The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

Our building is hardly distinguished, although the rusticated stonework around its entrance and the classical pediment above promise more than the plain, solid interior actually delivers. Its present façade must have been added in the early nineteenth century, but like most other houses on the street it would have been built originally around 1630. There’s a gold-smelting factory puffing up black smoke in the courtyard now, then an art gallery on the first floor, with its owner living above on the second, just beneath me. My own flat, Daniel tells me, used to house a printing press that specialised in producing anarchist literature and manifestoes; a long-standing feud with a Basque competitor led to the premises being bombed, but luckily the bomb that went off did only minor damage, while scaring the anarchists so successfully that they moved on, freeing it for Daniel to make his sculptures there. But while our side of rue des Archives now has few noble buildings, the opposite side is a barely interrupted stretch of fine seventeenth-century mansions, all still bearing their once illustrious or wealthy inhabitants’ names – the Hôtel Le Pelletier de Souzy, Hôtel Tallemant and Hôtel de Villefix – some of them visible from the street, while others are hidden by exterior walls and you only get a glimpse of their façades and cobbled courtyards when someone slips in or out of the main door.

  If you walk a little further down, to 60 rue des Archives, you come to the Hôtel de Guénégaud des Brosses, an outstanding, soberly elegant mid-seventeenth-century palace. It is the only house by the great François Mansart (who gave us the ‘mansard’ roof) to have survived in its entirety. Originally built for Jean-François de Guénégaud, ‘master of accounts’ and privy councillor in the early years of Louis XIV’s reign, the mansion passed to several prominent financiers and lawyers before it was invaded, after the Revolution, by an army of tradesmen and artisans. The building’s façade was soon blackened by the continuous smoke belched out from a variety of braziers and furnaces, its grand salons and staircase fell into disrepair, and little shanties were rigged up all round its spacious court of honour. Interestingly, this noble ruin was one of the first to attract Malraux’s attention as Minister of Culture in the early 1960s, and work got quickly under way to restore the whole building and recreate the garden, whose formal parterres had long disappeared under weed and refuse. The building was then turned into a museum devoted to hunting, with a prestigious private dining club where members wealthy enough to pay the dues could convene and no doubt share stories of their prowess in the field.

  The notion of clubs has always fascinated me, much as I am fascinated by all these private ancestral houses. I see them as somewhere between preserves of the élite from which I am debarred and secret societies, bound by rituals which I would not understand. But the real paradox here is that I am an out-and-out outsider, that much has been borne in on me, but an outsider who is nevertheless strongly drawn to the most insiderish of institutions, notably clubs, learned societies and religious sects. I’m pretty sure that if ever I got inside one of these closed circles I would want to get out; but the fact that here I can’t even slip through the door (as I have in so many other historic residences) and that the members go about their privileged ceremonies unseen by me rankles.

  The moment I got wind of the Club de la Chasse I began casting about for a way of penetrating this inner sanctum, not only to see Guénégaud’s whole interior restored, but also to savour the privileges, and possibly extravagant behaviour, of the rich huntsmen who foregathered there. The opportunity came up sooner than I thought. My own club, such as it is, is formally known as ‘La Société sportive des racquets et du jeu de paume’, since they have both squash courts and one vast real-tennis court, the ancient game which, with its drooping net and arcane markings on the floor, was originally played not with a racquet but with the palm (‘paume’) of the hand. Since both sports are seen as rather ‘chic’ in Paris, some of my fellow members bear aristocratic names, and no doubt titles, even though they would hardly flaunt them in the sweaty rough and tumble of our matches. One of my regular partners, Bertrand, has always seemed rather buttoned up and vieille France to me, but he’s pleasant and polite even when we’re thrashing away at squash and the desire to win is riding high. So when I told him I had moved to 77 rue des Archives, and he replied unthinkingly ‘Oh yes, I know it – just opposite the Club de la Chasse’, I realised that entry into this closed circle might be at hand. It only took a couple of beers after the game for Bertrand to open up about his love of hunting and the unique way it binds you to nature. And yes, he continued, he often went to the Club, although, he conceded, the place could hardly be of interest to anyone who didn’t hunt or shoot. My own experience was limited to deliberately avoiding shooting at anything on the rare occasions I had traipsed through dusty fern or drenched undergrowth in pursuit of small animals. But I quickly made up a line about my fascination with the symbols and images of the hunt in history, indeed with venery (a word I’d always liked but had never used) as a whole. Bertrand looked slightly startled at this outburst, then regained his sang-froid sufficiently to say that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to take me there for lunch.

  Knowing that I now had access to this holy of holies took the edge off my eagerness to go there, along the lines of Groucho Marx’s not wanting to belong to a club that would have him. Still, when the day came, I made every effort to look the part of an avid but elegant hunter by putting on my best suit with an old tie emblazoned with birds (gulls? geese? pigeons?) in flight. Bertrand escorted me rather stiffly through the renovated rooms of the museum with its stuffed animals, antique rifles and huge, faded tapestries of hunting parties of yore before leading me ceremoniously down into the club’s dining room with its view over the restored gardens. The club’s walls were painted blood red, and this is the colour that dominated the entire meal. I was introduced to several other members, all of them with heavy, reddened faces, and some with burgundy-coloured jackets and ties, as if in tribute to the blood sports they were celebrating. Bertrand recommended the wild duck on the menu, joking that as an Englishman I would want it well done rather than ‘bloody’, but since ‘bloody’ seemed to be the club custom I went along with that quite happily when the old waiter with bloodshot eyes appeared at our elbow. Pictures of the hunt and still-lifes of game hanging and butchered meat alternated round the room with an extraordinary number of dead stag’s heads. Our waiter returned, bearing an hors d’oeuvre of grilled marrow on toast, and I noticed how prominently the blue veins stood out on his old, reddened hands. Then minutes later Bertrand and I are slicing bloodied flesh off the duckling’s corpse on our plate, washing it down with a full-bodied Burgundy, and smiling with animal contentment and bloodied teeth at the other diners feeding off barely cooked dead birds all around the blood-red room. Although I begin to relax after a few draughts of the Côte de Beaune, Bertrand grows tenser and more circumspect. ‘Uzès is over there,’ he says, flicking his eye to a table on our left. ‘Premier Duke of France, and that, in the corner, is Rohan-Chabot,’ he adds, with a light nod, ‘whose family used to own half the Marais.’

  ‘That’s impressive,’ I say. ‘So what do they do now?’

  ‘You can’t ask a member of a great family of France what he does,’ Bertrand says severely. ‘It’s like asking a Hottentot how he dresses!’

  I take this in, rolling the wine round my mouth, vaguely realising that I have at last made my first faux-pas.

  ‘Some Hottentots probably dress better,’ I say airily.

  Luckily another bottle of Burgundy has materialised on the table, and I resort to it regularly to get me through the last, chilly half hour of our meal.

  Then I find myself again on the pavement outside the great Hôtel, wondering woozily how to fill up the rest of the afternoon.

  In moving further up the rue des Archives, my centre of gravity in the city has changed slightly but definitively. Where before I had rue Rambuteau as the street where I bought my food every day, I now have rue de Bretagne. I’ve moved infinitesimally, but n
ot disadvantageously, north of the centre. Rambuteau is an outlier of Les Halles which, before Pompidou had their great iron-and-glass pavilions ripped out in the name of progress, were as central to Paris as the belly is to a body. So I’m leaving that ancient connection and its once-great spectacle of flesh, fruit and flowers and relocating a short distance away, not unlike a noble repositioning himself at the Court of Versailles as Louis XIV moved his bowels before the highest in the land. But in this slight change, much changes. There is for instance no garden, no green, within sight of Rambuteau, unless it is the greens of leeks and lettuce left to rot in the gutters. The only nature is human nature: prostitutes in plastic thigh-boots, beggars whining (‘une p’tite pièce, M’sieurdame’), and a motley crew of buyers and sellers haggling over the heft of a ham hock, the ripeness of a melon or the price of a brief embrace.

  On Bretagne, on the other hand, we have the square du Temple, a large public garden with a mixture of native and exotic trees as well as a duck pond fed by a waterfall. In the twelfth century this pleasant place was part of the land where the Knights Templar built their walled city, a parallel kingdom closely protected by watchtowers and a drawbridge. Their power and wealth were at first admired, then increasingly envied and slandered. In the early fourteenth century, Philippe le Bel had numerous members of the order, then the Grand Master himself, burnt at the stake before confiscating their riches. The great Temple Tower survived to become a prison: Louis XVI was incarcerated here prior to his execution in 1792, and it turned into a place of pilgrimage for Royalists until Napoleon prudently razed it to the ground. Other Templar buildings met the same fate until only the palace of the Grand Prior remained, serving as a convent, then a barracks, before it also fell to Haussmann’s massive redevelopment of the city.

  No small quartier of Paris is without its local market, and where at Rambuteau it straggled along the street, growing in size and colour as it neared Les Halles, at Archives we have a compact, enclosed space called the ‘Marché aux Enfants rouges’ to buy our food. The ‘Red Children’, who have given their name to the whole of this neighbourhood, were orphans originally housed in a hospice founded here in the sixteenth century and recognisable from near and far by their uniforms of bright red wool – the colour red being, amongst many other things, the symbol of Christian charity (my first interpretation was that these were children of passion, born out of wedlock). I won’t pretend that the ‘Enfants rouges’, which incidentally has been going since 1628 and is now the oldest covered market in Paris, purveys quite as high-quality products as Rambuteau, but it has a quirky character, with the odd household wares or bric-à-brac stall, that I have already grown to like. It certainly suffices for my modest needs, and if I’m planning a dinner party other street markets abound, like Marché Richard Lenoir or Marché d’Aligre, both close to the Bastille, and where the sheer varieties of fish and fowl, herbs and spices, are overwhelming. Where other flâneurs go along the Seine or to the crossroads at Saint-Germain-des-Prés to be overwhelmed by the sights of the city, I enjoy getting lost in these avalanches of meat and shellfish, these atlases of fruit and cheese, savouring an occasional oyster or a thimble of Muscadet while gusts of thyme and rosemary scent the air like the fields of Provence.

  By moving from the Left Bank, I thought I would be leaving the heart of the Paris art world behind. Apart from the more conservative art establishments along rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, we have little on the Right Bank to compare to the clusters of galleries that have sprung up around rue de Seine. In fact, the gallery that’s opened in our building is a rarity hereabouts, and I can’t foresee fancy art dealers pushing our grubby welders, plasterers and silversmiths out of their ground-floor bothies to display the latest conceptual trivia any time soon. But of course cities change more rapidly, as Baudelaire had it, than the human heart, and as if to prove him right once more, a vast hole has been dug in a piece of wasteland just nearby and filled up while everybody was going about their business. And it’s only now that a huge, Meccano-like metallic structure has arisen and been clad with industrial-sized, vividly coloured ventilation pipes and that everybody in the area and far beyond has started taking an interest in President Pompidou’s new art museum, mostly to poke fun at what passes for a vast, radically chic white elephant.

  I, for one, am delighted to see this juggernaut emerge – even though I’ve never forgiven Pompidou for bulldozing Les Halles down – and it may well bring a pied piper’s trail of arty folk with it. The New York Times has already commissioned me to do a full-length feature on the ‘hole’ and its aspirations, and Artnews has asked me to interview the new museum’s burly, controversial director, Pontus Hultén; now I foresee a whole stream of stimulating articles and reviews as ‘Beaubourg’, or the ‘Centre Pompidou’ as we’re supposed to call it, swings into action with its programme of heavyweight art exhibitions and cultural events. I’m particularly pleased that the New York Times has been knocking on my door (though, to begin with, I of course knocked on theirs, calling them from a payphone in the Metropolitan Museum to offer my services), and I feel that whenever they publish an article by me I’ll be read far more widely than anywhere else.

  The most rewarding piece I’ve done for this venerable paper so far was a portrait, or more accurately a sketch, of the photographer Brassaï. He seemed as keen on the idea as I was, and we met over a pleasant dinner where Brassaï’s obvious exuberance was held in check by his reproving wife. Gilberte decided to retire thereafter, leaving Brassaï and me to roam over Montparnasse in search of the poignantly sleazy scenes that he had captured so memorably in Paris de Nuit in the 1930s, chronicling bar life and street life in dramatically side-lit portraits of whores and gangsters, ‘characters’ and down-and-outs. I immediately took to this charming, voluble, Transylvanian-born émigré, identifying with his search for the soul of Paris, and through the night, with Brassaï recounting tall stories about the great brothels and kinky bars of the day, we plunged into every vestige of naughty night life we could find, from the Rosebud Bar to Chez Adrien (Giacometti’s favourite pick-up place), from lesbian clubs to a famed establishment where the whip held sway; but try as we might, and this had us collapsing in fits of laughter, every last joint came across as barely louche, as if naughtiness itself had disappeared, and we had to conclude that Brassaï’s pre-war Paris now existed in his photographs alone. We finished off by jumping into a cab for a nightcap at Harry’s Bar, not because Brassaï had ever photographed it, but because I’d always wanted to give a taxi driver the address that’s advertised for visiting Americans: ‘Sank Roo Doe Noo’ (5 rue Daunou), which provided one last giggle for the evening.

  It’s odd the way legends about a city die hard, and nowhere more than here. Even late nineteenth-century Paris, with its joie de vivre and sexual licence, when Toulouse-Lautrec was the great Brassaï of his day, still resonates, with tourists eager to go to the Moulin Rouge and watch the can-can (although the whole point then was that the girls dancing wore no knickers as they kicked up their legs, thus encouraging lascivious top-hatted Messieurs to see what they could see). For the English at that time, and for Americans ever since, Paris became a fantasy world of pleasure and permissiveness, far from Puritan morality and constraint. Men could have mistresses, young boys their sexual awakening, homosexuals the freedom to practise the love that has no name and, of course, epicures could explore and gorge on all the refined pleasures of the table. Along with this, both before and after the war, came another seductive myth: Paris as the place to think more deeply, converse more freely, create more significantly. It wasn’t just Tony Hancock in a beret remonstrating with an unrepentantly philistine Sid James: there was a real mystique about the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the cranky little hotels of the Left Bank, and the reputations of such cultural monoliths as La Coupole.

  Every visitor I have from America insists on at least one dinner at the Coupole, like a Muslim making the pilgrimage to Mecca. Of course I always indulge them, not least b
ecause I’m usually the guest and I can forsake my nightly pasta to hesitate between oysters or foie gras, sole or duck, every time the blue-ink menu is plonked on the table. For my American friends, the Coupole represents an exclusive club (which I have accessed by a simple telephone call) where only the chosen dine. They see the shades of the Surrealists, of Hemingway and Picasso, Joyce and Beckett, flit through the banquettes and dart between the scurrying waiters holding laden trays of seafood on high. I have dined here, under the indiscreet dome that eventually, I suspect, releases all its secrets, with American friends of friends, such as Judy Krantz or A. E. Hotchner, authors respectively of ‘airport novels’ and memoirs about ‘Papa’ Hemingway, both eager for some of the Coupole’s glittering reputation to rub off on them. I have also dined here with Hans Namuth, the photographer best known for filming Jackson Pollock at work dripping paint over his canvases, and with such friends of his as the painter Helen Frankenthaler. We have all partaken of the Coupole’s mystique, but none more so than the two American painters close to Hockney, Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, who are always there, for lunch, dinner and in between, convinced that fame will come to them if enough people see them holding court at what was once the epicentre of Paris’s cultural life.

  One memorable dinner I had here was with Peter Bogdanovich, who was over in Europe for complex film negotiations with various producers and agents. The dinner itself was cordial, since I’ve always had a good, easy understanding with Peter, and I’d managed to set up several exhibitions of his father’s paintings. But since we had seen each other in Los Angeles, his life and his career had been blighted by a bizarre double murder. The girl he was going out with, a stunning blonde called Dorothy Stratten, had been murdered and raped (in that order) by her estranged husband, who then killed himself. Thus Peter, who had been going his relatively merry way as a successful new movie director, woke up to find two dead bodies on his doorstep. This ghastly event had of course turned Peter’s life completely upside down. No place topples its idols more savagely than America, and from being admired and envied Peter was vilified in the press, receiving not only violent hate mail (which accused him of being indirectly responsible for the murders) but actual death threats. These latter were the reason why, as we made our way through the Coupole’s celebrated steak tartare and profiteroles, we were not alone: a lean, tough-looking man sat at the next table, eating nothing, but scanning the room constantly and even, on two occasions, getting to his feet and interposing himself between Peter and other diners who he felt had strayed too near our table; and, fascinatingly, the people moved away without a word, as if they had sensed the threat emanating from him subconsciously. At one point the bodyguard accompanied Peter to the Coupole’s cavernous lavatories, then he relaxed for a moment when he came back and let me know he’d been in the French Foreign Legion and in Vietnam before choosing his present position. I’d noticed the discreet shoulder holster he carried and was longing to ask how many people he’d killed, one way or another, but he was up and off again to shield his client from any unwelcome attention as he re-emerged from the loo.