The First Time I Saw Paris - Letters From 50 Years Ago
(Note: This piece is based on my actual letters, but a few memories from later on seem to have found their way in too.)
I first saw Paris 50 years ago, in 1973. I was young, naive, and oh so starry eyed about the City of Light. It was a trip I’d been planning for years, and there had been obstacles along the way. But finally I did get there, and I wrote about what I saw, what I did, what I felt about it all, to my college friend, Claudia. What follows are excerpts from those letters, written from Paris, all those years ago. As someone, somewhere said once, Paris is a movable feast. It’s moved with me through a life now growing long. And as someone else said, We’ll always have Paris. And I say, THANK GOD!
1971
May 13, 1971, St. Louis – Dear Claudia – I had a nice note from my draft board commanding me to empty bedpans for "24 consecutive months." "Please do this because if you don't we'll wreck your life." But it struck me the other day that in two years I'll be free. I wonder what it will feel like to be rid of that great oppressive concern. I've been aware of it as an impending disaster since at least my junior year in high school. But now there is an end in sight. It's hard to imagine freedom without having tasted it before. But in just two years …
I plan to find an inexpensive room to rent in St. Louis and save as much money as possible in the next two years for a trip to Europe in the fall of '73. Of course I mean Paris. I say the fall because I'm going to live there for as long as my money will allow, and I suppose the tourist prices will be down by then. But I can see it now: May 1st, 1973 – NEWS FLASH: WORLD WAR III Begins: Paris Destroyed by Atomic Bomb. It will make my nightmares for the next two years.
1973
April 19, 1973, St. Louis – Dear Claudia – Come to visit whenever you like. As long as it's before May 16th. On May 16th, I'm coming to Chicago. On May 17th I'll be flying out of O'Hare toward Paris. For a month and a half I'll be frolicking in the capitals of Europe, namely Paris, Amsterdam, and London. … Oh, the pain of unrequited love. Yes, it’s happened again. Alison wanted to go traveling, just as I do, it appears – only not with me. He has decamped to other beds. At least experience has taught me by now that time will heal the wound.
Late April, 1973 St. Louis – Dear Claudia – Suddenly the sun is shining. I had come to fear that it had washed down the river in the flood. And you should see the river. My God, what an amazing sight, twice its usual width.
Now, as I pack and get closer to the trip, I find I'd as leaf not go. I'm sure that once I'm there it will be different. As I consider leaving St. Louis permanently, I am very nervous, but I remember your fainting heart at the prospect when you moved to Chicago in December, and I think of how much happier you seem now. That gives me courage. It does get old spending a year, or two years, or even four in a place and then leaving. Long enough to make some friends, then its time to face making new friends in a different place. I know its time to leave. I may be back sometime. After all, its not a bad place. At forty, when the dreams have all melted away it might be nice to settle here. Not at twenty five when there's still hope that the dreams won't all melt away.
I'm reading Proust again …
May 18, 1973, Hotel de Flandre, 16, rue Cujas, Paris, 75005 – Dear, Claudia – At last I’m here. Well, it certainly is swell. Sort of exactly what I'd hoped it would be. But I can already tell that like most decent places, its nice to visit but I'd sure rather live here.
I'm writing this at the table of a café where I've just bought an exorbitantly expensive cup of coffee. But as I understand it, that price entitles me to the seat for as long as I care to keep it. Not bad, with the Luxembourg across the street, the Boulevard St. Michel on one side and the Rue Soufflot on the other. My hotel is two blocks from the Luxembourg, up the street from the Sorbonne (I can see it from my window), and two blocks from the Pantheon. At only 20,40F, which means if I stay here ten days it will cost me roughly $50 for the room. And it’s a better place than where I've lived for the past year in St. Louis!
I met a young lady from Montreal on the plane who was also unfamiliar with Paris, so we got rooms in the same hotel and will probably do a lot of our wandering around together. She speaks fluent Parisian French! But I'm amazed at how much I can understand with what little I know. And I've managed to have coffee and a snack without any help at all.
I also met a beautiful young man on the plane who lives in Paris, is a pilot for Air France in fact, and has offered to show me around a little Sunday. We'll see what comes of that. (I know what I'd like to see come of it.)
It's too bad we couldn't have come to Paris first together. It's the sort of place we could enjoy well together. But I understand why we couldn't, and I wish you happiness in your new love with Stephanie. If I had a chance like the one you have, I'd take it in a minute. Of course I do have to get over being jealous, don't I? Well, I have, and there's nothing now to keep us from being the friends we always have been.
It's not that I don't believe I'm really in Paris. Now that it’s a reality instead of a dream, it hasn't quite the magnitude for me it had before. Existing in a place, whatever place, is always like floating above it. The same self in the same fog goes to all the places and often, even in Paris, drifts into the same dream world. That's comforting, I guess. It might as well be.
May 19, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia – Something I saw today: Two boys sitting on the quai along the Seine on a Spring day – sitting close together, their backs to me, as the river flowed through the heart of the City of Light and Love toward the sea.
Leaning on the balustrade, I watched them from the street above. They had no idea I was there watching. Would they have minded if they'd known? One slipped his arm through the arm of the other; their shoulders touched; they turned their heads until their foreheads kissed, and then their lips. It was a love out in the open which centuries of other boys could not even have dreamed.
I’ve come to Paris because I had to. The romantic visions of multitudes of paintings and novels and movies and dreams compelled me to be here, and so here I am, as soon as I could manage it. At 25, I am, perhaps, no longer a boy myself, but manhood has not yet waved aside the wonder I feel at such things as seeing Paris for the first time, and seeing boys in love, loving each other boldly before my eyes. Seeing them – both Paris and the boys – fills me with joy.
As I watched the boys, I heard the beautiful sounds of French from the people passing along the street behind me. My French extends only to indispensables, and barely those, so I had no idea what they said. The sounds were music rather than language, but they brought a message of beauty if not meaning – they made the beautiful soundtrack for this image I suspect I’ll carry with me for 50 years.
May 20, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia – I'm now discovering the Luxembourg on a Sunday afternoon. Thousands of Frenchmen streaming through. Tourists (like me) inconspicuous. After this morning on Montmartre, I was ready to go straight home and try again in September. I've never seen a tourist spectacle as grotesque, not even at the Grand Canyon or Disneyland. This is not the time to come to Paris. I'll make my next trip in the fall. But even so, the Luxembourg is wonderful. Today the sky is just a little cloudy and the breeze is blowing. The horse chestnuts are in bloom. When the breeze blows, the blossoms fall like pink snow. Along all the paths are wide borders of blue and yellow pansies and a pink flower I've never seen. All through the grass, tiny white daisies. And in the basin, the little boys' sailboats. Beautiful little boys; I've never seen such beautiful little boys. All the children in Paris are beautiful. Even the babies must be beautiful here. The beauty of the Luxembourg is the feeling in the air as well as the flowers and trees. The feeling is all over Paris. Life is sensual here. It's relaxed enough to make time for strolling and sitting in cafés. This is a city that's been made carefully, as long as it's been being made, its been made for beauty and the enjoyment of beauty.
Later, Café Mahieu [now a McDonald's]
I could have stayed until closing in the Luxembourg without a bit of boredom, but it started to rain. "Il pleut, Papa," as one of the little boys said. So now I'm at this café (nothing in particular; one of thousands) with un espress, 1,70F servis compris which means that for $.30 I can stay here as long as I wish. This is a wonderful city to see alone, but it would be wonderful to see it with someone too. I mean someone for whom you really care, someone whose spirit and mind go well with yours.
The stimulation of the place is beyond belief. I've seen nothing like it except in a way, New York. There's life and energy in the air. The cars and all the people, of course, make that. But there's something else. This is a capital, the capital of French culture like New York is a capital and St. Louis and even Chicago are not. This is where the culture is transformed.
I've thought a lot and written (in letters) a lot about feelings the last few months. I've mainly been concerned with the feelings inside. But here the feeling outside is so thick it can't be missed. Perhaps atmosphere is a better word. The feelings inside make the atmosphere our minds exist in. There's also the atmosphere our bodies exist in.
I saw the Musée Rodin yesterday and Le Dernier Tango à Paris. They're both masterpieces. See the movie!! I hate telling and being told where the mind is concerned. I'd never tell anyone to read Faulkner, important as it is, or to see Cézanne. If you're not overwhelmed I'll never recommend anything to you again. Because if you're not, our minds have taken different turns. It's an excruciatingly beautiful movie, one of magnificent despair. The contradictory superlatives are carefully chosen. Its a love story about the death of love and a sex movie about the meagerness of sex. It looks in the face of that ubiquitous modern concern, the place of sex in life; and that more important, universal concern the place of love in life. Already I sound absurd and ignorant, but the movie is neither absurd nor ignorant. See it!
Et ce soir Montparnasse, je pense. Ou peut etre, le Boulevard St. Germain des Pres. Ou … Mon Dieu! The possibilities seem almost infinite. We must come here together sometime, Claudia, if only for a short while. Together we could do Paris royally.
May 21, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia – Paris, Monday Morning, Boulevard Saint Michel. There's always traffic on the Boul-Mich, crowds on the sidewalks. But this is rush hour. L'heure d'affluence. The people hurry past with scowling focus, the tempo frantic, as in New York. Even so, I feel the difference. I'm new to Paris, here less than a week. My French is a dismembered skeleton, so I can communicate only with simian shrieks and pointing. But in the silent times, sitting at a café table with my coffee, watching the parade pass by, I can at least pretend I’m a Parisian.
May 22, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia – Something I saw today: Very early, as soon as the gates were opened, I walked through the Luxembourg Garden. I stopped to enjoy the ethereal beauty of the Medici Fountain. There, floating in the basin, a pink rose drifted among the fallen Luxembourg leaves.
How had it come to be floating there, I wondered. It couldn’t have been accidental; there was no rose bush nearby. Someone had put it there, a token of La Vie En Rose, perhaps, or maybe a memorial to it. Did it have something to do with Piaf’s heart-piercing song or Gertrude Stein’s enigmatic repetition, written only blocks away?
I thought of Proust when I saw it – though his rose is yellow – but so much in Paris puts me in mind of Proust. As you know, I’m in that phase, half-way through Scott Moncrieff’s more than translation, for better or for worse when it comes to seeing Paris through my own eyes.
When I saw the rose, I saw two men in dinner jackets (do I even know what dinner jackets are?), walking through the garden at night, after a salon or play, going to a mid-night supper at a fashionable place on an avenue. Never mind that it couldn’t happen: the garden is closed at night, and Proust would have been in the Bois instead, and not walking. Still, I saw my two handsome men in dinner jackets, a rose (pink or yellow) in the lapel of each, walking under the chestnut trees, and around the basin where the toy boats sail, and up the steps – stopping at the fountain to listen to the splash of the water, and hold hands, and kiss in the dark, away from the gaslit street. Even sophisticated Parisian gentlemen had reasons to avoid the light. For me, they were Marcel and Reynaldo – Reynaldo Hahn, the composer who may, or may not, have been Proust’s lover. In my image, one of them – more likely Hahn, perhaps, since Proust might have pressed his in a book, to remember another day – one of them takes his rose, kisses it, drops it into the water, two petals falling away, but all floating above the yellow leaves.
In my mind he drops it there so that I (or someone else, but fate made it me) will find it the next day, or the next century, and remember them – remember them together.
That is one explanation for how a pink rose came to be floating in the basin of the Medici Fountain, in the Luxembourg Garden.
May 23, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia – Something I saw today: I wonder what she thought of them, the leather boys of the Buttes-Chaumont, as she passed them on the path this crisp morning?
When I saw them, in their leather pants, leather jackets, leather boots, I thought, How sexy – just coming home from a night of leather and bondage – or maybe just heading to a morning of them. But surely she would not have had such thoughts, such a stern, proper Madame, in her buttoned up coat, with her white hair and her sensible shoes. She’s the one who looks at me with gimlet eye and pursed lips when I talk too loudly at the exhibition, the one who clucks when I take too long to pick my pastry at the boulangerie, the one who pokes my back when I step too close at the market stall. No, she would not have thoughts about leather and bondage and sexy boys, would she?, not even in Paris.
It's market day, so maybe she’s headed there in her determined way, thinking about what Monsieur will want for dinner – and wondering where he was so late last night, and with whom. Not that she much cares now, as long as the bills are paid and the larder full. She’s French; she has her priorities.
Our eyes met the moment after I snapped the photo, hers suspicious, mine contrite. I took the picture for the boys, for their leather backs and my fantasies. They were heading away, so unaware that I photographed them, though perhaps half-aware of the lust-longings they sparked. I hadn’t seen her at all before the snap. Afterwards it was too late to pretend innocence. She had my measure, and was perhaps thinking something Gallic about Americans and their gall.
The boys walked on in their direction; she walked on in hers. I lingered a little longer at the spot, savoring the moment the four of us had shared together. Then I walked on in my direction too, the crunch of gravel on the path breaking the quiet of morning in the Buttes-Chaumont.
May 24, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia - It was not his smile that I noticed first, though his smile radiated as warmly as the incandescent bulbs illuminating the old Marais café, steps from Place des Vosges.
No, it wasn’t his smile, and it would be coy to say it was. He knew why I asked to take the picture, and he liked it – did a little seductive dance – a Salomé dance of a sort that Oscar Wilde might really have wanted to see. I’d stopped there to wait for opening time at the museum, still half an hour away. I’ve been in Paris by myself a week already, long enough to feel lonely, even as a party goes on around me at all hours – a timid American with no French and no friends, not from New York, from further west, more awestruck, less brash than a New Yorker would be. Paris alone is still Paris, but not the Paris of dreams.
I thought about what his life must be like. Old enough, but still young enough; handsome; amply masculine; working – no doubt living also – in the Marais I’ve heard so much about. If he’s gay, he’s in paradise; if he’s not, he knows how to work it to his advantage. He smiled at me and my heart leapt.
Of course, I knew there was no reason to it. The museum would open and I would leave. He would go on talking with his friends, smiling his radiant smile for other customers. I would still be lonely when lunchtime came, and dinnertime and bedtime. I’d think about his smile, and other things – maybe the art; maybe not (maybe him) – and try to feel Parisian, at least a bit.
May 25, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia – If there's a paradise, I'm sure I've found it. I'm sitting in it now. A place of unimaginable beauty. On one side, an augmented rainbow of rhododendrons (literally every shade, including an orange I'd never seen before); and on the other, a horse chestnut in pink bloom. In between, above the trees, rises the Eiffel Tower. A little boy is playing in the sand pile, and Parisians on lunch hour are sitting on the benches and chairs scattered under the trees. A pigeon and a sparrow are sparring over a piece of bread. And I'm finishing my lunch with a box of luscious strawberries.
I found this spot by accident. That's the way I've found most of the most beautiful things I've seen in Paris. I went to Les Invalides this morning. Too many tourists. After that, I collected lunch (it's become a daily routine, from one shop to another), and then I happened on this spot.
There've been moments here among the most beautiful I've ever had. But on the whole I'm a poor tourist. I'm not much interested in the sights. I saw Napoleon's tomb this morning for a total of ten minutes. I could stand staying no longer. But I spent an hour at coffee and another hour watching people in the Luxembourg. Then another hour at coffee, and I'm sure I'll be here an hour at least. I've decided not to go to Versailles, though. I don't have time!
Even the museums aren't what I'd hoped. I'm not in the mood for them. I’m making the obligatory visits, and in the Louvre I did find the Dutch galleries interesting, the one Vermeer particularly (my goodness, there were three in the Frick). But even before La Moulin de la Galette I kept thinking of a chair in a sunny park. This tourist scheme is no way to see a city. It must take at least six months to get any sense of a city at all.
I saw Citizen Kane last night. It only got better the second time. That makes the second English language movie I've seen here. Fully half the movies are American. The plays too. And yesterday in the Musée d'Art Moderne I noticed that the latest pictures were painted in N.Y. In only a week I've found that artistically, Paris is no longer the center of the world. There's a lot here, but most of it's import goods.
Tonight I hear Isaac Stern and two others in recital. The major piece is the Brahms Concerto for Violin & Cello. That should be pleasant.
I went to a bar last night. Drinks $2.25 each. And the only person I met was from Chicago. It was a pleasant chat, but since no visitors are allowed in hotel rooms here … Well, that’s not always exactly true, apparently. The desk man looked the other way, and it didn’t even cost too much. I now have an new intimate Chicago friend!
Later
I'm back in the Luxembourg now watching the boats and their sailors. This garden is surely one of the chief delights of the world. Every city should have a Luxembourg but none of the others I've been to possibly could.
May 26, 1973, Paris – Dear Claudia – I've just been treated to the most delightful experience at dinner – one of the most amusing experiences I've had in Paris. There's a restaurant near my hotel which is the essence of inefficiency. Dinner there can take hours. Tonight, alone, I was an hour and a half. This evening it was full of Englishmen. The delight was the clash of priorities. One man, the caricature of a middle class Englishman, became irate at the slow service, worked up to red-faced volcanic pressure, and exploded with a tinkle. But he was pink, seething, and probably ulcerated. The waiter was surprised at the reaction. I couldn’t help but smile. How evil I am to take delight in the discomfort of others!
In the same restaurant, across the room, sitting alone at her table (as I was at mine), I saw a sort of well turned out French woman of “a certain age” – actually a pretty uncertain age, somewhere between 50 and antique. She was wearing a pink tweed suit (Think Pink! like the movie says) that may once have been Chanel – or may never have been, just as she may once have been elegant – or may never have been. Still, she had an air about her, the desperate certainty that she mattered, still matters, at least to herself – if to no one else. By the time I spotted her, she’d finished her dinner except for dessert. And for dessert, she had before her an almost overflowing bowl of cherries – small ones, by American measures, scarlet, the stems still on. She ate them one by one, discretely slipping the pits into her hand, and then depositing them into a tiny bowl. Will I ever eat anything so elegantly myself? Will I ever have that air about me, that I matter, to myself, even if to no one else?
May 30, 1973, London – Dear Claudia - I came to London Monday. It was a wise move. I could soon have come to hate Paris, being there as a tourist. The final cut, the thing that made leaving unavoidable, happened two days ago. It was a five-year anniversary of some sort relating to the 1968 student uprising. I was so oblivious to all that, it never even crossed my mind.
I was sitting peacefully in my café around the corner (OK, not completely peacefully; I’d just that morning discovered that my new Chicago friend, at least I guess it was him, gave me crabs! – ugh – and that I had no idea what to do about them, in French! Shades of Henry Miller, don’t you think?), when suddenly busses and trucks filled with armed police (or soldiers – I’m not sure which they were), drove up Rue Soufflot to the Pantheon. They stopped in the square, and, with their guns prominent, got out and took up their formations all around the buildings. I was terrified, in part because it was completely unexpected – I had no idea what was happening – and, of course, my hotel was just around the corner.
It turned out that the authorities were acting out of caution, in case there was trouble. Uprisings in Paris are not unheard of. That’s why all the Boulevards are wide and straight, they say, so that cannons can be fired down them to quell the mobs. There is a law school across from the Pantheon, and the Sorbonne is up the street, so there are masses of students in the neighborhood. The powers feared that there might be a repeat of the troubles of ’68, which threatened to bring down the government. Remember, we even had some of that at good old Washington U.
As far as I’ve heard, nothing happened, aside from the massive show of force – so nothing to fear - aside from all those guns rampant. But the bloom was well off La Vie En Rose (so to speak) by then. I was afraid that things might still turn ugly. Too much stuff that hadn’t figured into my fantasy Paris. Besides, I’ve been all alone as the party went on all around me, and it seemed increasingly clear that I would not be finding my French Prince Charming, at least on this trip, so I decided it was time to go.
I will return sometime, NOT as a tourist, and I hope that then I’ll come to love Paris as much again as I did before I ever went. But for now, au revoir, Paris - jusqu'à la prochaine fois.
(As it’s happened, I’ve been lucky enough to return to Paris many times, and I still find it as thrilling with each return as I did that first time, 50 years ago.)
Your observations and descriptions are wonderful, and you paint a lovely picture of Paris and people with words, so real I can imagine sitting by you as you tell me the story while we sit on a bench enjoying the horse chestnut blooms and lovely sailboats. Ah, if it were only so...
Lovely, Randy. How lucky for all of us that you saved these bits for all those years!