Travelers' Tales Paris (10 page)

We made a good decision, not to have a car in Paris. No more fretting over repairs, parking, premiums, is there enough gas? For excursions outside Paris we take the train, or find a reasonable weekend car rental. In Paris the Métro works remarkably well. Maps are clear and easy to follow, with their ribbons of color to mark the different lines, and the trains are frequent and graffiti-free. There is no sense of menace; young musicians play their saxes and guitars, an occasional orator presents his opinion of French politics, beggars implore politely, “
Excusez-moi, madame
, but I'm hungry....” I always reward the puppeteers, who sling a velvet curtain across the car and present a lively little show with their ten decorated fingers.

Buses are even better. Sitting in a warm comfortable seat, gazing out of clean, clear windows at the passing sights, I roam the city armed with the yellow
Le Guide Paris-Bus
. It is quiet, other than a pleasant voice announcing the stops, although recently we had an international colloquy going. An Italian couple asked the French woman in front of me how to get to Étoile, and before we were finished, we all had our maps out, chatting
animatedly, even the German man across the aisle piped in with his suggestion. You would have thought we were solving a problem of the world; we did, in fact, put together a nice little tour for our new Italian friends.

I walk in Paris, sometimes hours a day, and I observe, discover, reacquaint. Having mothballed my American walking shoes in capitulation to Parisian fashion, some days the soles are weary, which has led me to yet another Parisian delight: our neighborhood
podologue
, who will pare nails, shave calluses, and always finish with a foot massage. I still don't miss my car.

—Ann Davis Colton, “Letter from Paris,”
Paris Notes

SHUSHA GUPPY

T
HE LEGEND OF
S
T
-G
ERMAIN-DES
-P
RÉES AS THE INTELLECTUAL
centre of Paris had reached Persia by the end of the 40s and gradually spread among the young progressives. Through articles, photographs, and films we learnt the topography of the area: a maze of cobblestoned streets clustered around the square, dominated by the abbey and its graceful 11th-century tower—the oldest in the city. We knew of the cafés Flore and Deux Magots, where Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and many other authors had written the books we read in translation. We had heard about Le Tabou, where Juliette Gréco had first sung the songs of Jacques Prévert and Raymond Queneaux, and launched the fashion for a pale complexion and disillusion. All you had to do was hop on an aeroplane and disembark in Paris, and there they would all be, waiting for you!

In reality by the mid-50s the writers, singers, and actors had mostly disappeared, having moved from their dingy hotels to apartments acquired with their earnings, while the developers and financiers had moved in. But many of the old
habitués
still lived in the district, and sometimes went to the cafés and restaurants they had made famous. It was not unusual to see a short, tubby man,
with balding head and strabismic eyes behind thick glasses rush down the boulevard towards his home in the square—and recognize Sartre; or to see Simone Signoret and Yves Montand having a drink with friends at the Flore. But if the stars appeared occasionally, those in supporting roles—writers and poets of various nationalities living in Paris, actors and film-stars, chanteurs and impresarios—were regular visitors, and you could count on seeing them if you went to the cafés at certain times of the day, or at night after the shows.

All this was enough to attract intellectual tourism, and put prices up beyond the reach of students, who increasingly favoured the less expensive establishments further down the Boulevard St-Michel. By the 60s many of the small food shops had become boutiques, the run-down hotels where impecunious writers and artists had lived were refurbished into three-star hotels, and the apartments had been bought up and restored—yet another twist in the fortunes of a district which had fluctuated from commercial prosperity in the Middle Ages to dilapidation at the beginning of this century, when its derelict buildings had become the abode of students from the Beaux Arts and other university annexes. Yet despite it all, the area retained something of its village atmosphere, as it still does, with crowded street-markets, food-stands and flower-sellers suffusing the air with varied fragrances, antiques and exotica shops, while the presence of important cultural institutions such as the Institute and the Academy, and of major publishing houses ensures its continued intellectual prestige.

But St-Germain was a mental space far more than just a geographical district, for it symbolized the triumph of France's spirit after collapse on the battlefield. Germany had aimed its guns against culture, and lost; France had used culture as its weapon and won, wiping out the shame of military defeat. Jean-Paul Sartre (whose name more than any other was associated with the district) was one of a group of extraordinary French men and women in the forefront of European thought, who shaped their epoch: Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Simone Weil, Albert Camus....

Out of their writings here, in St-Germain, was born the philosophy of Existentialism, a philosophy popularized above all by Sartre's fiction. Each generation of students has its particular vocabulary, based on the prevalent ideas of its time. Ours was compounds of Existentialism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis.... At that time in Paris the majority of young people who called themselves “Existentialists” had no more read Sartre and Camus than most Communists had read Marx, but the ideas were in the air, and the post-war climate propitious for their spread.

I was given Sartre's lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” and later ploughed through numerous volumes of Sartre, as well as Camus. Philosophical choices depend on temperament and circumstance, and at the time Existentialism, as I understood it, suited mine: it was an expression of exile. It proposed that man is alone, “abandoned” in the universe; and free, and that the price of his freedom is perpetual anxiety; that there is no predetermined destiny, since we choose what we wish to be and thereby make our own destinies; that life has no meaning save what we give it; and that art and literature can redeem existence, which is fundamentally absurd. Most people, it says, refuse their freedom and take refuge in fantasy and self-deception, which leads them to “bad-faith” and “inauthenticity.” But freedom is exercised within a “situation” which can change by “action” (notably political action), and this makes commitment unavoidable.

Existentialism was a hard philosophy to live by, as it put the responsibility of life squarely on man's own shoulders, offering him no alibis and no comfort. Amazingly, Sartre himself found it too
hard to bear: he tried to reconcile Existentialism with Marxism—an attempted “squaring of the circle” which led him to compromise and to personal “inauthenticity.” He and Simone de Beauvoir aligned themselves with the Communist Party and became staunch fellow-travellers. They established a kind of intellectual terrorism by declaring “all anti-communists are swine,” broke with their friends—Camus, Aron, Koestler, even the suave Merleau-Ponty—and surrounded themselves with younger cronies, many their ex-students. By 1957, after the Hungarian uprising and the Khrushchev Report, most Communist intellectuals had left the Party or been expelled, but Sartre continued to “believe.” Later, when asked why he had concealed the existence of concentration camps in Russia, about which he had known for a long time, he replied: “One should not drive Billancourt [i.e. the Renault car workers] to despair”—a quote that has become famous since as a supreme example of “treason of the clerks.” Towards the end of his life, when he was ill and almost blind, and history—to which he had sacrificed truth—had moved on and left him behind, he declared: “I'm not a Marxist.”

Sartre was not alone in this political trajectory; countless other Left-wing intellectuals and fellow-travellers followed it. Disillusioned with Russia, they kept finding promised lands, in China, Cuba.... “Something in them aspires to slavery” is how Camus described their attitude.

By contrast Camus remained honourable and true to himself till the end of his life. He and Sartre had quarrelled after the publication of Camus'
The Rebel
in the early 50s—a dispute chronicled in numerous volumes since. Suffice it to say that Camus contrasted man's continuing metaphysical and political revolt with the banality of “revolution:” the one a refusal of injustice and an affirmation of human dignity,
the other a suspension of human values for the sake of a “
programme
,” a hypothetical better future. “I rebel, therefore we are” against “the end justifies the means,” which sanctions violence, deceit and terrorism.

More than a decade before it became a commonplace, he understood the nature of totalitarianism and denounced it—the irrational totalitarianism of Fascism as well as the rational totalitarianism of Communism. Not wishing to align himself with either the Left or the Right, he became increasingly isolated, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Stoically, he stood his ground, won the Nobel Prize in 1958, and died in a car crash in January 1960. And then, what posthumous triumph over his persecutors! All his predications came true and by the time that Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989-90 not a single intellectual of note was left in the French Communist Party.

Camus embodied a temperament both rebellious and mystical, but always on the side of life and joy. Unable to endorse a philosophy which says that moral principles have to be sacrificed until they can be resurrected in a “better future,” I found myself more and more drawn to his position.

Although married with two children, Camus was known to have extramarital love-affairs. His two marriages and major relationships have been chronicled in his biographies as well as in contemporary
romans à clef
—notably in Simone de Beauvoir's
The Mandarins
, published in 1954. At that time Camus's main “companion” was an ex-pupil of Tania's, a celebrated actress, whom I had met and admired greatly. But so many beautiful women came into his orbit: young aspiring actresses, would-be writers, society-hostesses. Clearly, he had no trouble making new conquests, and in this he was no different from countless other writers and artists; St-Germain was always rife with gossip about love-affairs among intellectuals.

“There are absolute loves and contingent loves,” Sartre had told Simone de Beauvoir, assuring her that theirs was of the first variety while his and her other affairs were of the second. The formula had become famous and provided a model for their followers. The American writer Nelson Elgren, with whom de Beauvoir had a
long affair, commented: “How can love be contingent? Contingent upon what?” I agreed with him: this was surely promiscuity dressed up in philosophical garb? And it was not for me: I was truly innocent, and I did not see any reason to change my behaviour—it would be inauthentic!

One of Camus's conquests was Antonella, a student at Tania's who was among the first to befriend me. She was of Italian origin and very attractive—tall, slim, with a dark complexion and grey-green eyes which seemed to be always moist with tears. She had studied Italian at the university, then married a fellow student and produced a son, while writing short-stories and fairy-tales, a couple of which had been published. One day she had written a fan-letter to Camus, which had led to their meeting and later to an affair. For Camus it was evidently a short, inconsequential encounter, like grabbing a chocolate bar on your way home to dinner, but for Antonella it was serious. She had fallen hopelessly in love with him. She had left her husband and taken her little son to live with a schoolteacher girlfriend, hoping that Camus would make a commitment to her.