Authors: John Baxter
B004MMEIOG EBOK (12 page)
Chapter 24
Paris When it Sizzled
Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
HENRY MILLER,
The World of Sex
T
hanks to Gelenter, and helped by word of mouth, I soon had more tour clients than I could handle. Each Monday morning, and occasionally on other days as well, I’d leave home at 9:40 and stroll along boulevard Saint-Germain to Deux Magots, where my guests of the day were waiting.
My afternoon with Andrew had shown the error of telling too much. With each tour, I omitted a little more information and covered a little less ground. Nobody remembered a statistic, but an anecdote could stick like a burr, and an image imprint itself on the imagination. Combing the best that had been written about Paris or depicted by its artists, I compiled a portfolio small enough to be carried on every walk.
How best to evoke the Paris that Hemingway and others like him first encountered after World War I: buildings black with centuries of grime, gutters running with waste water and food slops on which goats, dogs, and chickens fed? In words, nothing bettered George Orwell’s sour descriptions in
Down and Out in Paris and London
, written when he worked as a
plongeur
, a dishwasher in a Right Bank hotel, but lived in a Left Bank slum.
The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs.
But a photograph of such a room by Brassaï or Eli Lotar, or a street scene by Atget, told the story even better.
What did Le Dôme look like when Henry Miller loitered there, sipping
pastis
, watching the saucers pile up, and scanning the crowd for some acquaintance who’d pay his tab? Well, here’s a picture as it was when the untidy, unwashed Miller frequented it. And one of the Rotonde, too—not the expensive and smart café of today, but the noisy hangout of wannabee artists, hookers, and miscellaneous mysteries that Miller and Hemingway knew.
Sometimes I’d bring along the kind of saucer served under the aperitifs and cafés, each one printed with the price of the drink, so that even the most forgetful waiter needed simply to tote up the pile at the drinker’s elbow. At other times, I’d produce an absinthe spoon and show how one balanced it across the glass, placed a cube of sugar in the middle, then trickled ice water through it into the opalescent emerald fluid, the “green fairy” that supposedly drove drinkers mad but, as recompense, endowed them with vivid dreams.
The Rotonde café, Montparnasse, 1920s
Most of my clients needed little to stir the imagination. They would not have come to Paris if they were not already halfway convinced. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his sharpest insight, realized that “existence precedes essence,” that we act first, then find a philosophy to explain our actions. There are no “natural laws”—only those we make for ourselves. Every week, I’d see Sartre vindicated as some Ohio schoolteacher or advertising executive from Santa Barbara ran a hand over the counter of a café on rue Jacob while I explained it was at
this very bar
that Fitzgerald and Hemingway stood when a tearful Scott confessed that “Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make a woman happy. . . . She said it was a matter of measurements.”
“And if you wish,” I pointed to narrow steps leading into darkness, “you can visit where they conducted the examination that Hemingway mentions—but never describes—in
A Moveable Feast
.”
The café did happen to be the original, but I could have used another, and nobody would be the wiser. What mattered was the sense of reaching out and touching the past. After the first hour, the visitors moved more slowly, looked around more keenly, didn’t simply peer into the street-level boutiques but raised their eyes to the windows of the first floor and wondered. . .
And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
JOB 1:7
H
ugo rang me one gray Sunday in the middle of my first spring in Paris.
Back in those days, before the arrival of Louise, Marie-Do and I lived in her tiny studio in Place Dauphine, on the Ile de la Cité. I spoke no French and knew nobody except for a few English-speakers rounded up by her compassionate family.
Of these relative strangers, the one I saw most was Hugo. A wolfish New Yorker in his late thirties, he appeared able to live in Paris without doing anything very much except for . . . well, some sort of writing. He was never very precise, and I didn’t press, mostly in fear that he’d ask me to read something.
He’d been amiable enough when we met at the home of my sister-in-law, but his manner struck me as sinister. Probably his way of looking at one sideways, never directly, and communicating in a barely audible mumble. It fitted him perfectly to play Faulkner’s “soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards.”
Though Hugo set out to make me a friend, I never believed for a moment in his sincerity. At first I assumed he wanted an entrée to editors and agents for his mysterious literary efforts. As I got to know him better, other motives became more credible. He appeared to have cast me as a character in a psychodrama being played out in his mind. Expatriate fiction from Henry James to Patricia Highsmith seethes with such situations, but the closest parallel appeared to be that classic tale of expatriate betrayal,
The Third Man
. In this Parisian version, I was bumbling Holly Martins, writer of pulp westerns, adrift in postwar Vienna. Not speaking a word of the language, I was patronized and misled by smarter and more cunning locals, none more so than my supposed friend, suave, ruthless, philosophizing black marketer Harry Lime—embodied, naturally, in Hugo.
It was as Lime that Hugo rang me that afternoon. Marie-Do was at work and I’d been thinking about writing. Thinking was as far as it got. I felt numbed by the hollow booming of Notre Dame’s bells, so unlike the clanging cheerfulness of English churches. The sense in Paris that one was wading through history, real and imagined, could depress you. Was there anything here that hadn’t already been thought, written, done?
Hugo’s call chimed exactly with my mood.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Nothing. You?”
“Nothing. Wanna, uh, go someplace?”
“Like?”
“Oh . . . someplace. I gotta few ideas. See you at the Danton at two?”
At two, the overcast was, if anything, more oppressive. A wind drove the tourists in their beige Burberries through the square like dead leaves. I watched Hugo as he crossed boulevard Saint-Germain. His grubby sweater, baggy cords, and hand-knitted scarf fit right in. Ignoring the Paris tradition of scarfmanship, in which the way you wrapped, looped, hung, or draped the thing conveyed subtle hints about your character, profession, and sexual orientation, he wore both ends tucked down the front of the sweater, possibly the least attractive style short of a hangman’s knot.
He didn’t sit down.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
His grin was malevolent. Had I been a woman, I’d have invented a headache. As it was, I walked to the corner with him and descended into the métro in the shadow of Danton’s monument, erected, like most statues, long after it could have given the subject any satisfaction.
We emerged at Square Denfert-Rochereau, on the southern edge of old Paris, almost underneath another memorial, the bronze
Lion de Belfort
, a lion
couchant
, celebrating the inadequate defense of Paris against the Prussians in 1870. A few blocks farther down boulevard Saint-Michel, I’d often passed a modest stone plinth topped by the languid semireclining figure of a naked woman, holding her head, apparently in mild distress, as from a hangover. The wordy inscription explains that she commemorates the discovery of quinine as a defense against malaria. Obviously the size of statues in France is in inverse proportion to the achievement they celebrate.
The catacombs. “Here begins the empire of death.”
In the shadow of the lion, two eighteenth-century customs houses marked where the city’s inner walls once separated Paris proper from the countryside. Hugo led me across to one of them. We lined up at a tiny booth with shattered windows, paid ten francs, and were admitted through a door in a wooden wall painted deep, gloomy green. I puzzled out the water-stained sheet of official regulations framed behind dirty glass.
“The
Catacombs
?”
Hugo looked smug. He was enjoying this—so much, in fact, that he’d paid my admission himself—incredible munificence from someone who used a pocket calculator to split a café bill.
“What made you think I’d want to go down here?” The narrow concrete staircase spiraling into the earth hardly looked wide enough to admit our shoulders.
“It’s interesting.” Hugo grinned evily. “You’ll love it.”
“I don’t think so.” I read the wooden sign. “Sixty meters—that’s almost two hundred feet.”
“Writers should experience everything.”
Hugo’s sneer was infuriating. Grabbing a steel railing worn smooth by thousands of nervous hands, I joined the procession descending into the dark.
It took a long time. The grating of our soles on gritty concrete became increasingly loud. I was aware of my breath, and an oppressive heaviness and dampness.
At the bottom, we entered a long tunnel, so narrow that outstretched hands could touch both walls. Hugo had brought a flashlight. So had other visitors, obviously regulars like him. He turned it on the walls, where dressed stone slabs alternated with rock still bearing scars from the pick.
“It’s quite safe,” he said.
I told myself there was nothing sinister about this place. Strata of honey-colored sandstone underlay large areas of Paris, but in most places housing made open quarries impossible. Instead, since Roman times, the stonecutters had gone underground and tunneled, until northwestern Paris became honeycombed with their excavations.
The volume of rock weighed oppressively on my head. But I followed the jittering beam.
We walked for what felt like an hour down a passage that narrowed until two people couldn’t have passed without turning sideways. The floor rose and fell. A thick black line ran along the roof just above our heads. It looked like the soot mark of a thousand torches, but I found later that it had been put there as a guide for nineteenth-century visitors. Periodically, I noticed passages, all closed off with locked metal gates. Hugo turned the flashlight into one of these caves. The light penetrated a few meters and was swallowed up.
As we penetrated farther, steel gates gave way to looping ironwork, painted in flaking white. Graffiti was cut into the walls, mostly names and years. The dates got older as we went farther in. 1876. 1814. 1787. Before the Germans. Before Napoleon. Before the Revolution.
The deeper we went, the less frequent became the electric lights, the more saturated the air. Droplets condensed on the ceiling and plashed to the floor. Finally, we reached a narrow door on the low lintel of which was carved “Ici Commence l’Empire de la Mort.” Here begins the Empire of Death.
As an idea for relieving pressure on the city’s overcrowded cemeteries, storing the bones in these caves dated back to the eighteenth century. But Haussmann’s workmen were the first to do so systematically. Once they started excavating medieval Paris, they found cellars, graveyards, plague pits full of skeletons: a stratum of death. Instead of returning empty to the tunnels, the wagons carried the bones back to their quarries, where they reburied them, with due ceremony and not a little imagination.
The bones are there still, eleven kilometers of them, turned tobacco-colored by age and mold, and barely visible in the dark, packed head-high on both sides of the tunnel with bricklayer’s care. A course of skulls, ten courses of femurs and tibias, then another course of skulls. When they got bored, or the quantity simply overwhelmed them, they heaped them wherever they could. Barred bays showed further corridors filled with skulls and pelvises, though in some places they’d spilled down as the ceiling gave way.
Stone slabs between the bays gave details of the churches from which the bones were brought, and meditations in French and Latin on the transitoriness of life. A few people even
chose
to be buried down here. They lay in white painted catafalques carved out of the rock.
We stood back to let another group pass. It’s only since the 1960s that tourists have been admitted. Before then, nobody was allowed in, for fear of them wandering off into the dark. Today, thousands walk the tunnels every week—so many that, not long after our visit, they were closed for a major refurbishment, then shut again when vandals scattered bones and spray-painted graffiti.
Hugo leered at me from the dark. His torch lit his face eerily.
“So. Whaddya think?”
I told him what he wanted to hear. “Creepy.”
“Yeah. Isn’t it.” Hugo beamed.
He was in his element down here. Visitors from the United States, lacking as long a history, were a pushover for stories of lost treasures, ancient mysteries, and haunted chateaux.
The Da Vinci Code
is just the latest in a succession of creepy Paris fantasies like
Notre-Dame de Paris
, featuring the deaf hunchbacked bell ringer Quasimodo, the tales of black-masked villains like Fantomas and Judex, and the hugely popular
Phantom of the Opera.
As late as the 1920s, the city didn’t publicize the whereabouts of the catacombs. A 1927 book promising inside information about the
real
Paris treated the information almost as a state secret. “Few people you will meet in Paris can tell you where the Catacombs are located. Here is that coveted information. Taxi to corner of Place Denfert—and rue Rochereau.” For those who hadn’t read such books, guides offered what they claimed were clandestine visits. Clients were led through dark and smelly lanes to a gate beyond which narrow stone stairs and dripping tunnels brought them to a door with the painted sign
CATACOMBS. PRIVATE PROPERTY
. Under it, a faded coat of arms hinted at aristocracy. Inside, they found a cellar lined with skeletons, presided over by a distinguished bearded gentleman who graciously accepted a small fee (dollars preferred) to show them around. When a skeptic touched the suspiciously fresh-looking bones and found they were wax, the “Duc” explained the originals had long since crumbled into dust.
I’d lied when I told Hugo I found the experience macabre. The catacombs, like everything in France, were permeated with domesticity. Over the centuries, the quarrymen, typically French, made a little suburb of them. In the wall of a grotto, one had carved the façade of a model palace ten feet high. Dried green moss showed where a stream had once oozed out of the soft stone and washed down runnels into a now-dry pool. The national genius for evasion, accommodation, diplomacy, and disguise had been applied to death as well. Like oysters enrobing some irritating grit into a pearl, they lacquered a discomfiting object with layers of ritual and form. So respectfully arranged, the bones of the dead appeared no more gruesome than seashells edging a garden bed.
The path wound through and around the ancient workings. Sandstone isn’t granite, and if you quarry too much in any one place it caves in, forming
cloches
—bells, conical domes fifty feet high. Sometimes the householders above only knew that mining was taking place below them when a pit opened and a house dropped out of sight. We passed through half a dozen of these natural domes and, protected from a nasty fall by a flimsy handrail, looked down on a hollow where a natural spring had been turned into a foot bath. Filtered through meters of rock, the water was colorless as air. Apparently some stonecutters, accustomed to murkier water, feared to wash in it. Anything so insubstantial was unnatural, likely cursed.
The public entrance was only one of hundreds. If you knew the right manholes, you could get in from anywhere under this part of Paris. Above the graffito “1786,” a more recent visitor had added “1968” and the trefoil of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The catacombs attracted thrill seekers, devil worshippers, and plotters. It was here that the Marquis de Lafayette schemed to form a private army and sail to the aid of George Washington and the American rebels. The Resistance met here during World War II to plot sabotage of the occupying Nazis. Illegal parties were a tradition almost as old as the tunnels themselves. Modern geology students use them to celebrate their graduation. So did doctors; one manhole conveniently opened in a courtyard of a nearby hospital.
The official route led us back to another serpentine staircase and the welcome air and space of Denfert-Rochereau.
“We could go somewhere else next week.” Hugo said with the eagerness of a kid on Halloween proposing some fresh infantile outrage. “I know lotsa good places.”
