Chapter 7
The Digestive Cycle
I have gone out with a farmer and a friend in the countryside east of Paris. That is good cycling country; the hills, valleys, and woods of Brie produce landscapes as great as its cheese. There are long steady climbs, then drops of a mile or two when the wind whips by your ears and you hang on to the handlebars for dear life and limb, scarcely daring to twist a wrist to glance at the second hand of your watch to catch the time when you flash by a kilometer post---100 seconds, 90 seconds, 40 kilometers an hour, about 25 m.p.h.---that's flying for old men. I can keep up with them on these outings until the next-to-the-last village on the run, where we stop for a drink, and apéritif. Good sturdy Frenchmen that they are, they can down a Pernod without a problem, I sip only a glass of ladylike port wine, yet my legs turn to butter and my ankles to rubber while they leave me far behind.
On shorter runs without competition, I have less trouble. Every so often when I ride down to Poilane's on Rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris to buy a loaf of country bread, I come out of the bakery to find my bicycle gone. The first time this happened, it was a heart-stopping experience, but it was just Pierre Poilane's idea of a joke. He bakes the best country bread in France in a wood-first oven in a Renaissance cellar in the middle of Paris. He ships it by air to New York, he mails it to customers on vacation, he has ten little trucks delivering it all around Paris and the adjoining suburbs. But only on Rue du Cherche-Midi do you stand a chance of running into Poilane himself and getting an invitation to a drink over on Carrefour de la Croix-Rouge at Au Vieux Saumur. The ritual is always the same, never a word is exchanged; as soon as Poilane makes his entrance, the owner puts a bottle of Sancerre on the table before him. Then friends sit down and the bottle goes round. I have gone through the same ceremony with Poilane at his country place about a dozen miles away in the Chevreuse Valley, where he has an acre of jungle, a shack that should have fallen down twenty years ago, and a cellar that would put a Rockefeller to envy. Whether from Au Vieux Saumur or the Chevreuse Valley, I always get home somehow. The bike knows the way, I just follow the handlebars.
Whether or not cycling goes with drinking is debatable. Food is another matter, here is the happiest of relationships. I eat to ride, I ride to eat. At the best of moments, I can achieve a perfect balance, consuming just the right amount of calories as I fill up at bakeries, restaurants, or ice-cream parlors. On the road, I can get about twelve miles to a quart of milk and a piece of baker's apple tart. Always buy it from a good baker who makes it in the oven he uses for the bread. Pastry cooks can make apple tarts, but theirs are less rustic, not as substantial. I get along well with the French bakers, I eat their apple tarts in winter and their ice cream in summer. I know the little unpretentious ice-cream growers of Paris, local ice creams that have a bouquet and a body of their own. The red-headed Breton girl laughs and reaches for her scoop when I turn up at Duplessis's near the Eiffel Tower where the vanilla and the pineapple are aerial food for elves the day they are fresh from the freezer. In winter, however, the bakers shut down their ice-cream plants in Paris. It would be a hard cruel winter if it were not for Berthillon's on Ile Saint-Louis, right where Sully bridge crosses the Seine.
I have often drifted downhill from Montparnasse to Berthillon's after a stint of work for a double sherbet cone---tangerine and grapefruit, the winter flavors. You always know the seasons at Berthillon's by the flavors, a calendar is superfluous. In winter: tangerine, grapefruit, marrons glacés; in summer, melon and fraises de bois. These are only some of the seasonal flavors at Berthillon's, there are the regulars as well. The summer flavors are around not much longer than mayflies, for Berthillon's closes in July and August. When the weather gets hot (as it does for two weeks or so), when everything slows to a crawl in Paris, when the Seine is prostrate with the heat, hardly stirring at all, lying exhausted in its bed, then the owners of Berthillon's must sit behind the closed doors of their parlor, their ice-cream parlor, eating blueberry sherbet and caramel ice cream all by themselves.
None of this can be seen from the street. When the owners of Berthillon's close for their well-deserved two months' vacation, they shutter the place up. In the doorway, they hang the wooden plaques bearing the names of their flavors throughout the year. It is a ladder that climbs right up the glass door. Each flavor is a medal, an extra palm on the family's Croix de Guerre. The name-plates of the flavors in the doorway remind me of the bars that soldiers used to add to their badges for shooting---marksman, sharpshooter, expert rifleman. I remember the names only from hearsay, I couldn't hit the wall across the room with a MIRV. During target practice in the Army, my neighbor to the right, my neighbor to the left, my neighbors on the firing line always received a few extra shots on their scoresheets.
When I come down to Berthillon's for a double sherbet in winter, I buy the cone inside. In summer, you must wait outside on line; on a cold winter evening there is no one in the shop except the old lady who looks like everyone's grandmother---or the way everyone would like his grandmother to look; her daughter who is the business soul of the place; and Fernand, the waiter, whom I first knew when he was feverishly pumping beer at an Alsatian bistro a block away on Rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile. He stopped pumping beer just about the time I stopped drinking it, and we both met again at Berthillon's. He doesn't know my name, he calls me "Chicago" to remind me of my American origins. One sees the ice-cream maker but seldom, he is a dark stocky man and I think he must go to bed early because he gets up every morning to go to the markets and buy fresh fruit for his flavors. When I come around in the evening, he probably is taking his nap. Or else the family does not let him be seen in public for fear that he will be kidnapped and held on some remote island, not Ile Saint-Louis, until his gives up his secrets.
"Okay, now we know you make the poire so that it tastes more like fresh pears than fresh pears. But how do you get the little pieces of banana scattered so evenly in the banane? Come on, sing!" (Like Fernand's, their idea of America and American slang is somewhat dated.)
"Nevair!!!"
And one of the thugs pries his mouth open while the other stuffs in a scoop of Wall's Ice Cream flown over especially from England for this purpose.
On a cold winter night, I say hello to the family with a particularly kind word for the lady who looks like everyone's grandmother. I want to stay on good terms with her because she also runs a hotel on the same premises. My dream, nay, my wildest flight of gastronomic fancy is to take a room there American plan, coming downstairs only for sherbets.
Between-meal snacks are not enough to stoke the cyclist. Between snacks he must watch what he eats, he must make sure that he eats enough so that he will not fall famished somewhere around 110th Street or Garches, his tank empty of calories. I am a fortunate cyclist, my trainer is a lady who used to work for the Michelin family. The first day that Madame Lea Chagot arrived in the house, she saw a Michelin Guide lying on the table and exclaimed, "Oh, that's Monsieur André's book!" She put me in my place that day and I have stayed there ever since, waiting at the table for the wonders that come out of the kitchen.
When we have guests, Madame Lea and I discuss the menu several days in advance. Another dream of mine is to invent the most important guest of all so that she will surpass the unsurpassable; then I will turn up alone and eat it all myself. I would not dare to do this to her, she takes her work as seriously as I take mine. Just as an author likes to be published, she prefers to perform for an audience. I realize this, yet it is with great reluctance that I share her with others for, as one guest observed, her cooking just for me is like having the New York Philharmonic for a hall of one.
And so she has devised the biking man's diet, guaranteed to keep anyone in trim. No weighing of portions, no pangs of starvation, no secret yearnings, no need to lock the icebox. It varies infinitely, this diet. I once had a guest stay at the place for five weeks and, as a matter of pride, Madame Lea never repeated herself. There is such a wide range of possibilities, it is so pleasant to talk about them, the words alone bring savor to the tongue. Instead of putting gas into a car, this is what I put into myself. Quiche lorraine or fresh shrimp for a start? Shoulder of mutton or trout meunière for an entrée? Bavaroise au chocolat et à la crème vanille or tarte Tatin aux pommes for dessert? I must train to appreciate Madame Lea's art. Between the last clack of my typewriter in the morning and the first course of lunch, I must do my fifteen or twenty miles, spending my strength on the slopes of the Meudon woods or on the banks of the Marne against an east wind, returning sweated, exhausted, wind-torn, ready for resuscitation before a salade niçoise, rabbit à la moutarde, a light dish of fruit to keep me in shape to go another round of eggs mimosa, veal marengo, and that greatest dessert of all, the one that Madame Lea reserves for our most honored guests, mouse au chocolat covered with a winter overcoat of whipped cream, the dessert known to French cooks as a nègre en chemise.
Then after the nègre en chemise or the salade d'oranges comes the best course of all. Madame Lea emerges from her kitchen and sits down for coffee, bringing her own cup, adding a stiff dash of water so that she will not toss in her bed at night while the recipes race through her head. If the guest meets with her full approval, she will offer a pousse-café, either a blueberry liqueur she brought back for me as a gift from a holiday she spent in the Jura or else a swig of the marc that the winegrowers make in her native village of Cléry in the smiling Loire valley where I once had the privilege of harvesting grapes with her on her cousin's farm.
It was a good moment in the October sun, we were on our knees next to the heavy vines, Madame Lea on one side, I on the other, our pruning scissors snipped the grape bunches loose. We dumped them into the basket strapped to the back of the cousin's son in for the day, a day off from his city job in a bank. When the basket was full, he marched up a ladder and tipped the grapes into a cart with a big white horse in the shafts. That is how Madame Lea's cousin gets his wine. He always takes a small cask with him when he comes to Paris, he has never drunk store wine in his life.
Madame Lea grew up in Cléry, she roamed the countryside on her bicycle in the days before the First World War. The bicycle took her to school, to the woods of Sologne, to the villages on the other side of the Loire where the Beauce of the golden wheatfields and the gold-loving farmers begins. The bike took her to Amboise many miles away. If she was too tired to pedal back she could always put it aboard the little train that chuffed along the left bank of the Loire until it came to a steep hill, where the passengers had to get out and push it over the top. The bicycle opened Madame Lea's eyes and mind; that was how she first traveled until the day she took a bigger trip, the day she crossed the Loire and took a main-line train to Paris, one of those French steam trains with the locomotives that talked French, je t'amène, je t'amène, I'm taking you away, I'm taking you away.
Madame Lea still has her traveling bent. When she leaves me, I fall back on Batifol's, a small restaurant on Rue de Charenton that I found by bicycle while working my way out to the Marne valley. At Batifol's not so long ago, one could still eat like a king for eleven francs and, for thirteen francs, like an emperor, a king of kings, a playboy of the Western world. At Batifol's I need not stray from my strict cyclist's diet (had any Metrecal lately?), when Madame Lea goes back to her past in Cléry.
The couple who run the service station around the corner confide their children to Batifol. The kiddies take on mousse au chocolat while maman and papa are checking oil, while I linger over my pêche melba, just enjoying it, not wondering how the young chef ever got such a feathery quality into his whipped cream. A friend from New York once expressed such wonderment. I said the chef must have used an egg beater. My friend sneered at my jejune explanation; he knew better, such whippedness of cream could be achieved even on Rue de Charenton only with a wire whisk the way it is done at Huyler's right before the eyes of the customer who has stopped in for a little refreshment after a weight-watching dinner shorn of bread, potatoes, and dessert. So we went back to the kitchen to settle the argument. The chef rendered his judgment, revealed his secret: carbon dioxide cartridges, imported from Nutley, New Jersey.
I recalled that incident as I digested the chef's turkey and crème de marrons one Christmas Day in Paris, the sun coming in through the steamed windows, picking out the red-and-white checks of the tablecloths, the alternating gray-and-black points of the tiles. Batifol's does not cater to winter sportsmen, its regulars are around at Christmastime. They take their napkins from the numbered pigeonholes in the rack and sit down for the eleven-franc menu beneath the big ultrarealist painting on the back wall; white water in a racing brook, thick grass along the banks where goats graze, and a distant mountain smiling down. This is the lost river valley in Auvergne, where the owner will retire some day, taking his painting with him so that, at night, he can still look at the view he sees from his window by day, so that he can think up new ways to serve them, a happy active retirement in which no one will suffer boredom, least of all the trout.
Chapter 8
The Road Leveler
At Easter and Christmas in Paris, the leisurites (as distinguished from the laborites) go away for a week or two with their cars. The life of the city continues without death at every doorstep. Midtown Manhattan does as much work as any place in the world. Ride up the Empire State Building on a clear afternoon, then look back down on the street. There are no cars, just buses, taxis, and trucks going about the city's business. The private cars are all filed away for future reference, pigeonholed in their parking lots until the evening rush. The commuter who drives to Manhattan thinks the city is eternally throttled by cars. Not at all, it breathes almost easily as long as he stays in his office, it is he who throttles it.
Our children grow up in fear. They learn that relative safety lies in getting off the street and into a car. Then the danger becomes more manageable, a knight in armor has more chance than a barefoot peasant against another knight. At least it looks that way, until fear comes from another quarter. Our knight is afraid to move without his tin armor, he has no strength without his purchased muscles. Outside his car, power-man is like a turtle without a shell. Where he cannot take his car, he is afraid.
He becomes afraid in the city. He fears the wide lifeless avenues where he has destroyed all life. He locks up his car when he drives through the city. He locks himself up; his car is a social compartment, a cell isolated from other cells. This is the disease of Paris that is spreading to American middle-class suburbs. It is a shame, too, we almost made it in America, we came closer than anyone else did. Parisianization is setting in here and there, the automobile that brought us together when we were rural is now rending us as we become urban.
Fear in cities is not just a police problem. Both the overcrowded American city and the undercrowded suburb are artificial communities, their cohesiveness destroyed to a large extent by the automobile. Without such cohesiveness, they do not have the will to police themselves. Their very geography makes it all but impossible for the professional to do a proper job. We can't expect the cops to make Times Square safe twenty-four hours a day for fun-loving pornophiliacs unless they are to put on the same show that the police stage on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin near the old Halles in Paris. All the girls are whores there, but every other pimp is a cop in plain clothes.
My American acquaintances always loved to drive down Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, watching the street sights from my car as if they were staring through a rigged mirror in a circus. I now take my younger acquaintances through the same quarter by bicycle. The street is full of furtive men, but they are not interested in bicycles. They window-shop past bars and the doorways and the corners where the girls stand at parade rest. In the age of the mini and the bra-burner, it is hard to see how a girl in a door can get the idea across that she is more available than the girl next door, but she manages somehow on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin.
The cyclist goes unnoticed here. This is still a workingman's quarter and the bicycle does not clash with it. In Paris not so long ago the workingman used to get around by bicycle. Now, as he looks at us, it reminds him of his younger days; he smiles, perhaps condescendingly, but still he smiles. And then, the bicycle itself is a form of manual labor. The cyclist turns out his miles by hand and foot. He knows sweat and wet; ditchdiggers ducking under canvas feel sorry for him as he sloshes by in a rainstorm, the social barriers dome down.
A cyclist with a load of Le Mondes on his handlebars asks me how much I paid for my black bike, the one that a bike racer's son made up for me for city riding and occasional country sprinting, not a Ferrari but still an Alfa. I tell him; he thinks I got a good buy. A Portuguese laborer catches me on the squirrel cage at Longchamp; I speed up, we go round together, he asks me where I am riding next Sunday. We have a lot in common, we are both cyclists, we are both foreigners. I sneak up on a young man in the Bois de Vincennes. I get into his slipstream, then I race by him in the hope that he won't be able to get into mine, but he does. He's a salesman, it's not an easy life, he has heard that things are better in America. I give him the embassy's phone number.
On the banks of the Yonne, seventy miles from Paris, I stop to look at the river from a paved section of the towpath. A cyclist, an older man with young blue eyes, is looking at it, too. We talk about the river and our bikes. He lives three miles away along my route. We ride together, he invites me in for a glass of white wine; it comes from a friend, a retired colonel, who grows it himself. We make a date to ride again. He is a coal miner's son from the south of France; he came up to Paris as a mason's helper, a hod carrier. He went into plumbing and came out on top or, at least, high enough to be comfortable. A few apartment houses here and there, a country house, a modest car but a beautiful bicycle, a wide range of reading, the self-educated man who does not stop his education when he stops going to school. It was he who taught me the first law of cycling: on a bicycle, you never have the wind with you---either it is against you or you're having a good day.
He is one of my best friends in France. When he married off his daughter, I turned up with the photographer, who covered the wedding, starting when the mother dressed the bride. We spent the interlude between the ceremony and the wedding supper at a place on the road to Melun that is a sort of do-it-yourself amusement park. One can have a drink and rent trick bikes, tricycles, pedal-propelled rickshaws, bikes with pentagonal wheels, a tandem with one rider facing forward at the handlebars and the other looking backward and pedaling like hell. No brakes, just screams.
I get along well with French independent craftsmen. Many are cyclists; perhaps it is because they find identity in their work and see no reason to seek it in antiroll bars. Léon was one of the first I knew, he was an electrician in my neighborhood and he lived half a block away. He had been gassed during the First World War but he had enough strength left to cycle about his trade. Though he bought a big Renault for his son-in-law, he stayed on two wheels himself. One day, I saw him setting off with his helper (I prefer the French word, compagnon, it's got a guild ring to it), the two of them on their old bikes. He was going to Saint-Denis, a suburb to the north. I didn't believe he'd ever get there. It used to take me nearly an hour to make Saint-Denis by car before the Autoroute du Nord was opened. (Now it only takes ten minutes, but there's hardly anything left of Saint-Denis because the autoroute goes spang through the heart of it, eight lanes wide.) I never rode with Léon on those business trips of his. I was not a cyclist in those days, I was running a French Ford V-8. By the time I was on a bike, Léon was off his. The mustard gas and the Gauloises were getting the best of him. He had to have an operation that cost him a lung, but he went on five years or so, using a light motorcycle, working here and there. He had all the money he needed, his work was just his way of living. He had come out of the war with a crushed nose and the skin under his arm crumpled like rumpled onionskin paper, a gas burn that let him in for a lifetime of skin grafts. He died prematurely at seventy-three. Léon was one tough Frenchman. Léon did not look scared when he pedaled through Paris, he had seen worse in the trenches.
Socially, one can go anywhere by bicycle. I once made and lost the acquaintance of a mailman in Copenhagen that way. I caught him while he was delivering the mail and I was riding to some forgettable international conference. He had an unbelievable clunker. Danish bikes are heavy; the highest point in the country is only about a hundred feet above sea level so there's no need for lightweight hill-climbers. When I passed the mailman, I thought nothing of it. Then I heard some blasphemies in Eskimo or Lapp or whatever the local dialect might have been, and he was up to me. The two of us belted away at the pedals, his mailbag flying behind him, my briefcase trying to keep up with me. We had a good time at it, then he got ahead of me. We both laughed and I saw no more of him.
He was a young mailman, that was why he outsprinted me. Biking is like running, the longer the distance, the better the chances of age over beauty. In a Paris bike shop one day, a young American and I got talking and I offered to take him for a ride in the Chevreuse valley. I lent him a bike, purposely a heavy one, but he left me flat on the first hill. "Come on, old man," he told me gently, once he got to the top. Two hours later, I was encouraging him just as gently at every traffic light in Paris where I rested on the handlebars while he crawled up to me. He did some social traveling that day. Under questioning, he admitted he was the son of a former borough president in New York City.
Take automobiles off the street and the pedestrian, too, becomes a friend to his fellowman. This is not always apparent in European shopping streets and nightlife quarters closed to traffic so that salesmen and cabaret touts can pick off their game without competition from the cars. I prefer carless places where nobody does any business, places like the new Paris bridge that connects Ile Saint-Louis and Ile de la Cité. It was built wide enough for motor traffic but closed off following protests by the Saint-Louis islanders, an underprivileged lot whose number once included the late Helena Rubinstein. The only wheeled traffic on the bridge is provided by children roller-skating. Whenever I go by, they latch onto my back wheel the way I used to hitch the Eighth Avenue buses. First one kid, then another, then five or six as I slave over the hump of the bridge in the lowest of my ten speeds. My kind of city traffic does not frighten kids, they never miss me when I cross the bridge.
It takes an unusual event to realize what we miss in a motor city. A pedestrian mall is not enough, even if we need only bar the car to recognize air once again. Life must be able to jump the bounds of a pedestrian ghetto, it must strike the dominant note as it does when entire towns are given a reprieve from the gas barrage and the tank charges that are their daily lot. At Tréguier in Brittany, a pardon is celebrated every nineteenth of May to honor Saint Yves, patron saint of lawyers, sailors, and Bretons. He can truly work miracles; he clears cars from the streets of Tréguier and the cathedral square the way Saint Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland. Then the square is ablaze with the stands of a market fair; pinwheels catch the sun, bagpipe music comes from a stall selling records. Bells boom out over all this when the procession emerges from the cathedral, women in their sabots, farmers in their Sunday clothes, the pallor of their foreheads marking how they wear their berets in the fields; Saint Yves in wood, borne on two poles, a statue with eyes alive; a flock of choir boys as white and rowdy as geese; then the relics of Saint Yves, his skull in its glass reliquary carried reverentially on the shoulders of important-looking attorneys, one of them in rimless glasses, his round red face as fat as his fees, mouth serious, a bored wink behind the glasses when he sees a friend in the crowd, mouth still serious under the grinning teeth and unwinking eyes of the skull of Saint Yves.
The Bretons carry their saint through the hedgerows to a village a mile and a half away and then back to his resting place in the cathedral. Tréguier is alive, medieval Tréguier is back. You can sit in the cathedral square and lunch on crêpes wrapping ham, cheese, eggs, chocolate, the whole show at your feet. An American couple sits at an adjoining table, they are from Los Angeles. Just how bad is that smog?
"Do you see the cathedral? If this were L.A. on a bad day, you wouldn't."
Chapter 9
When Paris was a Pedestrian Mall...
The recent political history of France has seen an escalation of fear in the streets, a struggle between cars and pedestrians. Gaullians (a term I use so as not to libel the Gaullists I knew in 1944) take naturally to automobiles. During the Great People's Revolution that brought them to power in May 1958 (May was a sacred month on the Gaullian calendar until May 1968), the streets of Paris were filled after dark with processions of cars fearlessly rapping out on their horns: "DE-GAULLE-AU-POU-VOIR"; dot dash dot dot dot, We Want de Gaulle, cars racing through the night like Paul Revere, shouting their message to the dismounted. They once made the mistake of demonstrating in broad daylight on the Champs-Elysées, rubber-tired jackasses braying slogans in a traffic tie-up. There they were caught, helpless as flies in honey, stuck like elephants in quicksand, by the opposition wielding crowbars against windshields.
They did not make the same mistake twice in 1958. From then on, the Gaullians used their cavalry only when it was surrounded by great masses of infantry, a human wall of flesh and blood and fists protecting la patrie and les windshields. It was in this order of battle that I saw the Gaullians on one of their nights of triumph. A great mob had surged over Place de la Concorde, up to Concorde bridge leading to the bourbon palace, home of the corrupt decadent pusillanimous wavering ineffective anarchic French Parliament, the worst form of government that France had ever known with the exception of all the others. Walking through the mob, I came across a patriotic tableau, the spirit of La Marseillaise, the élan that sank the British at Trafalgar, the brilliance that put Wellington to rout at Waterloo. There, high above the seething crowd like the marines hoisting the star-spangled banner on Iwo Jima, was a pearl-gray Cadillac convertible, four blondes on it cushions. One was holding up a sign on a stick, a simple white sign with the black letters: "WORKERS COMMITTEE FOR DE GAULLE."
That was the apogee of the Gaullians. I saw them at their nadir ten years later in May-June 1968 when not a one was to be found in the city of Paris. It was then that the fearless crusaders of the Gaullian press took up their quills to skewer their erstwhile masters, currying the favor of whoever might be their new ones; last-minute Resistance men once more, everyone had a Maoism in his mind as everyone used to have a Jew in his cellar.
At the nadir of the Gaullians, there were no more wheels in the streets of Paris, except for the high-spoked whirring discs of bicycles, mine and others. The polluted auto tide receded first from Boulevard Saint-Michel one night in May. Students were facing the police on Place Edmond Rostand where Boulevard Saint-Michel gathers itself together at the top of the Latin Quarter before tumbling downhill to the Seine, Sorbonne to the right, Lycée St.-Louis (prep school for protesters) to the left, Cluny abbey to the right, Saint Germain-des-Prés to the left, the Seine dead ahead under Saint-Michel bridge where, many a night that May, the police parked their big black buses across the entrance to the bridge. There were no longer enough Gaullians around to traffic-jam the bridge. A way had to be found to stop the Latin Quarter from tumbling down Boulevard Saint-Michel and spilling over the city.
Up on top of Boulevard Saint-Michel, on the other side of Place Edmond Rostand, traffic had been shut off by two successive roadblocks. The first, half a mile away, was set up by the police to keep cars out. The second was run by students a quarter of a mile away to keep the innocent out of trouble. Past their roadblock, a breeze of freedom blew over Boulevard Saint-Michel. The cars were gone, so were the puking buses, the spewing trucks against which the big plane trees wage their losing fight, chlorophyll versus carbon monoxide. Now the plane trees took over, the air was freshly manufactured, to be breathed for the first time by you and you alone.
The oxygen was going to people's heads. They were standing in the middle of the street, talking, not shouting, not waving signs, not throwing slogans, not chanting "Long live me." Others strolled on the sidewalk, watching the new street, Boulevard Saint-Michel transformed into a seashore promenade. Couriers on light motorbikes, helmeted like knights, sped between the front lines on Place Edmond Rostand and the students' roadblock.
Right next to the roadblock, a small crowd thronged around a priest, a conservative priest still wearing his black cassock, who had a portable radio going. Over the radio came a report of what was happening two hundred yards away on Place Edmond Rostand. The news came courtesy of Radio Luxembourg. Reporters in a car parked near the front lines fed the story to their Paris office by radio. It then went out of Paris, out of France, out of French territory to the Duchy of Luxembourg, where it could be broadcast back to the portable radio on Boulevard Saint-Michel to tell the priest and the crowd what was happening on Place Edmond Rostand.
Later, when May began to look serious, the government took away all the channels that Radio Luxembourg reporters had been using to keep in touch with the Paris office as they raced from one flare-up to another. Without their channels, the reporters had to resort to telephones, putting spotters into houses throughout a sector where something seemed likely to happen. Every telephone in the sector would then be cut off, but no one could prove ill intent on the part of the authorities because telephones in France are cut off in every sector every day of the year. The state-owned phone company is not a communications system but a device for collecting taxes. You never get the right number, but the bill never comes to the wrong address.
It must be noted that channels were suddenly restored to reporters from all stations on the day the Gaullians turned out to march up and down the Champs-Elysées. Coverage was complete, the private radios knew which side was ahead. And summer vacations were drawing near. Student protesters were not going to sweat through July and August occupying the Sorbonne while their parents occupied Majorca. The best way to get Maoist students out of university buildings in Paris is to declare a vacation. In a trice, the occupier is driven back onto the beaches.
That was how the May Revolution ended. Yet the streets had not been ripped up in vain. Fighting tooth and claw, the revolutionaries had clung to their hard-won gains. In one office they wrested a half-hour reduction in their work week from management. Every day, triumphantly, they went home six minutes earlier. They had won their liberté.
The French always use months as adjectives, probably because the same things keep happening over and over again in their history and the only way to tell them apart is to use dates. One cannot imagine the French referring to the Civil War, a term which for them is not an event but an endemic state. For the same reason, they call the Franco-Prussian War la Guerre de 1870 because they have always been warring with the Prussians. It's like the schedule in big-league baseball---there must be a way to know which game you have in mind when you start talking about who struck out in the ninth inning with the bases loaded and a 3-2 count. If it was a Gaullian, it was because he had the sun in his eyes, the pitcher was using a spitball salivated with LSD, and the umpire was a crypto-Radical-Socialist. Gaullians never strike out, Gaullians always win. If the scoreboard says they're losing, they get a new scorekeeper. If a judge says they're wrong, they get a new judge. Then the right verdict comes down, the Verdict of 18 June. A street is named Rue du 18 June to the despair of cabdrivers who previously knew it as Rue du 10 Septembre or Boulevard du 30 Fevrier. The day becomes a national holiday until the republic changes and the street is renamed.
Dates are a good way to describe victorious battles in lost wars. We do this ourselves with the War of 1812, the only year in that war when we managed to come anywhere near a tie. People, too, are called by the names of months. There were the Octobrists of Czarist Russia, there are the Aôutiens, the Augustans of Gaullian Paris. The Augustans, a name I like because it has dignity and I am among them, are the Parisians who stay behind to suffer in their empty city from which the insufferable have fled, leaving behind palaces, parks, and boulevards, cafés and avenues aslumber, stretching drowsily, nothing in sight but foreigners touring the most relaxed city in the world.
The May Revolution brought fraternité and égalité along the liberté. One morning on Boulevard Saint-Germain after a nasty night in which a few trucks had been burned in the street, I cycled up to a group milling about the wreckage. It was during those glorious moments of the May Revolution when the revolutionaries had all gone to bed and the police had not yet straightened out the scenery so that it could be re-wrecked the next night.
A little man in overalls was muttering to all within earshot that it was the fault of the foreigners, they had no business coming to France. As usual, I said no one had said that to me on Omaha Beach, neglecting as usual to add that, by the time I got to Omaha Beach, it was as thick with Americans as Jones Beach. A tall man next to me with a well-sculpted face and light-tan skin, no doubt he was from Martinique, took my side in the debate. We recited the Declaration of the Rights of Man, I think he even quoted the Bible. We had the whole quartier on our side; the little man in overalls offered to buy us a drink. The Martiniquais worked for a ministry, he said, he was a chairman of the action committee, things would never be the same. When the morning-after quarterbacks had refought the riot, when the police started to haul the wrecked trucks away, we shook hands solemnly. We knew we had shared a meaningful moment.
A month later on Boulevard Saint-Germain, I was watching road crews pour a thick layer of tar over the paving stones on the street. No longer would the little sons of the bourgeoisie be able to put up their barricades. This saddened me when I thought of all the synthetic experiences they would now have to seek, even more synthetic than their revolution that had filled time so handily between the end of the Easter holidays when it began and the start of summer vacations when it stopped. The paving stones, laid by hand in a mosaic over a sand base, had given rise to one of the most beautiful of the May musings painted on the city's walls: "UNDER THE PAVING STONES LIES THE BEACH." One afternoon, following a long night on Boulevard Saint-Michel, when even trees had been cut down in an attempt to stop the onrushing Cossacks in their black helmets and plastic shields, I was walking on that beach in the middle of the boulevard. Boul' Mich' was really a mess by now, windows were boarded up, a movie theater had been gutted, residents had been evacuated by their families. Picking my way over the uneven terrain, I encountered two American tourists, a middle-aged couple, simply dressed, wearing big smiles, the only two American tourists in Paris during that month of May. They were saying in their New York high school French to a friendly Frenchman (the species, almost extinct in Paris, came back in May): "This is the way we have always imagined the French."
Yet as I watched the paving crew, I could not help but encourage them. They were making the Latin Quarter a better place to pedal in, a paradise for the cyclist, a glacé surface of black tar laid down as smoothly as pancake makeup. No more teeth-shaking over the paving stones, no more backbreaking between the cracks to get the wheel over the humps going uphill, no more hanging on to the handlebars for dear life while running down, vibrating from the tips of one's fingers to the seat of one's pants as if plugged into a 220-volt socket.
Such were the thoughts that skipped through my mind on Boulevard Saint-Michel as I watched the mementos of May being wiped out. Some have remained; there are still no gratings around the Boulevard's trees because gratings can be used to break up even a tarred pavement. Nor is there any railing around the mountain on Place Edmond Rostand, the authorities having decided that it was less dangerous to have small children falling into the fountain than to have large ones ranked against the police, pieces of railing lined up like spears over the plastic lids of plastic garbage cans, shields that could not keep anything out because they cannot even keep garbage in.
And there he was, my comrade-in-words from the month of May, the action committee chairman from the ministry, the man from Martinique who knew neither color nor creed, the freedom fighter. Ah, it was good seeing him among the police and the German tourists who had come to pick up paving stones as souvenirs. It was good to see Monsieur Egalité, it was great to shake the hand of Citoyen Fraternité.
I offered my hand, he looked at me quizzically, coldly. Don't you remember me? The morning on Boulevard Saint-Germain when we got into that wonderful debate about foreigners. "Oh, yes," he said, "the American! The cyclist!" We talked resignedly about the political weather; the barometer was falling, clouds of discouragement could be seen rolling in from every side. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
"No, they don't," he said, with a flash of his old fury, "they're not the same in our ministry." Did the minister call him by his first name? Did he call the minister by his first name? Was he, too, going home six minutes earlier every day? "Don't be childish, you Americans are just overgrown children. This is serious. Before the events of May, our section head used to take the office copy of Le Monde home with him every day. He tried it the first time we came back after the general strike. I told him it was the office copy. If he wanted to read a newspaper at home, he would just have to go out and buy one." A pause to let the import sink in. "And now he does."
It was sad but inevitable to see May end as it did in the June of 1968. The revolution had long decayed, it had turned into a leisure pursuit since its start that night on Boulevard Saint-Michel when the traffic stopped roaring by and, instead, the citizens walked and talked in the shadows cast by the plane trees under the street lights. It was hypnotic, it was heady, it was a potion that I shall never forget. It must be worth cycling the world over to find the Holy Grail containing this nectar of reason, the science-fiction world where the dreams of Tom Paine come true.
Up and down we walked that night on Boulevard Saint-Michel before the police were ordered to charge the barricades, down to the front where calm students faced calm riot troops standing at ease, up to the end of the free zone where traffic was being shunted away by the student cops. Each time, we passed beneath a tree where a man was sitting on a branch with a huge red flag. He was waving the flag beneath his feet, watching it ripple in the wind that he created with his arm, for the air was still. He waved it back and forth, slowly and rhythmically, like a human pendulum. I never saw him stop but I suppose he got down from the tree before the police came charging up Boul' Mich' because I did not see him there the next morning when there was a taste of tear gas in the warm air.
I do not know his final fate. He may have been mobbed for flying his red flag in the wrong quarter---no, not the dreary lanes of posh pushy Passy but the serpentine alleys of the Latin Quarter, the fun fair of plastic cutthroats, instantly inflatable cutpurses and the all-transistorized ghost of François Villon. Fashion awareness is acute there; when Seventh Avenue sneezes, boul' Mich' huddles in its hair coats.
In May of 1968, red went out. Black came marching in, the black flag of anarchy. Red belonged to the parents' revolution, to the grandparents' revolution that hadn't thrown a bomb since Ought Five. No, the students were not going to the barricades under the red flag. The shock troops of the Party, hardheads who needed no hard hats, kept students a safe distance away the day the Communists were turned out to march in the city of Paris, to turn the Grands Boulevards into a human Long Island Expressway eastbound the night before Rosh Hashonah, a clogged cloaca running from Place de la République to Place de la Bastille, from Place de la Bastille to Saint-Lazare station.
I watched that big Communist march from my bicycle. I could circle it, follow it, precede it, a backwoodsman riding around the redcoats. Hundreds of thousands marched, perhaps half a million or more. The first paraders had already reached their destination and gone home while the tail-enders were still playing cards on the hot asphalt of Place de la République, their red standards furled and stacked. I watched the march from Boulevard Sebastopol, from Rue de Rachelien, from other streets and avenues that intersected the Grands Boulevards. It was like peering through slits in the side of a tunnel. I could see only short flashes, never an entity, never a unity. I remember nurses in their uniforms only halfway out of the Middle Ages, their signs asking that French hospitals be moved at least that far from the past. None of the signs went much further. Wild eyed Communists, Red and proud of it, took over the streets of the nation's capital, banners demanding... a forty-hour week... the right to join a union... a chance to negotiate with management. They would have been the dragging sagging Right in the United States during the days of the New Deal.
I found them sad, those great gray masses that rocked, swayed, heaved along the street as if the struck subway lines were back in operation above ground, transporting their inert loads, straphangers without straps, riders without wheels. No one danced, few smiled, there was no tension, just obedient shouting in unison. At my command... WAVE! Out came a cottonfield, a Mississippi delta of handkerchiefs, up rose the chorus from the ranks: "Adieu, de Gaulle... Adieu, de Gaulle... Adieu." But at Saint-Lazare station, half a mile from the shaky quaking seat of power in the République, the victorious local version of the Red Army at the end of its long march simply dispersed, melted, vanished, just like the crowds of commuters that arrive at Saint-Lazare station during the morning rush. No one knew where, no one knew how. The march only showed that people as well as traffic could block the streets of Paris.
Yet it gave de Gaulle a stick that he used a few days later to beat the living fear of God into the middle class, middling muddling Parisians. Now things were serious, la patrie might or might not have been in danger, de Gaulle certainly was. No more salon chitchat about Yankee hegemony, no time could be wasted on the Anglo-Saxon octopus choking the breath of France, squeezing the sap from her vineyards, covering her sacred soil with an infamous pollution of dollars. No, this was the time for the old bedtime story about the Bolshevik in the closet waiting to get the gold in the mattress. De Gaulle told it like the great grandpa he was, with the tremolo in the right places, the thunder and the threats, the terrible suspense just before the Red witch opens her oven to clap the little Parisian in, the near-relief of the terror that comes when she slams the door shut, the happy ending when de Gaulle arrives in the nick of time to pull the little Parisian out, slightly seared but so much wiser, and to drive the Red witch back into the woods where he can keep her on tap until her services are needed again.
The Communist march to Saint-Lazare station was the last parade that I really watched during May 1968. By that time, demonstrations had sunk into conformity, there was an establishment way of raising hell, a power structure had taken over from street power. In less than six weeks, the movement had grown up and died. I could still remember the birth, the first hesitant steps through the playpen of the Latin Quarter.
One day, a small band, fifty or a hundred, soon they were two hundred, of serious kids marched down Boulevard Saint-Michel. On their momentum, they crossed the Seine. The bridges were empty, the streets on Île de la Cité were clear. They crossed the Seine and entered Boulevard de Sébastopol where it starts on the river, the hard-working hard-selling extension of Boul' Mich' on the Right Bank---no students, no Drugstores, no mod shops, no pubs, just a broad sweep running right up to Gare de l'Est, the great, elegant East station that sits on top of Sebasto' like a god waiting to swallow up another generation of sound solid kind friendly Frenchmen, to ship them off to the grinding mills on the Marne, in Alsace, on the German border.
The kids marched innocently up Boulevard de Sébastopol, carrying the word from Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Arabs and the whores, the shopkeepers and the housewives of the old Halles quarter that was still raising hell all night long every night except Sunday though already on its deathbed, gasping its last breaths for a few more months while work went ahead on the new markets at Rungis south of Paris, just a mile or so away from Orly Airport, strategically placed by the logic of le plan in the nexus of the biggest traffic mess in Western Europe.
Planners responsible for le plan want to move everything out of the city of Paris so that their friends can buy up the vacant tenements, the deserted market sheds, and mine money out of them, putting up ten or fifteen or twenty stories in the courtyards where once handcarts snored during the day, awaiting their nightly chores. Money grows on the streets of Paris, they are paved with gold if you know the right Gaullian. You buy an old building, where you don't even have the right to polish the brass doorknobs without getting the permission of the Undersecretary of Fine Arts, who has to make sure that you will polish them to exactly the same hue and gleam as all the other brass doorknobs in the neighborhood, classified as an historic quarter. Then you go to the right Gaullian and he changes the classification. Off go the doorknobs to be sold to an antique dealer, down comes the building, up go the cinderblocks and the concrete. Gone are the handcarts, gone are their Arab handlers, stout fellows who could make five or six dollars a night as human truckers, hauling half a ton of vegetables from seller to buyer through the market sheds.
The market people are exiled to the suburbs, the new walls of Paris, weeds of concrete and glass sprouting where green pastures, yellow wheatfields, hand-plucked market gardens grew the year before. At the Sorbonne during May, a poster showed those suburban housing projects as cans for storing labor. The biggest of all, Sarcelles, contains a supply of fifty thousand, who suffer from a disease called Sarcellitis. One symptom, discovered by a weekly catering to readers on the Left Bank Left, is prostitution by housewives who take to their beds to pay the rent. The story sent all the weekly's hand-plucked hand-polished hand-handled readers squealing in horror to their great and good friends about such a state of affairs. In a well-ordered French society with liberté and justice for all (all of which the Left Bank Left is the herald, carrying the good word to the dying farm villages of Île de France, where it gobbles up land for weekend houses, spreading the gospel to Saint-Tropez where it has driven the fishermen to the hills and the hill people to extinction, wiping them from the face of Provence as the Saracens were never able to do), in such a well-ordered society, it is not necessary for wives to whore for the rent. Husbands pay the rent, leaving wives the time and leisure to widen their circle of friends.
And their kids were marching up Boulevard de Sébastopol. I tagged along behind on my bike, I sprinted ahead. People in the street stopped to watch out of curiosity. They stared at each other uneasily the way city people do when someone makes a spectacle of himself, when a drunk mouths obscenities. Along the sidewalk, an over-forty was striding briskly in a raincoat, he was carrying a briefcase. Every few steps, he would bellow like a brazen bull: "De Gaulle!" And the marching kids would chorus back: "Assassin!" Point and counterpoint, priest and congregation, up Boulevard de Sébastopol the leader strode like a pied piper, the kids following him, boys and girls in jeans bringing up the rear, closing in on the stragglers. Such words had not resounded in France for nearly eight years, not since the pathetic putsch of 1961 when three insurgent generals proved they were as incompetent at rebellion as at any other form of action. It was then, when the three generals were the masters of Algiers, that General de Gaulle took to the tube, the terrain of his greatest triumphs, to appeal to his people. "Help me!" he begged. They did and he never forgave them. To punish them for having created him, he placed them under a pall. He put a shroud over their verve, their wit, their joie de vivre. They lived like a canary with a black cloth over its cage, never singing because the sun never came out.
"De Gaulle... assassin!" cried the pied piper and the children. Street cries came back to Paris in May. The last to go had been the old clothes man and the glazier who pedaled slowly under your window on his bicycle, a big pane in the back of his neck. The old cries were gone, so were the old criers. The city heard only the bleat of forbidden car horns when traffic piled up to the point where the herd could moo with none of the individual steers being singled out for branding. Now the cries came back:
"De Gaulle... assassin!"
"Ten years... that's enough!"
"Liberate... the Sorbonne!"
When L'Humanité, the French Communist Party's organ, as it says under the masthead without specifying which one, when L'Humanité said that Dany Cohn-Bendit, the student leader, was a German Jew, his comrades marched along Boulevard Raspail to the chant of: "We are all... German Jews!"
The new cries became a new way of speaking, they were the sound track for the slogans on the walls, those truisms written as if to be read in slow motion: "ADVERTISING MANIPULATES" I once saw on a wall on the old scaly flaking side of Rue Saint-Jacques that is due to come down some day when the street is widened to provide a pendant to Boulevard Saint-Michel, to strike the balance so beloved by the French architect, general, planner, politician, husband. Only one lane can now stack up in Rue Saint-Jacques southbound, but Boul' Mich' holds four suppurating ranks of cars. This will never do; down will come half of Rue Saint-Jacques so that proper circulation can be restored to the arteries of the Latin Quarter, so that the throat-ripping, eye-rasping haze now over Boul' Mich' will be spread over Rue Saint-Jacques. Then traffic will be able to speed north on Boul' Mich', turn right at the Seine, turn south on Rue Saint-Jacques until Boulevard du Port-Royal, then right again and back north on Boul' Mich', back and forth, to and fro, round and round we go around the Latin Quarter looking for a place to stop, waiting for the day when the vaults of the Pantheon will be opened and the tombs of the great men exhumed to make room for an underground parking lot.
In May, the walking and the cycling were good in the Latin Quarter. Cars refused to go near it. They balked like dogs yanking at the leash, clawing at the pavement to brake their masters. Their steel souls knew the instinct of self-preservation.
In the Latin Quarter, any innocent car ran the risk of being converted into a barricade or an unguided missile to be sent charging downhill at the serried ranks of cops. Or it could fall into the clutches of the barricade-breaker, that police bulldozer that turned a Renault Floride into a smear of rubber, grease, and tin foil reduced to two dimensions, a monolayer on the sidewalk of Boulevard Saint-Michel.
May had not yet become a sound-and-light show the day I saw my little band of students march up Boulevard de Sébastopol. Ahead of them, police lines were hastily forming at the Réaumur-Sébastopol intersection. The kids kept shouting their slogans. The noise gave them air cover, it laid down a protective rolling barrage. It carried them along, no doubt, as we used to be carried along in the Air Force when we sang as we marched.
The gap between the front ranks of the kids and the police lines was closing fast. I squeezed into it on my bike. I could see that the roadblock was on the far side of the intersection. The kids turned right, just grazing the helmets of the cops, and walked towards Place de la Bastille where another police contingent, like the corner cushion on a billiard table, was waiting to bounce them back at the Seine. The police moved ponderously ahead of the procession with their motorcycles and black buses full of gawking country boys, gendarmes brought into the city to reinforce the local talent.
But when the little parade and the pied piper reached the river, they did not cross back to the Latin Quarter. Instead, they turned east along the Seine, marching down the absolutely deserted streets leading towards Lyon station, the Bercy wine market, the Porte de Charenton, and the city line. A packet of police brought up the rear, escort motorcycles wobbling at the pace of a ragged walk. They moved out of sight, out of hearing. I do not know whatever became of those kids. Perhaps the pied piper took them to the Peripheral Boulevard, where they marched around the gates of Paris, shouting their slogans, waiting for the walls to come down.
What I thought was going to be my most serious brush with the Paris police in May occurred when they were supposed to be picking up anyone who looked suspicious or foreign or suspiciously foreign. I was on my racing bike in the Bois de Boulogne, heading for the Longchamp circuit where the cyclists run for that B.O. Grand Prix. Right before the road that goes around the racetrack, there is an intersection that cannot be negotiated without breaking some kind of law, if not your neck. As I got through it, one of those boxy black Renault police vans that do double duty as paddy wagons and riot patrol cars passed me. I got onto the racetrack road, the police van slowed up. I passed it, then I began to dig at the long flat imperceptible hill on that road, so imperceptible that you have to know it is there or else you start taking your brakes apart, pumping up your tires, or making appointments with your physician. The black police van got on my tail as if it was slipstreaming.
I was being followed by the Paris police. I accelerated, so did the police. I was getting up near the top of that slight grade, right where cyclists who have made the grade park their Open Commodores and take out their handmade bikes for a lap around the track. The police van drew alongside, the policeman sitting next to the driver rolled down his window. He had a stripe on his uniform, he was a brigadier, he had a big florid beefy face and a heavy black mustache (a brigadier in the French military hierarchy is the equivalent of a lance-corporal or a private first-class; in the British Army, a brigadier is a brigadier-general and that is one of several reasons why the two countries get into trouble). As the van drove by, the brigadier called out to me: "Quarante!"
Forty kilometers---twenty-five miles---an hour. I shook my head. I indicated that it couldn't be true. "Si! Si!" said the brigadier with a hearty smile of encouragement, pointing to the speedometer of the van. I did not argue with him; never argue with a policeman's speedometer. It was this clocking cop who started a very happy triangle involving me, my bicycle, and the Paris police. At the risk of losing the last Alamo of allies I may have by now, I must state that I get along very well with the police, whether in Paris or New York. Like theirs, my business is in the street; like them, I have to stay there come rain, hail, or high water.
I did not have too much in common with the five or six thousand young demonstrators on bicycles who tied Paris up in April 1972 when they rode en masse across the city. I was not among them, I was working in Brittany, but two of my bikes were there, borrowed by a couple of American girls.
I do not know exactly what the Paris bike-in was all about. What I do know is that the following week, on a cold wet day, I was riding a bicycle in the city and, as usual, I was an oddity. Out in the rain, I had only the traffic cops for company. The summer soldiers and the sunshine cyclists were nowhere to be seen.
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