Getting Real in Paris

February 7, 2014

People are always fussing about Paris, about going there, and then hating other people for going there, for the very good reason that it is at the very heart of the core of the center of the culture of the West, with all that that means.  Because people also go there and are bitterly disappointed: tourists from Japan experience this so frequently that it is a recognized category of nervous breakdown, the opposite of Stendhal’s Syndrome.  Paris has a large measure of humanity, both literal and figurative, and we all know what humanity is capable of.  Breathtaking vistas and grinding squalor abide right across town from one another.  Even its recent history has been marked by bursts of mayhem on a large scale, while providing endless series of small episodes giving delight.  One weekend spent well there can nourish a starved soul over long stretches of quotidian ugliness and thoughtlessness, but it is what happens on the weekdays that really make you think. 

            There was the weekend we arrived, when the last hurrah of Christmas was going up from the Champs-Élysées, between Place de la Concorde and the Rond-Point:  chalets full of choucroute and mulled wine or crêpes or gifts of all sorts, roller-coasters, ever-changing lights up everywhere, from here to the Arc de Triomphe.  By the next weekend, most of that was gone, but Friday night there was a gorgeous Vivaldi opera (who knew he wrote so many, gathering dust in a dark library until now?), and on a Saturday compounded of alternate sun and mist, a stroll along the Iles des Cygnes and through a neighborhood marketplace, full of the fresh and fragrant makings for many a Sunday-afternoon family feast.  There was also a visit to the first thing built in the International Style – just a simple house – surrounded by other houses unique in their various ways, and un-famous streets lined with liveable shops.  Then a dash by Metro to the gritty Marché aux Puces to search for some little ceramic favors baked into galettes de rois.  In the failing light we found our missing kings and shepherd at last, while the keepers of the few shops still open chatted together in the open air, arms crossed against the cold.

            On the next day, dull, cold, and dark, we found a genteel park where everyone not cooking that Sunday feast had been sent to get an appetite and haul the family sapin to a monumental heap of Christmas Trees Past.  Scouts were trying out wilderness maneuvers among the artificial ruins, or tracking down clues to a scavenger hunt, and runners were circling, circling, circling the perimeter. Next door in a private palais an enormous bronze Buddha and lively figures of people and animals were pointed out to eager children by fond parents.  Down the street, we sipped thé Marco Polo in a corner café, watching the bundled-up families skip and stroller by with their spent arbres de Noël, the steam-punk cupola of Saint-Augustin church looming behind them in the beige sky:  heart-warming and memorable, memorable, all memorable.

            But under the ground, in a vast and grimy transportation nexus, on a pedestrian weekday, came the real lesson in humanity.  Every morning we descended into the Metro to catch the 1 line, that runs like an arrow from La Défense to the Château de Vincennes.  Every morning we changed at Châtelet - Les Halles for the suburban RER-B line that would take us out to Orsay, and the Université-Paris-Sud.  There is a long, long connection under the ground between these two points, linked by a sloping, moving pedestrian walkway and then a broad concourse edged in shops and interrupted by massive cylindrical pylons.  Suddenly we noticed that while just the usual number of people were going our direction, the walkway coming towards us was filled to capacity, people using even the unsavory overflow walkway beside it. 

            As we neared the end of our ramp we could see a wall of humanity into we would debouch at any moment.  There were mercifully many fewer of us than of them; we were one lane of traffic, sidling along the wall and into the little shops to squeeze past an oncoming flood twenty abreast or more, all silent, all moving grimly where we needed to go.  It was a long, long moment before we were rushing for the “B” train, and by then we had deciphered the announcement on the intercom:

            “Due to a fatal accident, the “A” line has been closed between Nation and L’Etoile.”  Someone had chosen that morning to throw themselves in front of a train, and the world’s largest funeral procession was moving in solemn, silent order, to take the 1 line to work.

Waking up in Paris

The sun finally peered over the edge of the smoky horizon at about 9:00 this morning; we were headed out of the city to Orsay. The sky at the zenith was that classic alto-cumulus of every Monet poppy-field you’ve ever seen, lit gold from beneath and backed by the most limpid of pale blues; the lower bits were swathed in shreds of dirty-grey stratus, with hierarchical mists in the valleys: the hither irregular ranks of houses and apartments clearer and darker, the far fading into their backdrop of high, bare poplars. The rime of hoarfrost edges every fallen plane-leaf and crusts the grass in the fields along the Yvette, in Orsay. In suburban yards, the pollarded plane trees send up their bare bouquets of thin canes against the sky, and along the roads the Lombardy poplars punctuate the voyage outward like downbeats in a dance. Suddenly I’ve lost the environmentalist’s fury with the destructive hand of man and love the pollarding, the smoke, the poplars, all the mark of man, and high up, the blue streaks of contrails, racing across the upper air. We’ll be gone soon enough from the surface of the earth: long live the present moment! (Now there’s an oxymoron for you!)

It seems that Rue Daguerre runs right from our doorstep (or nearly) to where the entrance to the RER and Metro stations appeared to us, this morning, directly under the street crossing at Avenue General LeClerc. This is the sort of epiphany that happens the second or third time one explores routes in a new place, and really, the quieter, more direct route was better yesterday, laden as we were with big rolling suitcases. But Rue Daguerre is a treasure! Lit from end to end with festive swags of lights (watch for a photo to appear soon) and truly – we saw today, now that the holiday is really over and life’s patterns return to normal here – the pedestrian-only block at the far end is like a street market in Rome: the shops there spill out onto the pavement in booths of fresh ravioli, of oysters and mussels, of cheeses and rolled roasts. The fragrance of brioches and baguettes are wafted into the street on every side: there are Viennoiseries and Boucheries on either side of the street all the way from our end to LeClerc, and already we wonder how to manage a visit to each, should we be brave enough to go in. Last night I braved the chain bakery Brioches Doree and bought an apple-spice gallette… today perhaps one of the unique places? Oh, and there is a toy-shop with Tintin figures at our end of the street, as if I need any more! But everyone needs one, am I right?

But how silent and cool the Parisians are, of course! The young women stalk along in their skin-tight black jeans and black boots, their hair uncovered and their coat collars turned up high, the young men in their huge scarves and turtlenecks…and on the train this morning, not a person was talking, except for a trio of blithe Italian students headed back home via Orly Airport, chatting away happily, Maria laughing her musical laugh for all to hear, and all of them speaking a wonderfully gutteral dialect, perhaps Venetian? It made me smile and think of the cacophony on your average Roman busful of students. Yes, Parisians are awfully northern European. But so much feels familiar here: there is a fragrance used in European cleansers or laundry soap or something that I remember from a scruffy apartment near La Sapienza in Rome which I also smell here, and those built-in wardrobes in the apartment, with their drawers like the drawers in doll-cases of yore, and their taller spaces for coats and suits where the doll should go. Yet the streets of Rome are more fragrant even than Rue Daguerre: I don’t catch the espresso on the cold morning air, or the wonderful diesel fumes of the buses roaring by, or the smell of wet pavement from the sluicing down of sidewalks every morning by shop-keepers, using the water from eternally-flowing street fountains. That pearly beauty of the sky and trees and pale houses is only Parisian, however; nothing Roman about that.

A Little Sleep-Writing

It is so common for Japanese tourists who long to come to Paris to suffer disappointment when they get here that there is a syndrome for it and psychologists specialize in its treatment, but there is no danger of either Robin or I succumbing to it. We already know some of the grim realities that our friends who were green with envy that we would be spending a month here might have forgotten: specifically, that Paris is big, it is modern, and it is full of non-Parisian-looking people who do all the hard jobs and live in the northern suburbs. Paris is a primate city, meaning that not only is the country’s government centered here, but also its industry, culture, banking, you name it: all the HQs are here. And so culture isn't the only thing happening around here, and much of it is neither beautiful nor romantic!

It is a huge employer, for one thing. Yesterday afternoon, we flew over the winding Mississippi, and this morning at dawn we were over the Seine twisting through the darkened countryside, and already, the narrow, double-laned roads clogged with car headlights were snaking towards Paris from miles out in the 'burbs, freeways were already over-filled with traffic: it was nearly 8:30 AM. Dawn comes very late here, and sunset comes very early: we are as far north as Newfoundland! On the RER train into the center from the airport, there were places – the Stade de France station comes to mind – where we could indeed have been in suburban Japan, so many businesses were overlapping with highway bridges and apartment buildings and then with trains and stadiums. And a Japanese tourist could reasonably complain that most of the buildings are painted that pearly off-white of all the self-respecting apartments of Paris: so much more staid than the paint-box colors of Rome! A few whimsical houses from the '20s in multicolored stone and brick pop up here and there, heavily decorated with graffiti.

And Paris is sofar north that all day the angle of light looks like late afternoon, and it is indeed cold! Teens and twenties fahrenheit overnight, and about freezing during the day, so that every stitch of wool that we brought will be worn, and gladly. Snow is expected towards the end of the week, so this weekend will be a good one to lay in supplies for, and just venture out on foot for explores down to the river, not try to take a train anywhere. A good day to raid Shakespeare and Co. for English translations of Georges Sand, things like that.

We are at Robin's office at the University of Paris Sud, Number 11 (Science) in Orsay, 45 minutes south of our apartment in Montmartre, fighting off sleep: I, for one, really slept not at all on the plane, sitting upright in my seat all the short night. It is sad how scattered I sound, but I'm about to flop over on the desk! After our three-day drive back to Texas last week from California, Robin reflected that Paris would be just an eight-day drive from College Station, if the Atlantic were filled in, since Paris is only about twice as far from Texas as California is... (Oh, a tiny cup of strong coffee has appeared on the scene, and a piece of chocolate: I'm saved!)

Speaking of food, between the Denfert-Rochereau RER station whence we go out to Orsay, and our place on the second floor of 124 avenue du Maine (check Google Maps!) is one of Paris' famous pedestrian streets devoted to food, the Rue Daguerre, but shops were mostly closed this morning because in Europe groceries are generally closed from Saturday afternoon to Monday afternoon…but oh, we did see some bakeries open, with brioches and breads and gallettes galore – it being that time of year when one eats gallettes in honor of the Three Kings, washed down with hard cider from Brittany. What is a gallette des rois, exactly? A disc of flaky golden pastry, scored on the top into diamonds, filled usually with almond paste and holding a small figure: in a King’s Cake in Texas or Louisiana you might find a plastic baby Jesus, but here, a tiny porcelain donkey, or angel, or king, or bambino or other character from a creche scene appears somewhere in the filling. Last year at the Marche des Puces (literally the Flea Market of Paris), we found a whole basket of such figures from years past for sale, and if we can’t eat enough gallettes to collect ‘em all, we will have to go back there and invest!

Getting around town and out to Orsay will not be a problem, since -- after snooping online for just such a thing -- at the airport train station, we successfully negotiated getting our Navigo Decouverte monthly travel cards, running out to Walgreens the night before we left to get two photos, trimming them to the correct size and slapping down Robin’s European credit card (courtesy of the folks here at U. of Paris): now we can travel in any and all of Paris’ five concentric zones by subway or train for a whole month just by paying a cool 100 Euro each and by swiping our equally-cool Navigo card across the entry sensors.

But don’t ask about the airport itself: Charles de Gaulle Airport is a scandal and a place to be avoided but, alas, never can be! Over the years I have been insulted there when I was ill and had lost my ticket, yelled at for not speaking French, led astray by supposedly-sympathetic agents, I left books on planes never to be returned, looked in vain for seating or bathrooms at gate waiting areas designed (like everything else at CDG) for looks rather than for human utility … and today there was an hour-plus wait for bags, for no apparent reason. But there was the considerable comfort of watching – as we waited patiently – the pink-and-red light show on the interior of the doughnut-shaped building and the occasional drifts of bubbles up from the bubble machine at the ground level. Wonderfully pointless!

We have also successfully met the representative of ParisAddress (found online) at the door of our apartment building on rue du Maine, learned from her how to turn on the heat, how to work the various appliances: can you believe a washer-drier combination in one machine? You put the laundry in to wash and don’t have to take it out until it is utterly dry! And the ingenious dishwasher-oven? These two are one right above the other; not connected, this time. We have left the tiny radiators heating like mad: perhaps by bed it will be somewhat toasty in there?

Ah, but the entry to the building was classic: something very much like our first night in Sendai, at the university guest house, which has no elevator and upon whose third floor we stayed, and had to remove our shoes at the front door, put on slippers and slither up the carpeted stairs, hauling our several heavy bags behind us. Here in Paris we did not have to put on slippers, but the twisting wooden stairs are slippery in a different way and… oops, not to complain! One simply needs to be robust, to a certain extent. Certainly the walk from the train station to the apartment with those two suitcases was something for the robust; long may we still be so!

So, once we admit that we can do no more here in our state of somnolescence, we will potter to the nearest FranPrix grocery store or similar for basics for the next week or so, cook up our finds, eat them, and fall into bed… here’s hoping it is not too lumpy! But we will be waking up in Paris…