I approach the corner there, with Saint-Sulpice (church) to my left, and a wedding party lining up in two ranks on the steps, and stop to read the tail end of a Rimbaud poem painted by the Mairie (municipal body) across a wall leading out from the place towards the Rue de Vaugirard and vaguely remember somebody telling me Arthur himself had wanked from the sixth-floor window of a hotel there roundabouts. But these are not the Mnemes we are here theming, and so turn away to the trees and benches of this south eastern corner of Saint-Sulpice (Place).
There I find a boutique hotel with no sign, and quickly run under the yellow and white striped canopy that hangs out from its front to avoid falling ephemera. Inside is brightly lit, mirrored walls, with deep curtains cutting off the light and growing noise outside on the Place. “Is this, was this the Fontaine Saint-Sulpice?” I ask. The girl on the desk flicks a wrist towards the curtains, “fountain over there, over. there!” And, “yes, yes, that’s a fountain, is this a fountain too? A fountain (hôtel ([former] café))?” She didn’t seem to hear the bracketed caveats, and “no, no, Monsieur, this is the essjayashell”. I wasn’t all too sure what that was, but it didn’t sound all too much like a hotel, or café, or even a fountain, and so I slowly backed away in silence hoping my slow movements would render me invisible to the functions of her eye, and successfully escaped from the corridor of gleaming mirrors through the blackout curtains and out into the day. Where a tramp laid across the floor by the trees, rather than on any one of the benches, and I asked whether there was a café here in this corner, and perhaps whether it might open today, I asked: “Do you know if there’s a café here in this corner, and perhaps whether it might open today?” or ever. And he sort of shuffled about and grunted, like I was one in a long line of strange people stumbling into his living room asking if he was a café, if he knew someone called George. “You know, George Perrick?”
And this is mostly worn thin now, so I assert to find the very last of the three, the Café de la Mairie (café) where Jean Mimi and his cigarettes must surely be. I cross the Place by the intervening ground between the church steps and the fountain, where a kind of black-tie pile on appears to be taking place amongst the latter stages of a wedding party. All that Latin, y’know, in the church services here. Heady stuff, I reckon. An old lady clouts a small boy round the lug. A greyish dog chews a deflated football. A photographer fishes in the acid water for his camera.
At the road there is no crossing, and the 87, the 96, the 63 shunt through taxis lining up below the big P, behind the off-orange taxi pastille, and electric cars push Deliveroo riders onto the pavement to access the entry to the underground car park below the Place indicated by both the big P itself, and a smaller sign that reads “Saint-Sulpice (Pay Ah Err Ka Ee En Jay)”. Snaking the traffic I make the far kerb more or less intact, where Jean Mimi lets the book he’s not reading fall to his lap and greets me with “Monsieur, you are late!” And behind him I see a plaque in the green border blue background fashion of a street sign that reads “G ORG S P R C”. Noticing I’m foreign, the waiter comes bustling with, “Welcome to the George Perrick café, sir! What will you have? A very milky coffee?” And I nod and sit, and Jean Mimi tilts the cover of his book out of the sun’s glare so I can read that he’s not reading Rimbaud, and I say, “I just saw a bit of the poem on the wall there, across the way”. And he says, “Yes, it was around here or thereabouts he wanked out of the sixth-floor window of a hotel”. And I say, “I swear down I’ve heard that somewhere before”.
Ten Fragments of an Idea of Paris Already Imagined by You
Lee Rourke
1.
You were walking along Rue Saint-Antoine, near Saint-Paul with Maxine, your companion for the trip that year, looking at the people sitting outside the cafés, as they chatted, sipped, and ate. You pointed over to an old man, green scarf around his neck, sitting alone, glass of red wine, breaking small chunks of a baguette which he would dip into his wine before eating them. Look at him, you said, so Parisian, just sitting there, watching the world go by, dipping his bread into his wine. Do you mean him, she said, I’ve never seen anybody dip their bread like that before and I’ve lived here twenty-six years, what an odd thing to do. I just thought it looked French, you said.
2.
You remember standing at the bar in Bastille, but strangely you aren’t sure of its name, although you remember everything else, especially the way everyone dressed in there: all swathed in black, nonchalantly talking, huddled over tables, the background music quiet, a mere whisper of something electronic and German, way before you started listening to things electronic and German. You asked for a pastis in your best broken French and the barman kept replying to you in French that was too fast, too slick for you, that made you feel awkward, repeating that he didn’t understand what you were trying to say, so you spoke to him in English, and he answered in American — the accent of moneyed New York, you remember thinking.
3.
It’s funny, sitting in a café in Paris reading a book: there’s always the thought that one is playing a part; merely an actor on a very large stage. There’s something not quite right about it, like it’s been rehearsed, like you know your lines, as does the waiter, and those passing you by, chatting politely on the boulevard. You were reading Maurice Blanchot, translated into English, and seemed acutely aware of this, like it was some type of failure on your part, hypersensitive to each discerning glance you thought was directed your way.
4.
An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That’s the time and place when you can suppose that all people you meet are nice. It’s dream time.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.
— Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
Who will wake up at the end of my dream?
— Jacques Roubaud, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart
5.
You always preferred French novels. Thin and flimsy but full of ideas, the ones which postulate, proselytise, and show off. Two fingers up, you always thought, to those stuffy English readers, those you spoke to, witnessed reading on the bus, the fusty reviews in the newspapers, all of them afraid of that word that doesn’t seem to make the French budge: intellectual. How they revel in it, you thought. You would sit in your own room imagining the streets of Paris alive with intellectual conversation, in that uncaring, fuck you kind of way you’ve always wished existed, those long-winded conversations about Proust with crazed taxi drivers trundling across the arrondissements in wild abandon you’ve always imagined happened.
6.
There’s a chapter you like, or interpolation as Jacques Roubaud calls them, in his novel The Great Fire of London (“a story with interpolations and bifurcations”) in which he discusses, in interpolation, the perfect croissant:
The ideal croissant (and this has to do, naturally, with the Parisian croissant, since in whatever town I’ve tried them provincial croissants have been a disaster), the croissant that might be labelled the archetypal butter croissant, presents the following features: a very elongated rhombus, rounded at the tips but with an almost straight body (only the plain croissant, and it alone, has a lunar, ottomanlike look) — golden — plump — not too well-done — nor too white or starchy — staining your fingers through the India paper that wraps or rather holds it together — still warm (from the oven it’s only recently left: not yet cooled). […] It has three principal components, and three interlocking meaty compartments protected by a tender shell that lends it certain similarities to a young lobster. The centre section is, in this croissant-lobster homomorphism, the body of the crustacean; the end parts are the pincerless claws. It’s an extremely stylized lobster, a formal lobster, in short. For the croissant to be perfect, a simple tug on each “claw” should easily pull them apart from the “body”, eac
h trailing along an oblique, tapering excrescence of inner meat, subtracted from the centre, extracted, as it were, effortlessly from the still very warm innards of the croissant, without making crumbs, or any sound, or tearing. […] Furthermore, among croissant eaters (croissants in general, plain as well as butter) there are two contending schools: the dry school and the wet school. As far as I’m concerned, I belong to the drier part of the wet school. This means: after having prepared a bowl of café au lait (I still hadn’t given up milk), hot but not scalding, I dipped the croissant wing (the leg rather) (let’s preserve a metaphoric consistency) that I’d pulled off […] in such fashion that it becomes moist, saturated, softens, but without dissolving, without coming undone.
You, in homage to Jacques Roubaud, have always dipped your croissants into your coffee the same way (unlike your bread into wine), and you took great delight in doing so for the first time when visiting Les Deux Magots.
7.
The graffiti always struck you, especially in the outer arrondissements, there’s just so much of it, like New York in the Eighties you thought, and because you’ve always had a soft spot for this form of writing you immediately felt at home, even though it was the first time you’d ever walked those particular streets. You thought of M. Chat, that cheery, slightly manic cat that appeared on buildings and rooftops all around the city, trying to find one but never succeeding, and then Chris Marker’s docu-essay The Case of the Grinning Cat, a film (and filmmaker) you’ve always loved. You suddenly became acutely aware of this new form of protest, Paris and its revolutionary spirit, and just by walking and thinking this way, making these connections, you at once felt part of something, the socio-historico-political events that shaped this particular city. You may laugh, smirk and titter at this thought now, you find it hard to admit such things these days, but back then, walking through those streets, it was completely real.
8.
When Michel Houellebecq, in Atomised (a novel you both love and hate) said,
people often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things — even tragedy — with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humour won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.
You understood immediately that Paris would break your heart in the same way, and you laughed at yourself for being such a stupid Englishman, in love with something that doesn’t exist, in love with the idea of something invented by people who’ve had their hearts broken in exactly the same way, and this wasn’t an ironic laugh, nor metaphorical, it was guttural, you felt it deep within, and at once you realised the importance of your own inauthenticity.
9.
There was a time when the idea of a French partner excited you, Parisian being the ideal, the idea being that you could glean something of their very Parisianness and wear it as your own, but it never happened. You never met the right people, you thought, the right Parisians, and no matter how many you were introduced to, the language barrier always ended things for you, abruptly, they seemed to suddenly become bored with you, and you became nervous and anxious, and never once were able to say the things you’d imagined you would, everything became a mess.
10.
You’ve still never been able to speak French fluently — and you’ve always envied those who do. Everything you think and say is broken in this way.
The Total City
Will Self interviewed by Jo Mortimer
Will Self: If there hadn’t been the Roman Citadel in London — the Roman square mile — then London might be more like Paris. What defines Paris is the Medieval walls. That’s why you’ve got this very high density of Métro stations. You’ve still got a city operating within that idea of intraand extra-mural. Whereas, once London has expanded beyond the square mile, which happens in the seventh century, it’s over, because there’s never another wall built. After 1066, there isn’t another invader, so there’s nothing to stop London from expanding.
Paris has, for a long time, aspired to the condition of what you might call the total city. In essence, it’s trying to annul the reality of its physical geography. Yes, the river goes through it. Yes, you have the Île de la Cité. Yes, you have the hills to the north and the hills to the south. Yes, of course, they’re all there, but the reality is that the totalising — the means by which you move around the city and the furniture of the city — is incredibly consistent and well-designed. You see it in French châteaux and wealthy houses. The whole idea of French gardening is also very different to English gardening. The French don’t come up with the landscape garden, so the relationship between the urban and the rural in France is profoundly different. The English approach is to domesticate the wild by creating the landscape garden, and then move out into the simulacrum of nature and then into nature itself. The French idea is to close something in walls and make it look like a room. The gardens at Versailles are like the floor plan of a house. So there’s a radically different approach to that relationship between the rural and the urban. Britain, or England, because it was the most heavily urbanised society in the world, earliest, has no real wild at all. Did you know that? There is no wild country at all.
Jo Mortimer: That must be fairly recent…
WS: Take Rannoch Moor. You think, come on, there’s nothing, it’s a wilderness, but it’s the result of neolithic slash-and-burn. Otherwise, it would be woodland — it should be woodland. The reason it’s covered in peat is because they chopped the trees down. It’s an anthropic landscape; all of the highlands of Scotland is an anthropic landscape. It looks that way because of stuff people have done to it; it doesn’t look that way naturally. And I think that’s embedded very deeply in the British psyche: the British know their country is completely anthropic. It means that the urban has psychic primacy. It doesn’t need to cover the physical land area. Everywhere you are in Britain, there is something immediately in your view to tell you about human activity, and by extension, the city. The city is omnipresent. And here’s another thing that ties the urban and the rural together in such a way as to eradicate the difference in Britain: the fox is artificially maintained to be hunted. It would have been eradicated years ago if it was that much of a problem.
JM: Why do you think there is such a tendency to use medical and anatomical words and phrases to describe the city?
WS: It may go back as far as Saint Augustine and the City of God, because Augustine divides all of the cosmos into the City of God, which is the realm of the spiritual, and the City of Man, which is the area of the corporeal. In a way, the City of Man becomes synonymous with the human body. But I think that what we’re actually doing when we use a lot of bodily and anatomical metaphors in relation to the city, is we’re acknowledging the fact that you cannot understand the city while you cling to the notion that it’s full of autonomous individuals. It doesn’t make sense. If people really, really are deciding to do whatever the hell they want to at any moment of the day, why does the city run with such regularity? And the answer is that people aren’t autonomous. It’s back to flow dynamics. We’re always trying to keep at bay the fact that we know that the city, by definition, deprives us of our autonomy. So once you’re deprived of your autonomy, you relocate your feeling body in the city itself. Since you’ve been annulled, you’re just part of this flow — what are you flowing through? So the way to humanise the fact that you’re dehumanised is to infuse the city with corporeality. I don’t think anybody does it at a conscious level. If you stopped somebody in the Métro, in the rush hour, and said, “Do you realis
e you haven’t chosen to go down here? You haven’t chosen to go to work, and you’re not even choosing to go home now, you’re not acting out of free will. You have no more free will than a drop of water,” they’d look at you like you were completely mad, right? Nobody wants to be conscious of that fact. I’m saying that it operates at a subconscious level, that people start talking about the city like that.
JM: Do you think that came about as soon as cities appeared?
WS: No, I think it happens in the nineteenth century. That’s very important, and it’s to do with what I call the industrialisation of space-time. It’s not until you have completely regularised time, and completely mapped space, that there is this total loss of autonomy. Before that, there are still plenty of places left in the city where time runs slower. You can be yourself. It’s like the city freeze-dries into being at a certain point — it’s total — and then you have to practise psychogeography in order to escape from it. You can’t do it just by hoping to do it — you have to take practical measures.
JM: Do you think you could extend the metaphor of the human body and anatomy to death?
WS: In what sense?
JM: In terms of terminality.
WS: Cities certainly can die, though what’s more interesting is how resilient they are. I mean, Tokyo. A quarter of a million people killed in a single night by the United States Air Force, burnt to the ground. All the German cities after the Second World War, Henry Morgenthau and the Morgenthau Plan: his idea was that the cities were all to be razed to the ground completely, and it was to be solely an agricultural society forever. Well, that didn’t happen — that’s why Berlin is such a fascinating city. Berlin was killed and then remained in suspended animation until 1989. It was put on life-support and it’s only beginning to come back to life again — properly — now. So you can see all of that happening in Berlin. I think cities — the life and death of cities — call attention to our autonomy, because it’s not about what we do. As Marx said, history is made by the great mass of individuals. There’s nothing you can do to affect the destiny of the city unless you’re part of a mass of individuals who are thinking the same and behaving in the same way.
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