betwixteurope

Over there, it is over there

Pont Neuf, looking somewhere

Seeing Notre Dame

To Père Lachaise Cemetery, because I thought Susan Sontag was buried there; actually she’s in Montparnasse.

Like Notre Dame this is as multi-national and camera heavy as a Premier League football match, a good exercise in the post-Coryat world of travel. This is a collectable, the list of those buried here is well known

And to wander without a map throws up a Delacroix here and a Bastard there. But it is depressing. Tommy liked his inscriptions, but I think it is better to return to the reasons for a man or a woman’s burial here: read the books, see the plays, enjoy the art. Jim Morrison’s down there somewhere; a Yorkshireman is searching out Piaf, he adores her music.

I’m taking photographs, like everyone else, and I’m trying to get an interview with the Magnum collective, which is 60 years old this May. I’ll write in much more length about Sontag, Photography, Robert Capa and the Ritz as time allows. For now I’m interested in the Last Photograph.

I take mine on “vivid” with digital zoom extended. Into the sun, and on the move. I think of my photographs as the “last” ones, they are always entitled, “Why does the story keep falling off the page?” Everyone is a photographer now, and I wonder how photographic meaning remains as it replaces some other kind of connection to a place, to people, and to experience.

To be continued…

Notre Dame: the VIPs are up the tower; outside all is photography. Here too, of course

“It is divided into three parts, the University, the Citie, and the Town by the noble river Sequana, commonly called la riviere de Seine, which springeth from a certaine hill of Bergundy called Voga, neare to the people of Langres, in Latin Lingones. The University whereof I can speake very little, (for to my great griefe I omitted to observe those particulars in the same that it behoved an observative traveller, having seene but one of their principall Colledges, which was their famous Sorbona, that fruitfull nursery of school divines)…

…“The Cathedrall Church is dedicated to our lady, which is nothing so faire as our Lady church of Amiens: for I could see no notable matter in it, saving the statue of St Christopher on the right hand at the coming in of the great gate, which indeed is very exquisitely done, all the rest being but ordinary, as I have seene in other Churches.”

Thomas Coryat

Victor Hugo speaks pretty good Japanese these days. He has a good story to tell as well, a different story from his own famous novels, poems and plays. In rue Scribe, close to the Opéra in central Paris he is the narrator of the “Paris Story.” In fourteen languages, he – or rather a computer generated Hugo – is the commentary for a multi-media history of the city, all the way back to the Romans. He is a good choice for the new media age, Hugo was a polymath; engagé too. A historian of the present, some say. He was, Wikipedia says, “novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France.” In later life he was a great “Republican”, in the days when that meant something quite different.

When he published “Notre Dame de Paris”, aka, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, it was a pioneering social novel: spurred the nascent historical preservation movement in France and strongly encouraged the Gothic revival in architecture. Ultimately it helped to preserve Notre Dame Cathedral, where much of the story is based, in its contemporary state. It also boosted tourism to the capital, and led to the restoration of Notre Dame’s roof.

“Dan Brown’s novel has done for St. Suplice what Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame did for the cathedral of Paris. In the early 19th century the cathedral was in a terribly poor state of repair. As a medieval monument, it was not held in high regard. At this period it was the monuments of the Renaissance that were considered worthy of attention.”

The Definitive guide to the Da Vinci Code. Paris Walks. Peter Caine

Outside St. Suplice, near to Agnès b

Like John Ruskin in England, Hugo’s championing of the gothic caused a sea-change (one of Shakespeare’s neologisms, I’m sure Tom must have liked it) in the way we see things. Though, as “seers” often do, the two were not in accord. In a letter to a friend Ruskin wrote:

“I never was thoroughly ashamed of you and your radicalism till you sent me that ineffably villainous thing of Victor Hugo’s. did you ever read “The Hunchback of Notre Dame? I believe it to be simply the most disgusting book ever written by man, and on the whole to have caused more brutality and evil than any other French writing with which I am acquainted.”

So no De Sade for Ruskin then. His marriage failed on the wedding night because he saw his wife’s pubic hair – it is believed.

Hugo’s desire was to change the way not just Bourgeois France thought about architecture, but politics, and the way we live now. To create a debate: that was the aim in Hugo’s work. He was exiled for it, and not always understood to this day. In “Victor Hugo in Exile,” an author – forgive me – writes:

“The collective memory of Western twenty-first century societies, and specifically of France, is imbued with the ideals Hugo professed. France has accepted, at least in part, the telling of memories that its ancestors did not want to hear.

What Hugo achieved, at his best, was an “updating” of the past; going back and looking with new eyes in order to change the way a contemporary society perceived themselves, their country, and the way of things. Of course, Hugo brings with this vision his own demons, his own memories. But in certain key events, such as the siege of Paris in 1870, he was present as “history” changed.

One hundred and seventy years ago Victor Hugo brought one of his grander mistresses, the the actress Juliette Drouet, to Montreuil. The poet and flagellator, Algenon Swineburne always said Hugo was the greatest writer since Shakespeare. As he sweetly put it: “There was never a more brilliant boy than Victor Hugo: but there has never been a greater man…”

I don’t think we know Hugo in England nearly well enough. Sitting in the Grand Place in Montrueil its hard to think of social revolution, but that what his novel Les Misérables was all about. It was set here, largely, and is a novel of multiple plot and identities; what unifies all is the story of the ex-convict Jean Valjean, known in prison by his prisoner number, 24601. He becomes a force for good, but cannot escape his past, as they say in the movie traillers.

“I am not a number, I am a Free Man.”

By the time Hugo published the novel he was 60; but he had known success all his life. He was a literary prodigy:had a pension of 1,000 francs a year from Louis XVIII after his first volume of verse was published at 17. Before he was 35 he had written six plays, four volumes of verse, and the “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”.

The grand American critic, Harold Bloom, wrote in 1979 that Hugo was a writer who remains “absurdly unfashionable and neglected by his nations most advanced critics…”

Others are not so sure about the character of the man: in “The Fall of Paris”, Alaistair Horne’s definitive account of the Siege of Paris in 1870 he describes Hugo talking a lot, grandly, and sleeping with a large number of women. A Goncourt brother confirmed things with on the spot reportage. Of Hugo, he said: his main preoccupation during the siege – sex. In the introduction to Horne’s book I seem to remember Richard Cobb calling Hugo a fool. Somethere in the middle of all this is the French surrealist and general art-dandy, Jean Cocteau who gnomically states that Hugo: “He was a madman who believed that he was Victor Hugo…” And there are all those musicals…

Anyway, years after the love-tyrst here with Juliette Drouet, in exile in Guernsey, Hugo wrote Les Miserables, and set much of the action here. It is a novel using fiction as a weapon against another out of touch Emperor. An emperor who would fall in 1870, after a disastrous campaign against the Prussians.

Like Thomas Coryat, Hugo loved the classical poet Virgil.

“In Virgil, that almost angelic god, the high
Peaks of the lines are lit with a mysterious glow.
Dreaming beforehand things that we have come to know,
He sang almost when Jesus first began to cry.”

Hugo, Virgil

But what drove him on was a desire to change things. In the Place des Voges his house is now a museum, as with the Maison Jules Verne in Amiens, it is easy to understand the writer’s life here. Not so easy to understand why the museum is almost empty, when down the road the Café Hugo is overflowing. But it is a holiday.

Place des Voges, holiday time

His first novel, in 1829, Le Dernier jour d’un condamné (Last Days of a Condemned Man) influences such writers as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Soon afterwards he wrote, Claude Gueux, a precursor of In Cold Blood: a documentary short story about a real-life murderer who had been executed in France, a precursor to his most famous work on social injustice, Les Misérables.

As the computer generated Hugo takes us through the history of Paris, the idea of a socially committed novelist echoes; this haunting appears to have disappeared from twenty-first century life. What novelist changes things now? Answers please: but not the Code guy, please.

Or this.

A modern Scholar in the Marais

An older one, sans wi-fi

“I enjoyed one thing in Paris, which I most desired above all things, and oftentimes wished for before I saw the citie, even the sight and company of that rare ornament of learning Isaac Casaubonus, with whom I had much familiar conversation at his house, near unto St Germans gate within the citie. I found him very affable and courteous, and learned in his discourses, and by so much the more willing to give me entertainment, by how much the more I made relation to him of his learned workes, whereof some I have read. For many excellent bookes hath this man (who is the very glory of the French Protestants) set forth, to the greate benefit and utility of the Common-weale of learning…[long list] with which excellent fruits of his rare learning he hath purchased himselfe great fame in most places of the Christian World…”

Thomas Coryat

Tom’s big deal in Paris was a meeting (of minds) with the greatest Classical scholar of the era, Isaac Casaubon. Tom suggested that Casaubon came to England and write the definitive history of Queen Elizabeth. He did come two years later, after the assassination in 1610 of Henry IV and a change in political climate in Paris. In London he worked for James the First. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

He who would know Casaubon
Let him read not tombstones but his pages
Destined to outlast marble
And to profit generations to come.

If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it has been used on several occasions in literature since as it denotes a certain cleverness. Firstly by George Eliot, in “Middlemarch” the sweeping Victorian state of the nation novel, and more recently by Umberto Eco, in “Foucault’s Pendulum.

It is fascinating how the “brand” Casaubon changes through European history: Tom’s hero is replaced by George Eliot with a dry stick academic, attempting to write “The key to all Mythologies”. This Casaubon brings to mind the line in Robert Browning’s A Grammarian’s Funeral, being “dead from the waist down.” In a book of the same title about the Casaubon legacy Anthony Nuttal writes: “The scholar is at odds with life…Also, more disquietingly and more risibly perhaps, he is at odds with – cut off from – sex.”

This would be news to many academics, of course. But Eliot’s “Casaubon” represents the collector, too engaged in study to live life. In “Middlemarch”, married to the impetuous heroine, Dorothea, he quite simpy dries up and – conveniently for the metaphor – dies. Leaving Dorothea free to romance with more blood-coarsing romantics; love of passion rather than of the mind winning the day.

Eliot

In the labyrinthine world of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (the “thinking person’s Da Vinci Code™ says pretty much everybody) the modern Casaubon is the narrator. He and two friends in the Milan publishing world decide, long before Dan Brown, they have seen too many manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories. But instead of rejecting the idea, the three choose to improve the genre. (Foucault’s Pendulum will never be filmed). The three create their own conspiracy just because. It is named: “The Plan”. Soon, they have lost all sense of the fun of it. Real secret societies appear out of the woodwork, thinking (this sound familiar, at all?) that a Big Secret (a Lost Treasure) might be about to be found by Belbo, one of Casaubon’s two friends in all this.

Eco

Now we get spooky: on Sunday I went for a drink at the Arts and Métiers café in the Marais. Foucault’s Pendulum opens with Casaubon hiding after closing time in the Parisian technical museum Musée des Arts et Métiers, right here. Hauntings again, really it feels too close.

Here is a list, from Wikipedia, of the major secret societies that get a name call in Eco.

# The Knights Templar (the main players)
# The Rosicrucians
# The Gnostics
# The Freemasons
# The Bavarian Illuminati
# The Elders of Zion
# The Assassins of Alamut
# The Cabalists
# The Cathars
# The Jesuits

It is not an easy read, Foucault’s Pendulum, and is probably up in the top fifty of books bought but never finished. It is allusive and post-modern as befits an Casaubon-ish author polymath who travels in Hyper-reality. (I once observed the following exchange between the author and screen-writer, Gilbert Adair, and the author and journalist, Mick Brown.

Gilbert: “Do you see, Eco in L’Espresso, Mick?”
Mick: “I see it, I just can’t read it.”)

Just before I left I received an email from Professor Theodore Zeldin, a scholar of France and the French, and author of the classic humanist text, A Intimate History of Humanity. Zeldin is a kind of modern Casaubon, in the very best sense. He wrote:

“Congratulations. What a lovely idea. What an admirable
adventure.You invite comments. Mine is a question.
What will you leave in each place you visit? What germ will you plant? Is it just observation?”

I replied that I’d try to explain my roots and routes, to anyone I met. It would be an attempt to give back on a daily basis a little of what I’ve accumulated over the years, in the memory, and on the memory stick. And online a guide to Tom and a snapshot of life now. I don’t know if it is an answer, for over the past two weeks and the constant juggling between Tom, history, allusion, and the visceral moment I’ve developed what I’m calling “Casaubon Complex” – a complete sensory overload. I’m trying to learn what the best Jacobeans did, that to progress the processing and editing of the richly diverse material before me I must be hard-nosed. The information broken down into manageable themes, not some hyper-linked theory of “everything.”

“Causabon Complex” captured on film in the Marais.

The Impossibility of Pure Travel is theme one. Perhaps “New Yorker” was correct, my journey really is about being The Last Tourist. Other themes: family, roots, displacement and chosen exile; memory, and its lapses and revivals, the apparent, yet complicated, ease with which we can live elsewhere, the catalysts for these things; technoliges that change the way we see. These are not the staple-diet of tourism, but are some of the reasons to keep the mind engagé as the Giga-bytes of knowledge pile up.

“As for the streets of Paris they were more sumptuously adorned that day than any other day of the whole yeare, every street of speciall note being on both sides thereof, from the prentices of their houses to the lower end of the wall hanged with rich cloth of arras, and the costliest tapestry that they cold provide. The shewes of our Lady street being so hyperbolical in pomp that day, that it exceeded the rest by many degrees. …they exposed upon their publique tables exceeding costly goblets, and what not tending to pompe, that is called by the name of plate. Upon the middest of their tables stood their golden Crucifixes, with divers other gorgeous Images….artificiall rocks, most curiously contrived by the very quintessence of arte, with fine water spowting out of the cocks, mosse growing thereon, and little sandy stones proper unto rocks, such as we call in Latin tophi…”

Marais Street Life

The more I follow Tom, and see what excites him, I ask myself did he, a success story at court, with the most creative of friends, escape England, give up his salary from the Prince of Wales – twice – because he knew too much?

On the road it is easier to forget. Unless there is good fi-fishing, like tonight.

The Sphinxes behind the Pyramid

“Today it Rained,’ Joe Turner, Three Days of the Condor, 1975.

More Cult Members

There are even traces at the Bar “Three”

Home at Last

My Hungarian friend Zsuzsi put it best. It was dusk in Springtime, or snowy in the autumn, and we approached the Pont Neuf, the ancient Paris bridge that Tom Coryat saw when he was here. “We could kiss,” she said, “but we’ve probably both done that before.” She paused. “Several times, with several people.”

Several times with several people: the catch-phrase of Paris, bien sur.

This time in the pounding Pentecostal rain the Pont Neuf is revealing another memory. This is where Jason Bourne (“Matt Damon”) sets up an Act Three meeting with “Treadstone” AKA Dr. Kildare, Richard Chamberlain in “The Bourne Conspiracy.” Chamberlain has to stand in a Burberry raincoat in the centre of the bridge; from on high, from the building I’m standing next to, an omnipotent Bourne looks down and sees trouble.

Inevitably.

But I am on another kind of mission today, not to save my skin and discover my real identity but to crack the mystery of the Da Vinci Code, one of those book/film/franchises that changes the way we see a place – in this case Paris. It is not late at night, though I have bothered to walk from the Ritz, for veracity.

Several times with several people: Paris has been formed in some “popular” imagination by so many books, not least Hugo’s hunchback of Notre Dame. I will get to Hugo eventually. There was Baudelaire’s debauched visions of the city, Lautrec’s café paintings, the Goncourt’s gossipy insider place, that Stein-Hemingway-Fitzgerald axis of over-achievement that still has fans to this day, though sitting in a café and writing a novel is expensive these days: an activity for Dan Brown, not a debutant. In the 1970s we had Last Tango; today there is an entire Paris literary sub-section, a table to itself in Daunt’s travel bookshop in London. The best is Kate Muir’s “Left Bank”, of course.

The Louvre is massive, so solid, giant in the thunderstorm – and vaguely spiritual, un like the Tate Modern. I queue, I wander. There are a lot of corpses in the Louvre.

But as a Symbologist I am more interested in the strange yellow cult I’ve seen first on the Pont Neuf, and now cycling around the courtyard. I am drawn towards them, curiously they are thirteen in number.

There were thirteen at the Last Supper. In Judaism, thirteen signifies the age of maturity (bar mitzvah) for boys. According to the Torah, God has thirteen Attributes of Mercy. In the Sikh religion, the number thirteen is a number devoted to the remembrance of God, therefore it is also considered lucky.

There is a downside: irrational fear of the number thirteen is termed “triskaidekaphobia”, In the Persian culture, thirteen is also considered an unlucky number. On the 13th day of the Persian new year (Norouz), people consider staying at home unlucky, and go outside for a picnic in order to ward off the bad luck. In tarot decks, the thirteenth card of the Major Arcana is Death (Tarot card). And while Death is not typically interpreted literally, it could be in the Brown Universe. And there are always those Friday the 13s. And in yellow!

I see echoes of the Yellow cult everywhere: on galoshes, umbrellas, and even at McDonalds with its strange yellow “M”. Even the chicken there is “mythic.” Barthes would be pleased. At the Pompidou centre I notice there is far less yellow, and much blue. This is a rival sect, no doubt, its leader, one Samuel Beckett, the high priest of a savage minimal religion. (Once when snared for a night of passion by the American heiress, Peggy Guggenheim, he made love, rolled over, got up and said: “It was fun while it lasted.”)

Back at the Louvre’s Pyramid, votive offerings are made by a solitary virgin who approaches the temple slowly, carrying a turquoise relic. She disappears into the depths of the tempe to be sacrificed to the Gods of Retail Therapy, and is never seen again. The rain grows heavier still. Womb like symbols are held in the sky, and modern day electronic candles flash in the gloom.

There is a Dan Brown’s Paris guide book. I have it. Next stop is St Suplice. Perhaps I will see the strange yellow cyclists there again. Now I think about it, wasn’t the butter yellow in that Pagan, Last Tango? There is a cover up.

I am not so sure the French are descended from the Son of God. No, I think they come from another controversial gene pool. A blood-line that may – or may not, of course – have been chemically enhanced. I think that seven times Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong, is behind this sinister cult. Even the American President is involved.

The Tour begins in July, and visits England for two days. This year one stage is from London to Canterbury, seat of the English Church.

We should all be very afraid indeed.

Several times, with several people.

The Priest’s job is done.

Jane Fonda’s France is not normal. The American actor first came here at nineteen, staying at a villa her father, Henry, had rented near Villefrance in the south. There she met the Agnellis, Jacqueline Ribes, Princess Monica Gircona, and brother Bino, Count and Countess Volpi, JFK and Jackie, Onasis, Picasso, Cocteau, Hemingway and Chaplin. This year Jane Fonda is 70!

She went swimming with a naked Garbo, but kept her costume on. She took an apartment in Paris, on the avenue d’ Iêna, went to art school but – unlike Robert Redford – never got to paint. At a dinner-dance at Maxim’s she saw a man with exotic eyes and “an erotic aura” but nothing happened. Instead she had an affair with a playboy who took nude photographs of her; Henry Fonda ordered her home.

By the time she returned to France in 1963 Fonda had a fledging movie career and was taken under the wing of the French actors, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. They were, Fonda says, “engagé” – politically active.

This time, shortly after JFK’s murder, and an impotent courtship (which tells us something), she began a relationship with the man with the exotic eyes. They found a house together in the Marais, she learnt to cook and helped arrange “threesomes” for her partner – and husband to be – Roger Vadim Plemiannikov.

“I’ll tell you what I did enjoy,” Fonda writes about these frolics, “the mornings after, when Vadim wa gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk. For me it was a way to bring some humanity to the relationship, an antidote to objectification. I would ask her about herself, trying to understand her history and why she had agreed to share our bed…”

Many things are interesting about the Fonda-Vadim relationship: not least that it was a “big” and symbolic one, open, glamourous and “free”. French most of all, in most non-French eyes. Vadim “abhorred jealousy”, but had a gambling addiction – on anything, even racing Scalextrix model cars. He did not, surprisingly, rate fidelity high on the “to do” list. But then Vadim was haunted by his teenage experiences of occupied France in the Second World War – much later in life he wrote a gothic novel of sex and death, set in that era.

“At 16,” he writes,

“I had established a rule for myself: I was going to take the best from life: The sea, nature, sports, Ferraris, friends and pals, art, nights of intoxication, the beauty of women, insolence and nose-thumbing at society. I kept my politics…but refused commitment of any form. I believed in man the individual, but had lost my faith in mankind at large. ”

Vadim sounds a little like many men of this generation. At least his friends were interesting: Gide, Dali, Piaf, Cocteau; and Vadim shared a mistress with Hemingway for a while. And read aloud to Collette in her apartment.

When the pair first got together they were given somewhere to live in the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs by Commander Paul-Louis Weiller. It was on the rue Vieille-du-Temple, a hundred yards from where I am now staying. It was huge space, filled with artists, friends and young models; a room was always kept for Chaplin but the Vadims never saw him. Roland Petit, who had directed Leslie Caron at the ballet, lived there as well.

History’s hauntings happen in the strangest places. Drawn to the Fonda story as an example of chosen exile, I am suddenly considering the nature of modern romance too, incredibly close to the Parisian base of Fonda-Vadim. Fonda was exiled not just from America, but from the American way, and yet choose to be with a playboy Frenchman whose autobiography was entitled “Memoirs of the Devil.” (It’s a pretty self-serving text, full of stories about the week Ursula Andress came to sleep (celibately) with Vadim and his first wife, Brigitte Bardot.)

And now walking in the same street, and away from my own, the Rue Des Archives, with the giant repository of national history, I am thinking about why relationships work or fail.

Fonda hints that she was with Vadim because he had been (and would be) with beautiful and famous women: he validated her. For all the coquettish sexuality of “Barbarella”, in which Fonda starred and Vadim directed, hers was a very one-sided relationship: she gave, he took. Vadim, after all, had lost his “faith”.

He was a good father though, it is said. And for years Fonda was happy, if bulimic, bisexual, neurotic and just plain confused.

In Bar three, just around the corner from rue Vielle Temple the soundtrack is Blondie and The Pretenders: the French relationship to contemporary music has always been a little skewed, a little retro, tonight is no exception. Spiky American pop-princesses seem about right when thinking of mid-life, post-Vadim Fonda living back in America, when “Hanoi Jane” – who followed Barbarella – was replaced by the “Activisit-Populist” actor of “The China Syndrome” and “Coming Home”. Hanoi Jane would have liked these rock-out women, even if she was taught the guitar by her friend, David Crosby.

I watch the male-female relationships (from many, many countries) in the bar, in their infinite variety: this is BoHo land in the straight part of the Marais – itself a kind of Parisian SoHo. These are not the sons and daughters of marriages such as Fonda and Vadim, but neither are they so utterly different from them. The hauntings of family, and of the lives of men and women active in the 60s and 70s, lives on in us now.

For Thomas Coryat the hauntings were those of the Classics, Latin inscriptions, visions of his heroes, Virgil and Homer. His father had died just before he travelled and though he does not write about it, this must have been some kind of catharsis and catalyst for change.

Our hauntings are not just the sudden remembrance brought on by “Precious” or “Call Me” heard in a bar, the potency of cheap music, as Coward put it. There are also echoes that just arrive. “I have a sudden memory of New York, the eighties, it was very hot, very late, I could hear opera blaring out, really loud, it was like that Scorcese film (After Hours). There were people everywhere. And then, in some small bar, the opening chords of “New York, New York”: time to go home,” Portia says, walking late night in the Marais with me. This is how some of our forgotten memories work. Others are more deep-seated.

When things weren’t going so well, the Vadims bought in the countryside, later still Fonda got pregnant, thinking that would save the marriage. (They finally married at the Dunes hotel in Las Vegas, afterwards they watched a floorshow that involved stripping French revolutionaries: the climax was a naked beheading at the “Bastille” to the music of Ravel’s Bolero). Afterwards Vadim went gambling; Fonda slept with his mother that night.

When pregnant Fonda was taken by Simone Signoret to an anti-war rally in Paris. The Americans were in Vietnam. “But remember,” Signoret told her,

“we were there before you, we French, and the attitudes that Schell [Jonathan Schell, author of the early Vietnam exposé, “The Village of Ben Suc”] describes the Americans attitide towards the Vietnamese – the total disregard, as though they aren’t human beings – these were the same attitudes Les Colonistes Français had. The difference is we didn’t need to hide it…you must know that at the end of World War Two when France had to go to war to keep Vietnam as her colony, it was your country that paid most of our military expenses…the French couldn’t have won alone, and colonization is a terrible thing…”

I wonder if stars, and us mere mortals can be engaged in the same way now. Or perhaps we have too many hauntings: have read about the Sixties, Vietnam, and student activism – and how that time led on to Aerobic Videos, Nixon, and later the increasing importance of us, as “individuals”. This Christmas Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was: “You”, because, it claimed, we are now in control. The cover was reflective. We buy the magazine to bask in ourselves. We read it, plugged into our I-Pod.

“I knew that if I threw myself heart and soul into the anti-war effort, a return to the permissive, indolent life I shared with Vadim would be unthinkable,” Fonda writes. But she did do it – whatever one thinks of her stance.

In Calais, I met the thirty-one year old Gigi, a highly intelligent Art History student, working in tourism. She had been shocked to be asked in Colorado, where she studied, about the French in Vietnam. Shocked because she didn’t know that history. How much can we care to remember? Is the haunting why we constantly seek the new? Why we “reposition”, and start again.

Jane Fonda’s life is a case study in renewals, just as the Marais now, glossy and chic. At least in part of the history, Fonda became engaged. It didn’t happen in the Marais though: that is for pleasure alone.

…which wiped even the wifi out. This is another fi-fish, 48 hours later.

“The unexpected encounter is a crucial theme within surrealism…”

Mark Polizzotti

Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!).

Andre Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto, 1924.

A few years after the end of the Second World War an already weary young romancer, writer and would-be film-maker met a young girl dancer on the ferry from Calais to Dover quite by chance.

It was 1949. Roger Vadim was searching for a star for his first film script, Les Lauriers Sont Coupés: back in Paris he screen-tested two actresses, one them the girl on the boat.

“I had come across Leslie Caron on the Cross Channel ferry and advised Marc Alligret to go see Roland Petit’s ballet La Rencontre, in which she was a strange and a fascinating sphinx, a snowy slyph wafting high above the stage on a thread from her spider’s web. On the screen, she possessed both charm and presence, but her inexperience worried the producer, and she was not signed. Shortly afterward, thanks to the test, she went off to Hollywood, where a fabulous contract was awaiting her.”

The other screen-test was Brigitte Bardot. Vadim married her (one of five wives), and as a Simulacrum God, he “Created (naked) Woman” with “BB” in 1956. Soon afterwards, and over the Atlantic, America “discovered” French Film.

Why Not?

In Hollywood, Leslie Caron returned to Paris, almost, with An American in Paris, the musical with Gene Kelly. Here is how she remembers getting the film part, it is quite different from Vadim’s version: “I was born in Paris to a dancer-mother and was prima dancer of the Ballet Champs d’Elysée when I was 16-years old. I was performing the ballet drama, Oedipus & the Sphinx, when Gene Kelly spotted me on the opening night and chose me for An American in Paris.”

In “Revolution of the Mind”, a Life of Andre Breton by the American, Mark Polizzotti, he explains that Breton: “often evinced a will to improve upon the mundane aspects of life, to recast them into something larger and more resonant – even if, at times, it meant adjusting his curriculum vitae. He claimed that he had no use for the “empty moments” of his life, the instances of “depression or weakness” that would nonetheless visit him so regularly, preferring instead to accentuate the unusual or dramatic episodes, to project them beyond simple biography into something approaching universal truth.”

I think that Breton and his Surrealists, informed by the ideas of psychology, the unconscious, and of The shapeless, memory-haunted City – and this sense of “improving” on the mundane, or an objective truth – pretty much invented one major strand of modern travel. The travel that is random, about cafés and careless, aimless, afternoons walking somewhere; which is about stories (imagined or real, improved or altered) not sights, seen – or missed – and photographed. It is about catching atmospheres, not the waiter’s eye; the alternative to this being the “collector” travel that is about reservations at restaurants, catching the hip show in town, the big art show, the most fashionable club. Both are equally valid, of course. But their evolutionary matter is very different. The latter start with Tom Coryat, morph into the Grand Tourists, and now…perhaps they are on the “Brand Tour”.

Once upon a time the “collector” traveller has perhaps seen An American in Paris, and wants to walk by the Arc du Triomphe, dance near the Seine. Or they have read a guidebook, or a restaurant review in the IHT. Heard about the great new Picasso show at Gallery X. This is not the Surrealist’s way, nor – for a long time – the backpacker’s.

“The Surrealists offered a critique of bourgeois sexual relations, masculinity and femininity, institutional treatment of the ill, social prejudices, religious bigotry, Eurocentrism and colonialist politics. Their anti-paternalism ran deep, and – I only mean this as a positive analogy – was that of the child (male or female) who questions the rules and values of an adult culture whose only reply is that as a parent they “know best”…” writes David Bate.

Ok. But how does a city “know best”? Often through the way its local and national government funds, promotes and advertises museums, galleries, and attractions of course; but more often through the stories told about it from a wide series of sources, not just its own. How, say, America had viewed Paris in the sixty years since the end of WW2: from Gene Kelly’s Paris, built on a Hollywood lot. “Well, for starters, it was never shot in Paris because in those days all films were made in studios. But I think it was the first ‘real’ musical that was made, with its amazing sets, music and choreography. The last scene took three months to choreograph and one month to shoot. The sets alone took three days to create. Everyone thought we were insane to end the film with a 20-minute ballet sequence, but it turned out to be the most talked-about feature of the film,”
as Vadim’s “protégé” Leslie Caron explains. Within a decade another kind of Paris described by the cinema of the “Nouvelle Vague.” Quirky, irreverent, obsessed with American pop-culture, cinema itself.

And there are later Parises: in Benieux’s film “Diva” or Polanski’s “Frantic” (Americans in peril in 1980s Paris). The Paris of “Three Colours Red”; “Moulin Rouge” or “The Da Vinci Code”. Bertolucchi’s “Last Tango” or more recently “The Dreamers”.

In the view of Walter Benjamin, the great critic and champion – if not “creator” – of the idea of the café-observing “flaneur”, following his heart, or some other major organ, around the City of Paris, is first formed fully through Breton’s novel “Nadja”, even if its origins go back to the nineteenth century poet, Baudelaire. In this strange novel, with photographs, a narrator describes walking parts of Paris, and an affair with “Nadja” that goes wrong. The aimless quality of the journeys he makes is very similar to what is a now quite mundane tourist idea: wandering Paris in a half-state, remembering, imagining, and experiencing, everything from the Revolution, through Miles Davis’s affair with Juliette Greco and a glimpse of Diana at the Ritz. “What is revolutionary in Nadja’s hallucinations is the recovery of scenes from historical Paris; her life is not subjected to dreary work, rather to the work of dreaming impressions of Paris. “ David Bate writes.

I like this sense of the city-story shifting in our minds as we walk, growing restless and re-writing itself, pulling in history but not being overwhelmed by it: Vadim’s Paris (with Fonda) was not Fonda’s, as we shall see.

But do we hear (and see) the overt history at Notre Dame when we copy the Surrealist drive for chance and the unexpected and just turn left when we feel like it, or do we merely seek to generalize from the “look” as we sit safe with our coffee and “watch” from afar? Do we find a meaning in the galleries of the Louvre, or just see a Dan Brown novel being acted out?

Which is, of course, one very real “meaning” of the Mona Lisa these days. A profitable one; probably as profitable as the visions of France in “And God Created Woman”, “An American in Paris” or “Moulin Rouge”.

And yet all these stories can help to bring us to a place, and pretend for a while that we are living out their fictions. This weekend, an aimless stroll through the Marais, a lunch, some Picasso, somewhere, shops full of 1960s newspapers, modern art and ancient churches. And in the Place des Voges, the Victor Hugo café (full) and nearby his house (almost empty despite the free entry).

Hugo was no surrealist – but I have avoided him too long (ever since Montreuil, in fact) and now here he is, confronting me: this encounter was by chance. I must respond to it.

Why not? Tomorrow: I must write about Hugo.

And I’ll come back to the Surrealists, Flaneurs and Wanderings when I’ve shaken off the atmosphere of the Marais in the Rain.