38
Sydney Stadium. August 1968. A packed house for the folk trio of Peter, Paul and Mary. As a change from white-bread protest (“If I had a hammer”? Seriously?), Peter Yarrow introduces Boris Vian’s “Le Déserteur.” “I’m sure I don’t need to explain its message,” he says. People look puzzled, even more so when the trio begins the song in French. Barely a handful understand the words, but perhaps that’s the point. With our troops fighting beside the United States in Vietnam, it’s a brave man who would proclaim in any language, as Vian does, “And I will say to people / Refuse to obey / Refuse to do it / Don’t go to war.”
“ARE YOU GOING TO THE FESTIVAL OF SAINT JACQUES?” ASKED our American friends the O’Days.
Praise be for visitors. Without them, we would never hear about most seasonal events taking place outside our corner of Paris. The arrondissements can be as intellectually isolated from one another as villages were physically remote in medieval times.
“Who was Saint Jacques, anyway?” asked Bob O’Day. “Jacques—what’s that in English? James?”
Another thing about visitors: They’re inquisitive. They assume we’re as interested in Paris as they are. In fact, we mostly take the city for granted. Maybe Sarah Bernhardt did live in this building, but to us it’s where our dentist has his office.
“Yes, Jacques is the same as James,” I said. “But I don’t know what he has to do with seafood.”
“Seafood?” They looked surprised.
“Saint Jacques is a kind of shellfish. You call them scallops. I guess this festival is some sort of promotion.”
“Not religious, then?” They looked disappointed. All that expensive camera equipment, and no colorful folkloric rituals to record.
We agreed to accompany them anyway, and planned to meet the following Saturday afternoon on what turned out to be one of the windiest corners of Montmartre, just opposite the cemetery. Arriving ten minutes early, I took refuge in a café, a gesture as automatic to Parisians as sheltering under a tree.
Tourists enter cafés to drink coffee and scribble postcards that begin, “Writing this in the cutest café.” To Parisians, they’re an amenity: somewhere to get out of the rain, use the toilet, make a phone call, or kill time before a rendezvous. Any coffee one buys is rent. Historians of the Lost Generation will tell you that writers and artists hung out in cafés for the conversation. More likely it was because the toilets were clean.
When the O’Days and Marie-Dominique arrived, we walked with them down twisting rue Lepic. As we passed the Café des Deux Moulins, where Amélie Poulain worked in the famous film, the keening sound of bagpipes floated up the hill.
At the next corner, a crowd had gathered around six pipers and a drummer playing on the sidewalk. After the drone of Scottish pipes, the Breton variety can sound shrill, but these players were experts. So were the women in long blue dresses, arms over one another’s shoulders, who danced in the street, their white lace bonnets nodding. Both pipers and dancers were well costumed, almost professionally so. I looked past them to a large open-front fish shop, where men were busy shoveling the orange fan-shaped shells of Saint Jacques into plastic bags. Business looked good. The presence of the pipers and dancers wasn’t exactly coincidental.
Two men left the crowd to spontaneously link arms with the ladies and join their dance, if you could call it a dance: one step left, slide the other foot next to it, hop, and stamp, then repeat—slide . . . hop . . . stamp . . .
Something about the movement looked familiar. There was something of Greek dancing in it, but I’d seen Hopi and Navajo people dancing like this too, shuffling and stamping, deerskin moccasins raising the soft dust. Australian aboriginals too, in corroboree . . .
This was ur-dance, the irreducible minimum of calculated movement, the seed from which would germinate Pavlova, Balanchine, Nureyev—and Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre du printemps.
“You don’t want to join in?” Bob joked.
With a little encouragement, he probably would have done so. That’s another thing about visitors: they participate.
We continued down rue Lepic. It narrowed as café tables and chairs crowded onto the sidewalk, then it widened into Place des Abbesses.
Saint Denis, the patron saint of Paris, was decapitated by Roman soldiers at the foot of the hill. Legend says he rose to his feet and continued the climb toward Montmartre, carrying his head, which all the while continued to deliver a sermon about forgiveness.
He was supposed to have paused near this square and washed his face at a spring before pressing on for another five kilometers. It may be an index of Parisian skepticism about Denis and his headless perambulation that there’s no church on the site. Only a modest subterranean chapel marks the spot.
Instead, the attractive little square shamelessly celebrates the bohemian lifestyle of Montmartre. Most weekends, the antique manège (carousel) keeps kids occupied snatching for the dangling tassel, the French equivalent of the brass ring. A green-painted Wallace water fountain with its four caryatids offers fresh water next to the art nouveau glass-and-iron metro entrance by Hector Guimard, rescued from the busier station at Hôtel de Ville and reerected here in 1974, out of harm’s way.
Today, the carousel and fountain were inaccessible. Instead, white tents crowded every corner of the square. Men and women in aprons and caps shelled and shucked oysters, grilled skewers of Saint Jacques, and ladled cups of soup. There was no room for dancing, even that shuffling step we’d seen earlier, but under an awning six men with impressive beards were harmonizing, more or less, on one of those folkish tunes beloved of pub bands around the world.
Couples bundled up against the cold strolled by, drinking from flutes. Bob disappeared, to return with a bottle of champagne and a handful of glasses. By then Deidre had also drifted away, but returned equally loaded down with a plate of mini–hamburger buns, in each of which was sandwiched a slice of jambon cru and a whole fat Saint Jacques.
As we juggled glasses and paper plates, a complete stranger standing next to us, glass in hand, turned and announced in French, “Isn’t this wonderful? Wine, food, a beautiful day. Who could ask for more?”
We raised our glasses in agreement. No place like Paris. No place at all.
Since our conversation about the Republican calendar on the balcony overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin, I’d become more friendly with Adrian de Grandpré, the historian priest.
I wish I’d encountered someone like him during my Catholic boyhood instead of our beery Irish pastors, most of whom, we assumed, had been exiled to rural Australia in punishment for some unmentionable transgression. His straightforward manner was the best possible advertisement for his beliefs. The less he talked about religion, the more interesting it became.
Author with musicians at the Saint Jacques festival.
Montel, Marie-Dominique. Author with Musicians at Saint Jacques Festival.
He was also refreshingly unfussy when it came to Catholic dogma. Just the man to clarify the religious connections, if any, between Saint Jacques and the shellfish that bears his name.
It was typical of him that we met in a Starbucks in Montparnasse, where he had set up his laptop. This wasn’t as incongruous as it sounds. France is the only country with a bishop of the internet. His name is Jacques Gaillot. When the church, because of his radical politics, fired him as bishop of Évreux, the pope placed him in charge of Parthenia, a defunct see in North Africa that expired in the fifth century. Gaillot announced mischievously that he regarded himself as a “virtual bishop,” responsible for the moral well-being of that other incorporeal world, cyberspace.
“Is Saint Jacques the patron saint of Brittany?” I asked.
“Where did you see that?”
“Wikipedia.”
Adrian sighed and shut his Mac. “Another reason not to trust the internet.”
“So he isn’t a patron? Or isn’t a saint?”
“This ‘patron saint’ business is misleading. Saints aren’t allocated to particular districts or trades. It’s more that people with special interests select a saint as someone to pray to, since he or she might understand their specific difficulties.”
“Like Denis and headaches?” Asking the decapitated Denis for relief from headache had always seemed to me one of the least likely opportunities for saintly intervention. “Or Saint Jude?” As the patron saint of lost causes, Jude is frequently invoked in the film business, a profession overendowed with desperation.
“Jude isn’t a good example, actually,” Adrian said. “He wrote in one of his letters that we should persevere in difficult circumstances. That’s about it. I’m sure plenty of other saints said the same thing.”
“Well, Saint Christopher, then?”
“Patron saint of travelers?” He shook his head. “There’s some doubt that there even was such a person. The first reference appears in a thirteenth-century legend that reads like Harry Potter. He was dropped from the church calendar in 1969. That should tell you something.”
“But Jacques—or rather James—really existed?”
“Oh, yes. There were two of them, actually. But neither went anywhere near Brittany. And neither was a fisherman.”
“So how did he get to be the saint of a shellfish?”
“You’ll laugh. Best theory? Boats carrying pilgrims from Britain on their way to the shrine of Saint James at Compostela in Spain would berth in Breton ports. Maybe some merchant put up a sign saying, ‘Pilgrims of Saint Jacques Welcome Here.’ You can see how it might happen.”
I remembered the pipers and dancers outside the fish shop on rue Lepic. Yes, I could see very well.