When you take a taxi in Paris you expect to be taken for a ride. The good news is that even a ride in Paris is enchanting. In the parks along the avenues the handsome, adult tress have turned to rust before the fall.
In the stylized square garden of Louis XIII at Marais the trees are still a light bright green but there is a feel of a last flutter in the air. The gardener out here is either a mathematician or a barber. The trees have been haircut into identical oblongs. In another place, another city this affectation might have seemed gauche. Paris carries it off with panache.
Louis XIII clearly took a singular decision and the citizens of this district, Marais, left their inheritance alone — it would have been gauche to interfere. The centuries-old bakeries of this arrondisement have become shoe shops now but are still called bakeries. Everything changes and nothing changes.
The Eiffel Tower wears electricity over its steel, and a lighthouse beam rotates at the top, searching for nothing more significant than attention. You can still crunch the leaves on the banks of the Seine, but the famous lovers are not around any longer to steal a moment to cherish. That stands to reason.
There is nothing to steal these days, for no one has anything to hide in this Age of Just Do It. Lovers do not need the silence of the Seine; they are all in their drawing rooms, searching for inspiration from television during a pause.
You and I shrug. A Parisian does not shrug. A Parisian does a tap dance with his shoulders. There is nothing indifferent or diffident about a shrug in Paris. It is full of pathos, and fit for opera. The reason may be trivial, or not. The reaction is never less than momentous. When a lady in a car a good foot lower than our taxi loses the balance of her nerves in the middle of a well-structured traffic jam on the Rue Bonaparte, and begins to scream, our driver responds with a Parisian shrug, some silence and then well-meaning advice on how she should spend her time home with her children before he slips through a glimmer in between the cars. I can report that the authorities are trying to do something about these famous traffic jams. The Rue Rivoli for instance now has a separate lane for taxis and buses, although every owner of a car has not been informed of this change. That jam has yet to become butter. The Parisian traffic settles in the mind before it congeals on the street. The Frenchman will never surrender his fundamental rights, having won them at such substantial cost 200 years ago. The primary right of the motorist is to press the accelerator with as much force as he presses the brake, in quick succession. He also has the right to gesticulate his attitude toward life with both hands, while driving.
Two centuries after the first, a second French Revolution is taking place. The French are speaking English. Arguably this achievement is on par with beheading the Bourbons, dealing with Danton, surviving the hope and despair of Napoleon and coming to terms with Waterloo.
In 1815 the French accepted the victory of the English on the battlefield; they are learning to accept the victory of English in the classroom, the cafe and even the coiffure. Waiters now actually bring food when you ask for beef instead of boeuf, throwing in an indulgent smile for free. This is a stunning philosophical and psychological somersault. It would however be incorrect to say that all the old fire has died out. There are still 20th century cabdrivers who, when it is midnight and wet, curl their upper lip at the sound of English and insist, with all the familiar ardor and zeal, that they are going in exactly the opposite direction to which you desire to travel. There is a glint in their eye as they leave you stranded and miserable on the Champs D’Elysee, the warmth of an excellent meal and fine company oozing out of your pores with each icicle of rain. But these are yesterday’s warriors, content with minor triumphs in meaningless skirmishes. The war is lost. English is taught in every school.
The French are, though, trying to salvage a last laugh from this horrendous defeat. An advertisement inside a train on the fast Metro between St. Germain and Gare du Nord shows a young man leaping into the air because he has successfully mastered “Wall Street English”. I had heard of cockney English, pidgin English, Indian English, Oxbridge English and BBC English. What was Wall Street English? It was a triumph of positioning. The French have bypassed the channel and moved directly across the Atlantic to Wall Street American. English has been shown its place, as it were.
France’s argument with America is political and cultural, not linguistic. There is muted glee in the French government over having slipped a bit of smooth oil under the feet of George Bush as the American president strides purposefully toward war with Iraq. The Americans lost their way when they got stuck in a confrontation of words, specifically the United Nations resolution meant to authorize President Bush’s demolition of Saddam Hussein.
France, with the open help of Russia, has bought some very expensive time at a very cheap price for Saddam. Of course Iraq will pay for this through some fancy deals in oil and weapons with Paris, but that can only be to the greater glory of the tricolor republic. There is also some superior sniffing going on at the manner in which the British have remained faithful to their American masters.
The only serious sign of British independence from America on Iraq is visible in some of the British media, which still knows how to laugh at itself better than the French. A plaintive cartoon in Private Eye has Bush saying: “The only way to find out if Saddam has got those weapons is to attack him and see if he uses them.”
One of the real dangers of this city is that even the mundane can tempt you toward philosophy. That is the power of beauty. Of all the sights of Paris nothing is grander that the Notre Dame, particularly now that the darkness of centuries has been scrubbed from its walls. The soul can search for sublimity here.
Luckily the police headquarters reminds me of The Pink Panther. I half expect Peter Sellers to come bumbling out, closely pursued by a tumbling Herbert Lom, both tripping into the Seine. Does my fancy exaggerate when I notice a veritable Inspector Closeau on the street? The police officer does have an expression that says that there is no point in trusting him too much. Tales of petty crime abound. I suppose they would in any city with so many tourists. Indians of course have the best stories. One is spreading word that all he did was look up at the flight timings at Charles de Gaulle airport to find that his suitcases had vanished from under his nose.
He must have taken his time to read that screen. Or maybe he was confused to find French written in the English script. When he complained to the police they apparently told him that he was the 24th person to make a similar complaint within the hour. I just hope the other 23 were not Indians from the same flight.
The true beauty of Paris is not in the tourist brochures or the sales pitch of cathedrals, however wondrous they may be. It lies in the love with which an anonymous architect has shaped the unknown cornice. Every corner of this city is a small dream; every district a collective inspiration preserved with passion.
In the Second World War the French surrendered to the Germans rather than let Paris be destroyed by the Luftwaffe and artillery of Adolf Hitler. Six decades later the French have recovered the pride they lost in 1940. But if they had lost Paris as well in 1940 there would have been nothing to recover from the rubble. It was a good bargain.
27 October 2002
