by Oliver Gee
When Baxter opened the door I let it slip that I was hungry. In fact, I didn’t let it slip. I asked him if he had anything to eat. Forget Hemingway and his romanticism, I needed a little morsel of something, even a piece of bread. Baxter, something of a chef on the side, took pity on my Oliver Twist routine and rustled up a quick feast; and then we got to talking. I say we got to talking, it was more just him talking, but that was fine by me. He was much more interesting than me and I was happy to listen. He told tales of his travels, his books, his lovers, and Paris. And I gobbled it up. This was the Paris I wanted to experience: chewing the fat with a prolific author on his balcony overlooking Paris. Eventually he asked what I had planned for the live show and I managed to convince him to be my guest. He had already been on my podcast and said he wanted to see it succeed, adding that he didn’t expect a cut of any of the profits from tickets. I’d already arranged a venue for the show, down at the headquarters of a tour company by Notre Dame, nestled on the riverbank somewhere between the Tour d’Argent restaurant and the Shakespeare and Company bookshop.
Baxter told me that Sylvia Beach, who started the original Shakespeare and Company bookshop, had once lived in his apartment block, and that Hemingway would often come to visit her. I went home and skimmed through A Moveable Feast - and marvelled to see that I’d been walking the same steps as Hemingway that day. The only difference was that a hungry Hemingway refused the food and I asked for it.
So, here it was, a live show. My first real money-making plan since I quit my full-time job. I could sell tickets. Imagine if I could sell tickets for 20 euros. And imagine if I sold 50 of them. Would it be possible? That’d be 1,000 euros. Now, with 1,000 euros coming in I could surely buy some nice food and drinks for the guests, right? It was strange to think that 1,000 euros could be so exciting considering I’d been earning much more than that at the news site - but this would be my own earnings, all from my own ideas, something out of nothing.
Empowered by this wild scheme, I forgot one crucial aspect of the event planning. Twenty euros is a lot of money to spend to watch someone talk. Heck, for 20 euros you could get tickets to see the top athletes in the world perform in front of a sold-out arena. So why would you want to see me and John Baxter talking about Paris, even if there was a glass of champagne thrown in? Perhaps predictably for anyone besides me, tickets were slow to sell. In fact, they hardly sold at all. I emailed all my friends and acquaintances, but the sales dribbled in at best. Eventually, I realized that it would never sell out; I was far too small a voice on the Paris scene to gather a paying crowd. But just as I was about to invite everyone to come for free, thinking that a non-paying crowd is better than no crowd, I got an unexpected email from a lady in Dallas.
“Hi Oliver, I heard you’re having trouble selling tickets to your show. Well, I love The Earful Tower, and if you promise to make a recording of the evening then I will buy a ticket and donate it to anyone in Paris who wants to come.”
What an inspiring email! I was ecstatic. It never occurred to me that I could sell tickets to people who couldn’t physically be there. The weight of imminent failure was lifted off my shoulders and I set about emailing listeners abroad who I knew loved the show. I told them that if they wanted to donate a ticket I would be happy to record the chat with Baxter. And those lovely listeners responded. One of them bought five tickets!
When the day for the show rolled around, I’d sold 40 tickets, mostly to people who’d never make it to the event and who had no intention to. I gave the spots away to anyone who wanted them, and would you believe it, 40 people crammed into the little room to watch the show. Those who got donated tickets brought treats from home and an Australian mate of mine, Mike, even baked cakes. The owners of the venue managed to sell drinks to guests, Baxter sold a few books, and everyone was happy. The show itself was a hit and Baxter was in fine form. It was lucky he’d said he didn’t want a cut of the profits because there weren’t many - not after the food and champagne I’d bought. With a belly full of (admittedly cheap) champagne and finger foods, I wasn’t hungry anymore. At least not for food. But I was hungry to see where I could take the show. If I could sell tickets to a Paris event to people in Dallas, then surely there was a way to make this podcast succeed.
6.2 The crocodiles
You might know the Canal Saint-Martin from the stone-skimming scene in the hugely popular movie, Amélie. Or you might be familiar with it as a popular Paris hangout for youngsters and hipsters. But did you know there’s at least one massive beaver in there? I swear it’s true, I saw it with my own eyes. In fact, a group of us saw it swimming along without a care in the world. I was beside myself with excitement, running along the canal like an excited dog.
Now, the reason I cared so much about this beaver is because I’m Australian. One of the things I miss the most about Australia, by far, is the wild animals. Where I lived in Perth it wasn’t unusual to see birds, tortoises, lizards, or snakes. Travel a little further out of the city and you’d see more kangaroos than you could imagine, plus emus, sharks, seals, dolphins, stingrays, and even penguins. In Paris, all I got was rats, which I quite liked to watch, to Lina’s disgust. So after years of only rats and domesticated dogs, imagine the thrill of seeing a real live beaver, which was as exotic to me as a kangaroo was to a Parisian. I told a few people in the following days about the beaver sighting and they all scoffed. A beaver in the canal? Impossible. I researched the mysterious animal and found that it was most likely a coypu, which is basically as close to a beaver as you can get without being a beaver - just add a rat tail and you’ve got it. But what intrigued me far, far more than the beaver was the idea people were so adamantly against the notion of any animal living in the canal. It was so puzzling to me and made me want to dig deeper. The whole thing had an almost conspiratorial edge to it. What was the canal really hiding?
I told the story to a British videomaker and let him know how everyone doubted it. His eyes lit up. He’d also been itching to tell a story, to uncover a secret of Paris, so we set our minds to figuring out exactly what this mysterious creature could have been. We went down to the canal to interview some locals about whether they’d seen the beaver, or indeed whether they believed in it. Most people laughed it off. One, rather worryingly, said he’d heard council workers had recently found a body at the bottom of the canal, though that turned out to be wrong. One thing was clear, no one had seen the beaver and we seemed no closer to an answer - until the last interview of the day blew the entire story out of the water. I came across an elderly lady who was sitting on a bench by the canal, looking wistfully over the water. I didn’t mention the beaver at first, and recorded our conversation about the canal. She said she liked to just sit there and watch the water, something I could relate to all too well.
Eventually, I turned to the subject to animals. Did she think, perhaps, that any creatures could live in the canal?
“But of course,” she said. “There are birds, fish…” She looked out to the water again, a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
“Do you think there could be... beavers?” I probed, holding my microphone ever closer.
“Why, yes of course. That wouldn’t be surprising to me at all,” she said, then paused, and looked straight into my very soul. I know there can’t really have been a fire in her eyes, that would be impossible, but I swear I saw some kind of flame. She added:
“There are crocodiles in there too.”
Crocodiles?! Did she say crocodiles? I almost laughed. At first I thought she had mistranslated the word crocodile. Maybe she meant lizard. But the word was the same in both languages. How could she know there were crocodiles in the Canal Saint-Martin? The woman wasn’t anywhere near laughing, she was deadly serious.
“I know there are crocodiles, because I put them there.”
Yep, she was serious. I had a hundred questions and I asked them all. I’ve listened to the full recording of our conversation
and my tone changes gradually from sheer incredulousness to astonishment to baffled intrigue.
The lady said she’d had two pet crocodiles and had decided to release them into the canal for a better life. She’d done it a year earlier, after council workers had emptied and dredged the canal - as they do every 15 years or so. In other words, if the lady was telling the truth, and I honestly believed she was, then perhaps the crocs could go undiscovered for years.
Of course, the crocodile claim changed the whole plot of our beaver story. In fact, the beaver angle went out the window. I followed the crocodile trail instead, which led me to the mayor of the fourth arrondissement, who told me the tale of another famous crocodile discovered in the Paris sewers in the mid-1980s. That croc was captured by firefighters and sent to an aquarium in the French countryside. That part was true, I found the old news stories to prove it. But at this point, I was far more interested in the new crocs, and whether they could possibly survive in the murky depths of Paris. A marine biologist told me he was confident that if they indeed existed, two young crocodiles could thrive in such conditions. Imagine, he said, if it was a male and female. They could become a mating pair. He said young crocs like that would grow quickly, and could already be a metre long with an appetite for rats. Or beavers…
I honestly hope the story is true and that there are two growing crocs lurking in the Paris canals. I’ve always thought the canal needed a little extra something to liven it up, and two crocodiles would certainly do the trick. The hipster Parisians wouldn’t be so quick to dip their toes in the water, now, would they?
I liked the story of the crocodiles so much that when we’d finished with all the interviews, we put it together as a podcast episode and performed it live in Paris. I rented a big room in a canal-side bar and invited a crowd to hear a “monstrously” good story. That was all I told them; I didn’t want to give away any of the plot details. This time I charged 10 euros per ticket and around 70 people showed up. But that story had a longer tail than the rest of them. For months afterwards I got emails from people saying they couldn’t look at the canal the same way. A year later a tour guide stopped me in the street to thank me for his go-to canal story for tourists. The Paris crocodiles made it to national radio in Australia and the pages of a book about Paris.
As for me, that crocodile story became one of my favourites, but it also taught me something valuable. While Paris is overflowing with some excellent tales from the history books, there are also plenty of new stories yet to be told. You’ve just gotta ask the right questions to find them.
6.3 Le Peloton Café
Where would a young Hemingway hang out if he was in Paris today? I often wonder. If you read his books about Paris, you’ll see he spent a lot of time at what are now the famous cafes on the Left Bank. These places have become so popular, so touristy, so expensive, I feel like there’s no way Hemingway would have ever stepped foot in them today. You know, I doubt he’d have even been on the Left Bank at all if he was down and out in Paris nowadays. So where would he be? If I had to guess I’d say the 11th arrondissement. Maybe the up-and-coming 19th or 20th. He probably wouldn’t even be in Paris, more likely in a nondescript French town where accommodation is affordable and beers are cheap.
As for me, I realized I was inadvertently following in Hemingway’s footsteps once again. Just like he did, I had quit my paying journalism job and was trying to make it on my own in Paris. But one thing was missing - I didn’t yet have a regular cafe of my own.
Mine turned out to be Le Peloton, a spot opened by a pair of Anglophone expats, Paul and Christian, who were looking for a finishing point for their popular bike tours. I can’t remember how I found the cafe, but I remember why I came back. It had everything I was looking for; a great location by the Seine River that wasn’t far from my basketball court, English-speaking staff and customers, and good coffee. It was around a 30-minute walk from my apartment, something I also liked, as I remained a big fan of the aimless walk in Paris.
But there was one big problem. I still had essentially no income, and the coffees were €4 a hit. A struggling podcaster can’t hole up in the corner of a cafe with those prices. The brainwave came - as most of my Paris brainwaves apparently do - over a canal-side picnic with the cafe owners, who were halfway through one of Lina’s banana bread cakes. What if we could organize a barter system: one of Lina’s cakes in return for free coffee? We agreed that every time Lina brought in a banana bread, they’d give us 10 coffees. And what do you know, the bread sold like hot cakes, so Lina kept making it. At one point the cafe owed us 80 coffees. For the price of a few bananas, sugar, and flour, Lina and I had a regular coffee shop hangout, and I had a working space. It was at Le Peloton that I’d have meetings, edit podcast episodes, or just enjoy some downtime. I was no stranger to sharing that information on the podcast - and it turned out people were listening.
One day I was sitting at the counter of the cafe when a tourist walked in, scouting the room with wide eyes. I heard her say “red scooter” to one of the owners, then watched as he pointed towards me. The woman approached, sidled up next to me at the bar, and said:
“I’d hoped you’d be here.”
It took me by surprise. Who was this woman and what did she want from me? She continued.
“I’ve listened to every single episode of your show and I’ve been to this cafe twice hoping to meet you.”
We got chatting and she revealed that she’d planned her vacation in Paris around the podcast. She knew my Paris, had eaten where I recommended, visited my favourite sites, and done walking tours with the guides I’d had on the show. She added that she was leaving the next day, and had done everything on her bucket list. All but one thing, it turned out, one burning question that remained. She lowered her voice.
“So, you have to tell me… was the crocodile story true?”
I told her that I believed it was true. Her eyes lit up.
“Well that’s the one thing I haven’t done. I want to explore the Canal Saint-Martin; I wanna find the crocodiles,” she said.
Without a second’s thought, I said I’d show her the canal right then if she’d like to book one of my walking tours. I had no idea why I said that, as I didn’t do walking tours. I’d never given a walking tour before. She asked how much I charged. My mind raced. How much did I charge? Out of nowhere, I said 100 euros.
“Will you show me where the crocodiles were released?” she asked, tentatively.
Was she kidding? For 100 euros I’d have dived in to find them.
I’d never have guessed it, but as we walked towards the canal together, a crisp 100 euro note in my pocket, I realized I’d found another way to monetize the podcast. As the summer rolled around I found that there were more tourists who wanted to see my Paris, which was incredibly flattering. It wasn’t really something I advertised - I didn’t want to be a tour guide, after all - but when people came looking for it I was ready with a plan and a price. I developed a circuit around the Marais and the canal, where I’d tell the stories behind my shows. The places I found interesting in Paris. The kinds of places you could find crocodiles, if you believed those kinds of stories.
6.4 Finding Mary
I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell the story of when I first came to Paris. I was in my early 20s and had been travelling through eastern Africa. I was living on the tightest of tight budgets - and I arrived in London with just 20 pounds in my wallet. The rest of my family got to London at around the same time as I did for a big family reunion a few days down the line, and it was decided that I should take my little brother Eddie to Paris. He’d been learning all about the City of Light at school and was desperate to see it with his own eyes. I was hesitant at first. You see, he was 12 years old at the time, a young 12 by all means, and I was 21. I have no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to leave Eddie in my hands, but that’s what they did. With the Eurostar train f
ar too expensive for our last-minute trip, we booked an overnight bus, packed a change of clothes, and arranged a bus ticket back a day later. All we’d need to do was find a place to stay overnight.
Before we left, my Dad took me aside, gripped me by the arm, and warned me to take good care of my brother. Yeah, yeah, I said. Let’s go.
We got into Paris on a sunny summer afternoon and it was like a dream. Now I don’t know what your first ever day in Paris was like - or maybe what it will be like - but ours was glorious and overwhelming at once. We got off the bus from London and hit the ground running. We walked until our feet were too sore to continue. We wanted to take it all in. Eddie, loveable Eddie, was beside himself with excitement and so was I, drinking it all up like a chocolat chaud.
“Look!” he said to me as we strolled by the River Seine. “Is that the Eiffel Tower?”
“Why, yes Eddie, I believe it is,” I said with a smile and ruffled his hair.
“Boy oh boy, it’s a lot bigger than in my school books,” he said. “Can we go and see it?”
“All in good time,” I responded. “First we need to find a tourism office and sort out a place for tonight. We need to sleep somewhere, after all,” I said.
“Of course, Oliver, you know what’s best,” he said, flashing a cherub smile that showed his double dimple.
Now I was no expert on Paris in those days, but I knew we were near the most beautiful avenue in the world, the Champs-Elysées, and I figured there’d have to be some tourist help there. Plus I was keen to relax; I was surprised at how daunting the city was, the avenues so grand that it took an hour to walk along just one.
We crossed the elegant park, the Jardin des Tuileries, and made a beeline towards the Arc de Triomphe. About halfway along we discovered a little pop-up tourist booth, which looked like it could provide the answer to our questions of accommodation for the night.