Travelers' Tales Paris (6 page)

And our loves

Must I remember again

Joy always follows pain

Night comes hour's refrain

Days depart I still remain

Hand in Hand, toe to toe

While underneath

Our arms' bridge flows

Eternal gaze of the weary billow

Night comes hour's refrain

Days depart I still remain

Love runs away like a stream

Love runs away

How slow life seems

And how violent our dreams

Night comes hour's refrain

Days depart I still remain

Days depart, weeks in their train

Await time past

And loves in vain

Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine

Night comes hour's refrain

Days depart I still remain

—Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Pont Mirabeau,”

translated by Thérèse Lung

HERBERT GOLD

A
S WAS SAID OF ALL
P
ARIS, THE
L
EFT
B
ANK IS THE
C
APITAL OF
Hope and the Paradise of Misery, where one can live in continual expectation, relishing failure and the pleasures of melancholy if one chooses. During my student days there, Jonathan Cape, an English publisher, used to take the boat-train over from London on weekends and lead me on walks through the Paris of
his
youth—here he rejected James Joyce (“Bloody crossword puzzle”); there he knew a lady with plump arms and eyes of a heartbreaking sadness, right there, on the rue de Tournon. Maybe, if I listened, he would publish my first novel in England; he didn't, but this stately, white-haired relic became one of my favorite ambulatory monuments.

The Left Bank, or
Rive Gauche
, comprises half of the great city of Paris, so of course it includes working-class and middle-class districts, the monstrous Manhattanized skyscraper of Maine-Montparnasse, offices and businesses and quietly expensive neighborhoods where people live quietly expensive lives. Its monuments, such as the Eiffel Tower, its museums, such as the great Rodin Museum in its classic hotel, and its historic refuges, such as the Roman baths from 200 A.D. in the Cluny complex, have little
to do with what we think of when we think Rive Gauche. The spirit of the place is more truly expressed by the little passage near St-Germain-des-Prés where Dr. Guillotine perfected his “philanthropic decapitating machine.” The enduring legend of the Left Bank comes out of the 5th, 6th, 7th and 14th
arrondissements
: the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the warren of medieval streets near the Place St-André des Art (including the narrowest street in Paris, the Street of the Fishing Cat—
rue du Chat-qui-Pêche
), the spirits of Sartre and Genet and Camus at St-Germain-des-Prés, and the ghosts of the painters and writers of Montparnasse, where Gertrude Stein made so many remarks and Hemingway paid attention.

This legendary lifestyle adjusts and survives in its own way. Take, for example, the
cinémathèque
phenomenon—the countless little rooms where movie-crazed Parisians can assuage their indiscriminate passion for Jerry Lewis and Eric von Stroheim, Akira Kurosawa and Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin (“Charlot”) and Ingmar Bergman and
le film noir américain
, which generally means cheapie gangster movies of the '40s and '50s. It sometimes seems as if Left Bankers make their livings selling each other movie tickets and ancestral antiques, like Jimmy Durante surviving on a desert island by peddling newspapers.

Despite the accelerated rusting of time, the Left Bank retains its consistency. In the crowds, a visitor still walks with Abelard in the Sorbonne; he meets the obsessed outcasts of Balzac, the cavorting bohemians of Henri Murger, the anxious Existentialists of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and the ghosts jostle each other. An ear to history picks up the steps of the Roman legions marching south past the baths and amphitheaters at Cluny, past the rue de la Huchette, where the tourists come to hear guitarists, past the ancient Romanesque church of St-Julien le Pauvre, where I saw a priest sweeping with a crooked straw broom that looked as if it had been bought in a crooked-straw-broom sale 300 years ago. And at many corners stand the urns, still filled with fresh flowers, for those who died to liberate Paris from the Nazis. Students, bureaucrats and widows live in buildings where Verlaine, Oscar Wilde,
generals, composers, heroes, saints, and revolutionists once sojourned. As did Benjamin Franklin; as did I, age 24.

A person who sits at a Left Bank café—which I have been doing for a generation now, studying literature, studying the newspapers, studying the pretty young women, studying my fellow studiers—will notice several brands of professional café sitters. There are those who carry a lot of mouth, filtering reality through laughter, companionship, and discussion. And there are many who carry a load of silence: who sit brooding and watching, smoking, munching, or sipping, waiting for the meaning of life to reveal itself, or merely for the day to end and the time to go back into unobserved privacy. The proper pursuit of a Left Bank café sitter is to practice an agile, caffeine or alcohol-released singing of the Left Bank arias of flirtation and commitment, while watching with irony over all the surrounding aspects of self. After all, there is time enough in this thousand-year operetta to be both solemn and giddy. There are other people. It may not matter. And even if I won't live forever, which is always a possibility, Paris surely will.

The Left Bank still bravely attempts to shoulder the burden of classic bohemia, but as it grows massive and expensive, other places come along to do the job: London, New York, San Francisco, a piece of every college town. There used to be (perhaps still is) a Left Bank bar or gallery or café in my other hometown, Cleveland, and elsewhere, too. Rive Gauche is a magic international phrase, evoking the universe of wine, garlic, fun and endless youth. (Maybe it was only a frame shop in Cleveland.)

Allen Ginsberg once took me to a vegetarian restaurant on the rue Cardinal Lemoine called Auberge Inn—a triple pun, since
auberge
means inn and
aubergine
is eggplant (well, it's funnier if it sneaks up on you without translation). There Allen sang a Buddhist country-western rock song about love and death, clacking his musical tools, and a young man tried to pay for our tea, saying, “I want to pay! I must pay! I've never paid a check before!”

I looked at the unhealthy vegetarians, dreaming in their Levis, strumming away and singing their versions of Judy Collins and
Bob Dylan songs, and remembered Baudelaire's relevant Left Bank question:
When shall we get on toward happiness?

Each new generation makes what progress it can. France itself, and even Paris, tends to be settled, materialistic, and family-oriented. The excess rootless hope and dreaming are shipped across the Seine to the Left Bank to be marinated in the cafés, parks,
brasseries
, garret rooms, discotheques, student clubs,
cinémathèque
, tryout night spots, and, in more organized fashion, in the various schools and institutes—medical, dental, liberal arts, language, art, music, and drama—that have traditionally supported much of the youthy bustle of these few square miles on the bank of the slow river that are devoted to the Elders and Youngers of Hope and Misery.

“Take those two words, gold and pleasure, for a lantern, and explore the great cage of Paris,” Balzac commanded. One of his print shops on one of the narrow lanes off the rue de Seine is memorialized with a plaque, but my favorite of Balzac's streets is the rue Mouffetard, which runs upward into the Place de la Contrescarpe, where until a few years ago one of the last
vespasiennes
of Paris could be found, offering relief to the kidneys
of men while affording everyone a view of their feet and their polite, abstracted, thoughtfully concentrating faces. Now the rue Mouffetard—pawn-shops, Left Bank proletariat, the boarding-house in
Père Goriot
where Vautrin and Rastignac lived—has become La Yuppieville, with trendy restaurants and antique shops and even, Lord forgive us, a t-shirt store or two. Several generations ago, another novelist, Huysmans, made an odd remark: “Paris is a sinister Chicago.” It must mean
something
—probably that Huysmans never visited Chicago, but being French he wasn't stopped by lack of knowledge. The artistic vitality of Paris is running a bit thin these days, but there is still enough to spread a sheen and gloss over the damp, gray, lovely city and conceal its mournfulness with good cheer.

The Left Bank tries to save the past, both the ancient traditions and the two centuries of bohemia. It tries to non conform and yet enrich itself. The result is the preservation of the charming tangle of medieval streets near the Seine and the dizzy street life of the rue de la Huchette and St-Germain-des-Prés and the cafés near the Sorbonne and Montparnasse. The result is also the plastic, glass, steel, and aluminum international skyscraper inflicted on the Maine-Montparnasse neighborhood, where once the streets were sweetly sordid. The City of Light is also the City of Neon Light.

Sobriety hides in the religious corners—the square of St. Sulpice, for example, the stately gray medieval church of St-Germain-des-Prés and all the lovely chapels and agreeable, foot-wearying sanctified enclaves—because, after all, this is still right-thinking France, even if it is also the Left Bank. Sobriety is stowed and spills out of vital junctions that reflect the ancient linkage of piety and marketplace. In front of the Hôtel Madison, where I used to stay—along with Alexander Calder, the mobile maker and Elie Wiesel, the writer—there is a statue of Denis Diderot, encyclopedist, philosopher, atheist, joy giving novelist, occasional jailbird. His finger is uplifted in warning. If one follows his pointing, it becomes clear that he is shaking his finger at the great church across the Boulevard St-Germain.

Sometimes the young and the discontented of Paris pick up cobblestones to demand virtue, or use the majestic sycamore trees to build barricades. After the “events” of 1968, many of the cobblestone streets were tarred over, many of the trees removed. This is a good French way to deal with unrest. There is equal justice for all in Paris, Anatole France noticed. Neither the rich nor the poor are allowed to sleep under the bridges.

The Left Bank is the original opera set—
La Bohème's
Mimi and Rodolfo warbling and dancing and embracing through a cutesy decor of chimney pots and narrow winding streets and four cafés at every corner. Well, that paroxysm of fantasy has subsided. Housing pressure takes precedence; both artists and real people live where they can. Where there used to be four cafés at every corner, there are now perhaps only two—the others replaced by a video-rental emporium, a mini-micro supermarket, even an amazing junk-food trough.

But there are still those two cafés at each corner (and a few on the block in between) with their terraces, serving the
flâneur
, the street wanderer who wants to share in the contemporary medley of musical comedy and rock 'n' roll. The splendid cafés of an earlier time, the Flore, the Deux Magots, the Coupole, the Brasserie Lipp, are still the splendid cafés of today. Hemingway, Sartre and Gertrude Stein have gone to the Great Café in the Sky, but I met a Moroccan film director's girlfriend at the Deux Magots. Surrealism, Dadaism, Existentialism, even Communism, have been replaced by Structuralism and Deconstructionism and a heavy fragrance of consumerism. Often the artists are merely playing themselves, merchandising the style, so one must search and poke to find the brooding old Left Bank.