Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [181]
Has it been the life I had in mind when I was young? No. It would be pointless, even stupid, to regret that it has turned out this way, but somewhere inside me there is a small ghost who whispers: ‘One should not be at ease in a world such as ours.’ As the man said when I read him in my youth: ‘The point is to change it.’
19
Marseillaise
I have gone to France almost every year since 1933, except during the Second World War. The country has been part of my life for almost seventy years, indeed for longer, because my mother had begun to teach her children French at home from the elder Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires, an enormous stiff-bound volume which we never finished. She and her sisters had been sent as teenagers to perfect their French at a pensionnat in Belgium. I belong to the last European generation for which French was still the universal second language. Even after a long travelling life, I have probably gone to Paris more often than to any other foreign city: and for all of us Paris was and remained the core of our experience of France.
I had first encountered it physically during a brief stopover on the way from Berlin to England in the spring of 1933. I travelled with my uncle, who presumably still had some final arrangements to make in Berlin, and must have had some business in Paris, for that city was certainly a detour from the direct route to London. I assume it must have been film business, for his later activities in Paris were based on an extensive network in the French movie scene, no doubt derived from his days at Universal, reinforced by his acquaintance with the emigrant film technicians he had known in Berlin.
As boys from families such as mine expected to go to Paris sooner or later, I was excited, but not surprised. Indeed, excited not only by Paris but also by the prospect of passing Nazi frontier controls in the company of a young and well-dressed middle-class communist called, I think, Hirsch, also going to France for undisclosed reasons, with whom I struck up an acquaintance in the train corridor and who taught me my first phrase of colloquial French (‘merde alors’). My uncle had booked us into the Hotel Montpensier in the rue de Richelieu, between the Comédie Française and the Bibliothèque Nationale, of whose existence I was then unaware; a building which introduced me to the basic pattern of French lifts in the 1930s, apparently unchanged since the early days of the Third Republic. (On his later business trips to Paris my uncle stayed in somewhat less basic establishments – during his most sanguine era, the Georges Cinq.) That evening, and perhaps the next, he took me for a stroll along the Grands Boulevards, the long stretch of cafe-lined avenues from the République in the east to the Madeleine in the west, which in those days were still the main promenade of Paris, as they had been from the days of Haussmann, pointing out the whores, who were then called grues (cranes) and the red-light district around the boulevard Sébastopol, one of whose brothels is now being preserved as a historic monument from the ravages of property development. However, I did not enter any of them until some years later, when, in the course of a night on the town with a Hungarian communist, I lost my virginity in an establishment – I can no longer