Travelers' Tales Paris Read Free Page B

Louis Vuitton bags by their sides, and two well-dressed small children strapped into the back seat—bearing down on the Étoile like tank commanders, shaking their hands with irritation (hand held palm upward, fingers splayed, and shaken up and down) at some offending other driver. Mais, qu’est-ce que tu fous?— What the hell are you doing?—they mutter under their breath as the battle ensues. Ta gueule, salaud— Up yours, you bastard (very rough translation)—they say .
    â€”Richard Bernstein, Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French
    What a car provides is the opportunity for unexpected adventure, a freedom to explore, to be overtaken by what might not interest others. A wrong turn, a one-way street running in theopposite direction from where I’m headed—getting lost is in fact the larger purpose. Exposure to the mundane puts me in touch with the rhythm of a place. I saw the locks of the Canal St-Martin and the slums of Belleville and Ménilmontant on market day before I saw the sublime stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle. I did not visit the Louvre until my sixth trip to Paris, and then only because a cloudburst had rendered my windshield wipers inoperable and the Quai des Tuileries impassable. I pulled under a tree, sure that in such a storm I would not get a traffic ticket, and ducked inside with my wife to escape the rain. We walked upstairs, smack into the Mona Lisa . How much better to be favored by the Gioconda smile that way, the first time, rather than as a sightseeing duty.
    In a car, on a given day, I can visit any number of destinations and never see a tourist gazing at a green Michelin guide. Sometimes I invent whimsical expeditions. One afternoon it was to find the apartments of American writers who had once lived in Paris (the addresses provided in an estimable volume, Brian Morton’s Americans in Paris ). I zipped from the building on rue de Tilsitt, near the Étoile, which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had occupied for a time in 1925, when they were in the chips, to the house on the Ile St-Louis where James Jones held court, to the sawmill on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the 6th arrondissement , above which Hemingway, almost broke, had lived in 1924, and then to the two apartments across the street from each other on rue de Varenne where Edith Wharton passed her Paris years. Close by the Invalides, rue de Varenne is the same street to which Wharton’s memorable creation (and perhaps fictional alter ego) Countess Olenska exiled herself from Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence .
    On another, more louche foray I set out to locate some of the old maisons de tolérance , or brothels, that Brassaï had photographed in The Secret Paris of the Thirties . At the Chabanais, not far from the Place de L’Opéra, the Prince of Wales—later King Edward VII, a regular—had a Hindu room set up in homage to his mother, Queen Victoria, empress of India. In a nearby maison on rue desMartyrs, an elderly president of the French senate had years before expired in the arms of his Venus, a minor scandal at the time. On Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, near the Montparnasse cemetery, I found the site of the Sphinx, one of the few brothels where customers could bring their wives and children. It was a Wednesday, and the street alongside what had once been the most famous whorehouse in Paris was closed for market day. At covered stalls with a staggering variety of fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, and cheeses, I watched as the farmers and the bourgeois matrons of the quartier haggled endlessly. I bought some chestnuts and then wandered through the cemetery examining the dates on the crypts and monuments; it was a history of France since the Revolution.
    On this eccentric one-day tour I had managed to see a huge part of the city and its quotidian life, past and present, which would not have been possible had I not been driving. Each day has its structuring