The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists

By Michael Peppiatt

The Existential Englishman is both a memoir and an intimate portrait of Paris ­– a city that can enchant, exhilarate and exasperate in equal measure. As Peppiatt remarks: 'You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you'. This, then, is one man's not uncritical love letter to Paris.

Intensely personal, candid and entertaining, The Existential Englishman chronicles Peppiatt's relationship with Paris in a series of vignettes structured around the half-dozen addresses he called home as a plucky young art critic. Having survived the tumultuous riots of 1968, Peppiatt traces his precarious progress from junior editor to magazine publisher, recalling encounters with a host of figures at the heart of Parisian artistic life – from Sartre, Beckett and Cartier-Bresson to Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. Peppiatt also takes us into the secret places that fascinate him most in this ancient capital, where memories are etched into every magnificent palace and humble cobblestone.

On the historic streets of Paris, where all life is on show and every human drama played out, Michael Peppiatt is the wittiest and wickedest of observers, capturing the essence of the city and its glittering cultural achievements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781408891704

Michael Peppiatt

Michael Peppiatt graduated from Cambridge, where he edited Cambridge Opinion and wrote exhibition reviews for the Observer. In an international career spent between London, Paris and New York, Peppiatt has written regularly for Le Monde, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Art News and Art International magazine, which he re-launched as its new publisher and editor from Paris in 1985. He is the author of over twenty books including the definitive Bacon biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (revised edition 2008). In 2005 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Cambridge for his work in the field of twentieth-century art. Peppiatt has also curated numerous exhibitions worldwide, and he is currently at work on a major retrospective contrasting the achievements of the two modern artists he most admires: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

PART ONE (1966–69)

1 Abroad! Abroad!

2 Behind Duchamp’s Door: 12 rue Larrey, Ve

3 Street Theatre: 12 rue Larrey, Ve

4 Love’s Labyrinth: 17 rue de Poitou, IIIe

PART TWO (1969–77)

5 The Empty Room: 17 rue de Poitou, IIIe

6 Stone by Stone: 11 rue de Braque, IIIe

7 One of Us: 11 rue de Braque, IIIe

8 Entr’acte: 24bis rue de l’Abbé-Grégoire, VIe

PART THREE (1977–94)

9 Laughing Boy: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe

10 The Reckoning: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe

11 Phoenix: 77 rue des Archives, IIIe; 14 rue de Birague, IVe

12 Fallout: 14 rue de Birague, IVe; 16 rue Michel le Comte, IIIe

Postscript: Full Circle: 16 rue Michel le Comte, IIIe (2014–18)

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

A Note on the Author

By the same Author

Also available by Michael Peppiatt

Preface

The turquoise lamps flicker and dim, or perhaps my eyes are playing tricks on me after a day’s tenacious reading in the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I love this place so much that even if I weren’t deep into research on seventeenth-century life in Paris I would come here simply to watch all the faces bent intently over manuscripts and listen to the concentrated hum of so many minds communing with the past. There’s also an oddly erotic note to the tense, hushed atmosphere, but even when your gaze doesn’t cross that of some raven-haired beauty framed in soft light at a distant table, it’s a unique privilege to be sitting in this lofty, book-lined space founded by Cardinal Mazarin in 1643 and without contest the most venerable, elegant library in Paris.

For a handful of euros, my reader’s card allows me to come and go as I please to the Mazarine throughout the year. As a young man finding his way Marcel Proust worked here fitfully as a librarian, and next door, under the golden-ribbed dome of this exalted institution, France’s academicians, its immortels, meet to discuss and defend the purity of the French language. Every time I cross the Pont des Arts and contemplate the extraordinary harmony and grace of Louis Le Vau’s building – in my eyes, the architectural focus of the whole Left Bank – I am transposed to another realm.

I have worked hard today, and before I go home I want to wind down by wandering through the streets for an hour or so. I start walking back over the bridge, thinking I might cut through the Louvre towards the Marais. But a wind whips icily off the darkening back of the Seine as it plunges towards the sea, so I retreat and head instinctively towards the bright lights and human warmth of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Dusk is falling fast on rue de Seine, and the art galleries and bookshops never look so seductive as when, on a bitter winter evening, their glittering displays of culture are about to be shuttered off for the night. The smell of roast chestnuts wafts across rue Jacques Callot and I’m tempted to buy some in a paper twist and stop off for a draught beer at La Palette, where a few art-world people I know are bound to have gathered in the cosy back room. Then at the bar I espy a dodgy art dealer holding forth to a couple of unsuccessful artists I’ve been avoiding for years, and suddenly the idea of a large glass of white Burgundy at Café de Flore becomes more appealing.

I pass by the Deux Magots and note superciliously how thronged with tourists it seems, sitting where great writers once sat and even wrote their books. Then I pause reverentially at the crossroads of Saint-Germain, the crossroads of civilisation, or certainly the cradle of what interests me most in modern literature and art, even if those hallowed names, from Joyce, Picasso and Giacometti to Breton, Sartre and Beckett, might not mean so much any more to the crowds of attractive young people milling around the boutiques along the boulevard. At Café de Flore I push back the tightly wedged door and savour the first rush of its wine-scented warmth, scanning the crowd to see if there is anyone I want to greet. No old friends are in tonight, so I shake hands with a couple of waiters and acquaintances, then climb the stairs to the clubby, wood-panelled room on the first floor and settle down at my favourite table.

After the first glass of wine I begin to relax, as if I’d walked through a wall into another, calmer dimension. The working day has faded perceptibly into evening, and I reflect on what other pleasures might be at hand. With my wife travelling abroad all week, I’d be glad to have a light supper here rather than face the snacks I wolf alone off the kitchen counter at home. Meanwhile, the terrace of Brasserie Lipp, ringed round with golden lights and rosy patio heaters, glows invitingly on the pavement opposite. I can almost hear the hubbub of elegant Parisians inside, nonchalantly relinquishing their haughty chic to put away a hearty meal. Once I start musing on the relative merits of Lipp’s entrecôte with crisp frites and its tender cassoulet, washed down with draughts of the house Bordeaux, the decision is quickly made. I pause only to pick up a copy of Le Monde from the kiosk outside, then realise, as I slip into a seat at the centre of the bustling brasserie, that I’ll barely glance at the headlines once the spectacle here begins to unfold.

All Paris is already filing in, the rising starlet and the ancient pop star, the notorious duo of decorator queens, the august men of letters, the élite lawyers and society doctors courting wealthy widows, the scandal-dogged politicians with their reproving wives or hard-eyed mistresses. The new episode of nightly drama, mercifully closer to farce than to tragedy, is under way. Some factions amongst the diners fall into each other’s arms while others pointedly cold-shoulder former partners or lovers, initiating new alliances as they eat. Meanwhile, like a conductor who can no longer keep to the podium, Lipp’s maître d’ wafts grandly through the melee, greeting the favoured few unctuously while hissing orders to the squad of white-aproned garçons following him round.

I’ve seen it all before, in numerous permutations, with once-famous participants who now exist at most as footnotes to eras long bygone. But somehow the familiarity is part of the attraction, and there is always an unexpected element, a sudden spat between client and waiter or an American heiress in dark glasses newly squired by a famous fashion gay, to offset the round of outrageous gossip and intimate exchange. I roll the last glass of claret round my tongue and watch every antic from my ringside seat, avidly but discreetly, since the whole charade can be closely followed in the huge mirrors that line the walls.

At that moment, as I choose a fine-spun Armagnac to cap my meal, I know why I spent more than half my adult life here – and why, after an interim of twenty full and happy years in London, I decided to come back and live in Paris again…

The book that follows describes my lifelong attachment to this bewitching, temperamental, exasperating city and the deep love-hate relationship that binds me to it. It charts my faltering progress in Paris from 1966 onwards as an arts journalist, writer, editor and, briefly, magazine owner and publisher, blending my personal experience of the city’s differing facets and moods with sketches of the memorable people I have known here as well as insights into the secret places in this ancient capital that fascinate me most.

But my story, my confession, derives essentially from the interaction of person and place, that constant and unpredictable osmosis, and the complex ways each influences the other. Paris undoubtedly formed me, changing my outlook and moulding my reactions: my awareness of history and the arts, my relationships with other people or, perhaps above all, the sense I have of my own identity, which would have been fundamentally different if I had spent those decades elsewhere. Dusk seen from a bridge over the Seine, for instance, is a far cry from the same early evening experienced on the Embankment or indeed watched from a skyscraper on Lake Shore Drive.

You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you. You are caught in a constant exchange which alters your thoughts and emotions in unforeseen ways because your relationship, particularly with a place as deeply layered and many-sided as Paris, is not just one relationship: it is every kind of relationship, because the city constantly encircles you, embracing and rejecting you without warning, revealing itself as it reveals you, mirroring you, remembering you, mimicking and mocking you, just as you might mimic and mock its peculiarities and pretensions when you escape elsewhere – as if fleeing a possessive spouse – and enjoy the illusion that for a moment you are beyond its tentacular grasp.

That relationship also deepens in time, of course, like any meaningful union. The Paris that visitors see as they flit between museums has nothing to do with the street where you have woken up, drunk your coffee and gone your daily round for years. You know the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. Your eye has run over all the façades, taking in the doorways and the courtyards. If you know the stones, you remember many of the staircases since you once ran up them eagerly to see a friend or a lover (or dragged your feet on your way to dentist and accountant). You also recognise scores of windows, grand and mean, on piano nobile or perched like seated dogs on rooftops, where people you once knew moved confidently, waving, calling out to you, even if you no longer see them because they moved away, fell out of touch or died.

All this, as your months in a city turn to years and the years to decades, binds you to Paris as it can bind you, in my experience at least, to no other city. Paris has been a haven for me, providing a vast historical backdrop against which I have had the stimulus and independence to become as closely as possible the person I wanted to be. In certain ways, as the city seeped into every crevice of my existence, the experience made me more consciously English as I reacted against the change in language, habits and culture that moving to a foreign country entails. The change felt all the more radical since I spoke French almost exclusively and, when I worked in the late 1960s as an arts editor at Le Monde, I began to write my articles and reviews in French. This linguistic volte-face did not last, but the contrast between my adopted city and the Englishness into which I was born has made me question and adjust many of my unconscious assumptions, just as a tree would adjust when transplanted to a different climate and soil if it were to survive at all.

My admiration for Paris’s architectural beauty and its resonance as an historical, literary and artistic capital has not only been repaid in incalculable volumes of visual and intellectual pleasure. Little by little, and often without my even being aware of it, it has formed the way I look at the whole world. It has trained my eye, sharpened my sense of aesthetic comparison and made the past come vividly alive. Where once I might have settled down happily in a modern metropolis of straight lines and skyscrapers (and no one loves Manhattan more than myself when there on a brief visit), I soon grow ill at ease in places that have no far-reaching history.

Now I need the tangible reassurance of centuries, to touch a stone or a doorway and think of all the generations that have come before, in wigs and beauty spots, breeches and crinolines. I want to walk along the river banks remembering snatches of Baudelaire, listen to Piaf in a seedy Montmartre bar, see the city from certain angles through Degas’ eyes. And I have: Baudelaire, as well as Apollinaire and Prévert, lend themselves admirably to being quoted by the Seine, and once I espied through a dusty window in a courtyard on rue du Temple a room full of exquisite adolescent ballerinas at practice that looked like a Degas pastel set suddenly into motion.

Like that dusty window, the past hangs lens-like over my everyday present, distorting and enriching it. I am delighted to know, for instance, that people in the building where I live at present once drew their water from the ancient canopied well that sits in our cobblestone courtyard, and that when it was an inn called ‘A l’enseigne de l’Ours et du Lion’ (‘At the sign of the Bear and the Lion’) in the fifteenth century, travellers used the well-preserved mounting posts to get off their horses, tethering them to the big iron rings still fixed into our walls.

But of course living in a city is not made up just of enticing historical perspectives. Feast my eyes as I may on noble façades festooned with armorial bearings and triumphal swags overlooking exquisite formal gardens, I have also slept in tenements where the walls were paper-thin and the squatting latrines communal, eaten (often not badly) in the cheapest student canteens and talked (often with profit) to vagrants, rag pickers and rubbish collectors. I have clothed some of them, and once there was a down-and-out of roughly my size whom I used to see regularly in the Marais dressed from head to foot in my cast-offs, winkle-pickers, flared trousers and all, a relationship that cooled when I caught him eyeing the new raincoat I was sporting with undisguised concupiscence.

I have been at the Paris Ritz, sipping champagne, and on the French dole, queuing up with Arab and other immigrants. If I had to endure being routinely humiliated by petty officials when paying my tax or renewing my residence permit, I could always remind myself that I was a regular guest at the American ambassador’s residence (‘Come more often, stay longer,’ one jovial incumbent told me encouragingly). I have escaped my humble lodgings where neighbours’ bickering drove me to distraction to dine with Sophia Loren or Catherine Deneuve, as well as a serene princess served by footmen in livery. But even if I could I should hate to live continuously in luxury and privilege. The luxuries, the grandeurs, have no meaning without the drudgery and misères of the daily round, and life itself loses its bearings if you are too cut off from the common lot. But this, I have to say, rarely becomes an issue in Paris, because even the most exalted are never that far from the street; and here, in the street, all life is on display, all human conditions visible and every drama played out.

So the book that follows is above all a book of deep intimacy, its love and gratitude mixed with flashes of sudden rage, like lightning in a summer sky. After all, is there a relationship, with a person or with a city, that does not decline from time to time into irritation, anger or even despair – that makes you long for the stately parks of London, the jolting energy of New York or the easy-going civility of Lisbon?

I would naturally not pretend that in my short span and limited activity I have had any significant impact on Paris in the way it has had on me. The city is vast and if not eternal it goes back for millennia and may well last for many centuries more. But I believe, presumptuously perhaps but not insincerely, that the Paris the following account evokes will in turn have its effect, and that anyone reading this book will come to see the city from a uniquely personal viewpoint, in a changed light.

This memoir is structured around the half-dozen addresses I’ve lived at in Paris, from Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the old, royal area of the Marais, which became and remains my favourite quartier. If, at one level, this confession chronicles my precarious progress in Paris from junior editor to magazine publisher, describing my encounters with certain memorable people I have met in the city, it also reaches deeper. Paris’s present can only be understood in terms of its past, intimately embedded in every keystone of every archway of its ancient centre. So the memoir also delves into various historical strata, some a few decades old, others reaching back to the licentiousness of the pre-Revolutionary Palais-Royal or even the Romans when they built the Arènes de Lutèce, one of the city’s most evocative, hidden spaces. It includes portraits of Parisians I knew well, including the writer Michel Leiris, the painter Jean Dubuffet or photographers like Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and sketches of others passing through the city, from Graham Greene and Marlene Dietrich to Sonia Orwell, David Hockney and Jasper Johns. There are also regular tributes to the heroes I associate with Paris, the patron saints that I kept in mind above all when the going got tough, whether Victor Hugo and Degas, or Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti.

My story is neither a paean of praise nor a critique of the City of Lights, but one writer’s record of an intimacy shared over half a century and a fascination with a culture so fine it illuminates and transcends the present. From my present perspective that time now seems either to have flashed by in a brief jumble of images and sensations, or to stretch out in countless, meandering directions. There were peaks and troughs, as well of course as infinite longueurs – that mass of cloudy, forgotten hours that makes up so much of every human life.

But I wanted to play it all back to see what shape it would take once written down. I wanted to play it back, sometimes fast-forwarding, sometimes pausing to explore half-remembered faces, feelings and events, to find out how things crystallised, to unearth what really remained.

Michael Peppiatt

Paris, May 2018

PART ONE

(1966–69)

1

Abroad! Abroad!

‘Are you Michael Peppiatt?’

‘Yes,’ I reply, cautiously.

The voice on the other end of the telephone is guttural, almost comically so, as if someone were faking an exaggeratedly heavy, Germanic accent.

‘Are you really Michael Peppiatt?’

‘Yes, I really am,’ I tell him. ‘I’m Michael Peppiatt.’

I can’t think of anything more convincing to say. But in my own mind a doubt has already crept in. The name sounds made up, even a bit preposterous, like a name in a play. What was it, anyway? French? Anglo-Norman?

‘I am delighted to meet the real Michael Peppiatt at last,’ the voice continues. ‘The real Michael Peppiatt.’

This is getting annoying. I quickly run through the people I know who might go in for a telephone prank like this, then I realise, regretfully, that they’re all too old now. I’m just about to put the receiver down with a sharp, sarcastic remark when the voice explains that this call concerns the will of a relative, a first cousin once removed I’ve never heard of, who has died intestate in Switzerland. The voice asks me to name several closer relations of mine, including my paternal grandmother, born in Dornach, a small town near Mulhouse, in 1882. I comply and this appears to tick the right box, since the voice then reveals itself as belonging to a lawyer in Zurich and confides in me that I am due to receive an inheritance. By the time the overall amount has been divided amongst all the rightful heirs, the voice continues, the sum will not be ‘princely’, indeed it will be modest and subject to fees and taxes.

I put the phone down in an odd frame of mind. My heart leapt at the sound of ‘inheritance’, only to subside at the qualifications of ‘modest’ and ‘taxes’. The conversation has only really served to remind me of what a mongrel I am, with some French blood here, some German blood there, and a name, although I’ve lived with it for over seventy years, that’s difficult to situate anywhere. Was that why, although I loved England, I often felt so rootless and restless there? At all events, a couple of thousand pounds was certainly welcome, but it was not going to change anything in my life.

It turned out I was wrong. A few days later a letter arrived, addressing me as ‘Cher cousin’, and I discovered that I was related not only to the amiable-sounding Jacques Küsser, the cousin who had sent the letter, but to a large group of people living in Alsace-Lorraine. To illustrate the point, Cousin Jacques included a photograph of his parents’ golden wedding anniversary where, he informed me, the many ranks of celebrants, mostly Alsatian farmers with impressively thick necks, were also cousins of mine in varying degrees of distance and removal. I scanned the rows of broad, grinning faces for any signs of a family resemblance but could find none.

My grandmother – ‘Nana’, as we called her – shared the same name as Flaubert’s long-suffering mistress, Louise Colet, but nothing else, not even, I suspect, the same language, since she had been brought up in Alsace at a time when a German or rather Alemannic dialect was most frequently spoken, with French coming a poor second. Yet my father traced his lifelong affection for France to Louise, as well as, more indirectly, to the French origins of the ‘Peppiatt’ name, which, he explained, was a diminutive of ‘Pépin’, or ‘pip’, and came from Normandy where, in the distant past, it had originated as a nickname for a ‘fruit farmer’. My father was particularly fond of Calvados (although he also indulged in every other alcoholic drink on offer), and I sometimes fancy he might have been drawn to it as a kind of distillation of our apple-growing origins. But Pépin was also the family name of the Carolingian kings, my father would add with a flourish, startling his listeners into wondering exactly who they were, before explaining in detail that Pépin le bref, ‘poor, old, short-arsed Pépin’, as he called him familiarly, was himself the father of Charlemagne. In a nutshell, we had probably not only come over to England with William the Conqueror (as a boy, I heard the armour clank and saw the sword flash in the mailed fist), but if you really went back, we were descended from the Carolingian kings. This royal perspective stimulated a foray into some amateur genealogical research which petered out when my father found he could go no further back into our ancestry than a forebear forbiddingly named Nebuchadnezzar Peppiatt, a yeoman in Yorkshire, and a ship’s cook, one Joseph Peppiatt, who plied his doubtless greasy trade around the mid-seventeenth century.

Failure to establish links with the Carolingians did nothing to dampen my father’s interest in, even identification with, France. Rightly or not, he declared himself ‘part French’, although I don’t think he had our earthy cousins in Alsace-Lorraine in mind when he said it, but rather a kind of bon vivant from the Belle Epoque, quaffing champagne in evening dress and twirling his moustaches whenever he caught sight of a lady’s ankle. ‘The French know how to enjoy themselves,’ went one of his favourite refrains, ‘however, the English take their pleasures sadly.’

Accordingly French cooking was very much de rigueur in our household, although my mother’s soups never seemed to match the potages that, according to my father, his eyes growing misty at the recollection, Nana’s stockpot had provided throughout the winters of his childhood in London. To compensate for this, my father took over the kitchen himself on Sundays and, with me serving as a sullen scullion, went through elaborate preparations that took up most of the day and left me resenting rather than enjoying the results that he orchestrated with an almost scientific precision. I particularly detested moules marinières since it fell to me to ‘beard’ great, blue-black shoals of them (and if any mussel still sported the slightest hairy filament it was tossed contemptuously back into the sink for me to re-beard), while my father, naturally enough, reserved for himself the star role of pouring regular, judicious amounts of white wine into the bubbling liquor.

French food, which included occasional celebrations at old French bistros in London like Mon Plaisir, was only one manifestation of my father’s love of things French. Having been brought up with only a smattering of school French, my father spoke it at best haltingly. ‘En Angleterre, c’est différent,’ he would begin, addressing a baffled waiter in one of these bistros who was probably in any case a Greek Cypriot, before tailing off into a random comparison of the two cultures mostly in English, with a few alors! and n’est-ce pas? thrown in. But if he was not fluent, his son would be, and I was packed off alone, at the age of nine, on what seemed – and no doubt in 1950 was – an interminable journey by boat and train, with my ticket and itinerary in a see-through wallet round my neck, down to Béziers in southern France. The idea was that I should stay a month with my host family, improving my non-existent French hour by hour, then return, with my opposite number, Luc, for a subsequent month in London. My French family turned out to possess a large, rambling mansion in a huge garden, and even before I learnt that they also owned estates, farms and vineyards in Algeria, I realised, as children quickly do, that they were considerably richer and more important than my family.

Luc, in particular, radiated privilege. He was already wearing ‘longs’ and sported a zip-up blouson (as opposed to the crumpled khaki shorts, elasticated snake belt and Aertex shirt I wore). His hair, moreover, was cut fashionably short – ‘en brosse’, as he called it – whereas mine fell lankly over wire-rimmed National Health glasses. I was particularly impressed to find that Luc’s morning toilette consisted of splashing his head and shoulders with liberal amounts of eau de cologne. Once perfumed and dressed, he would call out to the housekeeper who served us breakfast under the plane trees that shaded the house. In what would become a daily ritual, Luc then took me to the games room where there was a gleaming ‘baby-foot’ and a full-size ping-pong table. A tiny, hunch-backed boy from the village would appear out of nowhere and when Luc tossed him a coin (which usually landed in the dust), the boy would carefully polish the table with a shammy leather, and our game, which I always lost, would begin. When Luc returned with me to London, we found window-cleaners at work on the top floor of our suburban house, and Luc’s first question to my startled parents was whether these were ‘our people’, meaning part of the ‘staff’. A little later he gave my mother a summary account of what he liked to eat and how it would be best prepared.

If Luc’s stay with us was not a great success, our ‘exchange’, which had successfully kick-started my French, also initiated a whole series of family holidays in France. Despite strict currency controls, we generally fared very well, travelling on sturdy Rudge bikes with side panniers, staying in country inns in Normandy and Picardy, and eating vast meals that always began with a vegetable potage and an omelette fines herbes before the main course, which was followed, as surely as summer gives way to autumn, by salad, a cheese plate of bewildering variety and a choice of desserts. My father was in seventh heaven. Somewhere between coffee and Calvados, already fired by a litre or two of rough red wine, he knew that if he could not be a Frenchman, then his son, already blessed by the budding bilingualism of a short stay in the Languedoc, could.

Other exchanges followed. One of them included, in a mixture of hilarity and alarm, a visit with another French family to the Ile du Levant’s nudist colony, where the ice-cream sellers had nothing on but the trays of Eskimo Gervais that hung from a strap around their neck; only on the village square and beside the port was it required to put on what the locals referred to solemnly as le minimum. Another was organised when I was in early adolescence with a middle-class family in Paris, where the mother of my counterpart, Marcel, developed a crush on me and could think of no better way of exorcising it than by taking me on long walks through the quartiers chauds or red-light districts in Montmartre and around Les Halles. Formally dressed in a hat with a veil and black gloves, she would walk two steps behind me, clucking with pride every time I was propositioned: later we returned home, arm in arm, jovially assessing the charms, or usually lack thereof, of the girls we’d passed on that particular afternoon. I assumed this to be a deep-seated Parisian tradition, whereby a mature woman would prepare a very young man for the mysterious adventures and temptations that lay before him. I always responded affectionately to this kind lady’s lengthy, warm embraces, but never once did I consider her as anything but Marcel’s mother; so I felt bewildered and aggrieved when her husband, having come back from his day at the office, began eyeing me with undisguised suspicion over the dinner table.

Boat trains punctuated my life regularly and I could follow their progress from London to Paris simply by the change in smells, from the stale, dusty upholstery in the British railway compartments to the beer and vomit on board, then the unmistakable amalgam of chicory-scented coffee, garlic and sweat that heralded the arrival in France, just as, if I used my eyes, the cold-looking Englishmen in long, grimy macs drinking at the bars on the ferries were replaced by short, belligerent Frenchmen in blue overalls, breathing out plumes of Gauloises and gesticulating theatrically at every twist and turn of the voyage. One of these choppy crossings took me when I was fifteen on an exchange programme to study at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, where Verlaine and Proust had been pupils, and Mallarmé and Sartre teachers. But these magnificent names were as nothing to me because when all the English and French students congregated for a break in the school’s sober, colonnaded courtyard on the first day, I lost my heart utterly to a French girl with a mane of tawny hair who, throughout the following fortnight, never once acknowledged my moonstruck face or returned my lugubriously ardent stare. To soothe these pangs, I paced up and down the mysterious-sounding Salle des pas perdus at the nearby Gare Saint-Lazare in the confused hope that losing my footsteps might change my luck. But it did not.

Another crossing of the Franco-English Rubicon led me from the dank quadrangles of Cambridge (where it was my proficiency at French that earned me a place) to the Latin Quarter’s dark myth of student roistering, high learning and deadly knifings at night. My Trinity Hall roommate and I exchanged our scanty college accommodation for the antique plumbing and creaking charms of the Hôtel Stella on rue Monsieur le Prince, whose clientele consisted mainly of American writers arriving in the wake of the Beats to write their definitive novel about life back home seen from the dazzling vantage of Paris and the discovery of love by the Seine. They criss-crossed the hotel’s narrow corridors at regular intervals, gravely discussing narrative structures, time sequences and transitions with their friends in other small bedrooms before returning to their own to hammer out fresh revelations on their typewriters. In the early evening the hotel became a Tower of Babel, with a dozen machines chattering away, creating pyramids of rising sound and transient emotion. My roommate and I bought all the Henry Millers and other banned books we could from Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, as well as certain keys French texts, like the Chants de Maldoror, in editions where each page had to be carefully sliced open, reading them in varying degrees of incomprehension as we sampled the twinned delights of millefeuille and cheap Préfontaines wine in litre bottles. On most evenings our budget would stretch no further than egg and chips in student restaurants like La Source, but right next to our hotel was the far more sophisticated and enticing Polidor restaurant, where writers from Gide to Artaud, Joyce to Hemingway, had apparently eaten before us, although I found it hard as I peered through the window to imagine such hallowed legends seated at the red-and-white chequered tablecloths, tucking in to their steak-frites. But when on our last evening we did dine there, we felt we had gained access to a very special club, and we watched with envy how regular clients, clearly a cut above the rest, retrieved their napkin with elegant insouciance from a set of numbered pigeon holes fixed to the wall before settling into their preordained place on the banquette.

However consistently I had been drilled to see France as the ideal alternative to England, I began to waver in my heart of hearts on my very first trip to Italy. It wasn’t so much the extraordinary architecture and painting as the unusual amiability and social flair of the Italians that won me over (‘The French are Italians in a bad mood,’ Cocteau once opined of his compatriots). I learnt Italian and travelled all over the country, marvelling at the fact that you almost never find a city without charm there or a museum without masterpieces. Then I discovered Spain and was so entranced by its extremes of dark and light that as soon as I left Cambridge I dropped more promising professional opportunities simply to go out and live in Barcelona and along the Catalan coast.

After a year in Spain trying to write whilst gazing penetratingly at the Mediterranean and indulging every other romantic illusion, I returned to my previous life in London, moving back into the basement flat in Chelsea I’d been sharing with two Cambridge friends, reigniting old flames, renewing old friendships and eking out the small allowance my mother sent me with translations and other literary odd jobs for publishers. I also started going out on the town again with Francis Bacon, who had never ceased to fascinate me, both as a man and an artist, since I’d interviewed him for a student magazine while I was still at Cambridge. Champagne in grand hotels followed by extravagant dinners in Soho, skilfully orchestrated by Francis to introduce me to upper- and lower-class bohemia, gave me a transient feeling that I had somehow ‘arrived’. But as my flatmates forged ahead in their recently initiated careers, it became obvious that not only had I not arrived but that I was currently, and possibly permanently, going nowhere. I had frittered away over a year in Spain and had little to show for it beyond a miscellany of half-written short stories and a fast-fading tan. Still, I was glad to be back among old friends and to luxuriate in the familiarity of old habits, inimitable expressions and a shared sense of humour. And I filled in my days not unhappily with daily walks round the Brompton Cemetery and regular trips to the launderette, while dallying over the best ways to transpose, or even reinvent, the strange written world of the then little-known poet and painter, Henri Michaux, into English.

My father’s long, Francophile arm was nevertheless about to reach out again. He had heard that I’d still not found a job, indeed any form of regular, gainful employ, and he was irritated to discover that my mother had been financing this idle way of life by the fivers and tenners she carefully concealed in her regular letters from home. It was bad enough that I had been lounging around in Spain, where nobody apparently worked anyway, he announced in his booming voice, but that I should be back in London lounging further still, and at his expense, was too much. Without further ado my father instructed his secretary to search the classified ads every morning on the front page of The Times for any job that might suit my scanty qualifications. Things then seemed to go mercifully quiet, and I went back to mornings watching clothes spin-dry and afternoons, when the flat was blissfully empty, spent in obstinate seduction of old and new flames beside the living-room gas fire.

The week was barely out, however, than my father was on the phone.

‘Got just the job for you, boy,’ he announced triumphantly. ‘Top-quality magazine looking for junior editor. Right up your street. Full of art and books. Some pretty good recipes as well!’

I felt doomed at first, then perked up slightly when I heard the ‘art’ bit. I’d been offered a post as junior art critic by The Observer on the strength of some exhibition reviews I’d done for them while at Cambridge, but the allure of Spain had convinced me to turn it down. This might be a way, I realised, of making up for that rash refusal.

‘Best of all, boy, it’s called Réalités,’ my father resumed. ‘And it’s in Paris. Imagine. Paris!’

My spirits drooped again, this time seriously. Life in London had become very tolerable, with or without paid work. At least I didn’t have to drag myself into an office every morning and put up with the rush-hour tube. Better still, my fireside skirmishes had at last ended in such a delicious victory it wasn’t at all clear who had captured whom or whose strategy had been finer. All I knew, as the flames flickered up over the reddened grate, was that I had fallen in love with a beauty all the more seductive and mysterious for having a touch of the East in her blood.

‘My grandfather was a seafaring man,’ she explained cheekily in the morning as she kissed me goodbye.

If I keep a low profile, I think to myself, the whole Paris idea might blow over, as things do, and I can go on exploring my newly found love. Even so, now that I’ve flipped through a couple of recent issues of Réalités, I can also see myself quite happily writing on Picasso’s Cubism or Classicism for them, or on the nouveau roman, the Nouvelle Vague, the nouveau whatever. If only the magazine were in London. Paris is all very well for a visit, stimulating even, because it’s so different. That’s the problem. London is comfy. You go to a pub to have a drink and a laugh. In Paris, on the other hand, people only seem to laugh out of sarcasm. You sit alone or in little, intimate groups on café terraces and dissect the people passing by, superciliously picking holes in how they look and what they’re wearing. I know Francis Bacon keeps telling me when I’ve seen him recently that the French know how to ‘present’ themselves better than the English, that they’re more intelligent than the English. He may well be right, but there’s a clannishness and an innate disdain to Paris that I dislike and fear.

Still, I’ll probably be fine because the editor of the English-language edition of Réalités who’s coming over to interview us applicants will be so overwhelmed by the number of candidates who’ve applied, all of them mad keen to get out of Blighty, that he’ll probably end up by picking someone at random. When I go for the interview, there are already several eager beavers awaiting their turn in an anonymous office in Charlotte Street. The only surprise is that the editor, Garith Windsor, who for some reason I’d expected to look French, couldn’t look more English, with a weather-beaten complexion and keen blue eyes. He also looks bored. He asks me a few weird questions, like ‘In marriage who loses the most freedom, the man or the woman?’, which might have come out of some old manual about how to determine a person’s innate character right away. I answer impertinently, saying did he mean ‘more freedom’, adding evasively that however much I like writing about art and literature I would find it very difficult to live in Paris because, although Parisians might know how to present themselves and be more intelligent and intellectual than us, I found the city cold and snobbish. This seems to amuse Windsor, who tells me more about the Paris he loves and the fabulous garçonnière overlooking a beautiful square in Saint-Germain-des-Prés that he’s rented for the past twenty years for a song. He’s amusing in an exaggerated, camp way. We both laugh and by the time the interview is over I feel as if I already knew him, as if I’d already met him before. And it was only as I wandered back through Soho,