Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  A suicide is not just a tragic event fixed in time, as a fatal accident or illness that has come from without. By its willed destruction, it changes the entire perception of that life, casting a retrospective shadow over the whole, implicitly calling in question all the aspirations of the life, all the values by which it was lived. This much was clear to Julia within days of Ursula’s funeral. Yet there seemed to be a general, if uncoordinated adult effort to treat the suicide as if it had just been a relatively brief, unfortunate and rather embarrassing corollary to a life otherwise unaffected by it. A tragic event, of course, but you must try to put it out of your mind, Julia dear, and remember your mother as she was not long ago, before All This started … Tom, punch-drunk with his own mixture of grief, guilt and new-found freedom, awkwardly joined in the unconvincing chorus.

  This was before the days of counselling. Phrases such as ‘grief therapy’ and ‘post-traumatic stress’ did not yet trip off anyone’s tongue. In that era, the working-class reaction to a suicide in the family tended to be one of shamed secrecy. The middle classes did not exactly write the suicide out of the script in that way, but took refuge in the stiff upper lip, the getting on with normal life, the not-brooding and the keeping-busy that had been the coping strategy through two world wars. Dwelling on death was morbid – Victorian, indeed – and Ursula’s children must be prevented from doing so. Her little boy, who had lost not only his mother but his childhood home in Sussex, must stay at his boarding school. As Bertie, another child deprived suddenly of his mother, had done seventy years before. Julia, of whom so much adult understanding and responsibility had recently been expected, must somehow be thrust back into a more suitably juvenile role. Tom seemed in a hurry to remake his life, and she was now in the way. She had, of course, managed splendidly with cooking and so forth while poor Ursula, yes, tch, tch … But she would be off to Oxford soon, wouldn’t she? And before that, of course, she was going to be sent to spend a few months in Paris, what a lucky girl! That was always to have been the plan, no reason to change it. Poor Ursula had wanted Julia to spend some time in Paris with some nice suitable family just as she had.

  So it was that, five months and one week after her mother’s death, Julia found herself despatched to Paris. She had not asked to go there.

  The old daydream of Paris, which had been nurtured in her from childhood, was now, like the rest of that childhood, consigned wholesale to a fear-haunted, decomposing rubbish dump, shoved away out of sight along with her mother’s photo. In the last few months, she had managed to cobble together some sort of different life in London, a territory without a past or envisaged future. She read nothing, wrote nothing. Infinitely remote, now, seemed the great calm expanses of Ashdown Forest, its folded hills and dips, its white-sand streams. Instead, there was the crushed, much-populated grass of Hyde Park where she rolled around with an unsuitable boyfriend.

  Just once or twice, when alone, she found herself overtaken by an inexplicable burst of tears. She took this to be a physical symptom, like crying over onions, so divorced did it seem to her to be from anything she consciously felt or thought.

  She was not consulted about the arrangements for Paris. In an inappropriate attempt at the social patterns of the past, which were going rapidly out of date by the mid-1950s, the traditional-widow-taking-in-nice-girls-of-good-family was found for her. Apparently it did not occur to anyone that her experiences of the last twelve months, indeed of the last several years, might have unfitted her for docile acquiescence to such a scheme.

  The apartment was off a dull avenue near the Eiffel Tower. The drawing room seemed full of the furniture and cabinets of china already familiar to Julia from the pages of Pierre-Solange. The dining room, opening out of it through mirror-glassed doors, occupied a central position at the corner of the building: its pot-bellied balcony hung over the street and avenue as if to invite a heady plunge four floors down. There, in an atmosphere of darned table napkins the size of babies’ sheets, tarnished silver fork-rests and weary constraint, meals were served by a black-clad and overworked cook-maid called – what else? – Liliane. The rest of the apartment was dark and cramped. Off a corridor with no daylight but haunted by more mirror glass, the bedrooms, insufficient in number, overlooked a narrow courtyard and the twin apartment on the other side. The widow had a Second Empire, falsely aristocratic de to her name and the peremptory, over-emphatic manner of her kind. She owned a turreted château in need of repair somewhere in Normandy, and had several daughters to marry. These shared small rooms, or bedded down at night in the dining room, while the largest and best-equipped bedroom was left to the foreign girls on whose payments, it seemed, the whole household subsisted. Julia found herself sharing this room with a wordless Canadian girl and an older Belgian who smelt faintly, and who told nightly stories, in a nasal whisper, about men who followed her in the street. This quickly improved Julia’s spoken French, but did nothing to resign her to the circumstances in which she found herself. A weekly bath was permitted, and there was one lavatory, the door of which Madame de B complained foreign girls tended to leave ajar.

  Madame de B no doubt had many troubles and cares. Her only son, never seen, was said to be handicapped and was, like the crumbling Château, ‘in the country’. Her eldest daughter was engaged and was tacitly allowed to have her fiancé in her room far into the night because there was no acknowledgement that he was in the flat at all, but the young man was said by the Belgian, with heavy innuendo, to be ‘getting bored’. Even had Madame de B had the inclination to organise a pleasant and inclusive life for her paying guests, she had neither the energy nor the mental resources. She was, in fact, taking them on under false pretences.

  Once this had dawned on Julia it became, as far as she was concerned, the only advantage of her present situation. She had been, up to that point, invaded by sudden moments of misery and disorientation whose intensity stunned her. She had felt herself thrust into a false position, neither welcome guest nor autonomous lodger. She was darkly relieved when she realised that Madame de B’s initial assurances to her father, that she kept an eye on where her guests went and whom they saw, were empty. Madame de B showed no sign at all of being interested in what Julia was doing, provided she was there at mealtimes. In that case, Julia thought, she, Julia, need feel under no obligation to stay. It was barely a month after her arrival that she told Madame de B she had found somewhere else to live. Fending off Madame’s indignant protests and then her more craven pleas about her need for money, she waited till her hostess was visiting the Normandy ruin, then packed her case and left.

  In later life, on the rare occasions when she recalled this event, Julia was rather amazed that she had managed to carry it off. Evidently, the degree of ruthlessness, the stony refusal to be sucked into the prison of another person’s needs which she had evolved in self-protection over the last three or four years had come in useful.

  From distant London, no significant protest was raised. Tom too had made an escape and was now busy with his own emotional needs.

  So it happened that Julia, not yet eighteen, was living on her own in Paris. First she stayed in a bed-and-breakfast place in the polite Invalides district recommended to her by a Dutch girl she had met at the notional Sorbonne ‘course’ they were both following. She ate in subsidised student restaurants off metal food-trays – ‘Ne gaspillez pas le pain!’ notices said. ‘There are some who don’t have any.’ At this rate, the money in the bank which would not now go to Madame de B would last for ages, Julia thought happily.

  She had found herself drawn into the Latin Quarter through circumstances, without awareness. But soon it began to exercise on her the pull it had had for innumerable others before her, turning gradually from a collection of battered streets into a country of the mind with its own inherent contours. The shortest way to the Sorbonne from the bus stop where she got off at the Odéon crossroads lay up the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine: her feet trod daily where her great-great grandfather’s had
a hundred and forty years before. She had barely heard of Arthur Jacob, but something in her began to respond to the gravitas of the medical schools, whose fortress walls were decorated with a huge, antique injunction not to stick up posters (Loi du 29 juillet 1881 …) She liked, too, the way the august street narrowed abruptly into an alley with the murky windows of the Dupuytren museum on one side. Many things, she sensed, had happened here, but she did not yet know quite what.

  In her first weeks in Paris she had dawdled along the Boulevard St Germain and the Boulevard St Michel, looking into shop windows at flat sandals and green eye-shadow and the whitish lipstick that was fashionable in that far-off, Juliette Gréco, pre-Beatnik spring, but now she paced the side streets with their insistent suggestion of other and hidden lives. She discovered the tiny, zinc-countered cafés of the Rue Hautefeuille, and the one in the Cour de Commerce which sold cabbage soup and petit salé aux lentilles and leathery steaks from the butcher’s with two gilded horse heads in the Buci market. One day she left her lodging in the bland vistas of the seventh arrondissement and moved into a room in a modest hotel not far from the Ecoles de Médecine and the Odéon theatre. It stood in the slanting Rue Monsieur le Prince, which ran – though she did not know this then – right down the line of Paris’s thirteenth-century wall.

  From this new base, she explored more easily. Wandering a few hundred metres further east one day, beyond the point where the Sorbonne-bound crowds thinned away and the buildings in the back streets became scabrous and a little sinister, she passed through Maubert and came upon the steep, winding route up the Montagne Sainte Geneviève. She climbed up, slightly heady in the spring sunshine, beguiled by the ancient and ramshackle buildings she passed. Though far more ignorant of architecture than her grandfather had been some sixty years before, like him she discovered with delight the eccentric beauty of St Etienne and its stained-glass windows. She knew nothing then of Bertie’s time in Paris. It was not till several years later, when she had returned to Paris as a genuine grown-up, that he asked her for news of the tram terminus in the Place St Germain. Now, she simply wondered why no one had told her that this was what Paris was really like – the Paris into which you felt you could go deeper and deeper, far from the Champs Elysées, the Eiffel Tower and dull apartments near the Champ de Mars. The fantasy Parises of her childhood, too, fell away from her, forgotten as if they had never been.

  By and by, like a young animal staking out its territory, she ventured further. She sought out the old Portes St Martin and St Denis, marooned in the crowded boulevards of the Right Bank. She came upon the quiet Marais, and wondered in ignorance why the garment trade signs in the dilapidated Place des Vosges were so weather-faded, and why there were shut-up kosher butchers and a derelict synagogue in the Rue des Rosiers. She travelled to the ends of Metro lines that were not yet extended beyond the line of Paris’s now-demolished fortifications, and wandered around the wide spaces littered with bric-à-brac at the Porte de Clignancourt and the Porte de Vanves. Objects there called mutely to her, but she turned away. To travel lightly through life, physically as well as emotionally, that was surely the best plan? Someone advised her enthusiastically to go to Montmartre, but there were American tourists there in the Place du Tertre having their portraits sketched by much-bearded and jerseyed artists. She left, and went back to the Latin Quarter.

  When high summer came, and the hotel near the Odéon terminated the lets of lodgers such as her so as to rent the rooms in July and August to foreign visitors who would pay more, it seemed natural to look eastwards again. After some searching, she found herself a room high up in the Hôtel des Carmes. It cost three hundred old francs a night, two hundred less than the other hotel. Since the franc had by then inflated to the weightlessness of a pre-War centime, this worked out at two pounds seven shillings a week. Julia knew by hearsay, from her few months in London, that this was rather less than a bedsitter there would cost in any comparable position. Not that there was anything comparable in London, she thought. By leaning perilously out of her attic window she could see the towers of Notre Dame one way and the other way, uphill, the dome of the Panthéon. This, now, was her life, the only reality she had. To both the fear-haunted past and the yawning, unknowable future she closed her mind.

  Chapter XIX

  ANOTHER LIFE IN PARIS

  Long afterwards, when she looked back on this brief period with a detached nostalgia, as if at a time abandoned to history, Julia saw that the middle years of the 1950s had been the ending of an era. It was still, just, the Paris of the Liberation on which her eyes and her spirit opened fully for the first time. It was physically and mentally the Paris that had seen street-fighting on barricades in August 1944. There had been one between St Julien le Pauvre and the river quay, and there were small plaques on walls here and there throughout the Quarter commemorating dead fighters barely older than herself. But the city was, indeed, the same Paris that had hardly changed since before the First World War, merely growing a little shabbier and more cynical in the years between, stagnating economically behind peeling shutters, waiting for its fortunes to be revived by the next turn of history.

  In a year or two General de Gaulle would be summoned back into office and changes would begin. In a year or two the streets and boulevards would begin to fill with traffic, its fumes invisibly tainting the air, wheels a continual noise on the old cobbles. But for the time being many of the Haussmann arteries of Paris were great open spaces, traversed mainly by antique vegetable-laden lorries, by bouncing canvas-roofed Deux Chevaux, by the wide-based black Citroëns that had been the emblematic vehicle of the Liberation, by bicycles – and by handcarts. The handcart, piled with goods to be delivered or sold, or sometimes with household chairs, basins and mattresses being removed from one minimal lodging to another by a tired-looking man in an old alpaca jacket, was still the insignificant workhorse of the older quarters.

  Few people owned cars, any more than they owned telephones. The standard means of rapid communication was the pneumatique, a late-nineteenth-century invention that used vacuum pressure to suck small, folded missives along a network of special tunnels to all districts of Paris, as if the city were one huge department store. You bought a small, blueish letter-card (a petit bleu) at any post office, inscribed it with a message of instructions, protestation, love, regret or reproach, sealed it and dropped it in the slot provided. From there it would make its way to the appropriate district and be delivered by a messenger on a bicycle, all within an hour or two. Like the Metro, it managed to be admirably efficient and very old-fashioned at the same time.

  The Metro was crowded at most hours and in the early evening was packed tight. Its centre carriage was always the First Class one, which cost more and was therefore less full. Des jeunes filles, Madame de B had said, were well advised to travel First Class at busy times, advice which Julia naturally did not take. The trains were also full again after midnight, as the time neared for the last one – le dernier métro, a term still impregnated with the drama and fear of the Occupation curfew, when to miss it was to risk arrest. The trains travelled slowly, grumbling along on wheels that did not yet have rubber tyres. Passengers, coming down the stairs, would hear the last train approaching and begin frantically to run. You had to get to the platform before it was actually in, or a heavy automatic portillon would grind shut in your face. The Metro authority seemed to have a fixed fear – eventually abandoned – of people trying to jump into the train at the last moment.

  The portillons were in addition to the human guardians of the Metro, usually female, who sat by barriers at each end of every platform and punched holes in passengers’ tickets. Each ticket could be used twice, and the punched-out tiny circles of yellow littered the platform ends like confetti. The hint of gaiety was illusory, for this was recognised to be a job undertaken only by those who could aspire to nothing better, and the poinçonneuses were proverbially ill-tempered. They knitted, to pass the otherwise dreary, draughty hours, and occasional
ly two on opposite platforms would hold loud, complaining conversations across the rails. With almost three hundred stations, many of them with multiple platform entries, needing to be manned from five in the morning till past midnight seven days a week, the number of poinçonneuses must have been counted in thousands. Yet with the modernisation of the Metro and some reconfiguring of its maze-like passages, they began to disappear. There were no more left after 1970, and in the folklore of Paris they figure with an affection they never attracted in life. In the same way, the instantly recognisable smell of the Metro, which wafted up even through gratings in the street and seemed to be composed of garlic, dust and tobacco (although the Metro trains all forbade you to smoke), is remembered with nostalgia now that it, too, has gone.

  Gone as well are the meticulous notices on both Metro trains and buses stating who had priority over seats and in what order: First, War cripples (mutilés de guerre), second, civilian cripples and the blind … Those with heavy parcels or young children ranked only fifth. Since the Second World War produced few French cripples and in fact few military dead, owing to France’s rapid collapse and capitulation in 1940, it was the spirit of 1918 that was incarnated in these orders. The buses themselves, with their slatted wooden seats, open platforms at the back and pull-chain bells, were still in the 1950s the same early motor design that Maud Tindall had found in Paris when she returned from nursing in 1918.

  In the 1950s, too, the pissoirs (more genteelly known as vespasiennes), that had been first introduced by Préfet Rambuteau in the 1830s1 and redesigned circa 1900, continued to stand jauntily at street junctions. In wrought iron, usually round over a round grating and divided internally into three triangular stalls, they screened the user from shoulders to calves. No doubt their coming had originally seemed a hygienic advance, finally modifying the age-old Parisian habit of relieving oneself just anywhere, but their very obvious purpose, lack of overall concealment and characteristic reek meant that effectively the habit of urinating in public was given indefinite sanction. A perfectly respectable man, when walking in female company, would not hesitate to dive into a pissoir with a murmured Excusez-moi, make use of it while hardly breaking off conversation, and emerge buttoning himself. (The pissoirs, of course, were not designed for women. Women, presumably, had never been much given to relieving themselves in the street, so the need to accommodate females had not been perceived.) Alas for male comfort and ease, General de Gaulle – or possibly Madame de Gaulle – disapproved of the pissoirs. They were said to encourage male homosexuality, and after 1960 began to disappear quite rapidly. The one that had been installed on the remnant of Place Maubert in the early 1900s, along with the statue of Etienne Dolet, in an effort to make that ancient expanse of Parisian earth more respectable, was replaced with a small, purely decorative fountain.