Sunday Papers: Honore de Balzac

"A travel book is a chimera in which the imagination must know how to soar on a magic carpet."


On the turntable:  Bruce Springsteen, "The Wrecking Ball"

Sunday Papers: Napolean Bonaparte

"History is a set of lies agreed upon."


On the turntable:  Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

Sunday Paper: Honore de Balzac

"This is why the Orient boasts so few writers. One lives too much in oneself to have anything left of the self to hand out to others. What is the point of thought, there, where all is feeling?"

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan, "Going Going Guam"

Sunday Papers: Marcel Pagnol

"No history textbook in the world has ever been anything but a propaganda pamphlet in the service of governments."

On the turntable:  The Continental Op, "Stitch Music"
On the nighttable: Alistair Horne, "Seven Ages of Paris"

In the Protective Arms of the Father

It was still early when I climbed out of the Metro, but I knew that there would be at least one open cafe, and there was.  I sat and nursed two orders of croissant and cafe creme. The cemetery wouldn't open until 8 am, and I suppose it isn't tactful to wake the dead. 

I'd wanted to come to Père Lachaise since I first read Danny Sugarman's "No One Here Gets Out Alive," which detailed the madcap fan devotion around Jim Morrison's grave.  I'd made the long hike out here during a previous visit in 2005, but two days of snow had iced up the cemetery's hilly slopes and I had found it closed. 

The cemetery's distance from town had always been a problem, but a necessary one.  Until 1785, many of the town's residents had been buried in the near-open grave beneath today's Fontaine des Innocents near Les Halles. After the rains, the area became a mire of decomposing body parts.  Napoleon had those bodies moved to the city's famous catacombs, and when these began to fill people were buried out at Père Lachaise.  At first, residents were turned off by the cemetery's distance from the city center, so some of Paris' bigger names were moved here, in order to improve its cachet.  Writers La Fontaine and Molière were brought here first, then the tragic and celebrated lovers Abelard and Héloïse.   Steadily, the dead of Paris began to undertake this one-way trip, and Père Lachaise eventually grew into the city's largest necropolis.

Relieved to find them open, I entered the front gates and found a bench midway up the hill.  Nowhere else in Paris can there be found such a concentration of her history.  There were so many names here, and the grounds so expansive, that I needed to plot a route.  As I sat in the shade, listening to the birds, it dawned on me that I had finally escaped the incessant horns and sirens of the hectic streets of Paris.  A man with a cane hobbled by at that moment and said to me, "It’s beautiful isn't it?"  I had to agree. 

I continued up the hill in front of me.   This was the original section of the cemetery, and certainly the most beautiful.  Gothic and sometimes macabre sculptures decorated the graves of what must have been some of Paris' most noble families.  Each sculpture was a masterpiece, rivaling anything in the sterile museums of the city.  Here, surrounded by trees and dappled with morning light, the stone figures came alive.

I topped the first hill and looked to the west, catching sight of the Eiffel Tower and the domed Pantheon, itself a repository of renowned dead.  I saw too the man with the cane, ducking down one of the small cobbled trails that extended the wider "boulevards."  As he disappeared once more from view, I wondered if he was here due to grief or mere curiosity.  Through the morning, I'd repeatedly wonder this any time I encountered any other strollers, offering a subdued smile rather than a boisterous "Bonjour."

I found Colette's grave first, then sought out Chopin.  As I was looking, I took a photo of a life-sized figure of a man into whose hands someone had placed a rose.  I liked how the red of the rose contrasted so strongly against the grey stone.  Just then someone shouted out at me, and I turned to see a man with wild hair approaching, holding a thick notebook to his chest.  He repeated what he had shouted, then asked me, "Speak English?"  As I nodded, he told me that I was looking at one of the men who had designed the Louvre.  He then launched into a frenetic spiel, throwing out names of the famed dead in between answering questions.
"Do you know Chopin?" Gesturing behind him.
"Yes."
 "Balzac?
"Yes"
"Proust."
"Of course."
"Thierry Le Roi?"  I paused and apparently made a puzzled face.  Then he held out his hand to shake.  "And you?"
"Ted Taylor."
"Ah, English!  There are (X) English people buried here."
"My name is English but my family is Irish."
"Ah, Oscar Wilde!  There are (X) Irish people buried here.  The first person buried here is Irish.  A young girl.  Do you have time for a tour?"
I regret that I said no, that I didn't have time.  I liked the idea of wandering around the cemetery in the company of this eccentric, slightly mad person.  But as I made the universal gesture of tapping my left wrist he simply smiled, said "Enjoy Monsieur," and sped off again.

I continued my own perambulation, to pay tribute to Balzac, Yves Montand, Sarah Berhardt, Proust. The latter's grave was littered with Metro tickets, so I added my own.  I was amazed how simple some of the graves were, and how difficult to find were others.  The most elusive grave was Edith Piaf, with whom I played peek-a-boo awhile.  I admired the prone figure of Victor Noir, whose crotch had been polished to a fine sheen by the hands of women who rubbed it as fertility talisman.  Oscar Wilde had been encased in plexiglass, yet the cherub upon his grave had been emasculated, a fate that poor Abelard had suffered in actual life.  The glass didn't stop people from kissing the cherub's face.  And of course I found the grave of Jim Morrison, though it had been barricaded, and a group of workmen had chosen that area for a smoke break, which prevented a longer visit.

I visited too a few of the names in the crematorium, including Maria Callas and Isadora Duncan.  There were a number of people standing in front, and others continued to arrive.  Some were in black, and all looked to be in their 30s.  A friend had died I suppose, someone far too young.  It was a reminder that not all of us here had come for sightseeing.  Moments like this always bring to mind one of my favorite song titles, "Strangers Die Everyday."

I continued on to the back wall of the cemetery, its strip of lawn dedicated to mass graves, to air disasters, to the members of the French resistance, to Jews killed during the Nazi occupation.  Around and to the left a stretch of wall sat beneath an apartment building. Covered now with ivy, very few bullet holes were visible from the day in May when 147 Communards were shot.  There was no information on where they had been buried.

I allowed myself some time to wander free, coming accidentally to a few interesting graves (such as the Camera installed in the tomb of the very much living cemetery ethnographer André Chabot), and missed a few that I'd have liked to see.  But the hollow grumbling in my belly told me that it was time to get back to the world of the living.   LYL had chosen to opt out of this morning excursion, not wanting to risk polluting herself with the ultimate impurity of death. As it was, I later made her anoint me with salt as a means of purification, before we went out to celebrate the rest of the day.

On the turntable:   Billy Joel, "Songs from the Attic"

La Rive Gauche

Where yesterday's walk north of the Seine had been a stroll amidst the classics of Parisian monuments, today we would take in the other side of the river, where the heroes and giants of the time hadn't been afraid to get a little dirt beneath their fingernails.

But first breakfast was in order, and what better than bread and chocolate and a cup of frothy caffeine taken upon the sidewalk?  The nearest cafe was the oddly named Cafe Winston, after Churchill of course, but I couldn't help think of 1984, as Orwell too had spent time in this city, and had penned one of my favorite books about it.  It was we who did the watching however, not Big Brother, as the passersby on their way to work offered endless entertainment.   

Closer to the river, we forewent for a moment the sound and sights of the city by ducking into the Paroisse Saint-Pierre de Caillot, a hulk of a building that was as monolithic as the Arc de Triomphe just up the street.  This was church as fortress, a square squat edifice originally built in the 11th Century, but redesigned in the 1930's.  It quickly became my favorite church in Paris as it was completely without pretense, free from spikes and towers and gargoyles, though those too have their charm.  I suppose I liked it because its minimalism could almost be Buddhist.

A short walk away was the river, and La Flamme de la Liberté, modeled upon the Statue of Liberty's torch. At its base lay a number of flowers to Lady Diana, killed as she was in the tunnel beneath nineteen years before.

Crossing the river now, Eiffel's creation rising sharply to our right.  The left bank of the Seine was as noisy, as hurried as the right.  We tried to ignore it, hugging the shore of the river as we went, but like yesterday, we never seemed free of the roar of cars, and what seemed the near incessant scream of sirens.  The latter was a constant for the three days we were there.  Despite its reputation as the apotheosis of Western culture, Paris is almost Asian in its chaos. The hordes of people with their hard closed faces, throwing accusative glares your way as if deciding what part you play in the whole melee of aggressively pushing along the crowded streets, constantly on their mobile phones, constantly arguing.  Motorbikes raced through and around the stand-still traffic, and on the sidewalks, very large men patrolled with very large weapons. 

The traffic was horrendous, the flow of the streets poorly planned. It was with great relief that we escaped into the Musee d'Orsay.  I loved how it maintained its look of old railway station, albeit one quite short.  How pleasant it was to walk where the rails had once been, overlooked by the statues of marble and bronze.  I liked too how it picked up where the Louvre left off chronologically (and the Pompidou Center likewise picks up the story from there).  Unlike that more visited museum across the river, the d'Orsay had a steady even tone to her collection, rather than wing after wing of overlooked works, followed by the sudden crescendo of a Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo.  More friendly too was the scale, which lessened the possibility of burnout.  (My trip to the Louvre a decade ago made more understandable Godard's famous scene shot there, and I found myself constantly looking out the tall and plentiful windows, wishing to just get on with it and return to the snow-covered streets outside.)

Ironically, it was nature brought indoors that I appreciated most today.  The big names of Impressionism wowed me, as I knew they would, but what I took away from the museum was a newfound appreciation for Sisley and his landscapes.  As a writer I've always envied painters their ability to capture light, as it is something that can't be done well with words. And Sisley presented light perfectly. Scanning my eyes across the far wall, I found myself surprised that there were so many shades of blue.   

Sadly that blue wasn't with us outdoors as well.  Clouds and rain had been a persistent travel companion from prehistoric UK, down the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basel, and now again in Paris.  I was beginning to learn it was quite a wet city, a fact I recalled from films and paintings where the light glared off the city's slick streets.

After a quick visit to the Beat Hotel and its old photos and ghosts of tobacco past we decided to reward our other senses with a meal.  Hemingway took his initial immoveable feast at a good cafe on the Place Saint-Michel and we did the same, though I've already forgotten its name.  We left the bustle of the plaza for the uphill climb past the old Roman baths, past the more Greek looking Pantheon and Clovis' ancient Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.  Here began the Sorbonne, and further on, the quiet, somewhat run down neighborhood where Hemingway had cut his teeth as a writer.

It was a shift downhill from here, then a quick diversion across the islands to Notre Dame.  I'd been of course, and the long queue turned me off, so I carried on back across the Seine over its oldest bridge, Henri IV's ironically named "Pont Neuf."  Not far from here was the famed Shakespeare & Co. bookstore (or at least an homage to Sylvia Beach's original), which I had made a priority on this visit.   Unfortunately I had made an appointment which I now needed to rush to keep.  What I remembered from 2005 as a slow pleasant meander through snowy streets was now a dash in the steady rain.

I arrived at Cafe Deux Magots a bit late.  Richard Dindo, a well-know Swiss documentary filmmaker, was waiting at what had been Hemingway's favorite table.  A fifty year resident of the Left Bank, he told me a number of tales about his life and history here.  It was a easy relaxed conversation, where we discussed French filmmakers and Japanese poets.

The day was growing late so we did what the economically-minded Hemingway rarely did: catch a taxi.  It was a mad ride, the stresses of which dissipated with the magic-hour views from the rooftop of our Hotel Raphael.

There was one more stop for the day.  During my last visit to France in March I read Colette's classic, "Gigi," and upon returning to Japan, had watched the film with my musical-crazed daughter.  The most memorable scenes had taken place in Maxim's.  Pleasantly surprised that it still existed, we decided that we needed to visit.  Walking through the door was very literally a time-warp to the Belle Epoque, where waiters in long coats offered a level of service rarely seen anymore.  Amidst a very red interior of mirror and velvet, we sat beside what later in the night would become a dance floor, and from somewhere behind the darkness of the stage a woman began a chanson croon.


There was yet another day, with drinks at the Buddha Bar (in the darkened basement of Hemingway's Crillion Hotel), a side trip to a tourist infested Versailles, and an oasis of quiet found within the Rodin Museum and garden. But by then we were growing  a little tired of Paris and its roar.  (Though we agreed that we'd like to come back a spend at least a week next time, to mop up the final sites as it were, to take in the lesser visited crumbs.)  For now we would set the plate aside.  Going beyond the metaphor, we were in fact quite looking forward to time spent in the south, to the quiet meals we'd have there.  Though Paris does deserve its food reputation and its constellation of Michelin stars, the feasts were always a little too bombastic (a criticism that could equally be leveled at Saint-Tropez).  Even with my limited time here, I was quickly beginning to realize that the best meals in France could be found in its villages, of a renown that went little further than its confines.  To quote LYL, why go out for a meal that is inferior to one that you can make yourself?  And there would be plenty of those too.

So we left Paris with a simple breakfast of croissant and cafe, taken at Gare de Lyon's Le Train Bleu, where we awaited our own.  It took us south, over hills rolling long and green, eventually beginning to shorten into a softer, cafe au lait brown populated with short trees and sheep. These shortened ever still into higher rocky spires, then fell away completely with the sea.


On the turntable:  Bill Withers, "Best of Bill Withers"
  

La Rive Droite

It took us less than an hour to get from rail to rue.  In between we taxied from Gare de Lyon to our hotel, the Hotel Raphael (which had been used by Wes Anderson for his short film, "Hotel Chevalier," and which I found out too late had been set dressed with furniture from his own apartment a few blocks away), then into the Metro for a short ride back across the city.  

Our premiere destination was the Place de Vosges, which LYL was quite excited to share with me.  Developed by Henri IV in 1605, it is the oldest planned square in Paris, and was today decorated with Parisians sprawled on the grass, enjoying a cool summer afternoon within its splendidly walled confines.  Moreso than the lawn, we were tempted by the Victor Hugo house tucked beneath the arches in one corner, but a special exhibition had resulted in a queue. We settled instead for crepes and cafe creme at a sidewalk table and watched the bustle of the trendy Marais.  

Thus fueled, we passed the large stele marking the Bastille, then followed the Seine, trying to ignore the race of traffic above.  We reentered the city where the Hotel de Ville rose up, and tried in vain to get inside.  The front plaza too proved popular with those looking for sun, as was the nearby Fontaine de Innocents.   

It was here I began to follow a course laid out in the book, A Walkable Feast, which was a companion volume to the Walks in Gertrude Stein's Paris that I had used on my last visit over a decade ago.  (The current volume was dedicated strictly to Hemingway, and as such it compared more poorly, since the Stein book dealt with all of her circle, making for longer strolls and richer variety.)  With the innards of the Pompidou Center spilling out behind us, we passed through The Halles, seemingly under perpetual construction.  The Louvre and its environs weren't any less busy, as the Jardin des Tuileries was hosting a large fun fair that seemed to harken back to the chaotic days of the Commune, with its wild rides and screaming teens.  

Things were a little calmer in the side street canyons leading to the old Opera House.  LYL made a quick detour to Chanel (picked clean this day by a cluster of Hong Kong tourists), but our intended stop at the Ritz Hotel bar (which Hemingway "liberated" in 1944) had to be tabled due to ongoing construction there.   We did find a surprising bit of solitude in the open Place Vendome, where the tall statue of a Caesaresque Napolean towers above both the room where Chopin died and the now scaffolded Ritz from where Lady Diana began her final ride.   

Along a narrow side street we took a rest at Harry's New York Bar, an idea shared with many foreigners finished with the day's work in the nearby financial district.  Spoken English filled the place, finding parallel with the decor: the crests of the public schools of England hanging above the pennants of America's better known universities.  Above a photo of Hemingway himself I found the pennant of my own alma mater of Arizona, in whose renowned creative writing program I discovered Hemingway and first devoured his Moveable Feast.  It was there I began a flirtation with Paris, or at least with his Paris, so it was there that it began.  And here, in Harry's bar, it came full circle.  A rather elliptical circle at that.  

Our next stop was Hemingway related as well, a pleasant simple meal at Gourmand Prunier, where he would dine if he had done well at the races. We considered this warranted as our own legs had by now carried us much father than his winning horses had.  

But those legs weren't finished just yet.  Up the steps of Église de la Madeleine for photos of the fading sunlight.  From here we carried on toward the lengthening shadow of the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde.  Just around the corner, the Champs-Élysées was coming into her nighttime finery.  

Up toward the famous Arch, the Avenue was closed to traffic, in some sort of rehearsal for Bastille Day. Thus unchallenged by traffic, we stepped out into the middle of the grand road and snapped away at the last traces of daylight.   
 

On the turntable:  Buffalo Springfield, "Buffalo Springfield Again"
On the nighttable:  Peter Mayle, "Toujours Provence"