Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [84]
I was relieved by this assurance of little change in the weekend-maddened, vacation-crazed spirit of the French commerçant. No matter how greedy he might seem to mere mortals, plucking money from the air and sewing it into his mattress, the flight to seaside or country cottage remains sacred.
Throwing duffel on bed, not even glancing at the exchange rate, I seized a notebook in jet-lagged claws and made a quick tour of the few streets and circumnavigating quays of the island, trying to find what had changed, what had remained the same, and what might persuade my body that it was time to sleep. The fact that I had cleverly scheduled my visit to come near the July 14 celebration, when France dances and drinks and makes new friends in the street till dawn—all because their ancestors tore down the Bastille—did not induce thoughts of prudent shut-eye.
(In my student days, when an American friend studying in Belgium bicycled into Paris for the first time, he happened to arrive on Bastille Day and found colorful lights strung from everywhere, accordions, embraces, a fierce festival glitter in every eye. He fell upon my little room crying, “Oh, I always knew Paris would be like this!”)
A street sweeper with the timid face of a peasant come to the metropolis was scrubbing down the stones in front of the Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. No change here.
Libella, the Polish bookstore on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, reminded me that Paris has always been everyone’s other home. The wall above Libella bears a stone plaque telling us that in 1799 the engineer Philippe Lebon discovered, in this building, the principle of lighting and heating with gas—the word “principle” and past experience suggest that the French did not actually get around to doing it for a while.
The island is crowded with such notices—tributes to poets, advisers to kings, soldier heroes, men of God, and even a film critic immortalized on a plaque affixed to the place where he analyzed Jerry Lewis as auteur.
There is also a plaque on the wall of the Fernand Halphen Foundation in the rue des Deux-Ponts:
To the Memory
Of the 112 Inhabitants
Of This Building
Including 40 Children
Deported and Killed
In the Concentration Camps in 1942.
No island is entire of itself, exempt from history. Across the street, in the ice cream shops, bistros, the Bateau Bar—fifty brands of beer from all nations—gratification proceeds on its necessary course.
It was time to sit at a café table for the island equivalent of my typical San Francisco after-racquetball vitamin and health hi-pro yogurt shake; in this case, a coffee with “yak”—cognac.
Two helmeted Vespa people came skidding to a stop in front of me. Like space warriors, they were encased in huge plastic headgear. Evidently they knew each other, because they fell to kissing, their helmets thudding together. I peeked at their faces when they came apart. They were both about sixty years old and hadn’t seen each other in hours.
A fisherman nearby, when I asked what he caught with all his equipment, assured me that trout hover near the fresh underground springs at the head of the island.
“And what else?”
“A moment of meditation. A view of Notre-Dame. There are gargoyles, sir. At this season, there are roses.”
During the morning, a fisherman was catching roses; that night in front of the footbridge leading to Aux Alsaciennes, the Communist Party sponsored a rock celebration of Bastille Day. A girl in a “Wichita University Long Island” T-shirt danced to a French knockoff of “Lady Jane” and other Rolling Stones hits. Instead of a male partner, she held a contribution box for Humanité, the party newspaper.
The little park at the end of the island where the Pont de Sully links the Left and Right Banks of Paris—leading to the workers’ quarter of Bastille in one direction, the Quartier Latin in the other—has a grand stone monument to