Travelers' Tales Paris (3 page)

I don't mean they argued as in “had a fight,” which you almost never see in Paris, but an
argument
as Aristotle thought of it: a coherent series of logical reasons, advanced to prove a point. What could be more Parisian than that?

The young woman in the café takes the young man's coffee cup from his hand so he cannot hide behind it. It was not religion that invented love, she asserts, leaning forward. It was not your school or your parents, she continues, eyes afire. It is men and women who reinvent love together, and if we two do not make love, love is not made in this world. She crushes out her cigarette and throws her hair back over her shoulder in a flourish of valedictory passion.

You don't have to be Parisian to appreciate this kind of romance, or to participate in it either. An American woman I know spent years trying to convince her Provençal boyfriend that they should leave Paris and live somewhere, anywhere, else. Katie is a professor of economics, a discipline in which so little is actually provable that the ability to persuade is paramount. The discussion about leaving town should have been over in a month. They remained for years. How could this happen? They were in Paris, and in love: the argument illuminated their happiness like a bonfire.

Another Parisian love story, that of Mimi and Rudolfo in Puccini's opera,
La Bohème
, has made millions of people weep. It makes the Parisians I know squirm. They prefer the scenes between the second couple, Musetta and Marcello. I once asked a Frenchwoman to explain this to me. (Of course I started by stating a logical case; I was secretly in love with her, and we were in Paris.) Both Mimi and Musetta leave their artistic lovers to be kept by wealthy men, I argued, so one is no better than the other. Mimi has far lovelier arias, more vulnerability, and one of the most touching deaths in all of theater. Why do you spurn her?

It's not her, the lady said, rolling her eyes. (She was reversing the usual procedure by opening with attitude and then hitting home with logic.) It's the story, she said. Rudolfo and Mimi meet in his room at the beginning, then she dies in his room at the end. But where's the rest? With Musetta and Marcello you get to see them argue a little, so they express their love. The other two, they split up somehow, but we never see it. The real love is all offstage!

Right now, on-stage in the café, the young man reaches for a cigarette. He lights it thoughtfully, blows out a cloud of grey-blue smoke, and considers the intelligent face of his tablemate. I cannot disagree with anything you say, he begins softly. This does not melt the young woman. She is in Paris, and in love. Instead her back stiffens a little.

Even Paris itself, the physical city, is an argument for romance Parisian style. Baron Haussmann's broad boulevards and great monuments argue eloquently that Paris is not like other cities, and its inhabitants not like other city dwellers. Why then should they love like others, with more feeling than reason? Even recent civic “improvements,” such as dropping a glass pyramid into the lap of the Louvre—Europe's most romanticized museum—appear intentionally designed to stimulate passionate argument.

The first time I took a woman to Paris, I discovered things about her—and her attitude about our relationship—that were previously unrevealed by years of polite American passion. We were sitting in the cozy corner of a small restaurant in the rue de l'Echaude, savoring winter soup and crisp Sancerre, when she said
casually, “This is working out better than I ever thought it would.” I believed she was praising either the dinner or my management of our trip, and asked which she meant. “No,” she said, “I meant us, the whole thing.”

I do not remember any of the courses that followed, nor how we got back to our hotel. I'll never forget the argument that erupted, however, or the heightened passion of the remaining years we shared.

The young man retrieves his coffee cup and gazes into it. When we make this change it will be glorious, he says softly, as if thinking aloud to himself. Our essences will be mixed, our destinies joined in a way that cannot be described, or reversed. He shakes his head slowly at the immensity of it all.

The young woman's body is still wary, but her face is beginning to soften, her eyes to glisten. The young man puts down the coffee cup and takes her hands. He continues speaking to her with such persuasive sincerity that even I am willing to believe anything he says. But what of today? he asks. Once we leave this moment we cannot return to our passionate innocence. When at last we make love, the wanting and waiting will be over, but they will also be gone. Then we cannot go back, he says. Ever.

There is a long moment in which neither of them moves. The sun slides away behind the buildings, and afternoon becomes twilight. An older couple enters the café to warm greetings from other
habitués;
on the sidewalk a man in an elegant overcoat sweeps a woman in furs into his arms; inside, the bartender is talking
on the phone with one hand and gesturing dramatically with the other. Yet somehow all is silent, waiting for love to decide the argument.

Finally the young woman extracts her hands from his, sits back, and luxuriously smoothes her hair. It is not clear whether she is savoring victory or accepting defeat. A moment later, the two of them go out together. Do they go to her place and make love, or walk the Seine in silence for hours, arm in arm? Which one of them has prevailed? This is Paris, this is love. The argument continues.

Numerous writers have depicted the famed City of Light as a woman, and I must agree that she is definitely a sensual, voluptuous, sometimes loving, often laughing, playful spirit. She can also be cruel and cold in her sophisticated way, seeming to say, “I am all that is romance and splendor of the past, but if you do not respect my ancient history and try to understand my deeper mystery, then I will show you only one side of myself...the flat dimension of glittering night life, champagne and sequins, the odor of expensive perfume and cigarettes. But I will not unveil my inner beauty that lies within the cracks of every statue, depicting the glory I once knew. You will slumber in a drunken paradise, unable to keep the vigil as the sun rises on wings of fire that kiss the breasts of my monuments to the past. Because my light is invisible to the naked eye, it only touches and blesses those travelers who continue to dream and believe in their own muse with all their heart. For them, I will shine brightly through their tears of pain and infinite joy.”

—Carole Brooks, “A Love Affair with the City of Dreams”

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

I
WAS
22
WHEN
I
WENT TO
P
ARIS FOR THE FIRST TIME, A MEWLING
, puling first-class private in the army of the United States, on a three-day pass from an artillery battalion in divided cold war Germany. I was drawn to the City of Light by Charlie Wales in Scott Fitzgerald's
Babylon Revisited
and by Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
and by Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
, drawn by wine and by (let's face it) what opera stage directions call “women of the town.” I spoke a little French,
un petit peu
, as I was always quick to say, but I did know the most thrilling word I had ever heard in any language—
apéritif
.

“
Une fine, s'il vous plaît
,” I told the barman that first day in Paris (at the Hemingway Bar in the Ritz, where else?) when asked if I would like an
apéritif
. I didn't know what
a fine
was, but if it was good enough for Jake Barnes the night he met Brett Ashley again at the
bal musette
on rue da la Montagne-Ste-Geneviève, it was good enough for me. I had a second
fine à l'eau
(the barman discreetly suggested that cutting the brandy with water might possibly help me make it through the rest of the afternoon) and a third—bad news at lunch, but a gin martini seemed
de trop
, three positively vulgar. Full of brandy, youthful adrenaline, and testosterone
and absent good sense, I decided I must rent a car; I would drive, not so much to see Paris as to take it on in my disorganized (and at this point quite hungover) fashion.

The rental agency to which I was directed by the barman had only one car available, a stick-shift Renault 4CV of uncertain vintage and provenance, more a Tinkertoy with a pushback canvas roof than an automobile.

It was scarcely larger than a carnival bumper car, but no matter; I soon discovered that a bumper car was perfect for what proved to be my first, and what I thought might be my last, destination—the Arc de Triomphe at rush hour. It was like being sucked onto a giant merry-go-round that, as if in a dream, I could not get off. Round and round the Étoile I went, swept by the tide of cars—there a glimpse of the Avenue de Wagram, and a moment later Wagram again, then a third time, a fourth, and always over my left shoulder the Arc, my lodestar.

By the fifth time around, however, I began getting into it, feeling the rush, waving now, shouting, cursing, exuberantly singing “La Marseillaise,” cutting cars off, flipping other drivers the bird, and then suddenly, as if I had been ejected by a slingshot, I was off that demented carousel and onto the relatively safe haven of the Champs-Elysées. I could, however, only feel disappointment; the ride around the Étoile had been so exhilarating that I turned right around and went back again. It was as if I had finished basic training—now it was time for advanced Étoile maneuvers, except this time I would choose where to get off. And so, supremely confident, moving easily with the flow, darting through openings, I exited onto all the great avenues branching out from the Arc—Champs-Elysées, Marceau, Iéna, Kléber, Victor-Hugo, Foch, Grande-Armée, Carnot, MacMahon, Wagram, Hoche, Friedland. I will not say that I underwent an epiphany that afternoon, but in some inchoate way I realized that the only way I wanted to experience Paris was in an automobile.

Ever since that first trip I have always rented a car immediately upon my return, more than twenty times now, and on my first day in the city, sane and sentient wife in tow and protesting vigorously,
I make for the Étoile at rush hour: it is the way I let Paris welcome me back. Here a confession is in order that will perhaps explain my need for wheels. I have an aversion to sightseeing and little affinity for museums, monuments, cathedrals, shrines, grottoes, tombs, castles, and palaces. No organized bus tours for me, no group forays to Notre Dame or the Orangerie or the Palais du Luxembourg, no checklist of sites and sights to be ticked off: if this is the 7th
arrondissement
, it must be the Eiffel Tower, the École Militaire, the Invalides with Napoleon's tomb. Guidebooks leave me numb, except for the odd nonessential fact that I might later put in a book of my own. My heart leaps, for example, to learn that the Florentines, while laying siege to Siena in the 13th century, catapulted excrement and dead donkeys over the city's walls in hopes of starting a plague. Or that the Germans, during the Nazi occupation of France, added their own savage wrinkle to the guillotine: unlike the French, they made each condemned prisoner face upward, and taped his eyes open so that the unfortunate victim's last terrifying sight was the blade heading toward his neck.