La Sociabilite

May 31, 2015

     It is a rainy Sunday in Paris, a day when no one does anything, anyway.  The city is quiet and most people stay home.  I have a ticket to hear the Orchestre Colonne, a sort of "Paris 'Pops'" at five o'clock, again at the Theatre des Champs Elysees, but in the morning I go to Mass at Sainte Clotilde.

     Sainte Clotilde is a famous French saint: it is she who is said to have forced the Huns to turn around, rather than ransack Paris.  My French teacher in New York says that that is because when they arrived, Clotilde told them the plague was rampant in the city, so they prudently drew back.

     Whatever the truth, the church of Sainte Clotilde, set in a small park in the 7th, not far from the Assemblee Nationale, has more than one thing to recommend it.  It is the first neb-gothic church built in Paris in the 19th century, and renowned for its organ, which was built by Aristide Cavaille-Coll, the famous organ maker.  The Cavaille-Coll organs are extraordinary machines, each one having at least fifty stops: Sainte Clotilde's has seventy-one.

      Walking into the church twenty minutes before the eleven o'clock Mass, the nave is a buzz of activity.  Thirteen children will have their first communion in a few minutes,  and the church is chock-a-block with parents, siblings, relatives and friends jostling for seats.

      However, this is France, so no one thrusts themselves forward.  Rather, exercising their individual form of retenue (restraint), each person eyes hungrily the vacant seats in the front until, recognizing someone they know, they break the ice and enter the social circle.

     Sainte Clotilde is a parish of the haute bourgeoisie, so everyone is carefully dressed, and the hair of the women gracefully coiffed, with many "French twists" and chignons, frequently ornamented tastefully.  The men look immaculate whatever their age: well-shaven, their neckties rich and modest, their jackets well-cut.  Everyone is talking at once, in the breathless way well brought up French do.

     In France la sociabilite --a fondness for the company of others, and for festivity-- is still an important virtue.  I have only been in Paris four days and I have already been the beneficiary of it many times.  Friday, trying to find my way to my restaurant in the Latin Quarter, a woman I stop shows me the way, engages me in conversation, then offers to drive me there, as it's on her way, an offer I accept.  It turns out we have in common an interest in human rights --she is the president of a committee fighting human trafficking.  Today after Mass, the organist of Sainte Clotilde, Olivier Penin, welcomes my interest in the instrument and we chat at length about the "five great organs of Paris",  new versus old organs, and what the great organs are in New York City.  With the result that we exchange e-mail addresses, and assure each other to be in touch when I return to Paris in the Fall.

     It is important here to be agreeable.  It might be all pose, but it makes interactions with strangers easier.  You begin with the formulas of politeness, Bon jour, excusez-moi de vous interrompre --Good day, excuse me for interrupting-- if you are coming upon people conversing, a simple Bon jour, excusez-moi-- otherwise.  The language demands you use the formal "vous" in such circumstances.  The distance between you and the stranger is respected and matters can proceed.  The French still pride themselves on their poise in social situations and command of the rules of good behavior.  In fact, from childhood on, a well-brought-up son or daughter learns to Dire 'Merci' a la dame --To say 'thank you' to the lady-- if they are given something, or shown some special attention.    These are the bienseances --simple good manners-- that are part of civilized life.

     Not for the French the frontal assault, the slap on the back, the presumptuous address.  Depending on whether he believes that France needs "waking up" or not, a Frenchman (or woman), will find the unbounded affability of Americans welcome --or off-putting.  From this American's point of view, it is good to remember that both our countries see themselves as having a "civilizing mission" --something to contribute to the betterment of the world-- and be glad we don't have to go it alone.

    (I'll be off to Caunes-Minervois via Toulouse tomorrow, Beau in tow, so this will be my last post until I am settled there.)

     

Stop!

May 30, 2015

     Even before I departed for Paris my back and one of my knees had been giving me trouble.  It's partly because I gave my body no rest while in New York, combining my usual approach of walking everywhere with "spinning", along with packing my schedule to accomplish every task I had on my "to do" list before I left for what will be a long stay abroad.

     While Paris may not seem to many a place where it is possible to enjoy solitary pleasures, I found one yesterday and today pursued another: a day at a hammam in the Marais, Les Bains du Marais.  The baths are located on rue des Blancs Manteaux, off rue des Archives.  On a walkabout through Paris years ago, I discovered both the baths and an outpost of Mariage Freres, the French tea company.  Mariage Freres in the Marais is on rue Bourg-Tibourg, a few blocks from the baths and near the Bazaar de l'Hotel de Ville ("BHV" to Parisians).  I'd returned to the area to shop at BHV many times and always thought the baths exquisite, with their Moorish reception hall and crepuscular lighting.  However, it was an expensive luxury, compared to New York's plebeian 10th Street Turkish Baths, with their  $18 admission.

     Thursday, on the way back from my lunch in les Halles, I changed my mind, and made a reservation for a massage at noon today.  "I can always cancel", I reasoned thriftily, and went about my business for the next two days.

     Waking up this morning feeling black-and-blue, it seemed a stroke of genius to have made the appointment.  Staying up until 3:00 a.m. to write the last post, morning did not smile on me.  Gnarly, sleepless, I dressed and got myself out the door and headed for the baths, a 45-minute walk away.

      Upon arrival at 11:25 a.m., I asked for mint tea, which I was told would be brought to me.  I was led downstairs to the baths by a Maghrebienne --perhaps Algerian, perhaps Moroccan or Tunisian-- with eyes lined with kohl.  She explained the layout and took me on a tour of the hammam, which featured Moorish arches and in the largest space, a steamy courtyard.

       Putting on my bathing suit, I walked to the hottest room, a steambath off the courtyard.  I sat on the highest steps and immediately found the heat soothing.  There was only another person, a stocky middle-aged man, there.  I closed my eyes and enjoyed the quiet, which was interrupted by the entrance of his friend: I opened my eyes to see a pair of firm buttocks beneath a broad-shouldered, short, trim body, upper body thrust forward.  The man did not seem to know that Saturday was "co-ed", so swimsuits were required; or, if he did, he didn't seem to care.  A scrappy Frenchman from a working-class background, from the look of him, I wondered whether the repose I was hoping to find would turn out to be a chimera.

      I need not have worried.  The two men left, and for a long while, my only companion were the mists.  At noon my masseur, a Tibetan named "Lopsong", came to get me and take me upstairs to the room reserved for my massage.

     Lopsong and I had a brief conversation before he began his work.  Je suis en panne "I'm out of order"), I explained.  And for an hour, Lopsong fixed me.  He never massaged my muscles, as massage therapists usually do; rather he rubbed oil into my skin in long, soft strokes.  Within ten minutes I was asleep.  --Which may not sound unusual, but is in my case.  I have no idea what technique Lopsong used, but after his ministrations, I had no more discomfort.  I stayed in the steam rooms another two hours, alternating my visits with naps in the other large room at the baths, a cool room lined with divans and pillows whose purpose was sleeping.  Respectez le silence ("Respect the silence") said the sign outside the door to the room, and for the most part, the few people that crossed its threshold did.  I lay down on the divan with glass after glass of mint tea in my hands atop my stomach and napped freely, stopping only to return to the hammam to warm myself again.  By the time I had had as much of the baths as I wanted, it was three hours later.

     The hotel had made a reservation for me at Mariage Freres and it was there I went next.  Mariage Freres' tea room is intended to take clients back to a French Indochinese Eden: the waiters are all young, epicene men whose uniform is an ivory linen three-piece suit worn with a matching bow tie.  The men's hair is very well cut and well groomed, their skins smooth and fine.  I had a Snob Salad (shiitake mushrooms, green beans, artichoke, quinoa, shrimp, sashimi and foie gras with "green tea toasts") and a Green Tonic (fruits and vegetables flavored with ylang-ylang) to start, followed by perfumed green tea and a raspberry tart.  It is an extravagance, but nothing better after the baths.  I feel restored and walk home amid the throngs that have invaded Paris.

     It occurs to me as I do that Paris is so close to so many western European places and flights are so cheap that people can visit for the weekend the way someone from Westchester or Bergen County comes to Manhattan for the day .  Which is not to mention the Chinese and the Koreans, who are everywhere, buying up French goods en masse here, where they are much cheaper than at home.  On the streets, Bangladeshis sell all of them bottles of water for 1 Euro.  The multitudes don't venture beyond the traditional places --Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, boulevard Saint Germain, the Champs Elysees.  I don't have the sense that they learn much about Paris either before, during or after their visits: it's all about accepting the experience in front of their eyes and recording it on a selfie, preferably taken with a Zuckerberg Selfie Stick.  The subjects --not infrequently women traveling alone-- smile at themselves in front of some beauty spot.

      Here I am in front of Notre Dame.  What a beautiful day.  Isn't Notre Dame beautiful?  --Oh, you've seen it?  Did you take a photo of yourself?  You couldn't --at least not one like this one?  Too bad.  Next time you'll have to have one of these sticks.

     Crossing over to the left bank, I encounter a bookseller, a bouquiniste with an interesting print of a 19th century connoisseur of wine exercising his discrimination.  One eye closed shut with the other wide open, his look registers that infinitely critical disposition which is so very French.  For 3 Euros I think it will make a nice thing to hang on the wall of my kitchen in Caunes.  The bouquiniste is a youthful looking man dressed in a tweed cap covering blonde hair.  His blue eyes are full of fun, as he suggests I might be interested in another poster, a suggestive one.  "That might be for you, but not me", I riposte, and we are off to the races.  It turns out he is a former chef who quit the metier at 40 and turned to his present occupation.  He is fifty-four and amazingly youthful-looking, with sparkling blue eyes and a ready, mischievous smile, not tall, but engaging.  Mais vous etes beau! (--But you're handsome!) I can't resist telling him --and telling him again.  We have a laugh about this, I pay, and I'm off.  The crowds engulf me.

Au bout du nez

May 29, 2015

     Au bout du nez is a French expression meaning "right in front of you".  It comes to mind as I think about the day I spent trying to find a place I had visited on a previous visit to Paris which I thought lost to me, the Monastery of the Visitation at 69 avenue Denfert-Rochereau.

     The monastic life has always had its attractions for me, from the time, I was a teenager and read The Story of a Life, the autobiography of Therese of Lisieux.  Therese is revered by Catholics and has the status of "Doctor of the Church",  a title she shares with, among others, Saint Gregory, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine.   She is an exemplar of "the little way", a heartfelt devotion free of intellectual complexities, but acknowledged by the Vatican as just as divinely inspired as anything an intellectual like Saint Thomas Aquinas ever thought.  Therese entered the Carmelite convent in Lisieux by special permission at the age of 15 and died there aged 24, a victim of tuberculosis.

     While I had no desire to end my life as Therese did, then and now, the idea of living apart from  the world and to be certain, at any hour of the day, of what I should be doing, has its appeal.  However, I think I would have made a very poor religious.  I am far too carnal and too rebellious to submit to the discipline any order, let alone that a monastic one, requires.  Nonetheless, I felt privileged to be able to attend the vespers at a convent I stumbled upon some years ago while walking behind the Observatory behind the Luxembourg Gardens.  The nuns were cloistered, spending their time praying through the days in accordance with the "hours", the schedule of prayers that govern the life of cloistered monks and nuns.   When they came out for vespers, the nuns were separated from the non-religious by an automated grill made of wood in the form of cross-ties, which came down as they entered.

     The vespers were attended by less then ten people, including me, everyone arriving some time before the beginning of the service.  The chapel where vespers were sung was inside a courtyard entered by ringing the bell of the door to the convent.  A nun whose designated work was to greet visitors (an exception to the rule of no contact with the outside world) pointed me to the chapel two doors down.

     I turned the latch and found myself in a chapel with a tall, circular, vaulted ceiling.  Right in front of me below the vault was a gilded heart topped by a small cross, the ensemble graced by what ought to be taken for rays of golden light.  At the top of the image, encircling it, were the words, VOILA CE COEUR, and below, QUI A TANT AIME LES HOMMES: HERE IS THE HEART WHICH SO LOVED MANKIND.

     The convent has always put me in mind of the Carmelite convent of Compiegne and its nuns, who were guillotined during the French Revolution for having a portrait of Louis XVI, and inspired Poulenc to compose his opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites.  I think the convent I visited is exactly the sort of place I think they would have lived in.  The silence inside the chapel is complete, notwithstanding that a few blocks away stand Le Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, Le Dome and La Couple, the famous hangouts for writers and intellectuals in Montparnasse, all situated near busy boulevard Montparnasse. 

      I wanted to know that quiet again, although no matter where I looked on the Internet I could find no evidence of its existence.  Had it moved away?  Closed?  Been consigned to oblivion by a lack of contributions, or the death of its last nun?  My hotel wanted to send me to rue de Poissy, near Notre Dame, where the Cistercians run the College des Bernardins, but I was doubtful.  I was certain the place I was looking for was nearer the Observatory and the giant statue of a lion (a facsimile of the even larger one in Belfort, sculpted by Bartholdi) that dominates Place Denfert Rochereau.

     As I was having lunch at a restaurant not far from the vicinity of the Luxembourg Gardens, once the meal was complete, I set off.  The gardens were planted with borders of lilac color, a particularly beautiful effect, but I was set on my purpose.  I walked along the gardens at the center of the avenue de l'Observatoire, glancing briefly at the Moorish-style buildings on my right, and smiling at the collection of elementary school students scampering like kittens on my right.  I passed the Closerie des Lilas and felt my blood race: I felt I was in the right place.  I crossed boulevard Montparnasse and started along avenue de Denfert-Rochereau when, a few paces down, I found the convent.  It was called Le Monastere de la Visitation --I had not been able to find it because it was listed everywhere as a monastery, not a convent.  I rang the bell and was admitted.

     All was as it had been.  I walked into the chapel and felt again that other-worldly quiet.  The icon of the golden heart and the message were intact.  I stayed three hours.

     At six p.m., after vespers and the praying of le chaplet, a sort of short-form rosary, I left for my next stop, Le Theatre des Champs Elysees, where I had tickets to hear Magdalena Koczena and Mitsuko Uchida in a program of art songs.  I walked from my location in the fourteenth arrondissement with the intention of heading towards the Seine and westward until I reached the Pont d'Alma and the Tour Eiffel.  I reached Boulevard Raspail by the Alliance Francaise, knowing I had time to spare.  Shortly after I passed the Tour Montparnasse and the famously named rue de l'Enfer ("Hell Street"), I realized I was going in the wrong direction.  Truly, our beginnings never know our ends.

     I turned around and retraced my steps, flying to reach the concert hall before curtain.  I just made it, and the concert was wonderful.  But my visit to the Monastery of the Visitation has stayed with me, and not just because of my religious experience.  Place Denfert Rochereau, near the cloister, is the location of an underground ossuary created during the late 18th century, when Paris' cemeteries inside the city limits were overrun and had to be relocated.  The catacombs of Paris hold, it is estimated, six million people, centuries' worth.

     Place Denfert-Rochereau used to be called Place d'Enfer.  Although nothing I have read comes out and says it, the name of the square and the street in the vicinity where I realized I was lost may be derived from popular mythology about where the persons in the ossuary were doomed to spend eternity.  Notwithstanding, until the creation of the ossuary, most Parisians were thrown into "Holy Innocents" cemetery,  burial grounds lying cheek-by-jowl (if you'll forgive the phrase), with Les Halles market --and bursting with corpses.  The creation of the ossuary freed up space elsewhere that was used to give "proper burial" --specifically, interment of bodies in accordance with public health standards of the time-- to fresh dead, who were interred in new, suburban cemeteries.

  Near Denfert-Rocherau are the buildings that formed the Jansenist abbey of Port Royal, which was closed in  1790, along with all the more conventionally Catholic orders.  Today, the buildings form part of the Hopital Cochin, a public hospital and Paris' burn treatment center.  The Hotel Cochin is where George Orwell was treated for a pulmonary infection, and  figures in his essay, "How The Poor Die".  Jansenism was a movement within the Catholic Church which emphasized pre-destination and was an object of criticism by the Jesuits.

     The Monastery of the Visitation was re-established in 1807.

Aterrisage

Thursday, May 28, 2015

     "Yes, travelling internationally is not for sissies!!!!" my sister Jazmin wrote in an e-mail in reply to the news I arrived safely in Paris yesterday after a challenging flight.

      I am swearing off overnight flights after this last one, which notwithstanding an "Ambien" pill, was a "white" night, as the French say.  REM sleep was tantalizingly close, but the combination of my dog wanting to sleep in my lap and my chatty seat mate, kept me both narcotized and edgy.  (Fantasies of traveling with Beau on board the QE2 have been popping up in my head, although I know all kennel spaces on all cruises for 2016 are already reserved.)

     I forced myself --and Beau-- to walk all the way from the hotel (by the Musee d'Orsay), to Les Halles, on the opposite side of the Seine a good ways away in the direction of Paris' City Hall.  There is a restaurant specializing in good butcher's cuts, Au Vieux Comptoir, I always visit, the owners, Cyril and Anne, always glad to welcome us.

     After a salad, tuna with ratatouille, country bread and tapenade, chased with a pichet of red from the Languedoc, I was rejuvenated by when the strawberries with creme chantilly arrived.

     On the way out I met two Swedes, Christian and Lars, in Paris for the first time.  They are heating, air-conditioning and ventilation specialists, graduates of a prestigious technical school in Stockholm and possessed of a wicked sense or humor.  Although whenever the conversation turned to anything Swedish, Christian would invariably say,

     It's shit!

     Although he also said that about Paris, the French, the Swiss and a few other things, by the time we were done with each other's company.  One thing Christian wanted to make sure I understood well about Sweden was the importance of June 28, the date the midsummer break begins.  Whenever you meet a Swede, in his view, this is fundamental information.

     As I'd heard Sweden has the highest rate of second-home ownership in the world, I mentioned the fact, only to move Christian again to his byword,

     It's shit!  (In case you hadn't guessed.)

     Lars was the detail guy, the brooder in the pair.  --Although they had both been drinking through lunch and chasing the meal with beers, so that's a relative term.  At a certain point exhaustion overtook me, so we exchanged e-mail addresses and Beau and I departed.  Last night I got the following e-mail from Christian :

Tack för en trevlig eftermiddag. I hope you have a bon soare! Cheers Christian
Du borde komma till Sthlm till midsommar

Skickat från min iPhone

      Swedish is a very difficult language to learn, it seems to me, based on the above, although maybe it's all shit, as Christian would say.

      Once at the hotel, Beau and I collapsed on the bed.  I had hoped to sleep through the night, but I awoke at 11 p.m.,  Of course I'd have to take Beau out for a last walk, so that was a good thing.  We started across the Passarelle Leopold Senghor, which takes you over the Seine to the entrance to the Tuileries: there was a lot going on for a Wednesday night.  Below us there was a barge where young people were dancing and generally enjoying themselves by the banks of the Seine.  On the bridge there were a few lovers, perhaps among those who force padlocks in between the grills of the bridge --to the consternation of Parisians.  Walking to the Place de la Concorde, there were cyclists and pedestrians making their way home.  We walked as far as the statue of Joan of Arc at Place des Pyramides, then over the nearest bridge back to the Left Bank and along the Quai d'Orsay over to rue Solferino, which intersects with the street that connects directly to our hotel, rue de Lille.  (I always feel particularly safe walking in the vicinity of the hotel because down the street is the headquarters of the Parti Socialiste, where there is always at least one policeman with a machine gun.)

       It was 1:30 a.m. by the time I organized myself for today and morning came quickly, about 7:00 a.m.  The wine of the day before was giving me a devil of a headache, but a hot shower helped.  I walked Beau, then fed him, then walked him again.  I would have to get him a ticket for the train to Toulouse next Monday (I can't buy it online, as I can my own), and I needed to get cash from an ATM  from my bank, Credit Agricole.  And I needed a coffee badly.

     So I walked down to the Cafe des Deux Musees, which stands between the Musee de la Legion d'Honneur and the Musee d'Orsay.  They made me a coffee with milk to go, and I walked Beau across the passarelle once more.  By that time, Eric, the owner of Doggies & Company, a service providing in-home boarding for dogs, was waiting.  A business school graduate, he has used all he learned to create a small business that cares for between 400 and 500 dogs every year, including traveling with them to a destination where their owners meet them when they cannot travel with them themselves.  Doggies' clientele includes corporate executives on the road, as well as people with their own reasons for not wanting to have their dogs shipped in cargo --although the company will also make sure a dog gets in cargo on a plane, if that is what the client wants.  Eric and I had a coffee together to exchange notes about Beau's care and after, I handed a trusting Beau over at the hotel door.   Amazingly, he seems to be unaffected by jet-lag, although I hope his days with Eric are restful ones: Monday we travel by taxi to the Gare d'Austerlitz to take a train to Toulouse, then a taxi to the airport to pick up a leased car, then drive to my house in Caunes-Minervois.

     Still tired from the flight and the short night's sleep, I still had to buy Beau a train ticket.  Fortunately, the SNCF, the French railroad, has a station by the Orsay, so it was short work to buy the ticket first thing in the morning.  However, Mr. Llm, the Chinese Frenchman who sold me the ticket pointed out that because Beau is not a tiny dog, the tickets says I have to muzzle him.  That meant a trip back to where I had lunch yesterday, as the Parisian equivalent of "Macy's" --"BHV" is located there.  I bought a muzzle in their dog boutique, "La Niche", although I'm sure keeping it on Beau will be a challenge.

     That task accomplished, it was getting near lunchtime.  I had made a reservation at Le Violin d'Ingres, near the Eiffel Tower.  That involved another long walk to the opposite side of town.  However, it was worth every step.  The restaurant, which is favored by Paris' haut mode, is discreet, the food delicious, the service ready when you are.  The prix fixe at 39 Euros left me feeling very pampered and wanting nothing else.  (I had neither wine, nor bottled water nor coffee.)

     Walking back, I saw graffiti on a signpost: Mourir d'amour, and thought it such a Parisian idea.  Because looking at all there is to see and see and see as I walk the streets in the heart of Paris, its beauty never fades.  One of my knees may be arthritic now, and I am the worse for wear, but I could die for love of the delicate skyline, the river with its wide, paved banks for strolling, and the luminousness of the skyline at night, a nocturne, if not a hymn to the idea that life could be beautiful, all our hopes met, and all of us better than we are.

      In Paris, I want to write, the words tumble from my fingers and my possibilities seem endless.  A curious phenomenon, that.  Those who come to New York to become writers in their youth say something similar about it, but I have never felt liberated by New York the way I do Paris.  I'd like to think the aesthetic of Paris, a drive towards the exquisite, is not just the obverse of New York's gritty energy and ambition.

     During my lunch at Le Violin d'Ingres I am perfectly positioned to observe a birthday party, a celebration of a young man by a group of over-the-hill Parisians with money and sophistication.  Everyone --including the young man-- looks slightly embalmed, with their injected faces and epicene brows.  A woman in the party has a particularly raucous laugh which erupts regularly, as if she has been paid to keep the party going.  They are all regulars at the restaurant and the staff caters to them particularly, opening the waiting champagne bottle as soon as the first to arrive --a woman with a crew cut, and a man with platinum hair in a bouffant-- are seated.  The overall impression I have is of jadedness.

     However, in the midst of all this, a messenger arrives with a bouquet of flowers for the guest of honor.  The delivery man is a fat, sweaty Levantine who nervously waits for the maitre d' to take the beautifully wrapped bouquet from him and present it to the birthday boy with the compliments of the absent well-wisher.  There are oohs! and aahs! all around at the extravagance of the gesture, but it has a refinement that is memorable.

     It's all part of la douceur de vivre-- "the joy of living".  Which in France is an art.