Mon Cahier De Paris: Cafe Writings 1989, 1999

By James A. Clapp

Mon Cahier de Paris is perhaps best described as a chronicle of the author's experiences with this great city. It is not a guidebook, not a history, and not fully a memoir, although it is informed by and contains some features of all. It grew primarily from notebooks he kept over several trips to Paris as a professor-escort on university educational travel programs in the 1970s and 80s, and two periods during which I was fortunate to live and work (as a visiting Professor Associé at the University of Paris, teaching courses on American Urbanism and American film) in the city. During these times he shared Paris with some very special women in his life, formed friendships, had fascinating personal encounters, and made self-discoveries, all while, and in consequence of, coming in thrall of Paris “herself.” Everyone’s Paris memory is sui generis, a product of a unique nexus of personal time in “Paris time.” So this is his Paris, or at least what was his Paris at not only mostly during the occasion of the city’s 200-year anniversary of its Revolution, but also experienced through a time of momentous personal change in his life. He writes, "I could no more return to find Paris as it was in the Bicentennaire as I would be able to spy that forty-nine year-old version of myself waiting for the train on the opposite platform at Metro Gobelins. Only in my notes, souvenirs and the reverie they evoke, and in these pages, do they exist, their pleasures, the tristesse, too, their time and place." Drawing upon the urban history, literature, film and painting about Paris from its founding to then present day, as well as several personal experiences that readers will find both similar and contrasting with their own encounters with the city, Mon Cahier de Paris will inspire one to book a flight, grab a pen and notebook, and head for their favorite Parisian cafe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781631927942

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them.

I

INTRODUCTION

What? Another Paris book? An Amazon search will turn them up by the gazillions, from the great French writers like Hugo, Dumas, Zola and Proust to the non-French who flocked there in search of their muse, to (dare I mention it) The Da Vinci Code. But while most, though certainly not all of those works are entertaining and informative about one of the world’s great cities they were doubtless, at least by intent, to be didactic about the process of writing.

The present volume grew out of the development of a writing course I designed for travelers and aspirant travel writers built around what I refer to as travel journaling, and is intended for future iterations of that course by myself as well as other teachers and instructors teaching courses about turning travel and living abroad experiences into both personal memoir and professional publication. While it is not intended directly as a text or manual for travel writing and memoir, it is an adjunct to those purposes, and illustration and a compendium of examples of subjects and styles useful for instructional purposes.

Accordingly, since it is derived from the contents of a travel journal itself it is maintained somewhat in the form of a travel journal itself. It intentionally maintains different writing styles and voices, with some chapters that are highly personal in tone, others historical or somewhat academic, and others illustrative of the writing process. As with all writing it is firstly about the subject, but this book, while it exposes the author’s personal interests and points of view about Paris—it is appropriate here to indicate that he is an urbanist, and by training an urban planner—it is also about the experience of that city as a foreigner, and experience that combines the pre-experience of literature, film and art (in particular painting) with subsequent direct encounter, as tourist, worker, or temporary resident.

This book is perhaps best described as a chronicle of my experience with this great city. It is not a guidebook, not a history, and not fully a memoir, although it is informed by and contains some features of all. It grew primarily from notebooks I kept over several trips to Paris as a professor-escort on university educational travel programs in the 1970s and 80s, and two periods during which I was fortunate to live and work (as a visiting Professor Associé at the University of Paris) in the city. During these times I shared Paris with some very special women in my life, formed friendships, had fascinating personal encounters, and made self-discoveries, all while, and in consequence of, coming in thrall of Paris herself.

Everyone’s Paris memory is sui generis, a product of a unique nexus of personal time in Paris time. So this is my Paris, or at least what was my Paris at not only mostly during the occasion of the city’s 200-year anniversary of its Revolution, but also experienced through a time of momentous personal change in my life. I could no more return to find Paris as it was in the Bicentennaire as I would be able to spy that forty-nine year-old version of myself waiting for the train on the opposite platform at Metro Gobelins. Only in my notes, souvenirs and the reverie they evoke, and in these pages, do they exist, their pleasures, the tristesse, too, their time and place.

This book does not purport to be comprehensive about the French, or the Parisians, for which I have neither sufficient nor lengthy experience, and so that is better left to those who have. It is confined in time and geography, if not entirely bounded, by the several rather brief periods I have spent in France, and is (to borrow the sense of their own term) impressionistic rather than comprehensive or analytical.

So this is a chronicle, somewhat in the spirit of several I have read by others¹ who have encountered this fascinating place, its history, its lore, its uniqueness, and been captivated by it. My own encounter was mostly with a pen, notebook (although I did have a portable typewriter) and a camera that was closer to what Cartier-Bresson used than today’s megapixel digitals. I communicated with home mostly by aerogramme and an occasional phone call made from a cabine at the local bureau de poste. I lived in rooms and studios that would give a monk claustrophobia and transported myself about the city with a thin little billet called a carte orange that took me though streets that had yet to know of ATMs. Instead I went to the American Express near the Opera (the 19th Century building, by Garnier) where I wrote personal checks to receive French francs and eagerly awaited mail from home. The view from today is anachronistic; a Paris of another time, but hardly as far back as the Paris that is famous for the exploits of my predecessor Americans such as Franklin and Jefferson, Stein, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Josephine Baker, Henry Miller, Man Ray, almost innumerable artists, musicians, scholars and writers.² But that is the point, is it not—the setting of the existential baseline that is required to assess how the intersection of place and time, circumstance, has changed us.

It is cliché to claim that one has fallen in love with Paris (it is after all called the City of Love, among its other sobriquets); but, as I have written elsewhere³ and of another city, loving a city is not necessarily a requited love, and can be a rather complex and sometimes disappointing relationship. As with people there are different characteristics that appeal to us in different ways. This relationship with Paris, which I now carry on mostly with distances of memory and geography, is explored in different dimensions in the pages to follow. For the present it is important to indicate that my affection for and perspective on Paris is strongly influenced by the fact that I am a professor of urbanism and city planning, an urbanist, that is, someone who studies cities and urban life with a particular interest in urban morphology, the physical design and layout of the city and its relationship, the character and quality of urban social life. Therefore, my enchantment with Paris crosses over the more familiar domains of art, food, culture and history, into territory in which, difficult as it can be at times, the academic in me strives to retain a posture of objectivity at some remove from the frisson that can overtake one in the instant of turning a corner to catch sight of Notre Dame on a sunny day, or on hearing that marvelous chord change from minor to major in Cole Porter’s I Love Paris.

So in this book I am looking back, an à la recherche du temps perdu of a minor sort (to borrow from a late Parisian), but through a prism of other times and urban experiences. By way not only of visitation, but also readings, movies, art, Paris has been a recurrent inspiration. Because I am an urbanist, Paris has confirmed for me that cities are far more than physical settlements, but expressions of human hopes and potentialities (sometimes marred by greed and stupidity). Cities are our greatest and most complex human invention, and in exceptional cases, like Paris, a work of art.

I am far from the first to sit in the terrace of a Parisian café making notes or attempting some lines of plot or poetry, drawing inspiration from the life of the city. Many of us have read the results of Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald and others. We need not be intimidated by these luminaries; every Paris is sui generis to each of us and so we are writing not only about Paris, but ourselves. All it takes is a pen, a notebook and, of course, some time in Paris.

I began writing notes about Paris sometime in the middle 1970s. My wife, Patty, and I were staying at the Hotel Claude Bernard in Rue des Ecoles. We had come over to Europe for two weeks to allow me an opportunity to familiarize myself with an itinerary in which I was scheduled to lead a group of students two weeks hence. With good reason. I had never been to Europe and yet I had designed and organized a tour for a group of my graduate students of some European cities with which I had only, as a student of urbanization, an academic acquaintance. I was, in effect, trying to avoid being discovered a complete fraud.

The whole idea, as I disclosed in the preface to my book, The Stranger is Me: Journeys in Self-Discoveries, was Patty’s in the first place. After we moved from New York to California and she embarked on her delayed desire to study art and art history, she insisted that we needed to go to Europe. The idea of me becoming a professor of educational study tours, and earning free trips in the bargain, was hers, as was the idea of disguising the fact that I had no credentials other than my academic acquaintance with Europe’s cities by simply being a couple of weeks ahead of my students.

So here we were, at the beginning of those two weeks, in Paris. Patty would return to San Diego to retrieve our daughters from her parents when I went to meet my students at Heathrow in London a fortnight later; so she had packed every minute of that time with activity, and food. Champignons à la Grecque, oeufs durs, baguettes, some brie and charcuterie, she swept through the small shops provisioning our picnic in the jardins at Versailles or the Tuilleries to fortify our jet-lagged bodies for the Palais-Royal or the Louvre, or the Orangerie (Orsay was just a proposal then), or … it is a vertigo-inducing blur just trying to recall it. The next day she would be loading her camera and checking the early morning train schedules to Monet’s place at Giverny. I watched her in wonder depart on her art excursions, and I skipped Monet or Modigliani for my chance at the leisurely pace of the flâneur, to slouch in the terrasse of a café to drink in the life of the street with a café espress.

Subsequently, I returned several times to Paris, on each occasion adding only marginally to my high school French. In 1979 I returned with Patty and our daughters, Laura and Lisa, at the time fourteen and thirteen respectively, and by then we had made some French friends, one of which, Joelle, who is an incarnate contradiction to the notion (usually by American tourists) that the French are snobby, surly, humorless and aloof, has been like a family member for decades. But the 1980s was a difficult decade. Patty did not live to see her beloved Paris again and, two years after her death I lost a dear friend and colleague in 1987.

But sometimes the same fates that throw one’s life into sadness can also press a reset button. In 1988 I met the late Professor Michel Gresset, the highly respected Faulknerian scholar and translator of the works of William Faulkner. Michel was visiting our campus and was introduced to me by way of a colleague in our French department. When he discovered that I was teaching a course on The American City in Cinema he asked if I might be interested in a visiting professorship to teach it at the University of Paris. There is a song lyric (the title of which I can’t seem to recall) that suggests a week in Paris as a cure for melancholia. While I don’t believe coincidences happen for a reason, I did happen to have a reason why accepting that offer might be a good idea. It took a year to work out all the arrangements, but I was going to get that week in Paris, and a good deal more.

In my view there is a significant difference between a traveler and a tourist. One distinction (not mine) is that a tourist knows where he is going and when he will be back; the traveler does not. But perhaps such a traveler is merely a wanderer. In my view the true traveler is on a quest, in search of a muse, inspiration, escape, resurrection, a dream, or dream girl (guy), something that perhaps transcends the destination itself, something existential. Elsewhere I wrote that one of my own travel objectives is … being a stranger … in unfamiliar territory. It is to be where the traveler must adapt to foreign ways, where communication is hampered by language barriers, and where most of the taken-for-granted modes of everyday life are suspended. Being a stranger is most often the travel mode of the ex-patriot, the foreign service officer, and the solitary traveler. But it can also be achieved by breaking away from a tour group or guide for an afternoon or evening, turning a few corners, and being on your own resources and wits, being unknown, but yet more acutely aware of yourself and your own nationality, of being slightly vulnerable, of seeing yourself as a stranger.⁴ It is that vulnerability, that reliance upon our wits and resources, that cultural contrast, that can prompt and lead to self-discoveries that often remain veiled to us in the familiarity and comfort of our native societies.

Still, destination is often of purpose and consequence: a pilgrimage to Rome, Jerusalem or Benares to pray; to Zurich or Hong Kong in quest of mammon; to Istanbul or Mumbai to find the exotic; Bangkok or Sydney for sex; to some South Pacific isle for primitive isolation. The choice of destination can be the first level of revelation of one’s existential purposes of foreign travel. While my formal purposes in traveling to Paris were initially to act as an escorting professor on study tours my prime purpose in subsequently accepting a visiting professorship at the University of Paris was to write.

As should be evident in the The Ladies of Paris that opportunity came close upon a tragic circumstance in my life. The salutary week in Paris and a good deal longer availed when I was offered the Professeur Associé. It was an opportunity to not only refocus the disrupted dimensions of my life, but to get to know and write about a new lady, Paris.

II

AN AMERICAN URBANIST IN HAUSSMANNTOWN

French journalist Sanche de Gramont, in attesting to the dominance of Paris, recounts an anecdote about Rudyard Kipling’s visit to Algiers in 1921. Kipling was surprised to find that while the rest of the Middle East was in turmoil, the French Maghreb was rather calm. The city’s mayor remarked that, Paris is the trump of our diplomacy. If a local chief becomes excited, dissatisfied, or wants to play the prophet, there is always the solution of a trip to Paris. Paris turns wolves into sheep.⁵

Many a visitor has been made to feel like a wooly ruminant by Paris, its intimidation consistent with the metaphorical feminine gender with which writers and residents tend to describe it/her. Paris’ grandeur, historical pathos, and beauty intimidate, as would an encounter with a grand courtesan of those characteristics. Kipling’s story applies to the Parisians as well, since the matriarchal dominance of Paris over the entire nation is like that of no other city in the developed countries of the world. Major governmental, productive and intellectual functions and institutions are shared among New York, Washington, and Los Angeles in the United States, between London and Manchester in England, by Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Rome and Milan in Italy, Tokyo and Osaka in Japan, and Berlin, Bonn in Germany. In France they are concentrated in Paris. It is indisputably the political, diplomatic, intellectual, commercial, historical, and tourist capital of the nation. Geographically, the extensive road system of France appears as spokes on a great wheel whose hub lies at the tiny island in the Seine that Julius Caesar chose as an encampment in 53 BC. That domination has diminished somewhat with the advances in transportation and communication that had spread economic development to other cities and regions and with the emergence of the Internet as a ubiquitous mode of cultural diffusion.

Unlike New York, Paris arrived at the opening of the 19th Century with enough turbulent history behind her to enrich the biographies of a dozen cities. In a land with little in the way of natural borders, control of the city has historically played an enlarged role in national politics and hegemony. Various emperors and kings found it necessary to regularly expand its encircling walls, or bulwarks (the etymological antecedent to the term which Paris has made famous, the boulevard), beginning with Philip Augustus’ wall containing little more than the Ile de la Cité and Ile Saint Louis, to the fifth wall of the Thiers fortification in 1840.

But threats to the control of the city came as often from within as from without. The greatest political event of French history before the 19th Century was, of course, the Revolution of 1789 that plunged the city into a rollercoaster of republics and authoritarian regimes that played out over decades. There is little necessity to review these events herein except insofar as the Revolution and its aftermath supply the present interest herein with events and scenes coincident with and influenced by it. Almost with a dramatic chronology, a century on from the Revolution, Paris had refashioned itself as a city for the modern age and, as though on cue, was raising a steel tower in the Champs de Mars as the bold focal point of its first centenary celebrations. To ascend the Eiffel Tower in 1989 was to stand at the midpoint of the Bicentenaire.

Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann’s mausoleum in Père Lachaise cemetery is rather modest. In the entablature above the arch of the narrow, oxidized door is incised Famille Haussmann. Save for the arch, the architecture is a pastiche of classical elements, ornate capitals atop fluted pilasters. It hardly stands out among the numerous similar mausoleums in this subdivision of Paris’s most renowned burial ground. But it has a special significance for me.

Even with a map that can be purchased at a florist shop across the street from the entrance, it took me a while to find Haussmann. Most visitors to Père Lachaise come to visit Héloïse and Abelard, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Modigliani, Jim Morrison, or anyone of dozens of other luminaries trying to get some eternal rest here. Haussmann is probably overlooked by most, but not by an urban planner, or anyone familiar with the planning of Paris. His neighbors in Père Lachaise might have made their own distinctive marks on the city, its history and its lore, but none made such an impression on what we instantly recognize as the very morphology of the city as did Haussmann.

Haussmann was the Prefect de la Seine in Paris from 1853 to 1870, essentially the director of public works, but probably no other urban planner, not Sixtus V in Rome before him, or Robert Moses in New York after him, made such an impact and imprint upon a world class city. But before we consider his accomplishments and destruction more specifically, it is useful to delve into Paris BH (Before Haussmann).

Paris began where we might have expected, beside that little island around which the river Seine flows, known as the Cité, on which there was a settlement of a Celtic tribe called the Parisii. They called it Lutetia. On the right bank, to the north the land was not well-suited for habitation. It was swampy and marshy, which remains commemorated in the Marais (marsh); the left bank, mostly meadowland, was preferable. Today, of the several little islands in this reach of the Seine, only the Ile-St.-Louis remains, but it had been unsettled upon for some time.

Although the Romans were having difficulty pacifying the Gauls (particularly that pesky Vercingetorix), Julius Caesar, author of the Caesar’s Gallic Wars from which I learned much of my Latin, sent legionnaires there in 52 BC. If the Romans had had their way they might well have imposed a street grid pattern upon the island consistent with their standard layout of a Roman castrum, or military encampment. That would be coherent with the present-day rectilinear layout of the Cité as well as Ile-St.-Louis, but the Roman influence upon the subsequent shape of things is conjectural. Remains of the Roman settlement are mostly on the Left Bank where remnants of their baths, some temples, a theater, and some traces of an aqueduct have been excavated. There might even have been a Roman temple near the east end of the Cité if the effigies of Roman gods uncovered in the 19th C in the crypt of Notre Dame are considered evidence.

Although Lutetia was not as strategically significant a Roman outpost as those they established at Lyons and Trier, the Romans erected the first walls toward the end of the Third Century, owing to attacks from barbarians (Gallic tribes fought amongst themselves as well as against the Romans). When Rome went into decline in the same century so did Roman hegemony over Lutetia.

By the Fifth Century there were only vestiges of Roman control and the region fell into chaos and lawlessness among the barbarian or Germanic tribes.

One tribe, the Franks, began to assert dominance. They