Paris satisfies the drives of Private Dunne.
I WAS 22 WHEN I WENT TO PARIS FOR THE FIRST TIME, A MEWLING, puling first-class private in the army of the United States, on a three-day pass from an artillery battalion in divided cold war Germany. I was drawn to the City of Light by Charlie Wales in Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited and by Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and by Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, drawn by wine and by (let’s face it) what opera stage directions call “women of the town.” I spoke a little French, un petit peu, as I was always quick to say, but I did know the most thrilling word I had ever heard in any language—apéritif.
“Une fine, s’il vous plaît,” I told the barman that first day in Paris (at the Hemingway Bar in the Ritz, where else?) when asked if I would like an apéritif. I didn’t know what a fine was, but if it was good enough for Jake Barnes the night he met Brett Ashley again at the bal musette on rue da la Montagne-Ste-Geneviève, it was good enough for me. I had a second fine à l’eau (the barman discreetly suggested that cutting the brandy with water might possibly help me make it through the rest of the afternoon) and a third—bad news at lunch, but a gin martini seemed de trop, three positively vulgar. Full of brandy, youthful adrenaline, and testosterone and absent good sense, I decided I must rent a car; I would drive, not so much to see Paris as to take it on in my disorganized (and at this point quite hungover) fashion.
The rental agency to which I was directed by the barman had only one car available, a stick-shift Renault 4CV of uncertain vintage and provenance, more a Tinkertoy with a pushback canvas roof than an automobile.
It was scarcely larger than a carnival bumper car, but no matter; I soon discovered that a bumper car was perfect for what proved to be my first, and what I thought might be my last, destination—the Arc de Triomphe at rush hour. It was like being sucked onto a giant merry-go-round that, as if in a dream, I could not get off. Round and round the Étoile I went, swept by the tide of cars—there a glimpse of the Avenue de Wagram, and a moment later Wagram again, then a third time, a fourth, and always over my left shoulder the Arc, my lodestar.
By the fifth time around, however, I began getting into it, feeling the rush, waving now, shouting, cursing, exuberantly singing “La Marseillaise,” cutting cars off, flipping other drivers the bird, and then suddenly, as if I had been ejected by a slingshot, I was off that demented carousel and onto the relatively safe haven of the Champs-Elysées. I could, however, only feel disappointment; the ride around the Étoile had been so exhilarating that I turned right around and went back again. It was as if I had finished basic training—now it was time for advanced Étoile maneuvers, except this time I would choose where to get off. And so, supremely confident, moving easily with the flow, darting through openings, I exited onto all the great avenues branching out from the Arc—Champs-Elysées, Marceau, Iéna, Kléber, Victor-Hugo, Foch, Grande-Armée, Carnot, MacMahon, Wagram, Hoche, Friedland. I will not say that I underwent an epiphany that afternoon, but in some inchoate way I realized that the only way I wanted to experience Paris was in an automobile.
Ever since that first trip I have always rented a car immediately upon my return, more than twenty times now, and on my first day in the city, sane and sentient wife in tow and protesting vigorously, I make for the Étoile at rush hour: it is the way I let Paris welcome me back. Here a confession is in order that will perhaps explain my need for wheels. I have an aversion to sightseeing and little affinity for museums, monuments, cathedrals, shrines, grottoes, tombs, castles, and palaces. No organized bus tours for me, no group forays to Notre Dame or the Orangerie or the Palais du Luxembourg, no checklist of sites and sights to be ticked off: if this is the 7th arrondissement, it must be the Eiffel Tower, the École Militaire, the Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb. Guidebooks leave me numb, except for the odd nonessential fact that I might later put in a book of my own. My heart leaps, for example, to learn that the Florentines, while laying siege to Siena in the 13th century, catapulted excrement and dead donkeys over the city’s walls in hopes of starting a plague. Or that the Germans, during the Nazi occupation of France, added their own savage wrinkle to the guillotine: unlike the French, they made each condemned prisoner face upward, and taped his eyes open so that the unfortunate victim’s last terrifying sight was the blade heading toward his neck.
I have an image fixed for ever in my mind of young, blond, admirably coifed, and chicly clothed young mothers in the driver’s seats of Renault 5s (the other part of this encapsulation of the essence of Frenchness), a Stuyvesant or a Virginia Slim or a Blue Blush by Helena Rubinstein held firmly in their lips (otherwise they would be biting them), a scarf by Hermés caressing their lovely necks, their Louis Vuitton bags by their sides, and two well-dressed small children strapped into the back seat—bearing down on the Étoile like tank commanders, shaking their hands with irritation (hand held palm upward, fingers splayed, and shaken up and down) at some offending other driver. Mais, qu’est-ce que tu fous?—What the hell are you doing?—they mutter under their breath as the battle ensues. Ta gueule, salaud—Up yours, you bastard (very rough translation)—they say.
—Richard Bernstein, Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French
What a car provides is the opportunity for unexpected adventure, a freedom to explore, to be overtaken by what might not interest others. A wrong turn, a one-way street running in the opposite direction from where I’m headed—getting lost is in fact the larger purpose. Exposure to the mundane puts me in touch with the rhythm of a place. I saw the locks of the Canal St-Martin and the slums of Belleville and Ménilmontant on market day before I saw the sublime stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle. I did not visit the Louvre until my sixth trip to Paris, and then only because a cloudburst had rendered my windshield wipers inoperable and the Quai des Tuileries impassable. I pulled under a tree, sure that in such a storm I would not get a traffic ticket, and ducked inside with my wife to escape the rain. We walked upstairs, smack into the Mona Lisa. How much better to be favored by the Gioconda smile that way, the first time, rather than as a sightseeing duty.
In a car, on a given day, I can visit any number of destinations and never see a tourist gazing at a green Michelin guide. Sometimes I invent whimsical expeditions. One afternoon it was to find the apartments of American writers who had once lived in Paris (the addresses provided in an estimable volume, Brian Morton’s Americans in Paris). I zipped from the building on rue de Tilsitt, near the Étoile, which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had occupied for a time in 1925, when they were in the chips, to the house on the Ile St-Louis where James Jones held court, to the sawmill on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in the 6th arrondissement, above which Hemingway, almost broke, had lived in 1924, and then to the two apartments across the street from each other on rue de Varenne where Edith Wharton passed her Paris years. Close by the Invalides, rue de Varenne is the same street to which Wharton’s memorable creation (and perhaps fictional alter ego) Countess Olenska exiled herself from Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence.
On another, more louche foray I set out to locate some of the old maisons de tolérance, or brothels, that Brassaï had photographed in The Secret Paris of the Thirties. At the Chabanais, not far from the Place de L’Opéra, the Prince of Wales—later King Edward VII, a regular—had a Hindu room set up in homage to his mother, Queen Victoria, empress of India. In a nearby maison on rue des Martyrs, an elderly president of the French senate had years before expired in the arms of his Venus, a minor scandal at the time. On Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, near the Montparnasse cemetery, I found the site of the Sphinx, one of the few brothels where customers could bring their wives and children. It was a Wednesday, and the street alongside what had once been the most famous whorehouse in Paris was closed for market day. At covered stalls with a staggering variety of fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, and cheeses, I watched as the farmers and the bourgeois matrons of the quartier haggled endlessly. I bought some chestnuts and then wandered through the cemetery examining the dates on the crypts and monuments; it was a history of France since the Revolution.
On this eccentric one-day tour I had managed to see a huge part of the city and its quotidian life, past and present, which would not have been possible had I not been driving. Each day has its structuring destinations. Sunday is park day—Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the 19th arrondissement, Montsouris in the 14th, Monceau in the 8th. It is to Monceau that my wife and I drive every Sunday morning to read the English papers and to watch the beautiful neighborhood children at play, many the sons and daughters of the diplomatic corps from the nearby embassies. Monceau is the most cosmopolitan of these parks, almost a child’s fairy kingdom, alive with the squeals of preschoolers. In a sandbox full of forts and castles and battlements, Linda, a tiny black girl, shouts at Abdul, equally tiny in his pink Lacoste polo shirt. The merry-go-round doesn’t have just horses but also a fire engine, a tank, a stagecoach, two motorcycles, a Paris-Lyons bus, and a rocket ship.
Then across the Seine to Parc Montsouris at the southern edge of the city. Like Monceau, Montsouris is a mix of nationalities—in this case students from the foreign dormitories at Cité Universitaire across the street. The students lend the park its raffish air of young love and unlimited possibilities. Adjacent to Montsouris is rue Georges-Braque, where the painter had his studio, and overlooking the park are the spacious ateliers of contemporary artists. Some of the nearby streets are cobblestoned and lined with ivy-covered cottages, giving the area a strange, almost Bavarian Mother Hubbard quality that makes it unlike any other place I have seen in Paris.
I suppose my favorite park, though, is Buttes Chaumont in the northwestern part of the city. I discovered it quite by accident driving back to Paris from the World War I battlefield at Château-Thierry. There was a déviation in the road. I of course got lost, then suddenly came upon this park in what seemed to be a working-class district. On an adjoining street, old men were playing boules. Buttes Chaumont is one of the highest spots in Paris with a view of almost the entire city. Its hills are impossibly steep—vertical and vertiginous. Walking there is a workout. The park has a lake and a suspension bridge which at one time was called Pont des Suicides because, like the Golden Gate in San Francisco, it seemed to invite jumpers. It was the contention of Louis Aragon, former literary godfather of the French Communist Party, that before the city erected metal grilles along its sides, the bridge claimed victims even from passersby who had no intention of killing themselves but were suddenly tempted by the abyss.
Cemeteries always attract. My wife and I first drove to Père Lachaise in the 20th arrondissement with our daughter, who wanted to see the putative grave of rock-and-roll legend Jim Morrison. She was then fourteen, convinced that Morrison was alive and living in the Philippines. If he’s in the Philippines, we asked, then who’s buried in his plot at Père Lachaise? Logic did not prevail; she obviously viewed our reasoning as heresy. I wondered how we would find the grave, but I needn’t have worried. Whitewashed on various crypts was the single word “Jim” and, under the name, an arrow pointing visitors through the cemetery toward Morrison’s monument. Lounging around the grave, draped over the adjoining stones, were denizens of what must have been the last hippie enclaves from around the world; the smell of their marijuana gave an immediate contact high. The monument, topped by a bust of the singer with a head of curls that would have done credit to Louis XIV, was covered with graffiti “Antonio, Stefano, Giulio, Paolo, Fabio—12/8/82. Music Is Your Only Friend Until the End.” We left our daughter to commune with the living dead and went to pay our respects to Oscar Wilde.
Having driven in Paris for more than 30 years, I know the city even better than Manhattan, where I live and where I rarely ever drive except to get out of town on weekends. New York’s outer boroughs are terra incognita to me, as Pantin and St-Denis are not. Parking in Paris is easy: you can pull up anyplace, sometimes even on the sidewalks. At night I always leave my car on the street, without worrying as I do in New York that I will find it in the morning absent tires and radio. Years ago, hopelessly lost in the cobweb of streets high in Montmartre, I came upon a launderette near the basilica of Sacré-Coeur. I still take my washing up there, lugging it out to my rental car, past the concierge’s desk and the steely eyes of assistant managers in morning dress, who I know are wondering why I bother to stay at the Ritz or the Plaza Athénée if I choose not to pay $75 to get some socks and underwear done by the hotel laundry.
There are closer self-service places, but speed is not the point. How I get there depends on my mood. I might go by way of the Jardin des Plantes. Or the Bois de Vincennes. Or the Place des Vosges in the Marais. Or the apartment house where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas resided on the rue de Fleurus. Or the hotel on Boulevard des Batignolles where Josephine Baker lived with a lover, a parrot, two rabbits, a snake, and a pig. It is perhaps not your way to see Paris, but in 30 years, there is very little that I have missed.
John Gregory Dunne is the author of many books including The Studio, Monster: Living off the Big Screen, True Confessions, Harp, and The Red White and Blue. His screen credits, shared with his wife, Joan Didion, include a remake of A Star is Born, True Confessions (based on his novel), and Play It as It Lays (based on Didion’s novel). He and his wife live in New York.
I’d been in Paris five days. I’d walked around in my sensible shoes—that is, a pair of sneakers that made my feet feel as if they were in clouds. Five days in Paris, watching gorgeous French women with thin legs and highly fashionable shoes stride seductively around the city.
On Day 6, I looked at my own highly fashionable shoes, which were sitting untouched in the hotel closet. “Wear us,” they called.
“Why not?” I thought. I’d worn said shoes for ten-hour workdays. Marched to and from parking lots, up and down stairs, into offices, even for a couple of spins around a mall. Never a problem. Never a rub. Never a blister. I strapped them on.
My husband looked at my feet. “You wearing those?” he asked, tremulously.
“Sure. They’re comfortable,” I assured him.
Two hours later, there I was in Père Lachaise cemetery, wandering among the illustrious dead, my feet weeping silently. Two gravediggers stood waist-high in a newly dug hole. I considered lying down.
—Jill Schensul, “The Splendor and the Pain: Touring Paris in Heels,”
The Bergen Record