Paris Was Ours (31 page)

All of this, or something like it, is echoed in Proust’s work. One of his favorite subjects was, as it happens, disappointment, and how art springs from it. And my freshmen get it. People I know who have not read Proust (or tried and failed) think it’s insane to even try to teach it to kids who are just starting college, but my students really get it—Proust, Paris, childhood yearning, and lost or artificial paradises, the whole thing. After all, they’ve just left home and their own childhoods behind. It’s
true that when we start out, many of them, fresh from Iowa, Illinois, even Tennessee, have never heard of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Champs-Élysées, or the Bois de Boulogne. They may know the terms
art nouveau
or
La Belle Époque
, but never anything about the Third Republic or about the final, saddest, and most gorgeous hurrah—the end of the French aristocracy. When we start out, most of my students can’t tell a marquise from a madam (of course, this will turn out to be a confusing distinction, halfway through volume 3,
The Guermantes Way
), and it’s only when they’re deeply into the text that they discover this is something that they are missing in their lives. That is, if I’ve done my job well enough.

To help them out, I put up images on our class’s Web site, and as the semester progresses, I imagine I see Paris 1900 taking shape in my students’ imagination. I link to reproductions of paintings, old maps, posters. There are plenty of early photos; the fin de siècle was one of the new medium’s first heydays. The work of Eugène Atget, for example, is easily found online, on the Web site of the Bibliothèque nationale and others. I’ve spent a great many hours staring at the deserted sepia streets, the dusty shop windows, the merry-go-rounds, the old blind organ grinder with his laughing daughter. I suspect I spend much more time looking at them than my students do.

It’s not necessary, of course. Paris is evoked for Proust’s readers even if they never look at a single photo, and it can be imagined in infinite detail (often more detail than my students ever bargained for, at least at first). I do believe that these visual aids facilitate the reading, but the truth is that I’ve fallen in love with those images and that particular iteration of my city. And just as one eventually becomes confused, while reading Proust,
about which are his memories, and which our own, which are his reveries alone and which are the daydreams in which we lose ourselves time and again when one of his sinuous, seductive sentences leads us to some wish we had forgotten we were hiding from ourselves, so, too, has my own Paris become somehow merged with his, as if the decades between his descriptions and my birth had really caused only a bit of cosmetic change here and there. Long after every student in my class can recognize the Champs-Élysées, where M. first heard Gilberte’s name (when both were children and she played with a shuttlecock, watched over by a governess wearing a hat adorned with a blue feather), long after they can identify Sarah Bernhardt from her Nadar photographs, or the Eiffel Tower in construction for the 1900 Exposition universelle, I find myself still collecting. I can’t get enough of the glistening pavements at night, of the allées of chestnut trees, of Verlaine, looking dazed, sipping absinthe at a corner table in the Café François, circa 1890, of the moody waitress at the Moulin Rouge. I’m amazed at my own obsessive collecting.

And yet I cannot describe the mood I’m in as I click through images of Paris as anything but painfully, almost unbearably, homesick. Homesick for what, exactly? It’s true I have family and friends there, whom I miss, but it really is more of a longing for something unnamable, very old and hard to articulate. Maybe for longing itself, that state of pure hope that children have and then are nostalgic about for the rest of their lives. Or should we call it pure illusion? Something about Paris awakens that nostalgia, somehow. And surely I’m not the only one who has felt it or who has, indeed, sought that incomprehensible and irresistible sensation. “For regret, like desire, seeks not to
analyze but to gratify itself,” writes Proust in
Within a Budding Grove
, the second volume of
In Search of Lost Time
.

My Parisian friends—those in whom I confide, anyway—tell me I am lucky to be in New York. (Though I don’t think they say this as often as they used to.) But still, especially the ones who have spent some time in the United States console me for my homesickness by pointing out how rigid a place Paris can be, how much less mobility there seems to be than in New York. True, true, all true. I know that the everyday variety of rabid ambition one encounters every moment in Manhattan seems downright naive by comparison with the sort of Grand Guignol snobbism everyone in Paris takes for granted, that it is perfectly possible to feel stuck and stranded in Paris, that shoes are too expensive, and that the subway doesn’t run all night. True, all true.

My friends laugh at what is left of France’s
folie de grandeur
. And as for Paris. Don’t get them started! The crowds, the prices, the brittleness, the stupidity! The deterioration of the butcher’s skills and the pastry shop’s display,
le fast-food
, the vulgarity of the Champs-Élysées, the museums packed with exasperating idiots, the gentrification—or as they call it,
boboisation
, for
bourgeois bohème
—the loss of the ateliers, which have all become expensive lofts, of the working-class cafés, indeed of the old working class itself, of the old dingy neighborhoods, of the bistros with the zinc bars where you could once get a brilliant lunch for next to nothing, briskly served by an expert waiter who spoke with a populist accent. “Now everybody sounds the same,” someone will always say at around this point.

Yes, it’s gone, all gone, even if you’ve never left Paris. My friends who live there, I’ve discovered, are as nostalgic for Paris as I am. In a way the extraordinary efforts of the city of Paris to
keep the city clean, all the sparkling monuments’ facades, the orderly parking, the kind of efficient garbage collection that would make New Yorkers weep with envy, all that takes away Paris’s grime and shabbiness also robs it of itself. Perhaps the best-maintained, the best-functioning, the most pleasurable city in the world, Paris may face the future more optimistically and with more beauty and comfort than any other world capital, but the price is a constant severing of its own past. But of course that is the very definition of renewal, and it is always accompanied by nostalgia, emotion, and, perhaps, romance.

And so it was in Proust’s time, as well. He was born in 1871, just after the siege of Paris. Less than twenty years earlier, Napoleon III, obsessed with hygiene, had hired Georges-Eugène Haussmann to modernize the city. “Paris embellie, Paris agrandie, Paris assainie” was the campaign’s slogan: Paris was to be embellished, made bigger and more salubrious. All that was dark, dirty, stinking, was to disappear, down to the very belly of the city, which was disemboweled to make way for a sewer system such as the world had never seen, and a vast transportation system, the Métropolitain, over which were paved wide avenues supporting row upon row of new, opulent structures. Within a few years, the medieval city had been torn apart, most of its buildings destroyed or renovated. More than 60 percent of Paris is estimated to have been altered. Innumerable small streets were gone, replaced by the aforementioned noble vistas—incidentally providing clear paths for the army, in case any insalubrious insurrections should occur and crowds had to be strategically herded away.

Nothing stood in the way of this raging urbanism. Haussmann was obsessed with perpendicular lines —
le culte de
l’axe
. The Luxembourg Gardens, which had not respected the right angle, were amputated. Twelve avenues were carved out around the Arc de Triomphe to make la place de l’Étoile. One of the oldest and most populous parts of Paris, in the center, was razed to make way for the new opera house, flanked by a Métro station. The poor were pushed out to newly created zones outside the center. The bourgeoisie moved in en masse and set forth with alacrity upon the pursuit of so-called leisure-time activities—a brand-new concept in the 1870s—which the Baron de Haussmann had carefully segregated, away from residential quarters. The aristocracy still hovering in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the Left Bank, also caught the fever of modernity. Paris was soon studded with department stores, restaurants and cafés,
cafés-concerts
and concert halls, cabarets, theaters, indoor and outdoor dance places, and innumerable brothels catering to every imaginable taste, where the beau monde met the demimonde on a regular basis.

For all their storied gaiety, Parisians in Proust’s time must always have been aware that the city’s past had been lost, that they were unmoored, exiled. This seemingly definitive sense of loss must have receded in Parisian consciousness during the disastrous Prussian siege of Paris, and even more with the advent of World War I, when the concepts of loss, disappointment, destruction, and the unmooring of sensibility acquired their most gruesome and modern meaning.

Proust spent most of his war years writing and revising, feverishly adding thousands of pages to his work about the destruction of both the past and our fantasy of the past, and about the problem of hope that takes the form of illusion. The mourning that Proust expresses most eloquently is not for the
loss of what was possessed; it is for the loss of what was, on the contrary, never possessed, but profoundly desired. Here is what he writes in
The Fugitive
, the penultimate volume of
In Search of Lost Time
:

We do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.

As for me, I’m still waiting for that acceptance which seems to me to be a kind of paradise, even if it’s drenched around the edges with nostalgia and regret. I can wait in Manhattan as easily as anyplace else, perhaps, and teaching Proust is not a bad way to savor some of the hours, in the meantime. Or some of the years, I guess. Ten years! As it happens, I was ten years old when my parents first brought me to New York, so I’ve been teaching now for as long as I lived in Paris as a child. But of course, in so many ways, I never really left.

Every fall, I show my students how to levitate there, if they’re willing, without ever leaving our classroom. Unfortunately, I’ve stopped smoking and cannot have a Gitane. But in Manhattan the memory of blue smoke wafting toward the ceiling is just another detail from a distant, other world. Still, in so many ways Proust’s Paris lives on in the lives of my students even if, in spite of all my efforts, it’s a city that’s very different from my own.

Enfin

T
HE IMAGE PEOPLE
have of my life in Paris is that each fabulous day begins with a trip to the bakery for my morning croissant, which I eat while catching up with the current events by reading
Le Monde
at my corner café. (The beret is optional.) Then I spend the rest of my day discussing Sartre over in the Latin Quarter or strolling the halls of the Louvre with a sketchpad, ending with my sunset ascent of the Eiffel Tower before heading to one of the Michelin three-star restaurants for an extravagant dinner. Later, after toasting the day with glasses of cognac in the lounge at the George V, I stroll along the Seine until I’m finally home, when I tuck myself into bed to rest up for the next day.

One of my character flaws is that I’m not very nice in the morning, so as a courtesy to others, I refuse to leave my place until fortified with coffee and toast, which I eat while scrolling through the
New York Times
online and reading e-mail. And believe it or not, I’ve never been to the top of the Eiffel Tower. After the few hours I spent stuck in the claustrophobic elevator in my apartment building when the woman on the other end of the emergency phone told me to call back later—because everyone was at lunch—you can understand why I avoid elevators as much as possible around here.

As for starred restaurants, I can’t justify a bowl of soup for a hundred bucks—unless a visitor is footing the bill. And you can imagine how many of my friends are going to visit me now, knowing how I feel about visitors.

ONE OF THE
first words I learned in French class was
râleur
, which means “someone who complains.” Maybe it’s
la grisaille
, the dull, gray skies that hang over Paris, causing
la morosité ambiente
, the all-encompassing gloom that blankets the city at times. Complaining is such an important part of life here that my first French teacher felt it’s a word we needed to learn right off the bat.

But living here, I now understand the pouting and the infamous French reluctance to change. From my daily baguette being baked just the way I like it, to the tomato vendor at my market who sings the James Bond theme song to me (even though I tell him that Mr. Bond is actually British), I like things to stay the same. And let’s face it: most visitors come to Paris to bask in the glories of its past, not to marvel at the modern innovations of the present.