by Baxter, John
LOUIS HUART, “Physiologie du Flaneur,” 1841
In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was terrified of revolution. France had survived a century of internal strife, but if one could judge from the experience of other countries, more was imminent. As it happened, revolution never did come. Two world wars would protect France from civil unrest until the student-led disturbances of 1968, still referred to with some embarrassment as les événements—the events. But Napoleon’s generals couldn’t know that. Narrow streets and crowded tenements lent themselves to house-to-house warfare. They pestered him for broad avenues joining all the institutions of government—routes down which infantry, cavalry, and even artillery could be moved at the first murmur of trouble.
Napoleon ordered Paris rebuilt. The job went to Georges Eugene Haussmann—“Baron” Haussmann, as he liked to be styled, though he was no nobleman—who did nothing by halves. He drove his boulevards through the festering alleys and created fantasies like the Etoile—the star—where twelve of them crash together in a carousel. From its heart erupts the Arc de Triomphe, a stone colossus shouldering out of the earth.
No jutting shop front or portico was permitted to encroach on the pavement. Even the balconies that stretched the width of each new building were limited to the second and sixth floors. Most important, no building could be taller than the width of the boulevard on which it stood. With this commandment alone, he gave the emperor his military thoroughfares but guaranteed they would be sunlit from midmorning to late afternoon, with wide tree-lined sidewalks.
Comparing a map of old Paris from the time of the Revolution with the new city created by Haussmann, in which the ancient crooked and narrow alleys had been replaced by spacious and wide boulevards, one can’t help but be moved by the logic and clarity of his decisions. He made enemies, of course. He lined plenty of pockets, including his own, with the municipal contracts he negotiated. Many of the poor were made homeless. Whole districts of ancient and cheap housing were torn down, replaced by new, solid, and sanitary apartment blocks in which the former inhabitants couldn’t afford to live. But he got people back onto the streets. Because of sidewalks, one could more easily go on foot to a destination rather than taking a horse or coach. Walking, formerly an unsanitary necessity, became a positive pleasure. Soon a new upwardly mobile middle class flooded in, creating a market for food, wine, clothing, and entertainment. Napoleon fired Haussmann in 1870 when the Revolution never eventuated and landowners whined about the new cost of doing business. But Haussmann lived until 1891, and saw what he had created become one of the glories of Europe.
Others who came later tried to add their signature to his. At best, they scrawled a graffito. In the 1960s, President Georges Pompidou attempted to fill the city with tower blocks. He succeeded in imposing only one—the Tour Montparnasse, Paris’s lone, embarrassing skyscraper. At least François Mitterrand had the discretion to place his monument, the glass slabs of the new national library, on the edge of the city, at Tolbiac, where one needn’t look at them.
André Malraux, minister of culture for both de Gaulle and Pompidou, worked with a lighter touch. Rather than meddling with the city’s structure, he attended to its upkeep, reviving a law that required the exterior of every building to be cleaned at least once each decade. He told Edmond Michelet, his successor: “Je vous légue un Paris blanc”—“I bequeath you a white Paris.”
If the Paris of pedestrians has heroes, they are Haussmann and Malraux. When, in the nation’s ultimate accolade, Malraux’s bones were transferred to the Panthéon, his simple wooden coffin lay in state for a day, guarded only by Giacometti’s L’Homme Qui Marche—a statue, life-size, of a gangling, long-limbed man striding purposefully into the future. The god of walkers.
With wide clean streets, Parisians began to walk, and to walk for the pleasure of it. They even coined a word for this diversion. It’s called flânerie, and someone who does it is a flâneur.
The boulevards remade Paris as the freeways remade Los Angeles. About LA’s road system, Joan Didion wrote:
A typical flaneur, from Physiologie du Flaneur, 1841
Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident.
Walking in Paris requires the same rhythm. People who lead tours or write guides crave an itinerary, the route from A to B. The flâneur has no such aim. Their promenade exists for itself, irrespective of destination. It may involve little or no movement. One might simply remain in one place—a café, for instance—and watch what goes by. I asked writer Michael Moorcock, confined to a wheelchair at the time with a foot problem, to nominate his Most Beautiful Walk in Paris. He sent me a photo of himself seated in the middle of the Luxembourg Gardens. A square meter, correctly chosen, with all that he could see from that point, was happiness enough.
I’d been in Paris for about six years before this sense invaded me. Once our daughter Louise was old enough for kindergarten, I’d take her there, first by bus, then up rue Notre Dame des Champs—where, as it happens, Hemingway lived for a time. An avenue winding along the slope of Montparnasse, it’s lined with apartment buildings and schools. We threaded through groups of slim teenagers, smoking and chattering. In other countries, boys and girls separate like oil and water, but here the sexes intermingled. They stood aside courteously as we passed, a father with his little girl by the hand: a sketch of their adult life and their future as husbands and wives.
Having delivered her to the nuns—“Au’voir, Papa . . . Au’voir, chérie”—I often returned through the Luxembourg. One November morning the sky was that metallic gray one sees in the zinc-covered roofs of Paris, a sure sign of imminent snow, though I didn’t expect, as I entered the gardens from rue d’Assas, that it would start at that moment. Turning my face from the wind-driven dust of ice, stingingly cold, I passed the shuttered puppet theater and the playground with its silent rides. Detouring around the sandpit and the unmanned police box, I reached the curved balustrade at the top of the wide stone steps that led into the lower garden, directly behind the Sénat.
All color had drained from the park, reducing it to a photograph by Kertesz or Cartier-Bresson. Nobody occupied the chairs that morning or sailed boats on the pond. There was none of the gaiety and ease one associated with the gardens in summer. Yet I felt elated. As if, like ultraviolet light, it could not penetrate glass, the essence of Paris is lost if seen through the double glazing of a hotel room or from the top of a tour bus. You must be on foot, with chilled hands thrust into your pockets, scarf wrapped round your throat, and thoughts of a hot café crème in your imagination. It made the difference between simply being present and being there.
Chapter 10
The Murderer’s Garden
Gardens, you are, by virtue of your curves, your abandon, your plunging gorge, and the softness of your curves, women of the mind—often stupid and wicked, but the very stuff of intoxication, of illusion.
LOUIS ARAGON, Paris Peasant
“Walking is an excellent idea,” Marie-Do said when I told her Odile’s advice. “You can walk in the Luxembourg.” She saw my sour look. “What’s wrong with the Luxembourg?”
It all went back to those Sunday afternoons when our parents dressed us in our best outfits and dragged us to the nearest expanse of public greenery—in our case, Sydney’s Centennial Park. As an adult, I came to appreciate, if not actively relish, this Victorian relic, its roads lined with palm trees, and the reedy ponds where indignant birds squabbled and squawked. And how symptomatic of Australian conservatism that some self-appointe
d censor had taken a hammer and chisel to the statues of Greek and Roman athletes, castrating every one, fig leaves and all. But even in infancy I recognized my natural habitat as urban. What I wanted under my feet was asphalt, not grass.
Nevertheless, next day found us walking in the Luxembourg.
“It’s the park of Marie de Medici!” Marie-Do spoke with the enthusiasm you would expect from a woman who wrote her master’s thesis on the Renaissance printers of Florence. She swung me around to face the block-long building of the Sénat. “This was her palace. It’s an exact copy of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.”
“But the Pitti’s an art gallery,” I told her. “There are things to look at.”
“There are things to look at here.”
Over the next hour, we looked at them: fountains, flower beds, yacht pond, children’s playground, puppet theater, bee farm, Botanic Association pavilion, facilities for tennis, chess, and boules, not to mention the original model for the Statue of Liberty. I preferred the outdoor café by the bandstand where one could read a book, enjoy an aperitif, and turn one’s back on all of it. The Luxembourg, I decided, was just Centennial Park with a French accent.
Gretchen, the mistress of meat, the poetess of pork, changed my mind.
In a fit of manic hospitality, we had invited to dinner a dozen dealers in rare books visiting Paris for the annual Foire des Livres Anciens. Inspired by the season’s first succulent white asparagus, I decided to serve them as a starter, steamed, with sauce hollandaise.
Ten minutes after the last guest arrived, I was still in the kitchen, whisking hollandaise, when a wave of perfume wafted in. The woman behind it was startling in spike heels and a hot pink dress edged in black lace. Champagne flute in hand, she peered at the lemon yellow emulsion.
“And what is this?”
The black hair she wore pinned up, and the hot pink of her dress accentuated skin a shade too slatey and shadowed to be Anglo-Saxon. Leni Riefenstahl had that skin, and Hedy Lamarr. Her accent gave a husky cadence to her voice, like Lieder. “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blümen?” Do you know that land where the lemon trees bloom?
It says something for the impression she made that in defiance of all wisdom I stopped whisking to explain.
“Hollandaise,” I said. “For the asparagus.” I raised the whisk and let a ribbon dribble back into the bowl. “Not thick enough yet.”
Happily, she didn’t offer to help. Instead, posing herself against the edge of the table, glass in hand, she made herself available to be admired.
“In all the confusion,” I said, getting back to whisking, “I didn’t catch your name.”
“I am Gretchen,” she said. “I am the lover of . . .”
She named our most suave guest, a U.S. dealer who’d arrived with his own champagne, of a marque so obscure it had to be not only the best but the most expensive.
“Are you a book dealer too?”
“I was. Now I am artist.”
“Painter? Sculptor? Filmmaker?”
“You would say . . . performance?” She refilled her glass from one of her lover’s bottles and leaned back. Dietrich could not have been more alluring. It would not have surprised me if she began to sing “Falling in Love Again.”
“My new work,” she said, “is in flesh.”
That was enough to stop me whisking again.
“Flesh?”
“Well, skin, at least. In Berlin . . .”
It was a hell of a story.
A few years before, her husband had abandoned her. Choosing to express her rage in meat, she planned a life-size effigy in raw pork. The plan was to dress it in one of his suits, take it into the country, set two pit bulls onto it, and, while filming it, watch them tear it apart.
“And you did this?”
“Almost. But Schweinefleisch, you know, begins to smell, and is . . . not nice. I completed only the head . . .” She paused, sniffing. “Something is burning?”
Something was burning. It was me. Mesmerized by her story, I’d backed into the gas flame and set my shirt on fire.
She rang the next day. “Hallo, hier ist Gretchen. Ist alles OK?”
“It was only a shirt,” I said. “The flames never touched me.”
“You are me for coffee joining, ja?”
I found her at that same outdoor café of the Luxembourg.
“I thought you’d suggest the Flore. Or at least Deux Magots.”
“Oh, no! So . . . gutbürgerlich . . . how do you say—middle class?”
“And this isn’t?”
She looked around at the green-painted metal chairs clustered in the shade of the huge plane trees.
“Oh, no. You don’t feel . . . something?”
“Like what?”
“From the war, perhaps?” She nodded toward the Sénat. “This was Luftwaffe headquarters, I think.”
She was right. The Nazi high command, sons of schoolmasters and shopkeepers, greedily seized the castles of countries they conquered. As the headwaiter in Casablanca says of seating Conrad Veidt’s Major Strasser, “I have already given him the best, knowing he is German and would take it anyway.” In Paris, the Gestapo occupied the Lutetia, the best hotel on the Left Bank, while the army grabbed the Crillon, overlooking the Place de la Concorde. Not to be outdone, Hugo Sperrle of the Luftwaffe snagged the Luxembourg Palace, where his boss, Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, visited him frequently. Of Sperrle, Albert Speer observed dryly, “the Field Marshal’s craving for luxury and public display ran a close second to that of his superior. He was also his match in corpulence.”
Gretchen was right. Thinking of these paths strolled by jackbooted men plotting conquest did cast a shadow. At the side entrance of the Sénat, a young policewoman stood guard in a Perspex sentry box, pistol holstered at her belt. Why had I never noticed her before?
“And also, there was Landru,” Gretchen said.
About Henri Désiré Landru, I knew. Between 1914 and 1918 he murdered ten women for their money. When the son of one victim became suspicious, he killed him also. And his preferred location for assignations was the Luxembourg.
An advertisement in France Matin baited the trap. “Widower with two children, aged 43, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.” The details were mostly true. Landru sold used furniture, with a little swindling on the side. In his film Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin’s Landru-like killer is suave, even playful—a seducer. But no middle-aged war widow wanted that. They looked for someone solid, reliable—qualities writ large in Landru. He was short and billiard-ball bald, with thick eyebrows and a bushy beard of deep mahogany red that gave him a commanding air. He embodied what his victims craved: a serious man. And when he invited his prospects home, he never offered them anything more provocative than a glass of Madeira and a biscuit. Such a gentleman. So correct.
Mass murderer Henri Désiré Landru
He dressed the part, too, down to a discreet ribbon on his lapel, supposedly a decoration from the Ministry of Education. Louis Aragon was so impressed he wrote, “What a pity that the court does not issue a programme in which one could print in italics: ‘At court and in town, Monsieur LANDRU is outfitted by THE FASHIONABLE TAILOR.’ ” Jean Cocteau found his murders almost chic. “The ordinary lover disposes of his memories by putting them on the fire: letters, flowers, gloves, locks of hair. Isn’t it simpler to set fire to the lady herself?”
“It seems so . . . ordinary,” I said, looking around at the little cluster of chairs and tables, the green-painted kiosk, the waiter lounging in the shade.
“But it is perfect!”
I began to see it with her eyes: Landru sipping an eau à la menthe, leafing through Paris Matin, patient, waiting—while his prey paused at the gate to tidy her hair or loitered at a distance among the trees, snatching a glimpse before taking the plunge.
And where better to allay suspicion than the Luxembourg? No out-of-the-
way hotels or suburban cafés, but a park, with strolling couples, nurses with baby carriages, a brass band playing, and an old woman collecting payment for the use of the chairs.
His methods, too, were conventional, even boring. Always the same advertisement, the same kind of woman, the same promise of marriage. The opening of a joint bank account into which his new fiancée deposited her savings as the traditional dot, or dowry, that all French brides brought to a marriage. Then, an invitation to spend the weekend at his country house in Gambais, sixty miles west of Paris. On Monday, he returned alone, emptied the bank account, removed anything of value from the house, including her furniture, which he transferred to his warehouse, and reinserted his advertisement in Paris Matin.
A suspicious friend alerted the police, but Landru denied everything. Where was the evidence? And indeed no body ever came to light. Neighbors at Gambais talked of Landru’s kitchen stove burning late some nights, and oily smoke streaming over the fields. But sieving the ashes produced no bones—only metal buttons and catches of the kind used in women’s corsets.
In the end, Landru’s frugality betrayed him. He bought return tickets to Gambais for himself, but only singles for his victims. After all, they weren’t coming back. He could bluster his way out of most accusations, but that detail damned him. In 1922, at Versailles, the guillotine clipped his ticket.
The house in Gambais still stands, respectable and discreet behind its well-clipped hedge and surrounded by the same flat fields across which black smoke once streamed all night long. As it happened, Richebourg was only a few kilometers away, so I occasionally passed it. Driving by, I wondered, what, for a man like that, would have been the most beautiful walk? Was it the stealthy strangler’s approach to the unsuspecting widow? Or did even a murderer, strolling toward the Luxembourg and his next assignation, take a moment to enjoy the day, smile at a child, and share Louis Aragon’s vision of the garden as a woman, and this garden in particular as his own, to ravish and murder?