It snowed for the first time in three years in Paris, and it was .freezing cold, to boot. But how glad I was to come out of the Muse d’Orsay at 9 o’clock on a Thursday night, into a full roaring blizzard on the Quai Anatole France. On the Seine, barges were combing their searchlights through the snow, and the long south wall of the Louvre had a gauze-like glow across the river. Hundreds of thousands of Americans this century have sat at a table in front of the Closetie des Lilas and pretended to be Ernest Hemingway. But few can have seen the Seine running milkwhite through a pitch-black city in the middle of a winter storm.
So I had a novel tourist experience in Paris, and don’t think that’s easy. It was Mary McCarthy who first fessed up that tourism was the central modern fact of Europe’s great cities — that “the authentic Venetian experience, … the Venice the natives know,” was the Venice of the gum-wrapper-strewn plaza and the busload of drunk English hooligans. The same, of course, is true in spades of France, which receives twice as many foreign tourists per annum (60 million) as any other country in the world. (Spain is second with 30 million, the U.S. third with 25 million.)
Take the jerkwater town of Valengay. Who’s seeing the real place — the summer tourist who knows a sunny, lively market town next to one of Europe’s most elegant castles? Or my wife and I? We drove through on market day, a Tuesday. This wasn’t market day for Julia Child. This was three or four battered old trucks parked in the town square, haphazardly, as if they’d skidded to a stop and set up where the whimsy struck them. It was nylon bibs and refrigerator magnets and black velvet paintings and questionable fish. The cards were full of tired-looking women and dangerous-looking men.
The castle — bestowed on Talleyrand by Napoleon — was closed. In fact, it was abandoned. But you can tour the grounds for 8 francs. So we found ourselves in Talleyrand’s front yard, with no one around for miles. We walked through the wrought-iron gates and were immediately surrounded by several dozen peacocks. A horseshoe-shaped hallway around the internal courtyard was filled with classical sculpture — but we were in the courtyard, not the hallway, and could only see the backs of the statues. That is, at eye level, an uninterrupted row of plump buttocks. Walking out onto the lawn, we became aware that there was a working bestiary (and has been for decades), with water buffalo, kangaroos, llamas, and reindeer running about beside and behind us.
Who would believe any of this stuff?. To walk around Talleyrand’s empty house in a town” like a Guatemalan flea market, with no entertainment but a Boulevard of Rumps, and no company but peacocks, kangaroos, and llamas? This isn’t tourism: It’s some anorexic grad student telling her dreams to her shrink. And that can’t be right, can it?
In fact, I begin to fear I’ve missed the “real France” and got it all wrong: For instance, if I were to use one word to describe the Parisians I met, it would be “nice.” That was true especially of waiters in good restaurants. So as not to sound naive, let’s assume it had something to do with the strong franc. For a foreigner to be in France now, he must really want to be there — because he likes the food, or admires the people, or whatever. And if you’re nice to people, people are nice to you.
Meanwhile, the one word I’d use for the French pedestrians we pestered for directions would be “kind.” I began to think that there’s no such thing as the oftenremarked French frostiness, only what sociologists call compassion fatigue. Most Frenchmen will gladly devote a half an hour a day to helping tourists read maps or find the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately for them, in July and August they’ve generally met their quota by the time they arrive at the office in the morning.
One more area, in which I probably shouldn t believe the evidence of my eyes: France does have non-smoking sections — but it doesn’t have a national government that forbids restaurant owners from allowing their patrons, or airlines their passengers, or businessmen their employees, to smoke. Dogs are allowed on the subway; if that bothers you, you can — shocking thought — move to a seat across the aisle. The French also have this madcap idea that parents can somehow control what their children watch on television without creating a federal regulatory apparatus and mandating the rewiring of every television Set in the country. I’m even inclined to say the one word I’d use in comparing French society to American would be “freer.” But that can’t be right, can it?
Maybe only in the off-season.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
