Paris fairs and expositions, always attempted and sometimes realized on a grand scale, have been beset, at least in the twentieth century, by strikes, riots, floods, and other natural and man-made hindrances to such minor goals as opening on time. In the same way, they have left something strong and beautiful behind them, whether tangible or in men’s minds and hearts.
In 1937, for instance, there was the Internationale. Strikes were an almost stylish necessity of life in those quaintly distant days before all hell broke loose, and the fair lagged in summer heat while opulent or simply eager tourists marked time in the cafés and museums; outlandish buildings were put up and torn down and picketed and sabotaged. I was there from Switzerland to meet my parents, who loved great fairs, as do most Midwesterners reared on St. Louis and Chicago and even San Francisco shivarees, and my father was excited by the violent scornful unrest in that year’s Parisian air, as he had never been at home by giant mechanical toys like roller coasters.
We walked every day in the purlieus of the Exposition, to guess when a pavilion might possibly be opened or bombed. At night we looked at the lighted revolving statue of bright gold in the U.S.S.R. exhibit, but Father did not want to visit it, for vaguely political reasons. Once we went on the Seine in a bateau-mouche, and he was thrilled when every window in the Citroën plant was filled with striking beleaguered workers saluting us with raised fists. Nothing like that at home!
But from that fair, which never really came to life for us who waited, rose one bright star, the Guernica mural by Picasso. It was there. It was on view. It was well guarded. It was moving and terrible, and we went perhaps five times to look slowly at it, close up, far off, not talking. It was a difficult experience for my father, but one he faced with an almost voluptuous acceptance, so that we began to return compulsively to the long room where the painting unrolled itself. There were piles of rubble and discarded tools on the unfinished paths outside the building, but inside people walked silently up and down, finding parts of themselves in Guernica, even from Iowa and California.
Backwards to 1931, there was a fair called the Exposition Coloniale. As far as I know, some of it opened more or less on schedule, at least in time to assemble peculiar exotic hints of the imminent collapse of French attempts to keep their own sun shining around the clock on territorial land grabs. What else could it try to demonstrate? Why else would a reputedly thrifty nation spend hundreds of thousands of francs re-creating African villages and Indo-Chinese temples for visitors to gape at? From now in Time, it all seemed then to have some of the luminous gaiety of a terminal cancer patient’s final defiant fling. I lurched about on camels, and watched silent blacks squatting in front of their phony huts to carve cabalistic masks. Everywhere there was a heady perfume of leather, of raw silk and wool, of unknown spicy foods. As in the Internationale that came so few years afterwards, the Coloniale had a dappled green magic, under the summer leaves, and left behind it more than its rare polished woods and supple cloth.
But both those fairs seemed unreal. They were there, in spite of strikes and riots and general political uncertainty, but where are their physical traces? Where is the cardboard Angkor Wat by now? The painting of Guernica still exists, but where is the long shady building that harbored it? Where is the golden statue that revolved seductively, almost lewdly, above the Soviet pavilion? In the end, where are the dreams and wars that spawned all that pomp?
It was perhaps different in 1900. The hunger and shame of the Franco-Prussian War had been half forgotten by a new generation, and the Dreyfus Affair seemed temporarily under wraps. Paris needed and indeed deserved a circus. Architects were appointed, perhaps subconsciously, who could evoke all the rich weightiness of the Third Empire, before the late and current troubles, and they put together some pleasure domes for their fair that still enchant us: two palaces, the Grand and the Petit; the bridge across the Seine named for Alexander the Third; best of all, to some at least, the Gare de Lyon.
It happened before my time, and the French accounts are understandably vague about how and when that World’s Fair finally ground into action. It seems natural, by now, that the enormous glassy station was formally inaugurated a year late, but it is still there to prove that in 1901, on April 17, the President of the Republic and countless international notables gathered in it to declare that the Gare de Lyon was indeed a reality.
No doubt other very solemn things have happened there in almost a century, like treaty signings and top-level hanky-panky connected with both railroads and people, and municipal banquets, but it is hard to imagine that they did not contain a certain element of enjoyment, in that magical place. Surely the ceremonial toasts tasted better there.…
As far as I can know or learn, no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else. By now the public rooms on the train level are more plastic-topped, chromium-benched, than in the first days of wood everywhere, with iron and brass fittings. But the porters seem to stay sturdy and aware, and there is a near-obsolete courtesy at the “snack bars,” even five minutes before commute time.
For me, it began to come to life in 1937. I was there often, from 1929 on, always one more ant scuttling for a certain track, a cheap train south to Dijon, a luxury train to Lausanne. The station was something to run through. It was a grimy glass tunnel, and I felt glad when we pulled out and headed south.
But in 1937, when I could meet my parents in La Ville Lumière, I grew almost shockingly aware of the station. I went there early that twilight, to wait for their train. On the quai that looked far out under the glass roof and along all the gleaming tracks was a café, part of the big noisy bar-brasserie inside. There were little trees in long boxes, to sweeten the air and catch the soot, and the tables were of that grey-white marble that apparently was created by Nature solely for café tabletops. I sat waiting, drinking a brandy and water, realizing suddenly that I was not in a station, but in a place.
My family arrived, worn after a rough crossing, and it was not for perhaps ten days that I went back. My father was going down to Nice. For the first of countless times I cunningly arranged our getting around Paris so that we would have to wait for the train to slide in under the glass roof along the silver track, so that I could be there … in the place.
It was one of the pleasantest times I’d ever known with a man I’d always respected and loved. We were two people, suddenly. We sat behind the boxes filled with gritty tree-lings, and although it was only late morning we drank slowly at brandy again, with water and casual talk and mostly a quiet awareness of the loveliness of the great station.
It was not noisy. It was not stuffy. People did not look sad or even hurried. Trains whistled and chugged in and out, slid voluptuously toward us and then stopped. Big boards lit up here and there, high above the tracks, telling people where to go, when. A porter came to tell me that it was time for the gentleman to board.
“This is the way to do it! How can a railroad station be so beautiful?” my father asked happily, and I knew that I had marked off another mile in my life.
Then there was a war, and when I went back to Paris in the early fifties, I scuttled through without more than a shy shamed look at the glassed roof that the Occupiers had found too essential to destroy. I did not permit the station’s magic to take hold again until about the mid-sixties, when I went alone to Paris, for the first time in my life: no husbands—lovers—parents—children … I was on a writing assignment, and I asked to be lodged in the attic of a hotel on the Seine in a room I liked most. My husband and I had planned, before the War and he died, to rent two little connecting rooms there and make a kind of pied-à-terre, a place where we could leave books and be warmer than in Switzerland. This all turned impossible, and when I went back so much later I felt scared, so that I asked to take one of those familiar rooms. And in the other, to my astonishment, lived a person I admired deeply named Janet Flanner. It was fine. My husband would have liked it.
And so it happened that I reported, that summer, to my friend about my love affair with the Gare de Lyon, and she in turn decided to take her own look, her view she admitted had always been sketchy in spite of some forty years in Paris, and with due reflection she reported the whole thing to André Malraux, who then controlled the governmental wires that could declare a French relic or monument legitimately “historical,” and therefore supposedly immune to further human destruction.
Malraux had a rare and passionate belief in “the redemptive power of beauty,” and seemed to know that a minor living art form is far more vital than a major dead one. From what I have been told, he started at once to safeguard the shabby old restaurant in the Gare de Lyon, so that by now it is a twinkling Monument Historique, worthy of all that was opulently cheerful, generously vulgar and delightful, about la Belle Époque.
Things were different from my lives before, in the mid-sixties. The job demanded that I go between Paris and the South quite often, and I was looked at as freakish because I insisted on taking the Mistral train from the station instead of flying. A waste of time, of energy, I was told by my bosses. But nobody could understand how totally renewing of many strengths it was for me to go there at least two hours before the beautiful train pulled out, to eat a slow breakfast, and then slide southward through the forests and farms and into Burgundian vineyards and then suddenly, like an explosion, into the Midi below Lyon … and on down, through poignantly familiar towns like Avignon to the spot past the Étang de Berre, just before the Quartier de St. Louis in Marseille, where there is a mysterious flash of gold from the tiny needle of Notre Dame de la Garde.
From then on it was less emotional sailing, with cliffs and twisted pines and strange villas, until I got to the familiar little station in Cannes and the resumption of my professional life, but always I felt brave enough for it, after the private meal in Paris.
The main room of the First-Class Restaurant-Buffet at the Gare de Lyon seems to run the whole length of what to us Americans is the second floor. Actually, if one enters by way of the noble staircase from the inside quai of the station, there are several rooms of varying importance to the left, closed and reserved for board meetings and other mysterious gatherings. Mostly, pundits and tycoons heading for them use a smaller staircase that goes up under the Clock Tower, and never set foot in the enormous Restaurant. (The Big Ben Bar and the cloakrooms are conveniently to their right as they enter.)
To the rest of us travelers, going up the staircase from the quai is much more exciting than the handy little “back stairs,” and the huge room sweeps out, dream-like and yet inviting, and across from us the lace curtains move faintly in the drafts from the great square below.
Down at the far end, to our right, the Train Bleu is properly hushed and somewhat more elegant, if that is possible, than what any traveler can expect in the main room, only tacitly separated from its little offshoot. Service is swift or slow, according to one’s logistical needs, and there is a comfortable feeling of bourgeois polish and sparkle everywhere: clean linen and brass, waxed floors, good plain food as well as a few fastuous dishes. Madame Maigret would approve of it. So, I feel sure, would Brillat-Savarin, if it were not some 150 years too late.…
It is one of the most amazing public dining rooms I have ever seen, or even imagined. The ceiling is very high and elaborate. The windows are tall, looking on one side upon a goodly part of Paris, and then to the right into and under the endless stretch of grey glass roof over all the tracks that come to a dead stop down below … Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Near East, all France to the south.…
The walls, between and above the great lace-hung windows, are covered with more than forty huge murals of every possible scenic delight that the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranean trains could offer their travelers at the turn of the century, mostly peopled by plump Edwardian diplomats in top hats, and famous divas and courtesans in filmy garden frocks or even bathing dresses, all frolicking discreetly against breathtaking landscapes.
By now, the paintings have been cleaned, and their elaborate frames retouched. The lace curtains have been mended and starched and rehung, and the three monumental ceilings with their “crammed and gorgeous” paintings have been pulled back to life in our comparatively clean air, after years of collecting soot from the old steam trains below. And all the elegant bancs and chairs, comfortable in dark soft leather, have been refurbished, along with the sumptuous but functional brass racks for luggage and hats, and the tall lamp-stands along the middle aisle.
Perhaps best, at least for the waiters, is that the endless polished floors underfoot have been strengthened or repaired, so that there is no longer the steady creaking that I first noticed, when I listened there in the sixties.
I am not sure, by now, why I first decided to go to this station two hours before train time. Perhaps I wanted to sit where I had once been with my father. Perhaps I wanted to ready my spirit for the new job in the South. A porter (oh, a fine man, an angel in a blue soft blouse! I remember him clearly: tall, past middle age, oddly protective of me as was exactly right on that day …) told me when I asked to follow him to the café on the inside quai that he thought I would be better off upstairs, where he would come for me in ample time before the Mistral left. I felt docile, and followed him under the Clock Tower and past the end of the big noisy brasserie-café on the ground floor and up some back stairs, into the shrouded silent corridors of the First-Class Restaurant. I had never been there before.
He pounded on ahead of me with my luggage, and a waiter who knew him came from somewhere past the deserted old Big Ben Bar. My porter went straight down the middle aisle of what seemed like a silent gaudy cathedral to me, and stopped toward the far end, which as I remember was being remodeled for the new Train Bleu section.
“Madame is hungry,” he said in a mild way to his friend. “She is taking the Mistral. I’ll be back.” I felt helpless but undismayed. This was part of important private history, I sensed.
The waiter was surprisingly young to be working in such an awesome monument. He gave me a menu, and I settled myself in the huge sunny temple while he went down to the newsstand where I had planned to sit in all the sooty racket behind a spindly box tree, drinking café au lait. When he came up again with two very solemn dailies, I told him that I would like bread and butter, Parma ham, and a half-bottle of a brut champagne that seemed quite expensive to me and that is no longer on the excellent wine list. He looked pleased, and scudded off, with the floor under him making a fine high racket in the emptiness.
In 1967 or whenever that was, I felt dismal about the state of bread in Paris, and had not yet found that it would be almost as bad everywhere, and I decided then that the fresh loaf served at the Gare de Lyon was the best I had tasted since before World War II. (It still is.) The butter was impeccable, not something from a tinfoil wrapping marked with either optimism or blasphemy Beurre d’Isigny. The ham was genuine, perhaps tasting of violets on the wishful tongue. The champagne seemed one of the best I had ever drunk.
The waiter saw that I was more interested in where I was than in where the grim newspaper editorials were telling me to be, and he stood tactfully beside the table while I asked him about some of the murals. He knew a lot, in a controlled but fervent way that I had long recognized in devotees. Now and then he flicked at one of my crumbs, to stay professional.
Then the handsome, thoughtful, strong, blue-bloused, honest, punctual porter beckoned to me from the gigantic doorway that opened onto cloakrooms and the Big Ben Bar and the far closed doors of a Belle Époque palace, and I left without sadness, knowing that I would return. I turned back at the end of the corridor, and the waiter lifted the bottle of champagne where I had left one glassful, and bowed and smiled. I felt fine about everything, even my job … generous, warm, floaty.
The next time that I cannily arranged to be in Paris so that I would have to take the Mistral again, I went somewhat earlier to the station. I forget whether there were only two waiters that morning, or whether it was later on, when I suddenly looked up from my habitual little meal and saw four or five of them drifting around the table. Mostly they were young, but there were some old ones, too, and they had decided they knew me, and what they had apparently decided to share with me was horrendous.
The Restaurant, they said, was doomed. “One” (“they” in our lingo) had decided that it was too old to live. The famous lace curtains were in tatters. The paintings were out of date, and filthy with some seventy years of soot and general neglect and pollution. The floors buckled under the weight of the men’s trays. Yes, a promising young chef, probably a madman like them all, had opened the Train Bleu. But who but stunned starved travelers would come up to such a drab old wreck as this? “It is a crime of neglect,” they said furiously, very quietly, as they stood around my table. “It must not happen. This beautiful thing must not be condemned to death …”
I looked at them, so proud, and at the gleaming glass and silver and linen and at my little meal, and then past all of it to the bedraggled lace, the dim dirty light, the flaking gold leaf above us. I would like to think that I said firmly, “Something will be done.” The truth is that I probably whimpered a little as I let the men bustle me down the stairs to the train for the South.
I talked about all this, though, with my Paris neighbor, Janet. I told her about how passionately concerned the waiters were. And it went on from there. And by now the Gare de Lyon is in comparatively fine fettle, no way an aging beauty revived by hormones, but rather a mature female who has survived some unpredictable if foregone setbacks with good health and gracefulness.
Much is going on under the five storeys of the mansarded structure of 1900 (“… a fairly discreet evocation of the Belle époque,” one government document describes it with equal discretion), and within a few years most of suburban Paris will commute from six deep layers of artful stations being burrowed out, for various environmental reasons. Currently, ridiculous bright-orange awnings in a garishly scooped shape have been placed over the seven majestic windows on the “Paris” side of the Restaurant floor, but doubtless they will fade, and fall off.
The interior style of this giant station is “pure 1900,” whatever that may mean. On the ground floor thousands of people push in and out, buying tickets and meeting uncles and going somewhere, and the café-brasserie is always open and crowded. On the “train” side, the little trees in front of the marble-topped tables were sparse or gone when I last saw them in 1974, and the newsstand did not have its old inky glamour. This could be partly because I too was older and Colette and Simenon had stopped churning out their paperbacks, and partly because travelers do not feel as leisurely as they did when I once sat there with my father. By now there are snack-bar counters inside the busy buffet, and people drink and eat hastily. But a graceful stairway still leads upward, under the glass sky, and instead of one’s being alone in the bright huge Restaurant, there seem always to be some people. They read newspapers or talk quietly at odd hours like my own; the place buzzes gently, like a rococo hive, all carvings and paintings and gilt.
Conceivably gentlemen throng at proper hours around the Big Ben Bar, where “all the cocktails of the Belle Époque” are said to be served … along with the British (and by now international) substitute of whiskey and water for the sweet pinkish drinks of 1900. (I have never seen a barman there, but then, neither have I seen more than a few travelers in the Restaurant at nine-thirty in the morning …)
Once in the seventies I ate an early lunch rather than a late breakfast in the Grande Salle. It was moderately filled with middle-class people who looked as if they were going somewhere soon, which of course they were. They ate quickly but seriously, in general the plat du jour, and read newspapers or peeked at their watches, or talked quietly with Aunt Matilda, who was going to see her first grandchild in Montélimar. The waiters glided miles and miles on the gleaming new floors. The incredibly long lace curtains pushed in and out over half-open windows onto the square, but there seemed little city noise. The ceiling with its three enormous murals looked somewhat lower since it had been cleaned, and the walls glowed richly. I walked about, looking at the paintings I liked best, sipping a “Kir au Chablis,” and the waiters smiled at me as if they knew we shared a fine secret, which of course they did not know at all. Or did they?
I drank a Grand Cru Chablis, three years in bottle, feeling as extravagant as one of the well-kept women in the glamorous murals high above me, and ate a fine little soufflé of shellfish and mushrooms. Wood strawberries were listed, and their mysterious perfume would have suited the sudden sensuality of the meal, but the waiter shook his head. So I ate dark small raspberries with the rest of the wine, and leaned back to look at the ceiling crammed with color, in carved gilded curlicues, high above the incredible walls covered with their gaudily leering murals, all gold-scarlet-blue, a gigantic jumble of snowy Alps, fishing boats, trains, women, politicians, vineyards …
Even in its dingier days since 1901, the Gare de Lyon had stayed alive, I thought beautifully, and had made tired travelers stretch and smile. It had, one baffled but delighted writer said, “great harmony in spite of its decadent extravagance.”
Yes, that was it: a strange massive harmony!
I thought of my friend Janet, who had grown angry with herself after she went there to lunch quietly alone, a double wonder for a person of her gregarious volatility. She felt baffled about not using, ever in her long years in Paris, more than the quick dashes through the station and onto the quais for trains going south to Lyon and then east and west and on further. She groaned, and scolded helplessly at human blindness.
Often people try to keep secret the charm of a tiny restaurant one thousand light-years from nowhere around the corner, in case there will not be a free table the next time they are hungry for its inimitable broth or brew. But who can hide the secret of a colossus like the Gare de Lyon, where thousands of people rush or amble through every day, according to the trains they must catch or leave or even think about?
Inside, under the misty glass, in the music of wheels and horns and whistled strange signals, there are signs guiding passengers to the toilets, the newsstand, the café, the Buffet, the upstairs Restaurant, the Train Bleu. There is no attempt to hide any of this vital and perhaps aesthetic information.
It comes down, I suppose, to a question of where one really chooses to be, and for how long. This is of course true of all such traffic hubs as railway stations, but nowhere is there one with a second floor like that of the Gare de Lyon, so peculiarly lacy and golden. It has, in an enormous way, something of the seduction of a full-blown but respectable lady, post-Renoir but pre-Picasso, waiting quietly in full sunlight for a pleasant chat with an old lover …
—Glen Ellen, 1979