It was the notion that this latter piece – gouged, pitted and crudely repaired over the centuries – might have been made under Henri IV, who had after all given us our address, that clinched the sale. Coming into the Marais has awakened a historical awareness in me that lay dormant not only during the years I wandered through the cloisters and quadrangles of Cambridge, but also, more surprisingly, in all my forays into the Latin Quarter. It wasn’t difficult to imagine marauding bands of drunken students, or even François Villon himself, engaged in a fast and furious knife fight, as one stepped carefully down rue de la Harpe to rue de la Huchette on a dark, winter’s night, avoiding the deeper shadows cast by the black silhouette of Saint-Séverin looming out with its array of gargoyles and flying buttresses against the midnight sky. But colourful as Paris’s medieval history was, it never engaged me in the way that the Marais has, because here, in some odd way that, for the moment at least, I have no idea how to explain, I feel I have at last come home. What binds one suddenly, perhaps durably, to a place like this? I can’t work it out, although it has happened before, notably in Italy, when I first saw the temples at Paestum (a sensation that was not in the least replicated when I visited the Athenian acropolis), and also when I stood for the first time under the open cupola of the Pantheon in Rome. But there again, although I was moved, impressed, even overawed, there was no personal association with those sublime edifices. In the Marais, I feel personally involved, though not so much, I have to admit shamefacedly, with the humbler architecture of the area as with the broken-down, and hence for me all the more glorious, palaces and grand town houses built for the élite of France.
These noble edifices look like tall people emerging from a crowd of lesser individuals, but it is not so much their size that sets them apart as their proportion and harmony. Perversely perhaps, I’m not sure I would have appreciated them so much if I’d come across them in their perfect glory, like the carefully manicured châteaux in the Loire valley. They would have retained all their aristocratic haughtiness, set between an impressive cour d’honneur for their plumed horses, magnificent coaches and liveried servants to draw up in, and a well-ordered garden, including beds of medicinal herbs and the occasional exotic fruit tree. But now these palaces have been very much cut down to size, or at least to a size that appeals to me. Dereliction alone would have ensured that their architraves were blackened by the smoke coming from a thousand hearths, smithies and furnaces, and their triumphant coats of arms and attendant goddesses and swags of fruit eroded by wind and rain. But that neglect would have been benign compared to the damage wreaked directly by man. For although abandoned the great hôtels particuliers were rarely empty. Living space has always been at a premium in densely packed Paris, and once the aristocracy had fled the hatred and revenge of the Revolution, new inhabitants crept in, timorously at first, then with a growing sense of entitlement. They were of course from the very opposite end of the social ladder, since no self-respecting professional person or bourgeois would have considered moving to such a reviled area, with its multiple echoes of the ancien régime and its suspect heraldic devices and other aristocratic trappings. For once, ample space was on offer in these great fancy hulks to hew stone, tan leather and beat metal over glowing fires. And when times were hard and the weather bitter, firewood could be prised out of the parquet floors or off the panelled walls, or even wholesale from the huge commodes and ornate chairs and tables that had been left behind. The people had put the aristocracy to flight, right? And good riddance to the lot of them.
So all these high and mighty houses have been subject to every known depredation, from chandeliers ripped out and sold on to frescoes wantonly defiled. But because they have been so humbled, with their great lords turfed out and replaced by the lowest artisans, because their ample dimensions had been chopped into sordid little dwellings and their courtyards reduced to a series of jerry-built artisans’ sheds, these buildings have become infinitely more poignant, more fully historical and more human than ever. Rather than remain fixed in time they have absorbed time by continuing to live and change, from high to low as it were, through the intervening centuries. Perhaps it says something about the morbid side of my nature, but the fact that their beauty has been so scarred and one can see their fragility and ultimate disappearance so plainly, like the progress of a disease on a loved one’s face, makes them infinitely more moving and significant to me.
We’ve got our flat pretty much the way we want it, and the space feels just right because we haven’t had time to build up all the junk that slowly begins to accumulate once you’ve established yourself somewhere. Anne has an insatiable appetite for brightly coloured cushions, but once it’s accepted that none will soften my austere little study, she gets on with decorating the apartment and I spend most of my free time simply wandering across the Marais. I feel it’s a privilege I’m entitled to, since everybody I know from my colleagues at Réalités to the few, lasting friends I made during the ‘events’ wouldn’t be caught dead visiting the area. Even Montel, usually the first to go into the lions’ den, has not taken up our invitation, though I think in his case it’s because he still actively resents the ancien régime in the belief that its attitudes linger on in France’s present ruling caste; and he has a point: you only have to compare de Gaulle’s regal bearing and conviction that he incarnates France with our homely, pipe-smoking Mr Wilson in his Gannex coat to see what he means. This general shunning of the Marais, however, makes the area all the more precious to me, as if I’d ventured into a snake-infested jungle or a leper colony. It’s clear that I’m not going to play the tourist here, moving from one neglected masterpiece of architecture to another and noting down its forgotten treasures in a travel diary. I want to soak up both past and present, follow the streets aimlessly, like a proper flâneur, pausing in this courtyard, gazing into that shop window, like a gourmet let loose in the poshest food stores such as Hédiard or Fauchon, tasting pâtés and cheeses while rolling the appropriate vintages round in his mouth. But while I savour the smell of hot metal being beaten, fresh horse manure or a leaking can of paraffin, I am above all eyes. Like tiny cameras in my head, they take in every doorway and balustrade, each decaying coat of arms and deserted courtyard. Most of the buildings that interest me are on open display, while others hide behind high walls or are just visible, but not visitable, beyond handsomely fashioned grille gates. But usually that is not a problem; you hang around until some authorised person like a postman is admitted and you follow in; and if you are asked why, you smile and say you are writing an architectural history of Paris and this jewel of theirs should not be omitted; and sometimes it works, and sometimes you are sent packing. It doesn’t much matter: everywhere you look, the centuries roll back, and the present seems like a thin, reassuring veneer, barely keeping you from falling head first into the deep, dark hole of the past.
If I’m a foreigner in the realm of space (though I was born not so many leagues north in Buckinghamshire), I belong totally in time here. My descent from the Carolingian kings is almost certainly pure fantasy, but I feel the Marais in my bones. Whether I strutted around the great banquets I gave to show off my magnificence to my peers, or bowed my head and touched my forelock in front of my superiors, is of no importance: I am convinced that in some shape or form I once lived here. Why else is everything so familiar, and why otherwise am I drawn back here like a horse scenting the stable? I have come abroad to find myself, so why should it be so strange that I have found at least a former existence, a former home? Since time immemorial we have all been wandering the earth. We have been countless people in places without number. We have simply forgotten who we once were.
This sense of belonging gives an altogether different complexion to the way I drift round the area. Whether I was a Knight Templar returned from the Holy Land or a Rohan prince on horseback surrounded by my retinue, a faded procuress or a baker’s flour-faced apprentice, I know I have existed here. So I see everything as a rediscovery of
place, and a refinding of myself. The Marais helps reknit the fractures, the cracks and the scissions, in me. The young foreigner is neither young nor foreign: he belongs here, he was part of this patch centuries ago, before most of you now milling around the streets and looking askance at his occasional struggles with French had forebears here. And the split in me, deeper, more intimate and more shaming, dividing self from self, finds some temporary relief. At least I can joke about it with myself, which is always a good sign, since whatever shape this mythical being might take on, from abbot to whore, great lady to common thief, the two of us share a common ancestor.
If Anne doesn’t take more than a passing interest in my flittings through secret courtyards and floatings up noble staircases with their marble landings and intricate, wrought-iron banisters, then she is always eager to hear about what little bistros and exotic restaurants I have discovered along the way. I note down the most alluring dishes and greedily we review the information together. Depleted by the move to rue de Poitou, our finances don’t allow for more than the odd evening out, so we plot our moves with utmost care. We have a good, solid standby called Chez Robert round the corner, full of wood smoke, dark beams and chequered tablecloths, where they do deftly timed grills of every cut of beef, charred on the outside and rare in the middle, and where I was flattered that Robert himself, a sturdy, middle-aged Auvergnat with a ruddy face and a shock of coal-black hair, would always settle at our table for a chat until I realised that he managed to drink half our bottle of wine in the ten minutes of fiercely held, unpleasant political opinion that he accorded us, while his wife, the much put-upon Louise, did both the cooking and the serving.Since then, Anne and I have veered towards the more foreign specialities that abound in our unusually cosmopolitan area. For centuries the Marais has had a thriving Jewish community (apart from their appalling fate during the war, of course), and over the last hundred years a large influx of Jews from eastern Europe has created specifically Jewish areas like the rue des Rosiers. We regularly buy our smoked salmon at Klapisch brothers’ and poppyseed cake at one of the street’s delicious bakeries, and as a special treat we have dinner at Jo Goldenberg’s where I could make a meal of the potato pancakes or latkes alone. I like very simple things perfectly done, and when Anne is out I often make a dish of pasta with nothing but olive oil and black pepper. In the same way I adore plain couscous with only a pat of butter, and it’s not until I have finished a portion of it that I will, quite reluctantly, pour some chili-enhanced vegetable broth on it and start on the grilled lamb that is supposed to be the star of the dish. Since our area has a large Arab population (you could hardly call it a community because so many of them, mostly men separated from their families, live in oppressive, deprived conditions), there is no lack of cheap little restaurants serving various forms of couscous and tagine. One thing that draws me back to them is the good humour and courtesy of the owners, who are usually a one-man band. Since they know my love of plain couscous, Omar and Ahmed always make sure they serve me that first, and they would never presume to help themselves from the litre bottles of Sidi Brahim or Boulaouane with which Anne and I wash down our last crumbs of Moroccan almond cake.
If habits beget other habits, change certainly seems to engender further change. It seemed mad to leave Réalités just as I had left rue Larrey, to make a break and head out into the unknown without any financial security. After all, I’d got the job as close to the way I wanted it as possible: I picked the articles I liked most and wrote them the way I thought best, and usually at home so that I didn’t have to follow an office routine – which, moreover, I still quite enjoyed because I liked all the people I worked with. But even before the May events, something had been nagging at me, not just the usual shrill self-criticism that dogs my every move, and gradually it dawned on me that now that I knew how to write a good Réalités piece, whether it was on Balthus or Bellini, I would not learn much more; and also that whatever I came up with would be seen only by the very limited readership (overwhelmingly dentists in the Midwest, I’m told) that subscribed to the reformulated English edition of a rather rare French monthly. So I decided that with my new address I was going to take a new and riskier tack as a freelance arts correspondent in Paris, working for whichever publications would take me on. I write to my parents to let them know of these far-reaching changes in my life, but they have little to say because I think they feel that by living abroad for so long I have put myself beyond any advice they might give. They also have less and less grasp of what I do and where I go. This was borne in on me the other day when I went down to Antibes for a short holiday and my mother wrote asking me whether I had had a nice time in Entebbe.
I’ve contacted the arts and literary editors of several newspapers in London, and a couple of them have shown moderate interest, particularly now that the ‘aftermath’ of May has made Paris generally more newsworthy. Most of what they’ve asked me to do has in fact been related to the ‘events’. Apart from interviewing the Greek composer, Xenakis (whose music was unlike anything I had ever heard, and rather than incomprehensible, disturbing, even anguishing), and the increasingly acclaimed French writer, Michel Tournier, I’ve been asked to follow the Parisian art and literary scene in general. James Jones, who’s well known for his best-seller, From Here To Eternity, is living in Paris and apparently at work on a book about the May uprising. I didn’t think our interview was very revealing or stimulating, but he does have a beautiful apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis, with fantastic views onto the Seine, so I put in as much as I could about his enviable lifestyle and the Sunday Times seemed happy enough with the piece. A much more electric and controversial subject is Roland Topor, whose bitterly funny, often nightmarish drawings came to the fore during the May events and were widely circulated in the French satirical magazine, Hara-Kiri. Topor goes off in every direction when he talks, with manic energy and a high-pitched giggle that turns everything to derision, making both him and anyone else around acutely uncomfortable. He seems compelled to ridicule what he considers to be the fundamental absurdity of existence in his drawings, with a face turned into a punch bag, a nose into a penis and France portrayed as a hexagon of steaming shit with a large bluebottle landing on exactly the spot where Paris would be. This latter is the drawing he has asked me to send as the illustration to our interview, and gamely enough the Sunday Times has published it.
However, I’m going to need more than occasional pieces in the British Sundays to keep up my improved lifestyle, and I’m beginning to look to the American press, which pays notably better fees for freelance contributions. Since their offices aren’t far, just off the Champs-Elysées in fact, I’ve dropped in at the International Herald Tribune to ask if they might need someone to review art exhibitions in Paris. They’ve just had a staff reshuffle and appointed a new arts editor who’s asked me to send in weekly ‘gallery roundups’ that summarise the best shows in a few snappy paragraphs. The Trib is a useful addition, but it only pays European rates so I’ll have to cast my net further abroad.
I have a few old Cambridge friends who have become proper, full-time journalists as well as, on my side of the fence, a couple who earn a living by their pen. Alastair Hamilton, who’s now living in Rome and writing a book about Fascism and intellectuals, is one of them, and when he was in Paris the other day we got together for dinner at a local bistro to compare notes on the splendours and miseries of writing as a career. I have to say his book sounds much more interesting than the cluster of reviews and interviews I’ve been doing, yet what has made the evening stick in my mind was a banal incident of a kind I try to ignore but Alastair, bless him, met head on. We’d been engrossed in our conversation and hadn’t particularly noticed an ordinary-looking French family seated at the table next to ours until the father, thinking we wouldn’t understand the French, launched into a petulant tirade against the English and their general uselessness, ending with a snub that I’d heard before: ‘And to top it all they drink nothing but tea and eat jam
with their meat!’
I would have told myself that I was a guest in this country and turned a deaf ear, even though such comments stung, but Alastair, who had given me only a rough outline of his book, changed into faultless French as he continued talking to me, and without missing a beat described in detail the arrival of the German troops in Paris in June 1940. ‘And suddenly they were everywhere, Michael, marching in formation down the Champs-Elysées towards the Arc de Triomphe,’ he said, raising his voice only slightly. ‘Some of them were on horseback, others on Panzers, it was a real victory parade. Of course the French government had fled, so had quite a few Parisians. But most of them had to stay there and witness the defeat. It was an extraordinary atmosphere because here were the enemy, the oppressors who had occupied the city, but they looked so well-fed and handsome, so fine in their uniforms that many of the onlookers, and not only the women, couldn’t help admiring this superior race and wanting to be on their side…’
A deathly hush settled over the next-door table as the father hurriedly paid the bill and hustled his family out into the street.
Even though I go through bouts of despair and disillusionment, and have still not shaken off this sense of scission in my personality, I can’t help feeling remarkably fortunate. I love my new apartment and our new area, and while freelancing is going to be a continuous challenge, I’m really pleased I took the risk and left the security of Réalités, where everyone has remained friendly and supportive, even putting the odd piece of work my way. I’ve created a situation where I can do as much ‘writing for myself’ (whatever that eventually turns out to be) as I want, in the ideal quiet of my little study, gazing into the coloured whorls of the marbled endpapers on the walls, so that I feel I am working within a vast book – an incentive in itself to write. This privileged position also allows me to recreate myself in whatever way, to whatever extent, I want. If I’d stayed in London and taken on the job I was offered as junior art critic on The Observer, my life would be following a fairly predictable pattern by now, I imagine. But here I have a freedom that I could otherwise only have dreamt of. Whatever identity I have is mine to make. In Paris, I am classless: no one knows or cares who my father or grandfather was, what school I went to and did I know the Mosleys or the Mortimers of Melton Mowbray? Nothing is expected of me, and such pretensions as I have can only be private and personal rather than social. I am an unknown quantity and can remake myself as I wish, fashioning the self-portrait of my choice on this blank, foreign canvas.
The Existential Englishman Page 12