Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

hands aflutter, ‘not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread. ’
    The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.
    The other thing I have never understood about the French is why they are so ungrateful. I’ve always felt that, since it was us that liberated them – and let’s face it, the French Army couldn’t beat a girls’ hockey team – they ought to give all Allied visitors to the country a book of coupons good for free drinks in Pigalle and a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. But they never thank you. I have had Belgians and Dutch people hug me round the knees and let me drag them down the street in gratitude to me for liberating their country, even after I have pointed out to them that I wasn’t even sperm in 1945, but this is not an experience that is ever likely to happen to anyone in France.

    In the evening I strolled the eighteen miles to the Île de la Cité and Notre-Dame, through the sort of neighbourhoods where swarthy men in striped Breton shirts lean against lampposts cleaning their teeth with flick knives and spit between your legs as you pass. But it was a lovely March evening, with just the faintest tang of spring in the air, and once I stumbled onto the Seine, at the Pont de Sully, I was met with perfection. There facing me was the Île St-Louis, glowing softly and floating on the river like a vision, a medieval hamlet magically preserved in the midst of a modern city. I crossed the bridge and wandered up and down its shuttered streets, half expecting to find chickens wandering in the road and peasants pushing carts loaded with plague victims, but what I found instead were tiny, swish restaurants and appealing apartments in old buildings.
    Hardly anyone was about – a few dawdling customers in the restaurants, a pair of teenage lovers tonguing each other’s uvulas in a doorway, a woman in a fur coat encouraging a poodle to leave un doodoo on the pavement. The windows of the upstairs apartments were pools of warm light and from the street gave tantalizing glimpses of walls lined with books and sills of sprawling pot plants and decorative antiques. It must be wonderful to live on such streets on such an island and to gaze out on such a river. The very luckiest live at the western end, where the streets are busier but the windows overlook Notre-Dame. I cannot imagine tiring of that view, though I suppose in August when the streets are clogged with tour buses and a million tourists in Bermuda shorts that SHOUT, the sense of favoured ecstasy may flag.
    Even now the streets around the cathedral teemed. It was eight o’clock, but the souvenir shops were still open and doing a brisk trade. I made an unhurried circuit of Notre-Dame and draped myself over a railing by the Seine to watch the bateaux-mouches slide by, trimmed with neon like floating jukeboxes. It was hopelessly romantic.
    I dined modestly in a half-empty restaurant on a side street and afterwards, accompanied by small burps, wandered across the river to Shakespeare & Co., a wonderfully gloomy English-language bookstore full of cobwebs and musty smells and old forgotten novels by writers like Warwick Deeping. Plump chairs and sagging sofas were scattered about the rooms and on each of them a young person in intellectual-looking glasses was curled up reading one of the proprietor’s books, evidently from cover to cover (I saw one