by Oliver Gee
We reached the town of Lons-le-Saunier on the other side of the mountains and the hotelier couldn’t believe what we’d done. He kept repeating the details as we told him. You started in Paris!? Via Brittany?! You crossed the mountains?! For a honeymoon?! He upgraded our room to the biggest he had and sent up congratulatory drinks.
Lina and I, exhausted, unfolded our map of France on the bed and studied it once more. The plan had been to make a sweeping arc back towards Paris via the northeast of France, thereby exploring a new part of the country and tidily completing the other arc of the love heart shape. But as the sun set out the window and we sat on the edge of the bed, we decided that enough was enough and we instead planned a direct route back to Paris. The heart was a gimmick, and even though we’d based so many of our decisions on that silly heart-shaped route, completing it didn’t seem important anymore.
In some ways, that day felt like the last of the journey, even though we’d continue for another week. We had driven 130 kilometres that day, which might not sound like much to you if you’re used to travelling by car or motorbike, but for us it was a stupendous achievement. Tough driving conditions, perilous and unfenced ledges, and speeds as slow as 10 km, it was no wonder the hotelier was amazed. As for me, I was done. Absolutely wrecked. And so was Lina.
We plotted the route back to Paris with a rough idea of where we’d stay each night. While the carefree adventure was now (pretty much) over, we planned for a few memorable sights on the way home like some ancient caves and the pilgrim site of Vézelay. But make no mistake, we were done. We had conquered the mountains. The Red Beast was now The Alp Slayer.
And we slept very well.
8.9 The return
I knew we were officially back in Paris when I saw the other scooters. For two months, we were the only scooter on the road. Cars would beep their horns as they passed us, waving in delight to see us in the remote French countryside. Other motorists would chat to us at gas stations. But the novelty was gone as we approached the capital from the south. It was strange to see how the city became so much denser from such a long way out. Cornfields turned into houses. Houses turned into buildings. Roads turned into highways. Traffic lights popped up more and more frequently. And there was traffic. Heavy traffic. And just like that, we no longer felt unique. We were back to being one of the pack. Two people in the glorious heap of a million. Sure, we had a story, but everyone did. This was Paris, after all.
We took a few victory laps around the Arc de Triomphe then headed to a friend’s place to crash, and to crash hard. The friend was out of town for the week and we didn’t have anywhere else to go, after all, since our apartment had been sold off while we were away. Meanwhile, the hotel prices in Paris were a rude awakening after two months in the countryside. That night we went to our local bar to meet our friends who we hadn’t seen for months. And each of them, without fail, walked into the bar and said the same thing:
“I’ll be honest. I was certain you wouldn’t make it”.
But we did make it. 4,000 kilometres, countless terrible hotel rooms, two months, one honeymoon. We’d scooted through the wild plains of the Camargues national park, where white horses and pink flamingos roam in green fields and on white beaches. We dined in Michelin starred restaurants and swam in the Mediterranean. We’d broken bread with village mayors, had numerous run-ins with local doctors, and three visits to the mechanic for repairs. I tasted cognac in Cognac, Bordeaux in Bordeaux, and Chantilly cream in Chantilly. We’d admired the ancient arenas of Provence, explored abandoned chateaux, and even stayed in one. I’d met fans, friends, and family along the way - and more kindly strangers than I could ever list. We’d scaled the ramparts in Carcassonne and Mont-Saint-Michel, dipped our toes in three different seas, and shared the view from the top of the Alps with soaring falcons.
In short, we’d seen France, the real France, the France that isn’t Paris. And we could appreciate, well and truly, that it’s a magnificent part of the world. The trip put the country into perspective, and as a result, it let me understand Paris and its people better too. Most French people in Paris aren’t originally from the capital, and they often take great pride in talking about their hometowns and regions. Now that I was armed with the context from the trip, I felt I could understand the French a whole lot better. After all, as we had heard time and time again on our trip, we had probably seen more of France than many French people ever will. It wasn’t an easy journey but we did it and it was wonderful. The scooter survived. And so did the relationship, thank God.
And for the umpteenth time in my Parisian life, I got ready for bed that night exhausted and I wondered what my next step would be. After all, we didn’t have an apartment, our belongings were in storage, and we had no idea what the future held. As I got to bed, I saw Lina looking over the map from our trip and it turned out there was one last surprise.
She was drawing the last day of the journey onto the map, and she paused after adding the final stroke. She stepped back, turned her head to one side and furrowed her brow.
“You know,” she said, “we may just have made the heart shape after all.”
She took the map, which was almost as big as the bed, and turned it ninety degrees in a clockwise direction. Unbelievably, miraculously, we had indeed made a heart shape - and a rather impressive one at that. When we’d ducked inland from the west coast to visit the village of Verteuil, we’d fashioned a clear inward pinch or cusp at what was now the top of the heart. Annecy, to the east of France and on the opposite side of the country, was now the pointed outward pinch at the bottom. Paris and Marseille marked the outer edges, with the arcs now looping around Brittany and the southwest.
“It’s a miracle, a romantic miracle,” I said.
“It’s a miracle that the scooter survived,” she responded.
We’d been in Paris for almost four years now. The real miracle would be if we could find another apartment and make it to five.
CHAPTER NINE
Moving to Montmartre, free drinks for life, and one last party.
9.1 Montmartre
“You know,” she said, lowering her voice and looking over her shoulder. “You could always bribe them. That’s what we did.”
My eyes widened. How exciting. How daring. How… infuriating.
I was sitting in a cafe on the Left Bank with a woman who’d finally found herself an apartment in Paris. She was an American, so was her husband, and they’d had enough.
“We’d been to 20 home viewings and no one ever called back. We got so sick of it that in the end we just offered the landlord an extra hundred euros a month. And it worked.”
My mind raced. No wonder it’s so hard to find a place, people are paying more than the asking price. How do the rest of us stand a chance? And we were already undesirables. If you lined me and Lina up against ten other people looking at an apartment, we may have just been the worst candidates. Two foreigners, neither with a full-time job contract from a French company, and lacking the infamous dossier - the series of papers proving that you earn the ‘right amount’ of money. Lina’s shoe company was growing, but was still based in Sweden, meaning that I needed to prove that I earned over three times the rent per month… which I didn’t. Not even close at that point. We already knew that we’d struggle to find a place after we’d been turned down for the drag queen’s apartment two years earlier.
“You seem like such lovely people,” the real estate agent said at the time. “But if you can’t prove that you have a stable income from France then we just can’t help you.”
A British guy told me to forge a dossier. A Parisian said his accountant had ‘modified’ his payslips with a healthier salary. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but this was ridiculous. It seemed the only real option was to buy a place, but unfortunately that was still a while away. So what are you supposed to do when you’re competing with fraudsters, bribers, and the French?
One course is to play the same game, which I considered. The other is to rely on the network that I’d built over the past four years in France. It was the only way for us, really. I bombarded my social media platforms with posts about what I was looking for, sharing them in various housing groups and online pages. I explained that I was the kind of guy who loved paying rent on time and that Lina enjoyed nothing more than being tidy around the house.
And I got a lot of responses, which surprised us both. It felt like the tables had turned; we didn’t have to prove ourselves like we would with a real estate agent. We were being invited to see apartments by people who wanted to have us there. Of course, there was an added danger to this approach: doing business without a professional middleman or woman can lead to all kinds of scams. But we were getting desperate. And to make matters worse, Lina, the standard by which I measure all things of good taste, was away in Sweden for work and I had to do it alone. Imagine the pressure! This wasn’t just picking a restaurant, a movie, or a holiday destination. This was finding a home!
But hell, I live for challenges like this and I’d come a long way since I was too afraid to walk onto the basketball court. So I took to the apartment hunting with an appetite and criss-crossed the city looking for a home. And I suppose if it wasn’t for the constant reminder that we were desperate, apartment hunting in Paris was rather good fun.
I got to meet new people who in some cases were being extremely kind because they were also desperate. One young couple, who contacted us because they thought the wording in our ad was so funny, poured me drinks and invited me to stay for dinner. They were heading to New Zealand for a year and couldn’t find a reliable tenant. Their apartment was the best I saw, but it was way out in northwestern Paris, right on the edge of the city. I almost took it, but kept coming back to the thought: Why live in Paris if we’re not going to be living in Paris? If we’re going to be one hour outside of the action, would it really make any difference to live two hours out? Nantes and Bordeaux in western France were appealing to us after the honeymoon, and wildly cheaper than Paris. The thought crossed our minds to throw it all in and get a much bigger place out in the countryside.
Despite some very near hits, I still had no place and my time at an AirBnB in the north of the city was running out. As a last resort, I messaged a woman I vaguely knew who worked with holiday rentals - expensive ones though, the kind I couldn’t afford. I told her my budget and she laughed. We were in different leagues, apparently. But a week later, she called to say a Frenchwoman had a place in Montmartre that matched my price. Montmartre, eh? Could we live in Montmartre? Despite four years in Paris at this point, I was no expert on what the locals call the village of Paris. I always considered it to be a little too far outside the city, a little too, well, touristy. But I could certainly take a look at the apartment.
This landlady, it turned out, hadn’t yet advertised her property. She hadn’t taken any photos of it either, which was no surprise. The Parisians are notoriously bad at photographing their own apartments. Sometimes you’ll see rental photos with dirty dishes in the kitchen, untidy bathrooms, or people lazing on the lounge room sofa. I emailed the woman for more information and she told me that she needed a reliable tenant as she was moving to the suburbs. Apparently she was about to start a family and was in a hurry. She glossed over the practicalities of the apartment, a one-bedroom place on the fifth floor, and I said I’d come that afternoon.
So there I was, ready to visit yet another apartment, and once again flying blind with no idea what to expect. But this one felt different. Five floors up in Montmartre could mean anything. And Montmartre. The idea felt exotic to me. Romantic even. Montmartre, the quartier that had attracted young artists for decades. Perhaps the most charming part of Paris. But to live there? I looked up the address online, it was on a street right between the Moulin Rouge and Sacre-Coeur. The heart of Montmartre.
I headed over and found the building on an impossibly quiet cobbled road halfway up a hill (like most of Montmartre). I punched in the code, buzzed for the landlady, and she told me to head to the top floor via the stairs. There was no elevator (of course). I took the stairs two by two, marvelling at how five floors seemed so much more manageable than seven. But what, I wondered, would be behind door waiting for me on the fifth floor?
When I got to the top, the landlady was standing there ready. She was a young mousy woman, the kind who looked like she enjoyed getting lost in a good book. She dragged open the door and revealed a small and cluttered hallway. The bookish bit was right, books were planted like decorations on every surface. Folders and papers, everywhere. Stacks of them. I looked beyond the woman, who was beckoning me in, and the library theme continued throughout the apartment. And it wasn’t just books. There were things, objects, everywhere. On closer inspection, the table in the hallway was actually a small piano. I glanced to the right, where a kitchenette was hidden by stacks of plates, pots, pans, and groceries. I tried to imagine where she chopped vegetables since there was no surface space. The bedroom over her shoulder looked like an overflowing vintage clothing shop. She didn’t believe in storage, it seemed, or at least she preferred stackage.
“Excuse the mess, I’m right at the end of my final exams,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the apartment. “But come in, come in.”
I kicked off my shoes and followed her into the bird’s nest of a lounge room. There were piles of books and CDs on the floor and two ankle-high tables in the centre that were cluttered with flowerpots, plants, mugs and more. Clothes were folded in piles on the sofa and the little desk in the corner looked like a stationery store that had been bombed. Even the walls were home to hanging clothes, hats, frames, masks, or rugs.
I was taking all this in while trying to keep up with the woman’s rapid fire French. She asked where I was from and when I said Australia she switched into perfect English. It turned out her mother was American. As we got to talking, I realized that she was a delightful person, perhaps just a bit stressed from her university exams. She was set to become a doctor and hadn’t had time to think of anything but her books for months on end.
The shock of the clutter and the foreign language had thrown me, but I was soon back to my senses and wondering if the apartment could really work for two people. It certainly seemed too small, but was that just all the books? I tried to reimagine the rooms as if they were empty. I mentally added a cupboard or two, removed 500 books from the floors, got rid of the piano, and stripped the walls of everything. This could work...
One thing I really did like was the light. Even on a winter’s afternoon, the place was bright thanks to the two ceiling-high French windows facing west. They looked directly into the building across the road, but there was a huge emptiness beside it, meaning a heck of a lot of light shone through. The landlady said that the windows in the kitchen and bedroom were facing east and gave plenty of morning light.
“And oh, you’ve not seen the view yet! I’ve forgotten the best bit,” she said.
She opened one of the large windows, stepped through, and stood on a little balcony.
“Come, you can open the other window and have a balcony for yourself.”
I hadn’t even noticed the balconies, tiny little things, covered in plant pots. But I followed her lead and launched open my own French window and my jaw dropped.
With only a slight glance to my left, what seemed like the entirety of Paris was spread out before me. Thousands, tens of thousands of silver rooftops and red chimney pots stretched towards an uninterrupted view of the Eiffel Tower. Because we were halfway up a hill, the whole city was a good deal lower than where we were standing. It was as if we were in a hot-air balloon flying low over Paris. And this view could be mine?
My entire mindset changed from that moment. As we stepped inside again and took the full tour, I couldn’t fault the place. Look at this, a bathroom with a full-sized shower! And fancy that, views from
the kitchen and the bedroom too! And sure, at 35m2 it was a small place (375 square feet), but it was nearly twice the size of our old home in the 2nd arrondissement. I didn’t need much more convincing; I told the woman we’d take it.
When she met Lina several days later to sign the documents, she said she hoped we would stay for a very long time. Yes, we were to live in Montmartre, the village of Paris. The setting for the Belle Epoque, where artists in the late 19th century gathered for low rent and cheap drinks. Where cabarets took the world by storm, where painters like Picasso and Renoir worked on their masterpieces, and where the legendary French singer Charles Aznavour based his most famous song, “La Bohème.”
Two weeks after we signed the contract - and decades after all those famous faces had gone - we came screeching into Montmartre in a rented van with all our belongings in the back. We’d chosen to move mid-week to avoid the weekend traffic, but it meant none of our friends were free to help us. And because the deposit on the new place had cleared our bank accounts again, there was no budget for hired help. This was a shame, because I’ve always wanted to rent one of those crane hoists I’d marvelled at so many times in Paris. The ones that lift the furniture from the street right to the top window. If only! No, we did the bulk of the move alone. Lina took the wheel of the rental van for the white-knuckle drive through the narrow one-way streets, stopped at our new address, and I unloaded as much as I could before the traffic started to pile up. Then, with no space to park a car let alone a moving van, she took off and drove in a loop of our new neighbourhood as I bounded up five flights of stairs with four years’ worth of belongings. It was insane and we were exhausted, but we did it with glee, knowing that our own little chapter was at the top of those stairs and ready to begin. Montmartre was to be on our doorstep. What a time to be alive.
9.2 The deal