I’d talked to the few estate agents in the area but they had nothing on their books between a huge atelier under the eaves of a decrepit seventeenth-century mansion (if only I had the money to buy it and borrow twice as much again to do it up!) and various commercial leases on ground-floor shops, one of which sat on such an impressive medieval vaulted cellar that I fantasised about it for a while even though spending five minutes down there in its dank, cobwebby darkness made me feel I’d been buried alive. As always, the best way to find the kind of space I have in mind, with a high ceiling, tall windows and a real Marais ‘feel’, is to ask around: so I put the word out with Marie-Hélène, who then tells me that one of her regulars knows of places for sale in the quartier and sometimes does them up himself to resell them. I can’t quite see a ‘property developer’ being part of this tightly knit community of artisans and tradesmen, although we have our share of oddballs like the one everybody calls the ‘professeur’, who gabbles away in heavily accented French on anything from nuclear submarines to the soups his mother made for him as a child in Murcia. And it never occurred to me that Bernard, the down-at-heel, upper-class misfit in his well-worn suit who’s always propping up the bar with the locals from the market, Bernard, with whom I’ve exchanged a bit of banter and who straightened up noticeably when I came in once with Anne and her sexy sister, Bernard, who spends half the day talking volubly over apéritifs he seems barely able to afford, actually dealt in anything, property or otherwise.
‘It all depends on what you’re looking for,’ Bernard tells me, rather unhelpfully. ‘Do you want a floor overlooking the place des Vosges, original painted beams, panelling and parquet? Or a medieval turret, not much room but in the Duc de Guise’s family for centuries? Or something less historical and more comfortable? I could probably fix you up with a place that’s had all its original features ripped out but proper plumbing put in.’
‘Bernard,’ I say, a bit desperately, ‘I have a limited budget, but I love this area, so I’d be happy with a small space that has as much Marais character in it as possible. The plumbing is less of a priority.’
‘That shouldn’t be impossible,’ Bernard says, his slightly bulging brown eyes focusing carefully on me over the rim of his Pernod which he holds as prominently as a saint holding his symbol. ‘I found Marie-Hélène and Bébert their studio over the café here. They’re delighted with it, and there are a couple of other spaces in this building that the owners have asked me to sell.’
Next morning we visit a whole apartment on the second floor. It has the traditional beams spanning the sitting room and the two bedrooms, all of which have fireplaces, and it hardly seems important that the original parquet floors have been replaced by red terracotta tiles, which long use has softened and toned down.
‘This is fantastic, Bernard,’ I say. ‘But it’s much too ambitious for me. I just need a single space where I can have bookshelves and a desk to write at.’
‘What about your bathroom and kitchen?’ Bernard demands, suddenly looking preoccupied.
‘Yes, of course. All of that,’ I say, ‘but they’re not what’s most important. I just want a kind of box where I can work that’s got a residue of the Marais style and history in it.’
This idea clearly appeals to Bernard, who contemplates it. I’ve never seen him so focused without a glass in his hand before, and I wonder if I might nip swiftly downstairs and get Marie-Hélène to fix him a beaker of cloudy yellow Pernod so that he can continue his deliberation with the right stimulants at the ready.
‘Well,’ Bernard says eventually. ‘Have you thought about the single room the owners of the building want to sell? The room adjoining Marie-Hélène’s – the bachelor’s studio?’
I’m intrigued. When I talked about getting right into the Marais, I hadn’t thought this might involve lying cheek by jowl with a bougnat and his wife whose grubby, picturesque business thrives on the floor below. But the narrow, slightly crooked house where they run their café has stood on this street since medieval times, with rue de Braque itself, which has a modest entry in a history of Paris streets Anne once gave me, having been originally established by the Templars in 1182 as a centre for butchering meat. It was called rue aux Bouchers du Temple then, before taking its present name from Arnoul de Braque, a prosperous landowner who endowed it with a chapel and a hospital in the mid-fourteenth century.
It’s my turn to look preoccupied.
‘Well, there’s no harm in taking a look at it, Bernard,’ I say, sounding as diffident as I could. I want to seem off-hand because I know that if there is one thing the French get mean and crabby about, it’s property, which inevitably brings the timeless peasant out in them. They put a garret in town or a hovel in the country up for sale, then behave as if you are trying to throttle and dishonour them simultaneously if you don’t agree right away to the exorbitant price at which they estimate these venerable possessions that you are now plotting underhandedly to wrest from them.
We go down to the first floor and Bernard makes a great show of rattling his bunch of keys before coming up with the right one and opening a rickety door. I enter cautiously and a single glance allows me to take the whole room in since there is not much to see: a high-ceilinged space with two tall windows and what looks like a cement-covered floor. But the ceiling has sturdy, ancient beams and the whole of one wall is attractively half-timbered, with large patches of the original, mellow stone showing through on the other, freshly painted white walls. I know I should hesitate and wait until I’ve seen some other spaces, but I can’t stand my forced cohabitation with Anne any longer and already Bernard is waving his hands around in the lofty space, explaining how easy it would be to run up a split-level platform at one end, where I could have a bedroom and wardrobe above with a small kitchen and bathroom below, leaving the rest of the double-height room for my writing desk between the windows and bookshelves galore. Bernard turns out to be extraordinarily persuasive, saying that he himself will help me get the renovations done, it would be a pleasure, and how about mahogany for the bookshelves and there’s a flue in the ceiling just waiting to be connected to a fireplace, and when I ask him about the price I’m taken aback by how reasonable it is; and Bernard, who’s taken my surprise for reluctance, begins winking and tapping the side of his nose, saying we could probably get the price down if part is paid in cash, and involuntarily I start winking too, offering a lower sum with a third of it en liquide, although I’ve no idea what I’m getting into, I haven’t bought much beyond a pair of shoes before.
‘Well, you certainly won’t get more Marais than this in a single space,’ Bernard says expansively.
It’s true the room is a kind of concentrate of the area, very much at the humble rather than the grand end of things, since with the bougnats’ room next door it would probably have lodged tradesmen or servants for people like the wealthy, recently ennobled de Braque family, Arnoul’s son having enriched himself sufficiently to build a palace with a large covered court where he could play the fashionable game of jeu de paume (real tennis). But I love the stonework and the beams, and I can already picture the blazing hearth that Bernard has conjured up, so much more seductive than a wheezy London gas fire, and then between the windows my writing desk, perhaps a Spanish table with a graceful, wrought-iron stretcher, where I would complete first a slim volume of poems and short stories, followed by a more substantial account of an impressionable young man trying to make his way in the art and literary world of a substantial European capital, flowing from my pen straight up to take their place in the mahogany bookshelves already crammed with the names of the great from Auden to Yeats and Zola…
With a bit more bargaining and a few last-minute winks, Bernard and I shake hands on a deal.
Waking up in this strange white shell on a length of foam-rubber bedding that looks as if it were adrift on the rough cement floor, I always allow myself a few minutes to study the ancient gnarled and pitted beams overhead in the hope that I will work out my
current bearings in existence. Bernard has come through with most of his promises. The split-level platform or ‘mezzanine’ is now a reality, constructed with beams that we took away free of charge from an old mansion being renovated on the place Dauphine (which Henri IV began building once his other great square, the place des Vosges, was under way). I also have both basic kitchen and basic bathroom, although for the first couple of weeks my living conditions closely resembled the way the Giacometti brothers lived in the unhygienic, ramshackle studio they shared in Alésia, their ablutions limited to what they could achieve under a single, cold-water tap. Bernard has also put in a handsome fireplace, complete with a fancy fireback displaying someone or other’s armorial bearings with blackened lions rampant. It’s funny, I’ve been looking for my own bearings, and now I’ve found theirs, and I only wish I knew who they were… What I don’t have are certain key bits of furniture, since after all the strain of buying the place, helping to fix it up (I played assistant to Bernard, much as I used to with my father when he took over the cooking) and half-moving in, I’ve fallen into the kind of apathy that often overtakes me once I’ve got something I really want. And yet there’s an ideal place to find whatever I need within walking distance: the Hôtel Drouot has been auctioning off everything imaginable for over a century, from the contents of Degas’s studio and Sarah Bernhardt’s furniture to marble-topped café tables and rustic wicker chairs.
Garith took me to Drouot in the first week I arrived in Paris because he wanted me to look after an art-market column that Réalités published every month. This auction roundup was a rather dreary affair, full of titles, dates and dimensions of the various works being auctioned off and the prices they had made (‘reached/attained/achieved’, as I put it alternately for a little variation), but it gave me a taste for the distinctly Balzacian atmosphere of the place, where the fabled sales of Impressionist masterpieces they once held have been replaced by a huge variety of things. European paintings and sculpture still abound, but they are more likely to be the work of lesser-known artists, or the minor triumphs of major figures. There are drawings galore, often whole collections put together over a lifetime or the contents of a château whose owners have fallen on hard times, and anyone with a good eye and a modicum of specialist knowledge can build an enviable collection here for a comparatively reasonable sum.
But that is only one side of Drouot, and not even its most fascinating aspect, particularly for someone like me who not only has no spare cash but would not, like a true collector, skimp on every meal to buy a faded Renaissance study in red chalk for a cluster of angels’ heads or a fragment of purportedly Roman, or Romanesque, statuary. Where Drouot’s creaking warren of salerooms becomes fascinating for me is the way high and low, valuable finds and outright dross, are jumbled together without any sense of hierarchy. A silky Persian carpet is displayed on a wall against which blackened fire tongs or rusty fencing masks, a chipped enamel basin or a cluster of pewter ladles, have been heaped up any old how, while dog-eared penny dreadfuls and romans noirs rear up next to an array of manuscripts, incunabula and finely bound old books. There might be a specialist sale of African carvings or ancient Assyrian bas-reliefs in one dark, cavernous room while another dimly reveals the monogrammed crockery of a defunct noble family, where the number of finger bowls, sauce boats and sets of plates specially created for the consumption of asparagus or the serving of salmon astounds, no less than the canteens of silver cutlery replete with intricate fish forks and abundantly decorated grape shears.
The mass of stuff that accumulates on any one day at Drouot – endlessly picked up, picked over, held to the dim light and discussed – actually gets into the saleroom air. You can see it above all when a shaft of sunlight pierces the auction-room gloom and the dust from the carpets or the motes from ancient costumes and powdered paper dance up and down in such a thick frenzy that the shaft looks like a solid tube thrust across the room, where the crowds of people are every bit as diverse and curious as the items on sale. In fact, after my first few visits trudging up and down the groaning, antiquated staircase, I found the customers at Drouot even more fascinating than the variegated items on sale. If you said they constituted a complete gallery of mid-twentieth-century Paris characters you’d be way off the mark, because the riveting thing is that you see faces from medieval sculpture, gargoyles even, then delicate portraits by Clouet or pinkly suggestive faces by Fragonard, while many of the visitors look as if they have simply stepped out of the pages of great French nineteenth-century novels. There is a Sorel here, a Rastignac and certainly a Félix Grandet and a Cousin Pons there, while an Emma Bovary or Maupassant’s Mme Loisel are easily recognised as they avidly eye the jewellery laid out in locked glass cases; and in visual terms, of course, the whole range of Daumier’s character sketches can be found milling and jostling, fondling or contemptuously declining items in this vast cabinet of curiosities. Some of them even seem to have dressed the part, wearing hats, velvet coats and top boots that would not have looked out of place on the grands boulevards a hundred years ago.
I have come here to find something very specific, an inexpensive but visibly antique (or at least old) table on which to write. It has already become a sacred object in my mind, as if the origin and the very grain of the wood will give wings to the words I find. The red lacquered table that I managed to keep when Anne and I split up has been relegated to my little kitchen, good enough to eat an omelette off but no longer appropriate for the lyrical poems and sonorous prose I am hoping will well up as if unbidden in me as I sit in my fine new space. The table is all important because it will be like a springboard for my creations, a solid, ancient base from which to launch the perfect flight of ideas become word. And I can’t find it in all this endless junk, which is beginning now to overwhelm and stifle me in all its stale abandonment. I stalk from sale to sale, spurning the flimsy escritoire and bandy-legged bureau, while realising that I’m not the only one to fancy an elegantly turned Spanish desk in walnut with scroll legs and that the bidding will leave me far behind, before at last I settle on a scarred refectory table at which a dozen monks might have supped, disappointingly catalogued as ‘17th–18th century, multiple restorations’, but which I carry off (with Bernard’s help) before even the lower estimate is reached by the desultory bids in the room.
The end of my massive oak table matches the space of the exposed stone pillar between my windows exactly. I sit at it now, my green Olivetti Lettera ready to burst into staccato activity before me. Together we wait, confident that all the desire and despair, the sparks of light illuminating the darkness, will flow through the keyboard, reverberating forever into the seasoned wood beneath.
My life over the past few months has been as monastic as any of the brothers who ate at my new table supposedly were. But I knew I would hear the siren call again, however hard I clapped my hands to my ears. My room has evolved into as enticing a lair as I, following Bernard’s expert lead, can make it. The foam rubber of my very beginnings here has been put on a wooden base and covered with mohair throws to form a soft, couch-like sofa; within minutes a crackling fire can be coaxed out of the logs I keep in a pyre beside the grate; a ladder up to my split-level bedroom stands forever at the ready. But so far, although there has been the odd skirmish on the homemade sofa down below, no dainty foot has yet been set on what I have come fondly but despondently to think of as the gateway to sexual heaven.
Then there was the fumble in the office that shouldn’t have gone any further but which, perversely, evolved as if of its own momentum. I wasn’t thinking much, yet if I was thinking at all I knew instinctively it was a bad idea. She may have thought so, too, but in the nature of these things that turned out to be part of the attraction. For the first few days we had a lot of fun, taking a light-hearted view of our fling, particularly since we were both aware that once her temporary position at Le Monde ended she would be heading back to the Sahara, where she has a passion for photographing the Touareg nomads – the
‘blue men’, as they’re called, because the indigo veil they wear stains their faces that colour indelibly. I call her ‘Desert Rose’ because she always carries a handful of those mysterious sandy crystals around with her, and she’s given me a whole range of them which I’ve dotted round my room in the hope they might bring me good luck. But they certainly haven’t, and nor has she, because no sooner did I indicate that I wanted a little more space in our relationship, which was growing overly intense, even hysterical, than Desert Rose turned up the heat and began stalking me. It started when we were walking back from a play at the theatre festival in the Marais: her possessiveness and manic mood swings had become so oppressive that I broke into a run simply to get away from her, and she followed me in a mad race through the small, silent streets. She turned out to be very fleet of foot and I only managed to shake her off by darting into an open doorway and hiding there, panting as quietly as I could.
The Existential Englishman Page 17