Travelers' Tales Paris Read Free Page A

a third—bad news at lunch, but a gin martini seemed de trop , three positively vulgar. Full of brandy, youthful adrenaline, and testosteroneand absent good sense, I decided I must rent a car; I would drive, not so much to see Paris as to take it on in my disorganized (and at this point quite hungover) fashion.
    The rental agency to which I was directed by the barman had only one car available, a stick-shift Renault 4CV of uncertain vintage and provenance, more a Tinkertoy with a pushback canvas roof than an automobile.
    It was scarcely larger than a carnival bumper car, but no matter; I soon discovered that a bumper car was perfect for what proved to be my first, and what I thought might be my last, destination—the Arc de Triomphe at rush hour. It was like being sucked onto a giant merry-go-round that, as if in a dream, I could not get off. Round and round the Étoile I went, swept by the tide of cars—there a glimpse of the Avenue de Wagram, and a moment later Wagram again, then a third time, a fourth, and always over my left shoulder the Arc, my lodestar.
    By the fifth time around, however, I began getting into it, feeling the rush, waving now, shouting, cursing, exuberantly singing “La Marseillaise,” cutting cars off, flipping other drivers the bird, and then suddenly, as if I had been ejected by a slingshot, I was off that demented carousel and onto the relatively safe haven of the Champs-Elysées. I could, however, only feel disappointment; the ride around the Étoile had been so exhilarating that I turned right around and went back again. It was as if I had finished basic training—now it was time for advanced Étoile maneuvers, except this time I would choose where to get off. And so, supremely confident, moving easily with the flow, darting through openings, I exited onto all the great avenues branching out from the Arc—Champs-Elysées, Marceau, Iéna, Kléber, Victor-Hugo, Foch, Grande-Armée, Carnot, MacMahon, Wagram, Hoche, Friedland. I will not say that I underwent an epiphany that afternoon, but in some inchoate way I realized that the only way I wanted to experience Paris was in an automobile.
    Ever since that first trip I have always rented a car immediately upon my return, more than twenty times now, and on my first day in the city, sane and sentient wife in tow and protesting vigorously,I make for the Étoile at rush hour: it is the way I let Paris welcome me back. Here a confession is in order that will perhaps explain my need for wheels. I have an aversion to sightseeing and little affinity for museums, monuments, cathedrals, shrines, grottoes, tombs, castles, and palaces. No organized bus tours for me, no group forays to Notre Dame or the Orangerie or the Palais du Luxembourg, no checklist of sites and sights to be ticked off: if this is the 7th arrondissement , it must be the Eiffel Tower, the École Militaire, the Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb. Guidebooks leave me numb, except for the odd nonessential fact that I might later put in a book of my own. My heart leaps, for example, to learn that the Florentines, while laying siege to Siena in the 13th century, catapulted excrement and dead donkeys over the city’s walls in hopes of starting a plague. Or that the Germans, during the Nazi occupation of France, added their own savage wrinkle to the guillotine: unlike the French, they made each condemned prisoner face upward, and taped his eyes open so that the unfortunate victim’s last terrifying sight was the blade heading toward his neck.
    I have an image fixed for ever in my mind of young, blond, admirably coifed, and chicly clothed young mothers in the driver’s seats of Renault 5s (the other part of this encapsulation of the essence of Frenchness), a Stuyvesant or a Virginia Slim or a Blue Blush by Helena Rubinstein held firmly in their lips (otherwise they would be biting them), a scarf by Hermés caressing their lovely necks, their