Paris to the Moon (11 page)

"It's a good question," a friend who has been a figure in the French media since the forties, and who eats lunch at the Flore every day, told me when I quizzed him about why, and when, exactly, and how the Flore had outstripped the Deux Magots. We were sitting, as it happened, at the Flore, eating good, wildly overpriced omelets. The downstairs room was as pleasantly red and melancholy as it always is, with its square, rather than round, tables, which give the impression that all the tables are corner tables.

In the week or so since my first inquiry I had been doing some reading. The Deux Magots and the Flore had, I knew, existed beside each other for more than a century. The Flore had long had a white marquee with green lettering, the Deux Magots a green marquee with gilt lettering. The interior of the Flore had always been decorated in red leather—what the French call moleskin— and the Deux Magots in brown. But I had only just learned that like so many timeless things in Paris, they got timeless right after the horror of the Franco-Prussian War. Although there had always been a church at Saint-Germain, the topography of the place Saint-Germain—the square itself—dates back only to the 1870s.

The Deux Magots is the modest inheritor of a silk lingerie store of that name that stood on the spot for decades, until the 1860s, when the growth of the big department stores across the river drove it out of business. The owners eventually rented out the space to a
cafe liquoriste,
which kept the name and started serving coffee. No one knows exactly when the two famous statues of Chinese mandarins—the Deux Magots—were installed; Anatole France, in his memoirs, written at the turn of the century, speaks of a big picture of three
magots
that used to hang in the lingerie store. The Flore, on the other hand, has no prehistory; founded in 1870, it was always a cafe and was called the Flore because of a statue of the goddess Flora that used to stand outside. Then, in 1880, Leonard Lipp, an Alsatian who had fled the German occupation of his province, opened a
brasserie
across the street, and the basic topography of the new square was in place.

For many years the Deux Magots was the more famous and fashionable of the two cafes. It was there that Oscar Wilde went to drink after he left England; he died about five blocks away. And it was there that Joyce went to drink Swiss white wine, with everybody except Hemingway, with whom he drank dry sherry, because Hemingway wasn't everybody. (That's how Hemingway tells it, anyway.) The presence of so much history ought to be unmanning or even just embarrassing. In Paris it isn't, not because the past is so hallowed but because it doesn't seem to be there.

The unsentimental efficiency of French commonplace civilization, of which the French cafe is the highest embodiment, is so brisk that it disarms nostalgia. History keeps wiping the table off and asking you, a little impatiently, what you'll have now.

Not until the 1940s—I had learned a lot of this in the course of reading Olivier Todd's excellent new biography of Camus, one of the big books here this year—did the triangle of the two cafes and the Brasserie Lipp at Saint-Germain-des-Pres become legendary. This was when the group of
resistants
came into being, and a culture to go with them—when Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as the cliche has it, brooded in one corner of the Deux Magots while Juliette Greco sang sad songs in another. The odd thing is that the cliche is almost entirely true. It was at the Deux Magots, for instance, that Sartre saw his famous philosophical
garcon,
of whom he wrote, "His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly, his eyes express an interest too solicitous for the order of the customer." (I still get waiters like that.)

Yet fifty years after the classic period, one cafe is more fashionable than ever and the other is not fashionable at all. You might not see this at once. At the Flore the fashionable people are spread out among the tables rather than concentrated in one spot or area; they occupy the place clandestinely, following the law of Inverse Natural Appeal. The
terrasse
of the Flore, even on a sunny and perfect day
(especially
on a sunny and perfect day), is off limits; the inner room, with its red moleskin banquettes, is acceptable; but by far the most OK place to sit is upstairs (I was sitting there now, with my friend), and the banquettes are made of an ugly tan leatherette. (The law of Inverse Natural Appeal is at work: The outlawed
terrasse
is, as it happens, an extraordinarily pleasant place to sit; the inner room is a very pleasant place to sit; and the upstairs room is reminiscent of the cocktail lounge of a Howard Johnson's.)

The sounds of the higher French conversation, with its lovely murmur of certainties and, rising from the banquettes, the favorite words of fashionable French people, resonated all around.
Perversite,
which means "perversity" but is used as a word of praise, suggests something—a book, a dish, a politician—that is aristocratic.
C'est normal,
which means something like "No problem" and can also refer to any political or literary situation, is different from the American phrase in that its emphasis is not on a difficulty surmounted or evaded but on the return to a familiar, homeostatic atmosphere of comfort: Something that happens may seem unusual (say, the revelation that a former defense minister might have been an East Bloc agent) but, properly understood, is not shocking at all; it's
normal,
even if a little deplorable. And from table after table, like the sound of a tolling bell, rises the connective
donc,
which just means "so" or "therefore," but, when used in literary and worldly conversation, and rung with sufficient force, means "It must therefore follow as the night the day" and always sounds to me as conclusive as Gideon's trumpet.

"But it all has to do with the character of two men, Boubal and Cazes," my friend said. Paul Boubal was the owner of the Flore from 1939 to 1983—he died five years later—and Roger Cazes was the owner not of the Deux Magots but of the Brasserie Lipp, across the street. "That is to say, both Gazes and Boubal were from the Auvergne—they were countrymen—and though each thought the other was running a sneaky business, each respected the other and frequented the other's place. This produced, in the fifties, a natural compact, a kind of family feeling between the two places. I mean family feeling in the real sense—of dependence and suspicion and resentment. The owner of the Deux Magots was a much more timid fellow. He was left out of the compact." So the real force working was that of the Lipp; it was the third planet, perturbing the orbits of the two others.

There it was, the explanation in terms of the romantic individual in almost perfect form, along with the bonus of a touch of
terroir,
the French affection for a bit of native land. Then someone suggested that I speak to the essayist and editor Jean-Paul Enthoven, who is the author of the season's most winning collection of literary essays,
Les Enfants de Satume.
Enthoven, I was told, would be sure to have an explanation; he could explain anything Parisian.

"Here is my hypothesis," he announced when I reached him on the phone at his office, at the publishing house of Grasset. "You must go back to the twenties and thirties, when the Flore became identified with the extreme right and the Deux Magots, by default, with the left. Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Francaise, used the Flore as his home base." Maurras was simultaneously one of the most important stylists in French literature—a member of the French Academy, and a crucial influence on T. S. Eliot, among other modernists—and a right-wing anti-Semite. "Before it was anyone else's place, it was Maurras's. His most famous polemic was even named after the cafe: 'Au Signe de Flore.' Maurras was a malevolent force, in that everything he touched was simultaneously disgraced and hallowed."

Enthoven went on to say, "This meant that by the time of the occupation, when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir came to Saint-Germain and began their
resistance,
they had to avoid the Flore like a plague, since it had been contaminated by Maurras. But then the tourists began to crowd into the Deux Magots in order to look at Sartre and de Beauvoir. The place became overcrowded, and eventually the intellectuals noticed the emptiness of the Flore next door. By then Maurras was gone, the occupation had passed, and confronted with a choice between the pollution of Maurras and the pollution of tourism, the intellectuals chose to remake the emptiness rather than abide with the many. So they went across the street and have never returned." He stopped for a second, as if readying himself for an aphorism, and then said, "The Deux Magots was sacralized by Sartre, desacralized by the tourists, and then left vacant by history." Eighteen-seventy, 1940, I thought. Like so many lovely things in Paris, the two cafes were given shape by the first German invasion and then in one way or another were deformed by the second.

It was left to another, more dour friend to supply the futility-of-explanation explanation, over coffee at a lesser, more despairing cafe—neither fashionable nor unfashionable, just a place where you go to talk. "There is nothing to explain here," he said. "The explanation is a simple, Saussurean one." He was referring, I realized after a moment, to the father of modern linguistics, who was the first to point out that signs get their meanings not by being like the things they stand for but by being different from other signs: A sign for black means black because it isn't like the sign for white.

"The fashionable exists only in relation to something that is
not
that way," he went on. "The relationship between the modishness of the Flore and the unmodishness of the Deux Magots isn't just possibly arbitrary. It's
necessarily
arbitrary. If you place
any
two things side by side, one will become fashionable and the other will not. It's a necessity determined by the entire idea of fashion. A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose
absolutely.
That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful—they are goddesses—and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser's name? Paris.
C'est normal."

DISTANT ERRORS,
CHRISTMAS JOURNAL 2

My fax machine, which was made by the French state, always blames someone else when things go wrong. It is a Galeo 5000 model, and it is made by France Telecom and is therefore an official, or French government, product; even its name carries with it the nice implication that 4,999 other models were attempted before perfection was at last achieved by the French fax machine ministry.

You even have to go to a government telephone outlet to buy a new ribbon for it. It's a plain paper fax (you have the same expression in French,
papier ordinaire,
ordinary paper) with all the usual features. It's really very nicely designed—much better designed than its American equivalents, with that streamlined, intelligent Philippe Starck look that the French seem magically able to give to everything they make. It's reasonably efficient too—perhaps a little overtricky in loading in the sheets and unduly inclined to
bourrage de papier,
paper jams—but still . . .

It has a little glowing window on its face where it
affiches,
or posts, the events and troubles of its day, its operating life. The window flashes, for instance, a shocked, offended
Pas d'iden-tite!—
no identity!—when the fax machine at the other end doesn't "identify itself," which for some reason or another most American machines don't seem to.

But the favorite, all-purpose
affiche
of my fax machine is
erreur distante—
distant error—which it
affiches
all the time, no matter where the error actually originates, far away or right in its own backyard. Whether the error comes from a fax machine in Lille or Los Angeles, it says that it is a distant error. When the machine itself has run out of paper, it is still a distant error. When I have forgotten to clean the ribbon heads, an error has nonetheless taken place, at a distance. Jams and overflows, missed connections, and faulty plugs: all are
erreurs distantes.
When it really is a distant error, it is still just another distant error. This is the French fax machine's way of getting through life. The error is distant; the problem lies someplace else; there is always somebody else to blame for your malfunctions.

French intellectuals and public people, I have on certain occasions come to the mordant, exasperated, and gloomy conclusion, share the same belief,
affiche
the same accusatory message, banding together and flashing
erreur distante,
whenever they run out of paper or ink or arguments. This morning, for instance, I saw the economist Emmanuel Todd being interviewed about his book on the economic "stagnation" of industrialized economies. He blandly announced that the U.S. economy was just as stagnant as France's, in fact was worse because its "cultural level" (by which he meant the level of education) was so much more depraved. Also, the United States manufactured less than it once had. Economic stagnation was the problem of all the industrialized economies, France was simply sharing in it, and the United States was really to blame. His debating opponent, an intelligent economist named Cohen—very poorly dressed in a brightly col-ored blazer and bad tortoiseshell glasses—tried to explain that this wasn't so, that the fall in manufacturing was in fact a sign of the renovation of the American economy, and that whatever its flaws in equality, the growth in America was real, that the one thing you
couldn't
call the American economy was stagnant. Todd, who looked terrific, hardly bothered to argue with him; he just made the same assertions again: The American economy is stagnant. He just
affiched,
like my fax machine
erreur distante,
and the host, terrified, nodded.