by Susie Kelly
A smiling receptionist (I wonder, is he actually laughing, rather than smiling?) asks if he can be of help. I introduce myself and point to Terry and the bicycles, and ask if there is somewhere that we can safely leave them overnight. The receptionist, whose name is Ben, picks up a telephone – I hear the words ‘anglais’ and ‘bicyclettes’. With a dramatic flourish he replaces the receiver and announces that the patron is on his way, and will deal with the bicycles. Terry is impatient, and signalling to know why I am taking so long – it has been all of three minutes since I left him on the pavement. Ben skips up a very narrow winding staircase, beckoning me to follow. He flings open the door to a small room decorated in multi-shades of glowing orange. The effect is like being inside a carton of juice, but it is clean, dry and warm. Most importantly to me, there is a small wrought iron balcony overlooking the front of the historic Gare du Nord railway station. Ben shows me how to switch on the lights and plug in the television mounted on a bracket near the ceiling. He picks up the hairdryer from its pocket in the bathroom and points it at his head, making whooshing noises. No doubt my appearance has cast doubts as to my mental capacity.
Remembering my husband is still under the bucket, I thank Ben and spiral down the stairs, and find Terry playing an indignant tug-of-war with an elderly gentleman wearing carpet slippers. He has hold of my machine and is trying to push it across the road. Terry is trying to stop him from doing so. They are evenly matched: Terry is younger, but has to try and balance his own bike at the same time as tugging on to mine, as well as keeping in contact with all the bags and bundles he has unloaded onto the pavement. The two tuggers are talking to each other, each in a language that the other does not understand.
“This gentleman is trying to help,” I explain to Terry. “He is the owner of the hotel. He is letting us put the bikes in his garage overnight.” I introduce us both to his adversary, who has a small boy in tow, who politely shakes Terry’s hand, and kisses me on both cheeks.
“Please, follow me.” Leaving obliging Ben to carry the luggage up to our room, the patron ushers us over the road, waving a scornful hand at the diversions and diggers and wooden walkways.
“Terrible. No idea at all. London is much better, Mr. Livingstone knows what he’s doing. Look what a terrible mess Delanoë,” (the mayor of Paris) “is making. It was perfectly fine before he started playing about. Now see what’s happened.” The traffic is still at an effective standstill and the noise of drivers and vehicles is deafening.
Our new friend unlocks a metal grille beside a shop, and the door slides upwards at the top of a long steep slope leading to an underground car park. We have to lean back and dig in our heels to stop the bikes dragging us down. At floor number minus 2 he unlocks another metal door, and reveals a very large, powerful, expensive shiny motorbike that he pats and strokes lovingly.
“Is it yours?” Terry asks.
“Yes, of course. At the weekends I ride it out into the country.”
It is an incongruous image, that of this stately and aged gentleman roaring around the French countryside astride a machine that looked more suited to a bearded, tattooed, horned-helmet Hell’s Angel.
Once our bikes are stowed safely and locked up, we climb back up the long slope; Bertrand walks very slowly. He tells us that he is nearly 80, and has had a heart by-pass, and is not as fit as he used to be. He calls himself ‘Le Comte de Paris’, he laughs, because his surname is Comte. He certainly has the aristocratic looks, bearing and manners to go with the title; he wishes us a happy evening as we part company.
Up in the radiant room we take it in turns to bathe, and then stand out on the balcony in the dusk. Now that the digging machines have closed down for the night, and their clanking, grinding noises are silenced, the traffic is no more than a rhythmic buzz, broken just once in a while by a brief peep, an occasional shout, a door closing. The streetlights awaken, illuminating the full havoc caused by the roadworks. We have an unhindered view of the magnificent Gare du Nord, an example of industrial design from an age when buildings were not only built for functionality, but also for beauty and elegance. Three tricolores flutter on the roof. The central elevation is topped by nine female statues, representing major international destinations. At the next level down, and spanning the left and right flanks, sheltered in cosy niches are fourteen male statues dressed in flowing robes – they could be apostles, saints or kings, it is difficult to say – and they signify major French cities. To make it unmistakably clear which station this is, the word “Nord” is engraved in the stone eight times on the upper front elevation of the building, and again at ground-floor level. For good measure, ‘Chemin du Fer du Nord’ is carved on the side of the wings.
Bertrand had mentioned that when the original station was completed in 1846 it was already too small to serve the booming railway traffic. It had been meticulously dismantled and transported to Lille where it is now known as the station of Lille Flandres. We are looking at La Gare du Nord mark II.
The station has always been a place of excitement and romance in my imagination, a haunt of spies, star-crossed lovers, and shadowy figures in long raincoats dragging on cigarettes and lurking with intent. We go to see if this bears any resemblance to reality, and I avoid looking in the cruel mirror in the lobby, because I really don’t want to see what I look like in my little chiffon skirt and black top. Limited by the available space in our luggage, I team my ‘going out’ wardrobe for the trip with a blue cycling jacket (to ward off the chilly evening air and scattered raindrops), and the gold moccasins which seemed the ideal footwear when I was packing, but look quite inappropriate now.
What is most noticeable about the concourse of the station is its cleanliness. The floors and the platforms shine as if they have been polished for hours. So do the trains standing with their noses buried in the colourful plants clambering from flower boxes beneath the buffers. The half a million passengers who use the station daily haven’t left any trace of their passing: not a sweet-wrapper, not a cigarette butt, not a dropped ticket in sight. With its shops and cafés and escalators the station resembles a skyport terminal, nothing like the vaguely sinister and murky sort of place I had imagined.
We decide to come back after we’ve eaten, when maybe the globe lights on their iron posts will add a romantic glow to the building, which the weak ambient light from the glass roof fails to do.
Multitudes of bars, brasseries, cafés and restaurants surround the station, and we select one where a lone waiter copes efficiently with a dozen tables and still manages a smile, and the food is fine.
Seen from a full stomach, half a bottle of rosé and two generous Baileys, in retrospect our journey today doesn’t seem nearly as horrifying as it did when it was happening, and tomorrow there’s only a short distance to negotiate before we will be out of town and into the countryside. I am pleased with myself for having come this far, and I realise that in some rather twisted way, I had quite enjoyed being terrified.
Even by lamplight, the interior of the Gare du Nord is too clean and bright to be romantic, and there are no signs of any shadowy figures or anguished lovers. Terry photographs a number of trains, until a burly, armed policeman politely stops him when he points his camera at the maroon and silver Thalys. The appeal of looking at trains has until now escaped me, but I cannot imagine that there exists a more exquisite engine that this svelte, bullet-shaped beauty that links Paris with Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne.
“Plan Vigipirate,” (France’s anti-terror alert system) explains the flic [French slang for a policeman], a little apologetically.
When we arrive back at our hotel after 11.00 pm, Ben is still on duty, fresh as a daisy, and bright as a button. Breakfast, he explains, can be taken in our room, or in the cellar – he points down at the floor.
It takes me a long time to fall asleep because of the continual noise from the streets below, something I haven’t heard for many years, living as we do in a small hamlet in the middle of rural France. Later
, I wake disorientated, sure that we are in London and must get back to France as soon as possible. Terry reassures me that we are exactly where we are meant to be, and that I should go back to sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
Versailles
“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Ecclesiastes 8:15
The young Marie-Antoinette 1769, Portrait by Joseph Ducreux
WHEN some new friends, animal lovers, had volunteered to care for our menagerie for three weeks, we leapt at the rare opportunity to take a holiday. Two places we particularly wanted to visit were the palace of Versailles, and Epernay, the spiritual home of champagne. The two towns, roughly 150 miles distant from each other, are linked by the Marne valley, one of France’s least publicised, yet most historic areas. Travelling by car is a poor way to get in touch with the countryside, and Terry didn’t want to walk – a shame as walking is my major accomplishment. Ruling out boats, camels and horses as too expensive, impractical and restrictive, we had settled on cycling, albeit more than a little reluctantly on my part.
I still harbour bitter memories of the daily cycle ride to school when each new day, it seemed, brought a puncture, snatching brakes, snapping cables, or a greasy chain falling off and covering my legs with black marks. The bike was my enemy, making life as difficult, uncomfortable and dangerous as it could, and the prospect of riding one for several hundred miles was not one that filled me with extreme delight, but it would be the most practical way to travel, allowing us flexibility and the opportunity to enjoy and explore the countryside in a leisurely way. I’m a slothful creature with chronic back problems, and for the previous two years a trapped sciatic nerve had been causing unpredictable spasms of exquisite pain. To compensate for these personal shortcomings, I’d bought an electrically assisted machine. It wasn’t a moped, it still needed to be pedalled, but the 36-volt battery delivered a fair boost, as if somebody was giving the bike a helping push, as my father had done when I was a small child. Managed carefully, a fully charged battery would last for up to 45 miles; all it needed was plugging into an electric power point for a few hours to recharge. Beginning at Versailles, after visiting the palace we’d cycle to Paris – a thought that I had pushed into the deepest recesses of my mind. From there we’d travel through the Marne departément in the Champagne-Ardennes region.
There seemed to be a dearth of information about the area; at the university library in Poitiers books about the Marne were remarkable for their non-existence on the shelves. The librarian searched her catalogue, to no avail. No, there wasn’t a single publication dedicated to departément 51. Our French friends pulled faces when we announced our plans to explore there, saying they were dubious that we’d find anything at all of interest.
While gathering information for our trip – something Terry was more than happy to leave to me – I noticed we would be following the same route as that taken by King Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie-Antoinette in their legendary attempt to escape from the wrath of the French Revolution. Where they had been, we were going, in their footsteps and wheel-tracks, and so I planned to try and integrate our journey with theirs.
With our bikes loaded onto the car, we drove to Versailles on the last day of May, a month that had been far from merry, each day having been uniformly grey and cold. That morning when we left home the skies had shown a promising hint of blue, but the nearer we came to Paris the gloomier appeared the clouds hanging over the capital. A few timid raindrops splattered onto the windscreen and by the time we arrived, Versailles was beneath a blanket of purple clouds and surrounded by rumbling thunder. We checked into our chambre d’hôte, swaddled ourselves in waterproofs, and cycled to the park, which we planned to explore today, visiting the palace tomorrow morning before leaving for Paris.
Five minutes later the clouds collapsed beneath their weight and exploded into a deluge, turning the roads into rivers and driving icy rain down the backs of our necks, up through our sleeves, and into our shoes. Together with a huddle of similarly soaked people we sought shelter in the nearest and only dry place, the park’s lavatories, where a motherly lady promised that in a few minutes the sun would come bursting out. She was well meaning, but quite wrong. We stood eating a packet of miniature doughnuts while pebble-like raindrops battered the road and the cars parked along it. We discussed how we would cope if this weather lasted for the whole three weeks of our journey, as French friends had predicted it very likely would. Once the torrent had dwindled to a heavy drizzle, we rode around the park stoically, slashed by blades of freezing wind. I felt quite furious, absolutely enraged, that after an already overlong winter and dismal spring, the weather was still so disappointing on this, the last day of May, when it should have been at least spring-like, if not almost summery. After twenty minutes we admitted that we were not at all enjoying ourselves, so we changed our plans and went to visit the inside of the palace, queuing with a small group of other wet people waiting to get into the building that Marie-Antoinette had once so desperately wanted to get out of.
The palace peered out through a robust network of scaffolding that could not hide its vast splendour. When Louis XIV, the Sun King, disenchanted after five years of civil war, wished to relocate from Paris so that he could collect his devious aristocracy under one roof where he could keep an eye on them, he decided to transform his father’s simple hunting lodge, known as the House of Cards, into the most legendary and opulent palace in the Western world. The cost was unimaginable. No expense was too great, neither in terms of money nor human life, for the solar monarch’s self-glorification.
We began our visit in the chapel, an astonishing confection of gleaming gilt and bright white marble, sculpted stonework and fluted columns rising eighty feet to a vaulted and magnificently painted ceiling.
It was here that 14-year-old Austrian Archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna of Habsburg-Lorraine, more familiarly known now as Marie-Antoinette, took the first step towards the scaffold, when she married the lumpen 15-year-old French ‘dolphin’ [the hereditary title of the French heir apparent, dating back to the 11th century], who would fairly soon have the misfortune of becoming Louis XVI of France.
If you believe in omens, you may find it significant that the Archduchess was born on the day following the cataclysmic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which left an estimated 90,000 dead, and is still regarded as one of the world’s most devastating natural disasters.
A high-spirited and poorly-educated tomboy, the young girl was a sacrificial offering made by her mother, Maria-Theresa, Archduchess, Queen of Austria and Holy Roman Empress, to preserve Franco-Austrian harmony. Despite maternal misgivings as to the future awaiting the girl, Maria-Theresa packed off her daughter to the French House of Bourbon, for what use were children if not to extend one’s power base and protect one’s borders? Anyway, she considered that her daughter should be more than satisfied to become a queen. Expecting happiness as well was just plain greedy.
It had taken many months for Austria and France to thrash out the fine points of the marriage contract between Louis and Marie-Antoinette, down to the most tedious of details. How many of this, how many of that; where, when, who, why and how. Protocol was everything. En route to her new life, the girl was ceremoniously handed over from Austria to France, and symbolically stripped of all her clothing, servants, pet dog, and even her name. From now on, she was exclusively French property.
Her bridegroom was dull, uncouth and most definitely not physically attractive; his interests were limited to hunting, fiddling with locks, and eating. He noted laconically in his diary, when his bride, having arrived in a great cavalcade, was introduced to him: ‘Met the new wife’. On his wedding day: ‘My marriage. Apartment in the gallery. Royal banquet in the Salle d’Opera’. A few days later: ‘Had an indigestion’. He could not be accused of being a romantic.
What were these two children, selected to be mated like animals, thinking about, I mused, during their marriage ceremony? Was Louis wondering how soon it wo
uld be over so that he could go hunting? Was the bride missing her mother and siblings?
To celebrate the royal marriage, a grand firework display was held at the square called Place Louis XIV in Paris. A fire broke out; the crowd stampeded to escape the flames, and 132 people were trampled to death.
Another bad omen? Twenty-two years later, that square would have been renamed Place de la Revolution. It was the last place the newly-weds would ever see.
But let’s not worry too much about that just now. It’s a long way off, and we have far to go.
From the chapel we trundled on along with the crowd from one gold-plated room to the next. There was not a square inch of floor, wall or ceiling that was not ornately adorned. It looked to me (and I have to admit that unlike Terry, I am not a lover of fancy furnishings, frills and flounces,) as if successive inhabitants had tried to see just how much decoration they could cram into the available space. From one room to another we all shuffled, past marble pillars, gilded doors; glittering chandeliers, polished candelabras and porcelain jars; bronze busts, oil paintings, marble sculptures, mirrors, tapestries, vases, chairs and sofas that looked uncomfortable, and ugly, heavy cabinets and tables with hard edges. Very bad Feng Shui. We gawped at painted ceilings until our necks ached. Overwhelming opulence, wild profligacy, the triumph of excess over moderation, it seemed to me a beautiful example of more is never enough.