Fouras, Charente, Atlantic coast of southwestern France. February 2010. 8°C. Dazed from a night of wind, locals straggle down to the concrete esplanade and stare, disbelieving, at the void once occupied by their beach, carried away by the storm surge of Hurricane Xynthia. Concrete stairways that once touched the sand now hang in emptiness two meters above black river mud.
ONE THING ON WHICH I ASSUMED EVERYONE COULD AGREE: IF there was a worst month to visit Paris, it was surely August.
That was the month when anyone with the most feeble pretext locked the office and left town. In resorts all over France, seaside hotels, apartment buildings, and even campsites came to life, filled with people fleeing the cities.
Lying like a musty quilt across its roofs, the heat of August stifled every quality in which Paris in particular took pride. Cafés and restaurants closed, museums went on half–time, and in the few shops that remained open, languid vendeuses made no secret of longing to join their friends in Le Touquet or Antibes. The essentials of daily life disappeared. “On the last day of July,” confided a friend, “everyone forced to remain in Paris buys ten fresh baguettes and puts them in the freezer. It’s the last edible bread they’ll see for a month.”
Until refrigeration made cold drinks commonplace, street sellers flourished, in particular those offering Coco, a concoction of lemon juice and water flavored with licorice. At guinguettes, open–air bars, thirsty men guzzled liters of beer, then collapsed under the nearest tree to sleep through the stifling afternoon.
Heat induced the apathy known as cafard. One could medicate it—with sex, for instance—but the result was often self–defeating. As temperatures climbed, relationships were stretched to the breaking point.
Paris emptied by degrees. People with children slipped away in July, when school holidays began. Others delayed, but never beyond mid–August. “Tomorrow is the Feast of the Assumption,” wrote Canadian writer and longtime Parisian expat Mavis Gallant, “and the whole of Catholic Europe will shut down its cities and make for mountains and beaches. Any tourist caught in Madrid, Vienna, Rome, or Paris on the 15th of August can vouch for what ‘empty city’ means.”
In her attitude to Paris in August, as in much else, Gallant was the exception. She relished the emptiness, and—particularly after arthritis left her bent, shuffling, and mostly housebound—she often chose to remain right through August in her little apartment on rue Jean Ferrandi. She wrote about it in 1993 for the online magazine Slate:
Coco soft–drink seller in the Paris streets, 1900s.
Anonymous. La Chaleur à Paris. Un marchand de Coco. 1900s. Studio Meurisse.
Keep the beer coming, 1890s caricature.
Guillaume, Albert. En Canicule. 1897. Author’s collection.
“It bothers people—friends, I mean—that I spend every August in Paris. They think it is unhealthy, surely lonely, probably eccentric. The truth is that I prefer being in a city, all the time, more and more, and ‘city’ means Paris. I am frequently offered an airy room in a country house, in Normandy, in Brittany, and sometimes the house itself. I am assured that I would be able to work in peace, that no one would ever bother me, that I could just turn up for meals. Thank you, no. . . .”
To equate anonymity with freedom is a particularly Parisian trait. At the bals musettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dancers behaved like neighbors who nod to one another in the street but never introduce themselves. Even at the small neighborhood bals, which could simply be at cafés with the owner playing an accordion for dancing, one never revealed one’s name. Clinging to total strangers, body grinding against body in the jigging dance known as the java, they still remained silent. In 1922 Ernest and Hadley Hemingway danced at such a neighborhood bal, the rule of silence a convenience for new arrivals like them who spoke no French.
Not that Paris in August is without its pleasures, but those that exist are, like those of the bal musette, perfumed with decadence. Many Parisians don’t bother with curtains, preferring to control heat and light with shutters. When, at morning or evening, these are folded back to admit cooler air, both voyeurs and exhibitionists are spoiled for choice, a taste that helps explain the popularity among the French of Alfred Hitchcock’s films Rear Window and Vertigo, celebrations of the watchers and the watched.
Mavis Gallant used this time to exercise a slightly perverse pleasure in observing the oddities of her neighbors. One incident would not have been out of place in one of her acerbic short stories. Kept awake all night by a barking poodle in another apartment, she reported it to the police, who found that the seventeen–year–old son of the family, alone in Paris while the family was on holiday, would leave the dog unattended all night while he went out to party. “Yesterday I met them both, boy and dog, in the street,” Gallant wrote. “Nothing was said, but he stopped, pointed to the poodle, raised the leash, as if it were evidence in a trial, and gave me a look that conveyed apology, bewilderment, and gloom.”