Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  —Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris

  The rue des Abbesses is named after L’Abbaye aux Dames, an infamous cloister of Benedictine nuns founded in the early Middle Ages who ruled the butte sacrée with a zest for pleasures of the flesh. Henri IV’s wild escapades in the convent while making Montmartre his headquarters are notorious. As far back as the 18th century, Montmartre had already gained a reputation for sex and abandonment, even before a parade of artists and bohemian funlovers had made it popular. Mothers sold their daughters to wealthy officials in the likes of such frolicsome taverns as A la Fontaine d’Amour and Au Veau Qui Tète. The 19th-century art scene provided the current guidebook reputation of Montmartre as an enclave for hedonistic artists: Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, Utrillo, Corot, Bonnard, Modigliani, Dufy, Ernst, Picasso, to name a few. Cabarets, underground theatre, dance-halls, and drinking establishments like the Chat Noir and the Lapin Agile proliferated in the twisted and cobbled passageways of the quartier. Today the vapid portraits and serene cityscapes displayed by the current “artists” of the Place du Tertre are a far cry from the energy and creativity of earlier times.

  Leisurely afternoons spent browsing out-of-the-way, minuscule bookstores provided me with an unexpected surprise: a little ragedged book in French, Les Racines Sacrées de Paris by Pierre Gordon, or The Sacred Roots of Paris. A chapter on Montmartre traced the history of the colline sainte du nord, or sacred hill of the north, back to pre-Christian times. Now here was some interesting material. Montmartre, according to Gordon’s little book, did not derive its name from mons martyrum or “martyr hill,” as the prosaically-minded would have us believe, but instead had received the designation Mont Mercure, after the God Mercury, back in times of the Roman conquest. In the year 742 A.D., under the Carolingians, Montmartre was still called Mont Mercure. Mercury, or Hermes, was primarily the god of initiations. It was Caesar who designated Mercury the representative god of the Gauls. You can see the winged symbol for the god on a very quotidien blue square package of Gauloises, the prototypical filterless French cigarettes. And in the pervasive French cartoon, “Astérix.”

  The Christian version of the Montmartre legend primarily describes the decapitation of St. Denis at the summit of the sacred hill, hence the appellation of Mount of the Martyrs which most standard guidebooks subscribe to. Gordon, however, maintains that initiation cults of pagan times frequently depict a “rite of the severed head,” thus ascertaining that a symbology existed prior to Christian interpretations of site-specific events. The severing of the head represents a psychological and spiritual death and rebirth, particularly in the case of an initiation rite. There is evidence that Dionysian initiation cults took place here as well.

  From 700 to 500 B.C., hordes of Celts from Bavaria, Bohemia, and central Europe descended on fertile France and swallowed (or were swallowed by) the existing Cro-Magnon mixture. The Romans, observing that these Celts kept fighting roosters (in Latin, “rooster” is gallus), called them Gauls.

  The French adore their Gallic ancestors. In the delightful comic strip Asterix, the little Gallic hero always outwits the block-headed Romans. The Gauls must have looked like today’s French from the Midi—of medium height, brown haired, brown eyed—contrary to the idealized French belief that the Gauls were tall, blond, and blue eyed. This belief persists: recently, the nativist politician Le Pen found it necessary to deny publicly that he used a peroxide bleach to produce his blond hair.

  —Henry S. Reuss and Margaret M. Reuss, The Unknown South of France

  Initiation was my prevailing mood at the time. There was my own cultural initiation of being a stranger in a strange land, learning the language and customs of a new country. I felt like a baby, groping for ways to express myself accurately. The French pay particular attention to the details of their language, especially pronunciation. I was also experiencing a deep personal initiation, of getting in touch with my self, turning 30. I had finally found my own apartment in Montmartre, after months of unsuccessful living experiments and sleazy hotels, house-sitting and transitional living with various acquaintances of old friends. And now, everyone I had met and knew was leaving Paris. I would stay on alone. The Paris I was getting acquainted with had the perpetually revolving face of Janus. Looking up as I wandered, I would see green and gold ancient gallic links of ivy, one crescent moon linking to the next, the spaces of sky reflecting between the trees and the medieval stone sides of buildings. After an inspired, formless day spent drinking Grog au Rhum in the afternoon café, I would find myself wandering aimlessly through the dark, misty streets, completely and utterly lost and alone.

  One foggy February day I had decided to take the Métro rather than a bus. After the automatic doors banged shut, I had an intuition that I had made a grave mistake. Claustrophobia pierced my outer calm, and my worst fears were confirmed as fumes filled the car and then the lights went out. The train pitched us forward as brakes squealed. Dead calm and darkness. There was a black-out between Château Rouge and Barbès-Rochechouart. Smoke filled the train, which moved along like a slug through the dark tunnels, stopping every five seconds. I felt the invasion of fear, my palms sweating. There I was, a messenger with letters which had to be mailed. But no one was allowed to get on or off the train. At each stop, a voice from nowhere announced, “No one may descend at this stop. Please stay on the train.”

  The following day, Paris showed me a different face. I walked through the winding streets, watched the old men playing pétanque. The sky was bright blue, and the sun was out. A large plant being unloaded from the back of a car resonated green against the ancient stone walls and I felt full of a Paris I loved, a place of intense magic. I went to the Musée de Cluny. One room was huge and white, full of headless white statues on a stage. I could imagine living in that room. The whiteness and mystery of that scene pitted against the roughness of 11th- and 12th-century artifacts fascinated me, and I lingered over the rich detail of the medieval tapestries, jewelry and relics. Paris, a sphinx of a city, could change like that in a day. And Paris was changing me.

  One day I noticed a small, peculiar sign on the door of the neighbor who lived directly across from me, a man I rarely caught a glimpse of. He was apparently African, and wore a traditional long and colorful robe. I stopped to read the sign. He was a shaman, a medicine man! His sign read “The Grand African Medium.” Fascinated, I began to look for him every time I came in or out. Eventually, I found a reason to knock on his door. He was there, and kindly invited me in. His apartment was very plain, no decoration, just a few colorful African cloths thrown over a chair or two. He chatted with me very sociably, unpretentiously. I gradually got to know him better as time went on. He told me of his village in Mali where his grandfather was medicine man. He even invited me to stay with them if I ever got down to Mali. I felt very lucky to have been his neighbor, although I never did make it to Africa.

  I wandered the winding streets of Montmartre on foggy nights, visited Masses in Latin at Sacré-Coeur (which seemed like pieces of performance art to me), heard Gregorian chants sung live in a medieval chapel, bickered with the Tunisian vendors at the Wednesday market, and suffered daily pilgrimages to the top of the Sacred Hill. I climbed the belltower of Sacré-Coeur, a tightlywound spiral of endless stairs straight up a narrow stone cylinder, but well worth the bird’s-eye view. And I spent many hours inside my apartment making art: magical, mystical paintings overwrought with shamanistic symbolism. I made the acquaintance of a French man, an enigmatic person and artist himself, who became my constant companion as we strolled the maze of streets, drank, and played chess in the cafés of Montmartre. Living there, in that place, turned out to be a turning point in my travels and in my life. From there, I traveled on to Turkey, where I later spent long periods of time and gathered experiences that changed my life completely.

  One last vivid memory of Montmartre remains in my mind. After I had moved out of my apartment, and was leaving with my belongings—my cat a
nd a large suitcase mostly filled with books which I dragged to the bus stop—I passed a man I did not know or recognize who said something to me. I will never forget what he said: “You haven’t changed.” I was shocked, and stopped to find out what he meant, who he was, but he seemed to disappear. I was left with only the image of his face looking directly at me, the eyes burning, and his mouth moving with those words. To this day, I take that experience as a visionary one. What he said was full of truth, but I did not realize it at the time. The enigmas of that man and his unexpected words had sealed off my time in Paris with a fitting postlude. I had to recognize in that moment, as I was getting on the bus, with the tolling of La Savoyarde in the background, that this hill had infused me with its very old magical spell. Montmartre would change my life, only much later.

  Irene-Marie Spencer writes, paints, and climbs volcanoes in her spare time. The rest of her time is taken up with her four spirited daughters, a husband, two dogs, a cat, five rabbits, two guinea pigs, and two budgies. She hails from Wisconsin, but now lives with her family in New Zealand. Her first novel, Tales of the Moon and Water, was based on her experiences living in a fishing village on the island of Ekinlik in the Marmara Sea.

  We stood in awe watching the red sunset behind Sacré-Coeur at the summit of Montmartre and its pink and orange reflection in the pools before the Palais de Chaillot. Silently we congratulated ourselves on providing the memory of a lifetime for the mature, cultured young gentleman that Kevin had become on his “Grand Tour.” With the magnificence of Paris laid out at our feet, I turned to my son and asked gently, “Kevin, what are you thinking of right now?” Expecting a nugget of inspired brilliance, I was dismayed to hear him say, “I wonder how my Little League team is doing tonight.”

  I was crushed! Despite our best efforts, our son’s mind was still back in the all-American pastime.

  To most, thoughts of Paris bring back memories of lost passion, lingering kisses along the quays, whispered conversations in sidewalk cafés. But my heart fills with love when I recall this light-hearted memory of my son’s childhood.

  To this day, eighteen years later, whenever someone expects us to hold forth with some brilliant reply, our stock answer, followed by knowing smiles all around, is “I wonder how my Little League team is doing tonight.”

  —Sharon Huck, “Bon Anniversaire”

  LAWRENCE OSBORNE

  Turkish Baths

  Our peasant explores the world of Parisian hammams.

  IT IS ALMOST CERTAIN THAT THE ARABS LEARNED THE SECRETS OF the art of public bathing, with its meditative and homoerotic dimensions, from the 400 bath houses of the Alexandria they conquered. In the modern equivalent of Alexandria the Islamicized art of corporeal purification has come home to roost in the city where the largest Roman ruin is a municipal bath and in which the desire for solitude is so intense that its ultimate gratification may rest only with the hammam aturki, the bain turc. Our peasant, now that some months have passed and he is firmly established as a naturalized citizen of the City, has become so addicted to this far from gratuitous pastime that he spends almost all his money on the joys of steam rooms, refrigerated pools and the manic manual skills of the little Maghrebian masseurs who can be picked up almost as easily as street girls and for a fraction of the cost. A light and intensely individual eroticism holds court in the depths of the hammam in almost alarming harmony with a communal serenity enforced by the habit of the masseurs in the smaller establishments of interrupting all operations at five o’clock precisely, unwrapping their wicker mats between the massage tables in the direction of Mecca and offering up their devotions in quiet but heartfelt undertones. The object of the hammam is to escape the City and the world around it. Not only does the Moslem, as in the mosque, escape the City of War, but the sensual atheist, too, escapes from the asphyxia of the present and exiting by a series of illusionist doors in the form of underground chambers and ante-chambers, of mystic waters and fountains, leaves his existence behind, flirts more openly than ever before with his own body and suffers a sudden and vertiginous loss of toxicity—a brutal advent of cleanliness that leaves him in a state of memoryless disorientation for hours and even days afterwards.

  The Turkish bath, with its mystique derived from the tendency of the European to indulge in infantile fantasies of the opulent, promiscuous, sorbet-eating East, the East of exemplary consumerist living which was never actually observed from close to, retains—in the high-class tourist establishments at least—the aura of the opium-smoking 1920s. The guides who cater to well-heeled international itinerants or local businessmen, the Gault-Millau for example, do not hesitate to include sections on the Turkish baths and the baths which they recommend are all devoid of true alien content, with the notable exception of the glorious hammam of the Mosquée de Paris. They are approximations to the original which compromise with Scandinavian modes of ablution. The systems of massage used, for example, with their—to our mind—tame and unimaginative hand-chopping and shoulder-kneading (as opposed to the more athletic and strenuous tendon-wrenching of the masseurs of the Middle East), seem to us to be entirely heretical in the context of the true hammam, as are their inclusion of such contraptions as saunas, exercise bicycles, vegetarian restaurants and bars. Let us be as explicit as possible: the true hammam is not a health club or a glorified gym. It is a place of non-activity, of withdrawal. The slightest athletic movement spoils the peculiar spiritual density of the small rooms, where every occupant is aware of every other down to his fingernails and the trails of sweat moving down his spine. Slowness of movement and reaction, a dropsical detachment, enable the bather to feel intimate with his fellow sufferers and to feel a primitive sympathy for his greatest defects, even for the rolls of diseased fat, the distended and craven bellies, the shrivelled-up penises that tempt bravura—or, for that matter for his greatest points of superiority, for the baths sometimes throw up disciplined and poetic male bodies that move with the ease of hammerhead sharks and which restore the dim memory of Roman court favourites, Neronic love-boys and professional Adonises expert in the nibbling of imperial testicles.

  Not only did the Hammam St-Paul miss its destiny, it’s become part of history. It is now a hip clothing store.

  —David Applefield, “Paris Review”

  An example of the hammam that has missed its destiny is the Hammam St-Paul on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais. It might have been difficult, of course, to maintain a scrupulous Moslem profile in this Jewish neighbourhood, with kosher butchers and cinnamon-scented bakeries filled with seven-armed candelabra only a few doors down, and the façade itself betrays other points of origin: the gold mosaic lettering set into a chocolate wall and sculpted lions’ heads on either side of a window with a blue push-out blind are clearly affected with 1930s mannerisms. A cramped lobby downstairs in a quaintly rectilinear style provides you with a staircase leading up to the first-floor restaurant and reception area housing a bar, a large and sunny space with rows of empty tables, rubber plants and semi-recumbent male forms draped in white bath towels. Subtending to this area are the mauve cubicles reminiscent of an obsolete swimming pool and from here, after undressing in distressing and anemic solitude, you descend the stairs to the baths. A crude thermal titillation awaits you. You sweat even before you push open the door that leads into the nondescript showers and by the time you have penetrated one set of doors further into the hexagonal steam lounge—the purgatory between the hell of the full steam room and the paradise of the icecold pool in the central atrium—your armpits are thrashing about in a swelter of racing moisture, you are reeking, your heartbeat has tripled, your eyeballs are popping like fragile ceramic objects accidentally thrown into a roaring oven. In this gasping, vapid little room long spruce deckchairs are ranged around a circular table of the same wood bearing a variety of French newspapers. You are intended to seat yourself, prevent yourself from passing out by checking the dairy odours emanating from your boiling skin, and leaf through one of these soggy and glutin
ous journals with nimble fingernails.

  It is not intended that you should be able to stand much of this sly thermic sadism and so it is that before long you desire to change direction and mood and—why not?—temperature. On either side of the door from the showers are the sauna and the steam bath. We would sincerely recommend you not to waste time in the sauna, which is naturally indistinguishable from all other saunas, and whose dry heat we find unbearable: direct yourself to the left-hand door and plunge into the inferno of the herbal steam room, where the moans of the dying are Dantean and where you can sit on any one of the ascending steps that recede back into invisibility: behind the wall of vapour, each one getting hotter as it gets nearer the ceiling. The heat here is abusive, the burning combustion that can be imagined on the surface of a wretched moon of Jupiter, except that here the steam is scented with eucalyptus and a piercing and tonic freshness quickly fills the lungs. The only criticism that can be levelled against this exemplary steam room, which is properly sealed at the correct temperature, is that far from our much-awaited ideal of repose and abstraction we find here fat businessmen discussing their sad little scandals in voices only half hushed and farting at regular intervals.

  Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

  —Simone Weil, “Oppression and Liberty” (1958)

  Needless to say, such vulgar interruptions are highly distressing to our refined and aristocratic peasant and you too may well find yourselves leaving prematurely and searching out the cold bath in order to attain your Sufic ecstasies. But you would be well advised to wait until you are on the verge of unconsciousness before making a move, and then you should move quickly, stride with closed eyes through the reading area, push through the aluminum doors into the atrium (which is cool and distinguished) and, ignoring the notices in 1930s demotic advising you not to hurl yourself about, hurl yourself into the small pool, at the bottom of which a multitude of tiny blue and white checked tiles dazzles the eye. You should be aware, of course, that this brusque but exquisite gesture, given the size of the pool and the room, will drench every occupant of every chair around you, but unlike the true hammam a certain egoism is permissible here. In any case, the atrium (for want of a better word) will now allow you to dry off in relative anonymity, being equipped with foam mats ranged along a raised dais on either side of the pool and here you can contemplate the hexagonal cupola cut into the ceiling in clear reference to its Andalusian model, the Roman clock presiding over the pool, the unfortunate and completely inappropriate photo-murals of Hawaiian beaches and the plethora of yellowing notices on the walls arguing for silence, respect and cleanliness. Here, the same businessmen who irritated you in the steam bath come out gasping for air, brutally naked and half-boiled, and lower themselves quietly swearing into the icy water. You can see that they have difficulty breathing. They have the appearance of flabby consuls of the late empire, addled with erysipelas, or St. Anthony’s Fire. So they wheeze and disport themselves like wounded dolphins in the blue and white shimmer of the pool and the clock ticks slowly while you sleep in the shadow of the arcade on your foam bed and hours pass by in the continual migration from steam to water, from heat to cold, from moaning to gasping, from sickness to health. After a while you notice that you have begun to smell differently, a smell of foul yogurt that comes with the exposure of your inner filth. It is time for that modern necessity, soap, and you can only regret that the masseurs available here, and who cost an additional 40 francs to the 90 you have already paid, are not authentic despite the fact that they soap you down as they should. You will have to go into the shower and do it yourself.