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James Salter
Updated Saturday, March 16, 2024-00:01
I lived in Paris one winter in the 1960s, in a wedge-shaped hotel overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery, the L'Aiglon.
The rooms were small but comfortable.
Next door lived Luis Buñuel, then in his sixties
, in what I assumed was a suite, and his pointy lizard-skin shoes were left at the door late at night to be polished.
Shoes were an important element in Buñuel's life and art
and I studied that pair with interest, especially because I never got to see the famous director in person nor did I hear a single noise from his rooms: no laughter, no broken glass, not even voices.
For me, this was the Paris of the Left Bank and the life lived there was that of James Jones and Irwin Shaw.
The Joneses lived on the island of San Luis, in a famous apartment that was always bright.
The Shaws then lived on the rue de Grenelle.
They often went to a restaurant that was not far away.
One night it became very late;
They had been drinking for many hours and it struck eleven.
Shaw suggested going to the restaurant.
It was too late, everyone said, it would be closed.
In his harsh and cordial voice, he insisted:
"No, come on, you'll see: their faces will light up when they see us
. "
Le Dôme, La Coupole, A Chez Benoît, those were the places we frequented.
I met Polanski, the director of
Paris Tribune
, French actresses, writers
, bar girls, marginalized people.
I met people who later became famous and others who did not;
They have all disappeared.
Years later I returned to Paris for a long stay, expecting to find an empty city.
We were three.
The first night I opened the shutters of a room in a small hotel on the Place de Mexico and I was almost speechless.
"Come, quickly, look at this!" I exclaimed.
At the end of the street, huge as a space shuttle and magnificently illuminated in the dark, stood the Eiffel Tower.
I couldn't explain what I felt: all the memories, the days and the nights.
Almost cried
.
Paris may be many things—after all, it is a great capital—but what really sets it apart is what I experienced again that night.
Visually it is overwhelming, not only because of the facades, but also because of the beautiful color of the stone
, the scale, the avenues, the trees.
Arriving in the city at night, speeding through the traffic on the Avenue de la Grande Armée and seeing at the end of it, supported by large slabs of light, the Arc de Triomphe, is an inspiring moment.
There are many amazing things in Parisian life;
As a friend of mine once commented, the French take up a lot of surface area
.
The women, the clothes, the young people who speed by in Porsches with their beautiful hair, the striking shop windows, endless things lovingly made by hand - chocolates, bread, gardens, wine -, the language, the demeanor of the waiters. , the white tablecloths, the doors.
There is a Paris of Balzac, a Paris of Victor Hugo, of Turgenev, Babel, Zola, Proust and Colette that still exists
.
There is a Hemingway's Paris whose echoes are still recognizable: the light of La Closerie des Lilas, the wards of the American hospital dedicated to women with the surname Macomber.
We can visit Hugo's apartment, converted into a museum,
on the Place des Vosges, and then have lunch in the company of the stylish rich of
the
16th arrondissement, in one of the places they usually frequent, the Brasserie Stella.
We can
sleep in the room where Oscar Wilde died
, in the small hotel, now too perfect, cheerfully called L'Hôtel;
We can dine in secluded bistros
or go near the place where the mob executed Louis XVI
.
We are with French people and among French people, entering their buildings, seeing their art, eating their food, breathing their air, the air of Paris that enlivens and makes us want to write, think and work.
We can see and do all that, but without owning anything, because in the deepest sense
Paris is closed to the outsider.
That's the infuriating thing: we can touch it and admire it, but it will never be ours
.
A Dutch woman who lived and worked in Paris for years and speaks the language fluently told me an anecdote.
One day she was having tea with Madame Pisarro, the painter's elderly widow, and she congratulated her on how well she spoke of her.
The Dutch woman felt flattered.
«
Oui, you talk très bien
– the old woman told him –,
more c'est pas Français
».
That doesn't matter when you can cross Paris in a taxi at the most beautiful time of the afternoon, with your legs stretched out and the magnificent streets passing by your side.
And you stop in front of the luminous windows of La Coupole.
The first time I went to Paris, my old agent, Kenneth Littauer, who had flown with the French in World War I,
recommended that I stay at the France et Choiseuil, "don't mind pronouncing it wrong
," he said.
He also suggested that I eat (a set menu) at the Grand Véfour, but, curiously, he never mentioned La Coupole;
It may have opened in 1927, a little after its time.
The food is not bad, especially the seafood and grills, and the service is good, but what is exceptional is the atmosphere.
The faces!
You see
le tout Paris
, not only the Paris of today, but that of yesterday and tomorrow
.
Not only do you see them, but they captivate you, they overflow the imagination and they are always changing.
I prefer the right side of La Coupole, next to the stairs (there used to be a second floor).
Sometimes they let you sit wherever you want and serve dinner until two in the morning, and when you leave there is a taxi waiting on Boulevard Montparnasse to take you home in the cool Parisian night.
We are in 1930, in 1960..., the years never change
.
I returned to another old-time favorite, Chez Benoît.
It was Art Buchwald, then almost unknown, who told the friend who took me about him.
So he didn't have any Michelin stars.
It was an old bistro on a street of ill repute
, the rue Saint-Martin, near the Seine and Notre Dame, but the Beaujolais of the house was excellent and the clientele loyal.
It used to be a classic Lyonnais establishment located on a corner in the heart of the vice district, but they have cleaned the street and turned it into a pedestrian shopping center.
The food is as good as ever and the clientele even wealthier
, but this time it seemed a little too uppity.
Was it really better when I ate
boeuf à la mode
for the first time in a new-to-me Paris? I wondered.
Or was it one of those things that have changed?
The
pneumatiques
, the small blue messages that were distributed in a couple of hours anywhere in the city, no longer exist;
The rusty
pissoirs
, as well as the Obelisk Press publishing house,
which
published pornography and authors such as Beckett, Nabokov and Henry Miller ( a banned copy of
Tropic
of Cancer, with green covers, was once the prize of a trip to Paris and opened the windows to a generation).
The Left Bank student hostels that Cyril Connolly wrote about – the Saint-Simon, the d'Angleterre, the Hôtel les Marronniers – have been restored and there is almost never room in them, anyway.
In Paris everything is always complete.
Les Halles has disappeared and with it the only "H" I knew in French that was not elided.
The painters and writers are gone.
Feminism has arrived in France, and here and there tall metal and glass buildings
, Mercedes dealerships, fast food chains, jogging clothes
...
, all the advances of the last decades.
"Paris is disappearing," laments a Frenchman.
The language is degraded because it is no longer spoken properly, the children know nothing about their heritage, the history of the city... When they govern they will tear everything down.
It's very sad... France imports the worst from the United States
.
The French no longer know the true wealth of their land.
"They only know the wealth of money."
However, one afternoon returning from Neuilly at dusk, I passed Maison Taittinger, with its neon sign next to the roof and the elegance of that French word,
champagne
.
I don't usually drink champagne, but I remembered the fifty cases of Taittinger's Blanc de Blancs stacked with the name and New York address of one of the Rockefellers waiting to be shipped aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 one November, and as I moved slowly through the traffic of Neuilly,
I thought of the privileged French life that is not lived anywhere else in the world
: the evening suits, the spacious rooms, the windows opening onto closed courtyards and gardens, the rivers, the cars, love affairs.
Along the avenue Foch, now somewhat
declassé
, the buildings are still little taller than the enormous trees;
There are prostitutes on the rue Saint-Denis, birds at the poultry market along the Seine, dogs on the subway trotting under portraits of
Ingres
and
Camus
;
You can park on the sidewalk and, if you get up early enough, you may see men arrive and open the sidewalk sewers: water pours out to wash over the city and they sweep up the previous day's debris with long straw brooms. .
Is Paris disappearing? Not yet
.
In other places
James Salter
Translation by Aurora Echevarría.
Salamander.
256 pp.
€21 Ebook: €8.99
You can buy it here.