Travelers' Tales Paris (28 page)

Whoever its designer, the Eglise du Dôme is a marvel, the organic perfection of which could only have made inserting a tomb worthy of Napoleon the more daunting. Nor were the problems exclusively aesthetic, as there were those who saw the “usurpation” of this right royal church by the “Emperor” Napoleon as criminal.

An architectural competition yielded a variety of schemes, the best of which was judged to be that of Ludovico Tullius Joachim Visconti, a naturalized Italian. Confronted with altering a beloved monument, Visconti found a solution that was much the same as I. M. Pei's when the latter was faced with an analogous problem at the Louvre more than a century later: dig.

—Catharine Reynolds, “Napoleon's Return to Les Invalides,”
Gourmet

MAXINE ROSE SCHUR

“W
E KEPT VERY STILL OF COURSE,” WROTE
E
LIZABETH
B
ARRETT
Browning, “and were satisfied with the
idea
of Paris.”

I sure know what Elizabeth meant. We've been to Paris five times, but the very idea of Paris still seduces—I lust over memories. Yet, at night, when I lie in my husband's arms, it is not recent, sybaritic images I conjure to lure him into that intimate realm only two people who've danced through life together can enter—the realm of memory. No. At night, fancy restaurants, scenic boat rides, châteaux and boutiques evaporate. In their place float up memories, strange and strong. Up floats an
idea
of Paris from my first visit a quarter century ago, when I was 22 and newly wed.

It is a Paris of passion and elemental wonder. It is the Paris I knew when young and poor, and free of all desires except to experience. Of course, even then I had an idea of Paris. That's why when we drove into the city in our VW van, I dressed in what I fancied were “Parisian” clothes. Never mind they were Parisian clothes of some other century. In my long black skirt, black boots, hoop earrings, flea market scarf of pink silk, I felt Paris personified.

The moment I arrived in the City of Light, I was lit. “We must stay at least a month,” I told Steve, my husband. “Let's enjoy Paris!”
Paris was expensive and we had little money but I made a fuss so at last he said “All right, we'll stay...but we'll have to camp.”

“Camp!” I cried. “In Paris? Nobody camps in Paris!”

We did.

That night we rolled our van, outfitted with no more than a mattress, down the ramp to the Quai de la Tournelle where vehicles are forbidden. We parked at the edge of the river, just past the Pont de la Tournelle. When we looked left, we could see the stone bridge with its little statue of St. Geneviève and beyond, the floodlit Cathedral of Notre Dame. Looking right, we saw our quay merge with the next then vanish in murky shadows. In front of us, across the narrow arm of the river, rose the elegant apartments of the Ile St-Louis.

We climbed in the back of our van, lay on the mattress and looked out the windows.

Magic.

The effect was as if we were both inside the van and out of it too. At once cozy in an enclosed, secret place, and also right out in the city. In its very heart. Above us, apartments loomed into the stars, their lacy iron balconies bathed in light, and at our feet, the Seine flowed discreetly southward.

“Let's enjoy Paris,” Steve murmured.

Now a lot of practical things can get in the way of romance, such as the need for a bathroom. But we had the courage of youth and didn't let it. The next afternoon we sat on the riverbank planning just which cafés' restrooms we would discreetly visit at what times of day when a van, big and white as an ambulance, pulled up next to ours. A young man stepped out. He wore no shirt and balanced a hammer vertically on his nose.

“Gidday,” he said.

This was Basil Didier, a Mormon New Zealander who'd come to Paris to research his genealogy.

His trick turned the wheel of camaraderie. We had a few laughs together, then, seeing our interest in his Citroen delivery van, he
asked, “Would you like a perv?” which is New Zealand for “Would you like to take a look?”

We were awed by the ingenious cabinetry. The seat that evolved into a bed, the stove built into the counter, the table hung on the wall like a picture, and the sink with its clever foot pump, small as a piano pedal.

“I'm a carpenter,” Basil said with down-under modesty. But when I opened the narrow door and discovered a flush toilet, I knew he was more than a carpenter. He was our friend.

There must have been something in the air that August of 1971. The next day two more vans arrived. One was inhabited by a young New York couple who'd just returned from North Africa. The other, a rusted black Fiat, contained a bearded artist from Hawaii named Hayden and his black dog, Mahler. Of an evening, the couple would regale us with their adventures in Morocco and Hayden would recount the curious theatrics performed by a tribe of gypsies he'd lived with in Toulouse. For the next month, the six of us shared food, opinions, toilets, and, at sunset,
vin rouge
. Surely there was alchemy at work for though it was totally
défendu
to camp there, directly across, as we learned, from the island home of Prime Minister Pompidou, the
gendarmes
never told us to leave.
Au contraire
! Each night a
gendarme
would stop by our van to check passports and to see that we were all right.

“
Ça va, les jeunes Américains?
”

“
Ça va
,” we replied.

Now one warm evening, as Hayden was inside his van painting on its walls by candlelight what he called his “private version of Paris,” and the New Yorkers were playing gin rummy, and Mahler was barking at every kerosene barge that chugged up the river, Basil and I sat on the quay, dangling our feet over the water. Steve and I were drinking wine and trying in vain to get Basil to taste the marked-down cheese we'd bought from the Monoprix. But Basil was too busy preaching how French cheeses were decadent. “Food is just matter to fill up space,” he said.

Then he went on about sex.

Mormonism forbids sex before marriage and in his opinion that was “too right” for any fool could see sex is merely a fad. A style! A fashion!

“Sex,” Basil declared, “is just Gucci Hootchie Kootchie.”

Bored with his ideas, we told him one of ours: to drive from France to India. “And what we need,” Steve explained, “is a camper, fixed up like yours.”

Basil was happy to take the bait for he said he was “right tired of looking up dead Didiers” and would be pleased to help us make our van into a camper. However, our joy turned to dejection when we realized the impossibility of such a project, which required power tools, for we had no electricity nor access to it. “Too bad too,” I said, “when there's electricity all around us...”

The maintenance crew at the College de France looked up from their lunches, astonished when we drove into the courtyard.

“Why are you driving your vehicle in here?” demanded a gray-haired man in overalls.

“Where else would we outfit it for the expedition?” Steve retorted.

“What expedition?” the man asked, as the rest of the crew stared.

“What expedition?” I asked myself silently.

Then in the same ringing tone that Métro stations are called out, Steve announced, “
L'Expédition à l'Afrique du Nord!
” The man
looked skeptical and the other men laughed. Then Steve began relating the details of our “
expédition scientifique
,” how we needed to collect flowers in Morocco and how outfitting the van for this botanical study was part of the project. Steve blended gobbledygook with what the New Yorkers had told us about Morocco.

The man threw his cigarette butt on the ground. “I'm sorry but my men cannot help. Union rules absolutely prevent involvement.”

“
Monsieur
!” Steve cried, “We wouldn't dream of troubling you. We only need to use the electricity here...and some power tools.”

The man paused, looking hard at Steve and me. And in that pause I dared hope he'd play accomplice to honeymooners. Then in a voice low and sly, like beer trickling out of a jug, the man said, “Well then, it's not impossible, is it?”

For the next three weeks we spent our mornings in construction. Basil drew a blueprint copying the classic VW camper interior. The crew chatted with us every day and cheered us on. They not only supplied power tools, but gave us steel rods and rollers from the lab to make the couch scoot into a bed. They also told us where to find scraps and army surplus items. While Steve and Basil built the cabinetry, I bought the supplies and sewed curtains.

Then, each afternoon, when Basil went off to his French class at the Alliance Francaise, Steve and I fell in love all over again. With each other and with Paris.

We strolled the Left Bank bookstores, plugging head first into musty books, anticipating delight in finding just the right one—for each other. We read Baudelaire at twilight in the spooky ruins of l'Arène de Lutèce, a Roman amphitheater off the rue Monge. We sipped tea in tulip shaped glasses in the garden of the Paris mosque, and every other day crossed the bridge to the Ile St-Louis to bathe at the municipal baths. In our private washroom, as we splashed each other with warm water from the copper pail, we were serenaded by the soulful tunes of the Moslem men who sang in their showers. “Mustafaaaa, Mustafaaaaaaaaa!” they wailed. Rising and dipping, their songs reverberated off the tile walls and washed us in music. Then damp-haired, we'd stroll at dusk along
the river bank, our sandals clapping on the cobblestones while above us chestnut leaves fluttered silently like the wings of giant butterflies.

The day our van was finished was also the day Basil ran off to Toulouse with his French teacher, Jacqueline. It was also the day before Pompidou was to return. And the day the
gendarmes
told us to go. “We have to leave all this beauty!” I cried. To cheer me, Steve said we'd have a farewell
tête à tête
in a restaurant. That evening we climbed up the steep market street, rue Mouffetard, but found all the restaurants full. Ambling down an alley we came upon a Chinese restaurant jammed with boisterous diners at tables no bigger than record albums.

“
Entrez
!
Entrez
!” the diners shouted at us. We were lured inside and before we understood what was happening, tables got squeezed together and we were seated with two men plowing through some inscrutable Chinese dish.