But Enough About You: Essays (44 page)

At Taillevent, which is a very great restaurant not far from where Scott and Zelda lived in those days, Peaches was so exuberant after the meal of wild boar and
foie gras de canard
with the caramelized figs and tangerines, as well as after the bottle of Nuits-St-Georges, the glasses of Maury, the sweet red wine from the southwest, and the four glasses of 1975 Armagnac, that she wanted to make love under the table. I said absolutely no because I want to come back to Taillevent and I am certain that they do not like it when patrons make love under the table, even after the other diners have gone and though the tablecloths are very long. Still she kept insisting, and finally I had to
say, “All right, we’re going.” It was four thirty anyway, a time when decent people have finished lunch.

We walked the few blocks in the cold rain to 14 rue de Tilsitt, where Scott and Zelda lived. There is no plaque like the one outside 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, where Hemingway and Hadley lived in those years. That did not seem right, since Scott moved there the same month he published a very good book called
The Great Gatsby
. But we did not care about that or the cold, being very happy from the meal and the quantities of wine and Armagnac.

We walked in the rain down the Avenue de Friedland, and I stopped into a
tabac
opposite the statue of Balzac to buy a cigar, and when I came out not two minutes later, a Frenchman had stopped his car and was asking Peaches if she would like to go home with him. In the restaurant she had flirted with three elegant French businessmen in the next booth when I went to the
toilette
. They had been looking at her the whole meal, and I could not blame them, since Peaches is wonderful to look at. I was also feeling sorry for the French because George W. Bush had just won reelection, so I smiled at them when I came back and took my seat, and they smiled at me as if to say, “You are very lucky, Monsieur.” In fact, the maître d’ had said that exact same thing, and not just because he was angling for a big
pourboire
.

But now when I came out of the
tabac
and saw the Frenchman scurrying off in his car and Peaches grinning at me, her blond hair shining like gold leaf against the wet and the dusk of the boulevard, and her green eyes bright and her cheeks dimpling in that way they do, I took her arm and resolved not to leave her out on any French boulevards untended.

This was how it was for us during our four-day stay in Paris. We were not very young and not very poor, but we were very happy. You can be happy in Paris if you are poor, but it is as Dickens says a far, far better thing to have euros in your pockets, even thick wads of euros, because then you can eat at Taillevent and Caviar Kaspia in the Place de la Madeleine and stay in the Oscar Wilde suite at L’Hôtel on the rue des Beaux-Arts and order champagne at all hours which to judge from the bill we did. Looking over the bill and feeling the hardness in my liver and the taste of cigars in my mouth, which I
cannot get rid of even after brushing my teeth dozens of times with the strong American toothpaste, I am surprised that I remember anything of our stay in Paris, but I remember being very happy.

You do not have to eat at expensive restaurants in Paris. For most lunches we had
jambon-beurre
sandwiches and drank house red wine and tap beer. We would sit outside under the mushroom-shaped propane heater and eat and drink, utterly content and thinking that the meal, which cost perhaps 20 euros, was the best that could be had in Paris. After, we walked to the Cluny Museum and looked at the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn that were woven about the time Columbus landed in the New World. In one tapestry the Lady is stroking the Unicorn’s horn in a way that must have caused giggling, or even a serious stir at court, for you had to be careful in the fifteenth century. They were very strict about things.

From there we walked up the steep hill toward the Panthéon, past a group of drunk men who were nice about our being American despite the recent victory by Bush, until we came to the Place de la Contrescarpe, at the foot of the rue Mouffetard. Hemingway and Hadley and their baby son, Mr. Bumby, lived a few yards from here. We celebrated finding it by having a drink at the little café, and I read Peaches one of the most beautiful paragraphs in the book:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

It made us want to have white wine and oysters, but that would have to wait, because now we had to find 27 rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas. I did not want to do this too precisely, because one of the pleasures of Paris is getting lost. We ended up on the street where Madame Curie worked.

“Remind me,” I said, “what she did that was so wonderful.”

“Radium,” Peaches said. “And I can’t believe you asked me that.”
Peaches is an M.D. and is getting her Ph.D. in public health, so she was unimpressed by my ignorance of the wonderful thing Madame Curie did, but by the time we came to the Jardin du Luxembourg, she had forgotten about it. There was a vendor of hot chestnuts by the gate, and I wanted to buy some until he blew his nose into his hand so we walked on. Hemingway wrote that he would come to the gardens to trap pigeons for dinner. Perhaps this is true, though I have read that he was not quite so poor as he said he was in those days, since Hadley, whom he would shortly dump for Pauline, had a comfortable inheritance. But it made a better story to write about how hungry and poor they were, so I tried not to dwell on this. I decided instead to dwell on the Palais du Luxembourg, where Thomas Paine was imprisoned during the Revolution and escaped beheading because the jailer didn’t see the X on the door indicating that he should have his head chopped off. I also dwelt on the fact that Isadora Duncan used to come here to dance early in the morning before she was strangled by her own scarf in the wheel of her car, which could not have been fun. Before we knew it, Peaches and I had crossed the tranquil park and were standing in front of 27 rue de Fleurus, residence of Gertrude Stein and her strange but
sympathique
companion, Alice B. Toklas, who had a mustache and would sit with the wives while Miss Stein lectured young writers on what was wrong with their work. I sensed from the Stein chapters that Hemingway thought she was grouchy and full of
merde
but that is only my opinion. I once tried to read Gertrude Stein and gave up after several hours, not having understood a single word other than
rose
, but I may be wrong. At the university I attended you could study her but I did not.

We walked up the rue d’Assas past a heartbreaking plaque noting that a Jewish family had been taken from here and sent to Buchenwald. There are a depressing number of these in Paris. In 1962, de Gaulle unveiled the moving Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation at the eastern tip of the Íle de la Cité near Notre-Dame, the monument to the 200,000 people, many of them Jews, and 30,000 of them Parisians, who were deported by the Nazis and the Vichy government. We went there the next day, and when you enter the cryptlike enclosure and see the 200,000 quartz pebbles embedded in the wall, it
is hard not to be overcome. As you exit, you see above you the words
Pardonne. N’oublie pas
. Pardon. Do not forget.

We were looking for 113 rue de Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where Hemingway lived over a sawmill, but all traces of it are long gone. Ezra Pound, who ended up in the same asylum where John Hinckley now lives, lived at number 70. He and Hemingway used to box for exercise, but Hemingway could never teach him how to throw a left hook.

That night we went to the Madeleine to hear Mozart’s
Requiem
. It is a humbling space, the more so because Saint-Saëns used to play the organ here and Chopin’s
Marche Funèbre
, the anthem of death familiar to any five-year-old, debuted here. Josephine Baker’s funeral mass was held here in 1975. The second-grandest funeral in Paris ever accorded an American was that of Myron T. Herrick, the American ambassador to France at the time of World War I, and from the photographs it resembled the funeral of a king. The French do turn out for a funeral. In 1885, Victor Hugo’s cortege passed in front of two million Parisians. But what is truly impressive about the Madeleine is that it is named for a prostitute. Peaches, who is a churchgoing Episcopalian, did not appreciate this insight of mine and hit me. But then the music started and she forgot to be cross with me. After the concert we walked across the street to Caviar Kaspia and sat in the room upstairs with the oil painting of the Russian boyar coursing through the snow in his horse sleigh and ate caviar on blinis and drank iced vodka and afterward felt very poor but very happy.

—
Forbes FYI
, September 2005

People going to Paris for the first time will ask you what they should see. I always tell them, “Père-Lachaise.” And always their eyebrows furrow when I explain that it is not a hot new restaurant but a cemetery. “Cemetery?” they say. “We’re not going all the way to Paris to see a
cemetery
.”

“Too bad,” I reply, “because then you’ll miss Oscar Wilde, Héloïse and Abélard, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Chopin, Balzac, Rossini, Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Richard Wright, Modigliani, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Molière, and Proust.” The ultimate
Who Was Who
.

I’ve been there a half dozen times. A few hours in this vast, leafy necropolis and you’ll emerge back into the hum and thrum of Paris feeling serene and refreshed. I first heard about Père-Lachaise a quarter century ago from Alistair Horne. He’s Sir Alistair now, in recognition of his achievements as a historian. He was knighted the same day as Mick Jagger, who showed up at Buckingham Palace twenty minutes late wearing jogging shoes. The palace chamberlain looked down his long nose and said, “Ah, Sir Michael, how
very
good of you to join us.” My favorite of Alistair’s nineteen books is
Seven Ages of Paris
, brilliant in every respect, including his description of Père-Lachaise, which, as he writes, “contains probably more of France’s past than any other 44 hectares of her soil.”

Père Lachaise was Father François d’Aix de la Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV. Being the priest who heard the Sun King’s confessions was, to judge from the acreage and the view from here, a very good gig to have.
Cheated on the queen, again, eh? Well, no one’s perfect. How about one Hail Mary and half an Our Father?
After the Revolution, the land was sold to the city. A city in which 1,343 people got their heads chopped off in two years was bound to run out of burial space sooner rather than later.

In 1817 city administrators had a brainstorm about how to
attract customers: reunite the remains of the doomed twelfth-century lovers Héloïse and Abélard and showcase them under a grand gothic marble canopy. Before long, Père-Lachaise was the chic place to be shoved six feet—rather, two meters—under. The remains beneath the ornate marble canopy are in all likelihood
not
those of the doomed twelfth-century lovers, but now there are so many famous people here that it no longer matters.

Mark Twain visited in the 1860s and reported that there were people “snuffling” over Héloïse and Abélard’s tomb. Today the snuffling takes place up the hill, at Jim Morrison’s grave. The first time I visited, there were a dozen young snufflers sitting around Jim’s grave, channeling their grief with fragrant hand-rolled cigarettes, multiple body piercings, and graffiti. These vigils became such a nuisance that the authorities put up a chain-link fence and posted a notice warning that grave defacement is frowned on almost as much as cooperating with U.S. foreign policy. But the liminal—from the Latin
limen
, threshold—urge to leave mementos on tombs runs deep. Tombs, particularly mausoleums, are vestibules to the underworld. On a previous visit, I found Oscar Wilde’s tomb covered with hundreds of lipstick kisses.

One of the pleasures of prowling about Père-Lachaise is stumbling upon the unexpected. You never know who you’re going to stumble on. While looking for the grave of Nadar, the nineteenth-century photographer who took history’s first aerial photographs, from hot air balloons over Paris, I came upon the inscription:

PIERRE DE CHABOULON

SECRÉTAIRE DE L’EMPEREUR

“IL ETAIT

PLEIN DE FEU

ET DE MÉRITE”

—NAPOLEON À ST-HÉLÈNE

A few feet away, my companion Peaches and I found the tomb of Dupuytren, the surgeon who performed the first successful cataract operation. He’s just up the avenue from Beaumarchais, author of
The Marriage of Figaro
and financier of the American Revolution. A distance from him we found Edith Piaf’s simple black granite tomb piled high—as it always is—with flowers. She died in 1963. If they’re still laying flowers on your grave forty years later,
that’s
immortality.

As you approach the eastern wall of Père-Lachaise, a kind of silence descends that’s even more still than the silence elsewhere here. This section evokes the greatest grief. It was here in the final days of May 1871, against the bullet-pocked wall, that 147 members of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot. It’s become a rallying point for France’s left wing.

It is also here that Père-Lachaise’s most wrenching memorials are to be found: those to the dead of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the other hecatombs of the Third Reich. Soil from those places was brought here and mixed with the earth beneath the sculptures.

It was November. We walked down the avenue lined by sculptures of emaciated, tortured humans. The late afternoon sun, slanting through the yellow acacia leaves, failed to warm. Here the chill goes through you. We did not speak. I looked and saw that Peaches’s cheeks were streaked with tears.