Tuesday, June 4, 2013

L’Hotel d’Orsay

93 rue de Lille

75007 Paris

6:30 p.m.

Arriving at a desired destination --when the plane toiuches down, the long, sleepless night over --always makes me feel as though I have entered fairyland, and the arrival in Frankfurt was no different.  I made the connection smoothly, although my hiking poles got lost at Charles de Gaulle and I had to leave to make my van without them.  The clerk to whom I was directed was insolent “Who told you to check three articles?” --The airline did.

Upon arriving at the Hotel d’Orsay, David Chevalier, the manager, took matters in hand, calling the number I had been given, confirming they had been found and then doing his best to get the van operator to retrieve them from Lufthansa.

That done, I had to shower and change before going out to try to get lastyear’s cellphone to work.  It doesn’t, because if 5 Euros are not loaded on the account, it deactivates.  For three years, that has meant a 30 Euro investment per year, above and beyond the necessary cost of a SIM card and the purchase of minutes. 

To find Phone House, at 149 rue de Rennes, meant walking almost to the Tour Montparnasse: the weather has turned bright and sunny, so the walk was not a problem.  La Grande Épicerie, the mega-gourmet store owned by and opposite the Bon Marché department store, is not that far from the Phone House; I go there, head for the vegetable salads and pick up also a large bottle of lemonade flavored with mint, and some levantine pastry made of pistachios and honey.  After, I eat my dinner in a pocket park off rue du Bac, the one whose centerpiece is a bust of Chateaubriand.  

It was four-thirty, and the park --whose white pebble-shot walks teem with very well-turned out young children and their nannies-- is an affluent glade.  One Filipina nanny, seeing her charge leave her group of girlfriends in tears, rushed over to comfort her. Repeatedly saying, “Who hurt my baby?” she stroked the child’s hair until the girl regained her composure.  The scene didn’t seem that different from those played out at the playground next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, except that here, the nannies seemed to share a greater intimacy with their charges, and who were not (even the boys) shouting at the top of their lungs.

Yet the scene was not an idyllic one: some mothers swanning in vertiginous heels, and I overheard two young girls whispering to each other like two old crones will whenever some malicious words are being exchanged.  Paris did not seem much different from New York at that moment.

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Disaster has struck my communications system and my hygiene.  The clerk at Apple in Manhattan sold me universal adapters for an IPad, and I brought my Macbook instead.  I do not have an adapter for my electric toothbrush, either.  Thank heavens I have a full day in Paris tomorrow, so I can obtain the necessary adapters: it might not be so easy to do in the Aude, the departement in which Caunes-Minervois lies.

Walking the rue de Varenne, one of the most beautiful streets in Paris, with row after row of hôtels particuliers, I passed Edith Wharton’s one-time home.  Its porte cochère, inclusive of a stable with ample room for several horses, is perpendicular to the elegant building of five floors.  It is here that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, very drunk, disgraced themselves and were never asked back.  

Rue de Varenne is home to many ministries, so many of the buildings are manned by gendarmes, in red-topped képis, or black-uniformed police of a vaguely menacing aspect.  It’s not a residential street, but the imposing wooden double-doors and creamy limestone evoke the ancien régime, France immediately before the Revolution of 1789, a more discreet, if less just, age.  The Rodin Museum at the end of the street, not far from the Eiffel Tower, abruptly brings in the modern world, with its floor to ceiling plate glass windows and attention-getting signs.

I grabbed a free magazine put out by Paris real estate brokers and get an eyeful options for those solvent enough to buy even a modest apartment near Place de Clichy, the neighborhood that inspired one of the erotic writer Henry Miller’s books, Quiet Days In Clichy:  Miller wrote from experience about the actual life prostitutes lived: he patronized many.

Not the women in the high-end brothels (“maisons closes”), but those hard-up women for whom the work would never be anything but dangerous and degrading.  The same was true for Miller: he writes in one of the books that he caught “crabs” --body lice-- from one of the objects of his desire, perhaps in Clichy.  today, it’s a neighborhood of choice for those who could afford to live in a less gritty part of town, but deliberately choose not to.  The Moulin Rouge is there, its giant neon windmill still blazing garishly evenings, the nude show still going, even as pornography has become more explicit and less about seduction than physical gratification.

Perhaps the Moulin Rouge relies on Japanese clients: I was recently told that there are Japanese psychotherapists who specialize in treating patients who dream of going to Paris and finding a fantastic romance.  When in Paris, they realize it is not to be.  Their resilience gives way and they suffer deep depressions.  The malady even has a name: Paris Syndrome.

Indeed, Paris seems a very busy city: the national capital as well as the cultural capital of France, its role has been outsized since Louis XIV, built up nearby Versailles and its newly-made aristocrats (la noblesse de la robe) as a counter-weight to the countryside’s nobles (la noblesse de l’épée), who twice tried to topple him during uprisings known collectively as La Fronde.  Unlike England’s King John, who had to bow to the nobles and formally acknowledge their rights in the Magna Carta, Louis XIV’s    shrewdness guaranteed that he, not they, would be where power resided in France.  The nobles based in Paris, rather than plot against the King, spent their lives seeking access to his favor and pursuing the distractions of Paris, ignoring as well the country’s problems.  As a result of this history, rather like New Yorkers, Parisians are a kind of sub-aristocratic species, not of birth, but by cultural inheritance.

Being where the decisions are made for the rest of the country in this highly centralized, rather than federal state, Parisians are, perhaps even more frequently than New Yorkers reminded that everything of importance that affects the average Frenchman is settled here.  If you are part of any of the numerous elites --political, intellectual, artistic, scientific, technological, electoral, legal, journalistic, cinematic, literary-- life in Paris is a heady brew.  If you’re not, you’re as isolated as a poor noble at the court of Versailles.

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My room, a single, number 61, is an actual garret, and delightful.  Reached by a private staircase, it has a shuttered window opposite the bath and another up the landing leading to the bedroom, both opening over the rooftops of the seventh arrondissement.  The room has two rustic wooden beams running its width and another its length.  Today, the sun streams in, and even now, at 8 p.m., on this, the first day of really good weather Paris has seen in a long time, the room is bathed in light.  Of course, Paris can be terribly rackety, ambulance and other sirens not less ear-splitting than New York’s, but here, and now, in this immaculate and simply furnished room, the peace is blissful.

On the way to the phone store, I passed L’ Écume des Pages, a well-stocked bookseller with mainly paperback titles.  (In France, most books come out in paper; originally, the paperbound books were leather-bound by bookbinders according to the preference of the wealthy, whose librairies were points of pride.)  Bernard Pivot, whose television programs about books were an institution in France, has published Les Tweets Sont Des Chats, (“Tweets Are Cats”), a collection of his daily tweets, collected aphorisms and bons mots.  He is making a fair bid to follow in the tradition of la Rouchefoucauld, an 18th century nobleman whose incisive utterances on a variety of topics are still frequently quoted here.  (“The woman who is adulterous rarely stops at one.” is one of his better-known.)

I found, too, in the “Le goût de...” series (“The Taste Of...”) --small imprints bringing together breif essays on every topic imaginable (cities, laziness, love, money, friendship, deserts, smoking, what-have-you), one on the taste for reading (Le Goût de la Lecture).  Finally, I found another small press paperback, “The Death of Venice” (La Mort de Venise), a travelogue written by the Dandy poet Maurice Barrès, published in 1903.  Heady elixirs, and spurs to my fantasy, but I am too stretched by the effort not to give in to the urge to sleep before 9 p.m. to enjoy them, with forty minutes to go.

Travel makes its demands as payment for the pleasure it gives me.  The Lufthansa Airbus model had more legroom than United, my usual carrier, and the seat more ample, so I was able to actually hoist my legs into a fetal tuck and sleep a bit, an effort which would have earned me a twinge in my lower back on United.   With thirty minutes to go now, the sun’s shadows lengthening, my thirty-nine sleepless hours since I left New York are almost over.  So I have much to be grateful for on my arrival in Paris.