by Jack Kerouac
But the next day I was suddenly unaccountably happy as I sat in the park in front of Trinite Church near Gare St.-Lazare among children and then went inside and saw a mother praying with a devotion that startled her son.— A moment later I saw a tiny mother with a barelegged little son already as tall as she.
I walked around, it started to sleet on Pigalle, suddenly the sun broke out on Rochechouart and I discovered Montmartre.— Now I knew where I would live if I ever came back to Paris.— Carousels for children, marvelous markets, hors d’oeuvres stalls, wine-barrel stores, cafés at the foot of the magnificent white Sacré-Coeur basilica, lines of women and children waiting for hot German crullers, new Norman cider inside.—Beautiful girls coming home from parochial school.—A place to get married and raise a family, narrow happy streets full of children carrying long loaves of bread.— For a quarter I bought a huge chunk of Gruyere cheese from a stall, then a huge chunk of jellied meat delicious as crime, then in a bar a quiet glass of port, and then I went to see the church high on the cliff looking down on the rain-wet roofs of Paris.—
La Basilique du Sacré-Coeur de Jesus is beauteous, maybe in its way one of the most beautiful of all churches (if you have a rococo soul as I have): blood-red crosses in the stainedglass windows with a westerly sun sending golden shafts against opposite bizarre Byzantine blues representing other sacristies—regular blood baths in the blue sea—and all the poor sad plaques commemorating the building of the church after the sack by Bismarck.
Down the hill in the rain, I went to a magnificent restaurant on Rue de Clignancourt and had that unbeatable French pureed soup and a whole meal with a basket of French bread and my wine and the thin-stemmed glasses I had dreamed about.— Looking across the restaurant at the shy thighs of a newlywed girl having her big honeymoon supper with her young farmer husband, neither of them saying anything.— Fifty years of this they’d do now in some provincial kitchen or dining room.— The sun breaking through again, and with full belly I wandered among the shooting galleries and carousels of Montmartre and I saw a young mother hugging her little girlie with a doll, bouncing her and laughing and hugging her because they had had so much fun on the hobbyhorse and I saw Dostoevski’s divine love in her eyes (and above on the hill over Montmartre, He held out His arms).
Feeling wonderful now, I strolled about and cashed a traveler’s check at the Gare du Nord and walked all the way, gay and fine, down Boulevard de Magenta to the huge Place de la Republique and on down, cutting sometimes into side streets.— Night now, down Boulevard du Temple and Avenue Voltaire (peeking into windows of obscure Breton restaurants) to Boulevard Beaumarchais where I thought I’d see the gloomy Bastille prison but I didn’t even know it was torn down in 1789 and asked a guy, “Ou est la vieille prison de la Revolution?” and he laughed and told me there were a few remnant stones in the subway station.— Then down in the subway: amazing clean artistic ads, imagine an ad for wine in America showing a naked ten-year-old girl with a party hat coiled around a bottle of wine.— And the amazing map that lights up and shows your route in colored buttons when you press the destination button.— Imagine the New York I.R.T. And the clean trains, a bum on a bench in a clean surrealistic atmosphere (not to be compared with the 14th Street stop on the Canarsie line).
Paris paddywagons flew by singing dee da, dee da.—
The next day I strolled examining bookstores and went into the Benjamin Franklin Library, the site of the old Cafe Voltaire (facing the Comedie Française) where everybody from Voltaire to Gauguin to Scott Fitzgerald drank and now the scene of prim American librarians with no expression.— Then I strolled to the Pantheon and had delicious pea soup and a small steak in a fine crowded restaurant full of students and vegetarian law professors.— Then I sat in a little park in Place Paul-Painleve and dreamily watched a curving row of beautiful rosy tulips rigid and swaying fat shaggy sparrows, beautiful short-haired mademoiselles strolling by. It’s not that French girls are beautiful, it’s their cute mouths and the sweet way they talk French (their mouths pout rosily), the way they’ve perfected the short haircut and the way they amble slowly when they walk, with great sophistication, and of course their chic way of dressing and undressing.
Paris, a stab in the heart finally.
THE LOUVRE—MILES AND MILES of hiking before great canvases.
In David’s immense canvas of Napoleon I and Pius VII I could see little altar boys far in the back fondling a maréchal’s sword hilt (the scene is Notre-Dame-de-Paris, with the Empress Josephine kneeling pretty as a boulevard girl). Fragonard, so delicate next to Van Dyck, and a big smoky Rubens (La Mort de Dido).—But the Rubens got better as I looked, the muscle tones in cream and pink, the rimshot luminous eyes, the dull purple velvet robe on the bed. Rubens was happy because nobody was posing for him for a fee and his gay Kermesse showed an old drunk about to be sick.— Goya’s Marquesa de la Solaria could hardly have been more modern, her silver fat shoes pointed like fish crisscrossed, the immense diaphanous pink ribbons over a sisterly pink face.— A typical French woman (not educated) suddenly said, “Ah, c’est trop beau!” “It’s too beautiful!”
But Brueghel, wow! His Battle of Arbelles had at least 600 faces clearly defined in an impossibly confused mad battle leading nowhere.— No wonder Céline loved him.— A complete understanding of world madness, thousands of clearly defined figures with swords and above them the calm mountains, trees on a hill, clouds, and everyone laughed when they saw that insane masterpiece that afternoon, they knew what it meant.
And Rembrandt.— The dim trees in the darkness of crepuscule chateau with its hints of a Transylvanian vampire castle.— Set side by side with this his Hanging Beef was completely modern with its splash of blood paint. Rembrandt’s brushstroke swirled in the face of the Christ at Emmaus, and the floor in Sainte Famille was completely detailed in the color of planks and nails.— Why should anyone paint after Rembrandt, unless Van Gogh? The Philosopher in Meditation was my favorite for its Beethoven shadows and light, I liked also Hermit Reading with his soft old brow, and St. Matthew Being Inspired by the Angel was a miracle—the rough strokes, and the drip of red paint in the angel’s lower lip and the saint’s own rough hands ready to write the Gospel… ah miraculous too the veil of mistaken angel smoke on Tobias’ departing angel’s left arm.— What can you do?
Suddenly I walked into the 19th Century room and there was an explosion of light—of bright gold and daylight. Van Gogh, his crazy blue Chinese church with the hurrying woman, the secret of it the Japanese spontaneous brushstroke that, for instance, made the woman’s back show, her back all white unpainted canvas except for a few black thick script strokes.— Then the madness of blue running in the roof where Van Gogh had a ball—I could see the joy red mad gladness he rioted in in that church heart.— His maddest picture was gardens with insane trees whirling in the blue swirl sky, one tree finally exploding into just black lines, almost silly but divine—the thick curls and butter burls of color, beautiful oil rusts, glubs, creams, greens.
I studied Degas’ ballet pictures—how serious the perfect faces in the orchestra, then suddenly the explosion on the stage—the pink film rose of the ballerina gowns, the puffs of color.— And Cezanne, who painted exactly as he saw, more accurate and less divine than holy Van Gogh—his green apples, his crazy blue lake with acrostics in it, his trick of hiding perspective (one jetty in the lake can do it, and one mountain line). Gauguin—seeing him beside these masters, he seemed to me almost like a clever cartoonist.— Compared to Renoir, too, whose painting of a French afternoon was so gorgeously colored with the Sunday afternoon of all our childhood dreams—pinks, purples, reds, swings, dancers, tables, rosy cheeks and bubble laughter.
On the way out of the bright room, Frans Hals, the gayest of all painters who ever lived. Then one last look at Rembrandt’s St. Matthew’s angel—its smeared red mouth moved when I looked.
APRIL IN Paris, sleet in Pigalle, and last moments.—In my skidrow hotel it was cold and still s
leeting so I put on my old blue jeans, old muffcap, railroad gloves and zip-up rain jacket, the same clothes I’d worn as a brakeman in the mountains of California and as a forester in the Northwest, and hurried across the Seine to Les Halles for a last supper of fresh bread and onion soup and pâté.—Now for delights, walking in the cold dusk of Paris amid vast flower markets, then succumbing to thin crisp frites with rich sausage hot dog from a stall on the windswept corner, then into a mobbed mad restaurant full of gay workers and bourgeois where I was temporarily peeved because they forgot to bring me wine too, so gay and red in a clean stemmed glass.—After eating, sauntering on home to pack for London tomorrow, then deciding to buy one final Parisian pastry, intending a Napoleon as usual, but because the girl thought I’d said “Milanais” I accepted her offer and took a bite of my Milanais as I crossed the bridge and bang! the absolutely final greatest of all pastries in the world, for the first time in my life I felt overpowered by a taste sensation, a rich brown mocha cream covered with slivered almonds and just a touch of cake but so pungent that it stole through my nose and taste buds like bourbon or rum with coffee and cream.— I hurried back, bought another and had the second one with a little hot espresso in a cafe across the street from the Sarah Bernhardt Theater—my last delight in Paris savoring the taste and watching Proustian show-goers coming out of the theater to hail cabs.
In the morning, at six, I rose and washed at the sink and the water running in my faucet talked in a kind of Cockney accent.— I hurried out with full pack on back, and in the park a bird I never heard, a Paris warbler by the smoky morning Seine.
I took the train to Dieppe and off we went, through smoky suburbs, through Normandy, through gloomy fields of pure green, little stone cottages, some red brick, some half-timbered, some stone, in a drizzle along the canal-like Seine, colder and colder, through Vernon and little places with names like Vauvay and Something-sur-Cie, to gloomy Rouen, which is a horrible rainy dreary place to have been burned at the stake.— All the time my mind excited with the thought of England by nightfall, London, the fog of real old London.— As usual I was standing in the cold vestibule, no room inside the train, sitting occasionally on my pack crowded in with a gang of shouting Welsh schoolboys and their quiet coach who loaned me the Daily Mail to read.— After Rouen the ever-more-gloomy Normandy hedgerows and meadows, then Dieppe with its red rooftops and old quais and cobblestoned streets with bicyclists, the chimney pots smoking, gloom rain, bitter cold in April and I sick of France at last.
The channel boat crowded to the hilt, hundreds of students and scores of beautiful French and English girls with pony tails and short haircuts.— Swiftly we left the French shore and after a spate of blank water we began to see green carpets and meadows stopped abruptly as with a pencil line at chalk cliffs, and it was that sceptered isle, England, springtime in England.
All the students sang in gay gangs and went through to their chartered London coach car but I was made to sit (I was a take-a-seater) because I had been silly enough to admit that I had only fifteen shillings equivalent in my pocket.— I sat next to a West Indies Negro who had no passport at all and was carrying piles of strange old coats and pants—he answered strangely the questions of the officers, looked extremely vague and in fact I remembered he had bumped into me absentmindedly in the boat on the way over.— Two tall English bobbies in blue were watching him (and myself) suspiciously, with sinister Scotland Yard smiles and strange long-nosed brooding attentiveness like in old Sherlock Holmes movies.— The Negro looked at them terrified. One of his coats dropped on the floor but he didn’t bother to pick it up.— A mad gleam had come into the eyes of the immigration officer (young intellectual fop) and now another mad gleam in some detective’s eye and suddenly I realized the Negro and I were surrounded.— Out came a huge jolly redheaded customs man to interrogate us.
I told them my story—I was going to London to pick up a royalty check from an English publisher and then on to New York on the lie de France.—They didn’t believe my story—I wasn’t shaved, I had a pack on my back, I looked like a bum.
“What do you think I am!” I said and the redheaded man said “That’s just it, we don’t quite know in the least what you were doing in Morocco, or in France, or arriving in England with fifteen bob.” I told them to call my publishers or my agent in London. They called and got no answer—it was Saturday. The bobbies were watching me, stroking their chins.— The Negro had been taken into the back by now—suddenly I heard a horrible moaning, as of a psychopath in a mental hospital, and I said “What’s that?”
“That’s your Negro friend.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He has no passport, no money, and is apparently escaped from a mental institution in France. Now do you have any way to verify this story of yours, otherwise we s’ll have to detain you.”
“In custody?”
“Quite. My dear fellow, you can’t come into England with fifteen bob.”
“My dear fellow, you can’t put an American in jail.”
“Oh yes we can, if we have grounds for suspicion.”
“Dont you believe I’m a writer?”
“We have no way of knowing this.”
“But I’m going to miss my train. It’s due to leave any minute.”
“My dear fellow …” I rifled through my bag and suddenly found a note in a magazine about me and Henry Miller as writers and showed it to the customs man. He beamed:
“Henry Miller? That’s most unusual. We stopped him several years ago, he wrote quite a bit about New-haven.” (This was a grimmer New Haven than the one in Connecticut with its dawn coalsmokes.) But the customs man was immensely pleased, checked my name again, in the article and on my papers, and said, “Well, I’m afraid it’s going to be all smiles and handshakes now. I’m awfully sorry. I think we can let you through—with the provision that you leave England inside a month.”
“Don’t worry.” As the Negro screamed and banged somewhere inside and I felt a horrible sorrow because he had not made it to the other shore, I ran to the train and made it barely in time.— The gay students were all in the front somewhere and I had a whole car to myself, and off we went silently and fast in a fine English train across the countryside of olden Blake lambs.—And I was safe.
English countryside—quiet farms, cows, meads, moors, narrow roads and bicycling farmers waiting at crossings, and ahead, Saturday night in London.
Outskirts of the city in late afternoon like the old dream of sun rays through afternoon trees.— Out at Victoria Station, where some of the students were met by limousines.— Pack on back, excited, I started walking in the gathering dusk down Buckingham Palace Road seeing for the first time long deserted streets. (Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.)—Past the Palace, down the Mall through St. James’s Park, to the Strand, traffic and fumes and shabby English crowds going out to movies, Trafalgar Square, on to Fleet Street where there was less traffic and dimmer pubs and sad side alleys, almost clear to St. Paul’s Cathedral where it got too Johnsonianly sad.— So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.
I called my London agent on the phone, telling him my plight. “My dear fellow it’s awfully unfortunate I wasnt in this afternoon. We were visiting mother in Yorkshire. Would a fiver help you?”
“Yes!” So I took a bus to his smart flat at Buckingham Gate (I had walked right past it after getting off the train) and went up to meet the dignified old couple.— He with goatee and fireplace and Scotch to offer me, telling me about his one-hundred-year-old mother reading all of Trevelyan’s English Social History.—Homburg, gloves, umbrella, all on the table, attesting to his way of living, and myself feeling like an American hero in an old movie.— Far cry from the little kid under a river bridge dreaming of England.— They fed me sandwiches, gave me money, and then I walked around London savoring the fog in Chelsea, the bobbies wandering in the milky mist, thinkin
g, “Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?” The dim lights, the English soldier strolling with one arm around his girl and with the other hand eating fish and chips, the honk of cabs and buses, Piccadilly at midnight and a bunch of Teddy Boys asking me if I knew Gerry Mulligan.— Finally I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed.
And on Good Friday afternoon a heavenly performance of the St. Matthew Passion by the St. PauPs—choir, with full orchestra and a special service choir.— I cried most of the time and saw a vision of an angel in my mother’s kitchen and longed to go home to sweet America again.— And realized that it didn’t matter that we sin, that my father died only of impatience, that all my own petty gripes didnt matter either.— Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble bas-relief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: “And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages,” Outside as I walked in the dusk around Christopher Wren’s great masterpiece and saw the gloomy overgrown ruins of Hitler’s blitz around the cathedral, I saw my own mission.
In the British Museum I looked up my family in Rivista Araldica, IV, Page 240, “Lebris de Keroack. Canada, originally from Brittany. Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. Motto: Love, work and suffer.”
I could have known.
At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton.— The performance was Antony and Cleopatra.—It was a marvelously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music, Enobar-bus noble and strong, Lepidus wry and funny at the drunken rout on Pompey’s boat, Pompey warlike and harsh, Antony virile, Caesar sinister, and though the cultured voices criticized the Cleopatra in the lobby at intermission, I knew that I had seen Shakespeare as it should be played.