Travelers' Tales Paris by James O'Reilly Read Free Book Online Page A

night. The “facility” was between each two floors. There was no shower or bath, so part of our social life consisted of meeting at public bath houses, carrying our towels. (“We always knew Paris would be like this!”)
    Now I was paying several hundred times as much to stay in the same hotel, but an elevator had taken the space once given to the water closets, there was a neat little bathroom in each room, and strategic antique beams had been exposed. All over the Left Bank, the little boardinghouses that recalled Balzac and Wilde and the Existentialists and waves of foreigners washing up on the shores of bohemia have become pretty and clean and healthy: “Nostalgia,” as Simone Signoret wrote, “is not what it used to be.” Yet the shadows of the lovers and philosophers and wine drinkers remain in corporeal new lovers, thinkers, flirters, café sitters. There are still plane trees and cobblestones and little squares like the Place deFürstemberg, where I heard a flamenco group howling magnificently of jealousy and loss. There are still international beatniks and hippies in the Place de la Contrescarpe; even a few French ones. The Rive Gauche is still a country of the mind, a nation of smoke in the head, the republic of imagination, the place of strict welcome to the amusing from everywhere, a purgatory of hanging loose.
    â€œMoney can’t buy happiness,” admitted my friend Claude Roy, a writer who lives on the rue Dauphine, but a person can use it well and happily here to buy his fruit, cheese and wine at the rue de Buci street market, books at Le Divan or La Hune, paintings in the dozens of galleries, all within a few minutes’ stroll of his apartment. In a shop on the rue de Tournon that sells toy soldiers of ancient breed—Napoleon, Lafayette, Joan of Arc—I saw a newer toy soldier, of painted lead, in a black hat and cape. It was one of the heroic battlers in the wars of the Left Bank circa 1930, a tall, thin, Irish toy soldier—James Joyce. The pen can be both as mighty and as leaden as the sword.
    C ome with me down this street and meet the ghosts of our earliest years. Run, school-boy, run, with your sachel bouncing between your shoulderblades — shout, shout for no reason, for the pleasure of being alive, glance quickly into the antique shop, where the grey cat sleeps amid the yataghans, parasols, and fans, run on past the shop where the embroideress is ruining her eyesight stitching initials onto snow-white sheets, run past the bearded chiropodist as he surveys the long pavement from his window, run as far as the bronze lion guarding the entrance to the Villa Fodor. But you’re so quick, I’ve lost sight of you. Have you slipped into the church where the candle flames flicker in front of the grotto of Lourdes? Are you hurtling down the rue Raynouard, where the cab horses needed to be reined in? I’ll not go chasing after you, little ghost from 1908. Too much has changed for the worse in our city to let me smile at you as cheerfully as I should like .
    â€”Julian Green, Paris ,
translated by J. A. Underwood
    Without going out of its way to welcome the stranger, the Rive Gauche has evolved an immense traditional hospitality. Hardly anyone rejects her embrace—although, as anyone who has beenthe victim of Parisian impatience can attest, sometimes the embrace is pretty cool. It requires an ability to fight back, which was lacking in the tourist I saw desperately shouting. “Diet pop! All I want is a diet pop! Why can’t I get a diet pop!” on the terrace of La Palette, on the rue de Seine, near various art schools. This is one of my favorite cafés, but the burly waiter, who must have attended Berlitz Anti-Charm School, kept asking, “ Champagne? Cognac? Faites un bel effort, monsieur! ” (“Make a beautiful effort, sir!”), as if he didn’t understand. Of course the waiter understood the tourist’s