 2 a.m.; cooks and waiters have home lives too. The Métro ceases around 1 a.m. Yet as one door closes, another is left slightly ajar. Intermittent Noctambuses (night buses) serve the sleepless, and a few cafés stay open all night, ostensibly for the benefit of newspapermen and others who work unsocial hours but in fact havens for the restless and, in the words of one habitué, “people who want to be alone but need company for it.” In the most famous of these twenty-four-hour cafés, Montparnasse’s Le Sélect, James Baldwin wrote most of his first novel, Giovanni’s Room, and Hart Crane, gifted poet of “The Bridge,” drank away his nights, brawling with waiters over the bill and more than once ending up in jail.

  Though I was only twelve when I first read Dylan Thomas’s poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” I recognized instantly a desire shared with him to “in the still night / When only the moon rages . . . labour by singing light.” The dark was always my home. In a country of blazing sun, I gravitated perversely toward the lightless space of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, the ruined Vienna of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, and Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, where “the streets were dark with something more than night.” Murmuring at my ear as I read was a shortwave radio broadcasting Voice of America’s nightly program of modern jazz, a thread of sound connecting me to Minton’s and Birdland and the Lighthouse at Hermosa Beach. I was home.

  Jazz, that ultimate music of the night, is the Esperanto of the noctambule. One winter night not long after I moved to France, I heard an a cappella vocal trio called Les Amuse-Gueules perform in a bleak municipal hall by the Canal Saint-Martin. Their repertoire included Thelonious Monk’s bebop classic “Well You Needn’t.”

  You’re talkin’ so sweet well you needn’t

  You say you won’t cheat well you needn’t

  You’re tappin’ your feet well you needn’t

  It’s over now, it’s over now.

  I felt like a traveler in a remote corner of the world who hears someone speak his own language. How often, talking to some French writer or artist of my generation, I’d seen their eyes light up at the mention of a favorite track. “‘A Night in Tunisia’? Yes, of course I know it. Which version do you prefer, Monk’s or Dizzy Gillespie’s?” Until then, it had never crossed my mind that people in France heard those same Voice of America broadcasts, that existentialism evolved to the music of Monk, Miles Davis, and Charlie “Bird” Parker.

  Jazz gave me something in common with Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, and Juliette Gréco. It ignored intellectual disciplines. In 1949, Charlie Parker chatted with Jean-Paul Sartre at the Club Saint-Germain. “I’m very glad to have met you,” he told Sartre as they parted. “I like your playing very much.” A writer may improvise just as powerfully with words and ideas as a musician can with an instrument.

  Modern jazz is an art of the night. So is sex. “Night, beautiful courtesan,” mused Apollinaire. In “Paris at Night,” Jacques Prévert wrote:

  Three matches, one by one struck in the night

  The first to see your face in its entirety

  The second to see your eyes

  The last to see your mouth

  And the darkness to remind me of all these

  As I squeeze you in my arms.

  “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” murmured my actress friend Anna. She was describing some neighbors she’d met just a few doors down the street in the early hours of the morning.

  We were sitting in a café on rue François Miron, a narrow thoroughfare that snaked along the edge of the Marais, the most medieval of the inner districts. Its churches and hôtels particuliers had already been old and leaning when François Villon reeled among them, shouting, “We must know who we are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul; dive deep and explore it.”

  I thought I knew who these people were, but the following Sunday around midnight, stepping out onto the narrow sidewalk in front of her building, I turned right and walked toward the knot of people standing outside No. 14. A light rain sifted down through the streetlights, adding a sheen to the ancient stones.

  The seventeenth-century exterior of No. 14 looked unremarkable. Exposed beams and crooked windows gave no hint that it housed one of Paris’s most popular sex clubs. On the first of its three floors, clients could enjoy a buffet supper, dance in the disco, and drink at the bar—and then they could descend to the lower levels to test the limits of what was possible between consenting adults.

  Ironically, one of the few forbidden acts was smoking. To light up, patrons had to ascend to the street. About a dozen, mostly women, huddled against the façade to escape the rain. Most wore long coats, a few of them fur, but I spotted a Burberry, and one woman was tightly wrapped, Marlene Dietrich–like, in a belted garment of black leather that brought to mind horse whips and handcuffs. All wore heels so high that to walk more than a block invited a broken ankle. Not that any of them needed to walk. For each, a chauffeur or obliging husband dozed in a nearby side street or parking lot, half listening to late-night radio, awaiting their summons.

  As I passed, a few of the women turned away and lowered their voices, but most continued to murmur into their cell phones. I caught snatches of conversation in German, English, French. “. . . thought I was going to faint . . . son bite . . . enorme, ma biche, je te jure . . .”

  Anna had been incredulous when I explained about échangiste clubs. I found them all too easy to understand. These were the people for whom Dylan Thomas had written:

  . . . the lovers, their arms

  Round the griefs of the ages,

  Who pay no praise or wages

  Nor heed my craft or art.

  He would have rejoiced in the existence of these fellow noctambules, as would Prévert and Aragon and Villon. As did I. Respect must be shown.

  “How about another bottle?” I said to Naughty Terrance.

  45

  The Weather at War

  Mérignac Airfield, near Bordeaux. June 17, 1940. 8 a.m. 15°C. A small plane sent by Winston Churchill takes off. Among its passengers is Charles de Gaulle, a junior general in the defeated army. Although France has surrendered, he will defy orders and set up a Free French government in London. He looks down on shattered tanks lining the roads and a torpedoed ship, sinking, with two thousand British troops on board. Years later, André Malraux will ask what it was like. Grasping his hands, the general, deeply affected, says, “Oh, Malraux. It was appalling.”

  THE GERMANS HAD FABULOUS WEATHER FOR THEIR INVASION. Hitler’s armies attacked Holland and Belgium o
n May 10. By June 14, five weeks later, they had overrun those countries and were in Paris. It didn’t rain once. The Wehrmacht marched down the Champs-Élysées under blue skies, perfect for the newsreel cameramen who framed them with a background of the Arc de Triomphe.

  Some say those sunny days lost Germany the war. Instead of ordering an immediate amphibious assault on southern England that might have forced Britain to surrender, Hitler took time out to enjoy France. The official newsreel Die Deutsche Wochenschau filmed him on the esplanade of the Palais de Chaillot, overlooking the Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower, grinning as widely as any tourist.

  How obliging of the French, he must have thought, to surrender so quickly, making it unnecessary to level Paris as he had Warsaw the previous fall. Now the city could serve as a rest-and-recreation center for the Reich. Every serviceman was promised at least one week’s leave in Paris. Luftwaffe Oberleutnant Dietrich Schultz-Köhn, a familiar figure on the prewar Paris jazz scene, acted as emissary to the café and club owners, arranging entertainment for the troops. His efforts earned him the nickname “Doktor Jazz.”

  With the armistice of June 22, hostilities ceased. The armed forces stood down. A puppet government under the eighty-year-old World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain administered most of the country from the spa town of Vichy. The coasts and Paris remained under military rule.

  Along the Atlantic, battalions of prisoners built submarine pens. Protected by 3.5 meters of solid concrete, the bases at Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux would survive the worst that Allied bombers could drop on them.

  I know this area well. Once a year, as reliably as any migrating bird or upstream-swimming salmon, we close our Paris apartment, arrange for the concierge to water the plants and feed the cat, and retreat for two weeks to the southwest and the breezier, fresher, less complicated countryside of Charente, where Marie-Dominique’s grandparents were thoughtful enough to bequeath her their spacious home in the village of Fouras.

  Paris has few memorials to the occupation. Here and there, discreet marble tablets embedded in walls signify that some resistant died on this corner pour la Patrie. On anniversaries, a military charity attaches a bouquet to each memorial, using the metal ring conveniently provided. Otherwise, there are few tangible souvenirs. It’s not something of which the French wish to be reminded. As the British novelist Sebastian Faulks wrote, “De Gaulle offered his battered country a fairy tale; we resisted the Germans and we freed ourselves by force of arms. His weary, disillusioned people were happy to accept this politically necessary fable.”