The pain and purgation of Paris guilt

by David Benjamin 

 

“…  Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing, going in circles, mounting each other. Paris is the city of love, even for the birds …” 

― Samantha Schutz

 

PARIS — We were barely awake yesterday before we were plunging through Métro tunnels, beneath the Seine, resurfacing at the place de la Madeleine (named for a church not the children’s book) and moseying toward the epic Christmas display in the towering atrium of the world’s most renowned department store, Galeries Lafayette. As we gazed up at a Christmas Medusa atop a fifty-foot tree composed entirely of light, as a hi-fi aria crooned across the store’s wedding-cake of balconies, Hotlips and I were—at least this day—absolved of Paris guilt.

Among the misconceptions we’ve encountered since we made Paris our second home is that the city is a 24-hour pillar-to-post party peopled by princesses, potentates, artistes and authors, chefs and fashionistas, jewel thieves and flaneurs, gigolos and gigolettes. Breakfast is champagne drunk from glass slippers, with strawberries expressed overnight from Morocco and dipped in ink-dark chocolate.

According to legend, short days blend fizzily into endless nights of cocktails at the Buddha Bar or Harry’s, dinner at Maxim’s or boeuf bourguignon at Le Train Bleu, watching can-cans into the wee hours at the Moulin Rouge or indulging the aquarelle nudity at the Crazy Horse.

The romance of the City of Light haunts and tempts, a Siren song seeping into our garret through ill-fitted windows. But we have jobs to do, projects to finish. To quote the pragmatist philosopher Johnny Castle, “Everybody works here, Baby.” 

Instead of Dom Perignon and fraises, we have a café creme and croissant at a neighborhood bakery. Instead of Maxim’s or Taillevent, we have shrimp noodle soup at Mirama, a Chinese hole-in-the-wall across from our local church (but the soup is the best in Paris and the church, St. Séverin, goes back a thousand years). Instead of all-night revels in Left Bank caveaus and Right Bank cabarets, we pull Charade from our DVD library and watch Cary and Audrey dining wittily on a bateau mouche, beside the Louvre, beneath the Pont des Arts, past lovers canoodling on the quai. 

Every hour spent sweating (or freezing) at our keyboards is one not spent savoring the pleasure palace of the Western world. Our labors leave us steeped in a regret that nags at the conscience and blurs our focus. Paris is lovely, dark and deep. But we have promises to keep.

So, we feel bad, irreverent to the fringe of sacrilege. Our friends who see us gallivant to Paris several times a year suffer Paris envy. We respond with Paris guilt. We feel bad for the leaving the jealous behind. We feel bad for paying paltry homage to Paris, for not burning both ends of the candle like Scott and Zelda, not cavorting, arguing and boxing with Hemingway, nor communing abstractly with Gertrude and Alice over pastis and saucisson sec in a Montparnasse hideaway.

But, despite its eternal aura, Paris is only somewhat the province of the chanteuse and the poet, of cobbled streets ’neath limestone buildings with windows full of art and vieux livres. It is—also—a quotidian city bustling with real people, who slog through their lives, cope with bosses, raise kids and puzzle over a politics that’s timelessly fraught with clericalism and revolution, colonialism and fascism, the Reign of Terror, the reign of Napoleon, the bulldozers of Baron Haussmann, the paradox of Pétain, the mistress of Mitterand, the rise of Le Pen and Le Pen, the ambitions of Macron, the sans culottes and the gilets jaunes.

It’s not just busy here. It’s confusing. 

You want to immerse into a city that poses, every minute at every turn, a startling surprise, an unexpected view, the promise not only of sensuality but enlightenment. But how do you live it up while trying to make a living? And how do you assuage the guilt you feel at not giving Paris your undivided attention and sensory indulgence from waking ’til sleeping?

And why are you asleep?

During five years of uninterrupted residence here, Hotlips relieved her guilt in a style purely Parisian, each morning, on route to her office on rue Etienne Marcel.

(Paris leads the world in streets named after people both famous and forgotten, priests to presidents, merchants to martyrs. Paris street names honor 130-odd saints from Amand to Vincent De Paul, plus—to mention a few among the non-canonized hundreds—Felix Fauré, Xavier Privas, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, Balzac and Apollinaire (but not François Villon), Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt (but not JFK), Madame de Sévigné and the King of Sicily.)

Hotlips dawdled as she made her way, taking in a daily infusion that began on our street, a cobblestone byway spared from Baron Haussmann and immortalized by Elliot Paul in The Last Time I Saw Paris. She passed the statue of St. Michael, flanked by two of sculpture’s ghastliest gryphons, slaying his dragon within sight of his eponymous café,  Le Départ St. Michel, where Robert Doisneau lurked with his camera and—allegedly—ambushed ambulatory lovers.

She crossed the Seine twice, first at St. Michel, and then across the Ile de la Cité on the Pont au Change. In between, the Palace of Justice surrounds and obscures the stained-glass magnificence of Sainte Chapelle, where—even on cloudy days when the windows are murky—there winds a queue of tourists. 

On each bridge, she beheld sunrise beyond the Hotel de Ville and the Ile St. Louis (formerly a pasture called the Ile des Vaches) to the east. The early light bathed her westward view of the Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette languished before losing her head, the Institute de France, the Louvre, the Petit Palais, Les Invalides where Napoleon lies fomenting autocracy, and—in the picturesque distance—Gustave Eiffel’s steel-and-lace tower.

Across the Seine, Hotlips had reason to pause at Chatelet, once portal to Paris’ prisons, now site of a Victory statue atop a column beneath a sphinx-guarded fountain, across from the theater where Sarah Bernhardt trod the boards, flung out her arms and soliloquized herself into Thespian immortality.

Nearing her office, Hotlips crossed rue de Rivoli. Looking right, she could see the heart of left-wing Paris, beginning at the place de la Bastille and snaking eastward along the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine. A left turn would take her to the place de la Concorde, at the foot of the Champs Elysées with a stunning view up the avenue to the Arche de Triomphe, under which every conqueror of France, from Napoleon to Hitler to George Patton, marched his minions. 

Her office, finally, was just past Les Halles, a shopping mecca once called the Belly of Paris because it housed the vast daily marché into which every fruit and vegetable, meat, fish, egg and perishable piled up daily and then dispersed in wagon and wheelbarrow to every market and restaurant for ten miles ‘round. That roaring, reeking, bloody madness was removed last century to suburban Rungis but it left behind a white-cobbled market street called Montorgueil, where once Hotlips spotted Queen Elizabeth (with entourage) visiting the neighborhood’s most celebrated boulangerie, and an exterminator store, specializing in rats, that had a cameo appearance in the movie Ratatouille.

From home to office, without paying admission, consulting her GPS app or asking directions (she knew her way blindfolded), Hotlips had beheld, casually, a grandeur more storied and quietly stirring than any other twenty minutes afoot anywhere else on earth …

… as though she had emerged forgiven from the confessional and finished her Hail Marys before heading to work.