Simenon’s Maigret: A world ‘without hope’?

Well, I guess it’s no surprise that it took Georges Simenon to get me back to this journal; if he could write a book in nine days, I should be able to file one dispatch in one month. (When an interviewer asked if he ever took time out to relax, Simenon answered Mais oui; as it took him nine days to write a novel, if he wrote six in a year that left him with 311 days off.)

If I’ve been absorbed by France Culture radio’s ‘grand traversé’ dedicated to Simenon running every morning this week (click here to listen to the archived emissions), particularly the first hour, dedicated to archival interviews with the author, I’ve been disappointed by the relatively scant time devoted so far, in daily programming of 3.5 hours quand meme, to Simenon’s major creation, the Commissaire Maigret. And when Maigret does come up, as he did today in the discussion portion of the program, the ‘experts’ seem to fundamentally misunderstand his world.

According to this particular expert, the world of Maigret, or of the Maigret novels, is ’sans esperance” or without hope. While this quality might apply to the other major part of Simenon’s oeuvre, the ‘romans dur,’ in which the criminal himself is the protagonist, typically perpetrating the crime at the beginning of the book and then degenerating before our eyes for the rest of it, the Maigret series, in which the detective is the hero, seems to me more an ongoing love affair with and portrayal of the principal character — his manners and his way to explore new worlds, his typical mode of access for solving the crime being to immerse himself in the milieu in which it took place. In effect, he’s our reliable old friend, the narrator we identify with as we encounter these worlds and communities with him. We feel that we’re with him when he enters a bistro and cries out, “Une demi!,” when he’s lost and morose and doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere in his investigation, when he ‘bavards’ with his inspectors. The most minute details of how he interacts with the drama become more important than the mundane details of the crime itself — even the way he becomes involved. In one tale, Maigret is ready to turn away a man who’s fled a small coastal village, where he’s accused of murder, to come to Paris to ask for Maigret’s help — until, crossing the bridge St. Michel, he gets a whiff of air that evokes oysters and ‘petit blanc’ and decides to take the case. (When he gets there, he discovers that the oyster harvest has been held up because of tidal problems, so he has to content himself with the petit blanc for the duration of the investigation.)

It’s not that the crime is incidental, but that the center of the story is not its grisly details, not the violence of the culpable, but Maigret’s quest — as much a quest for the solution of the crime as for understanding the personages involved. And because his ‘method’ (in quotes because Maigret would vehemently deny he has one) is to infiltrate the world, the milieu where the crime took place — be it that encircling an ecluse or lock, a port, an upper-class household, a demi-monde, a boarding house — the stories become chants to these communities, in Maigret’s case a tour de France alternating with immersions in the neighborhoods and rhythm of Paris. (Even more fun for those who have lived there; Simenon often situates the crimes on specific streets or in specific places in the general area described by Montmartre and, below it, the 9th arrondisement, often Notre Dame de Lorette, a street I know well.)

The point is that where the ‘romans dur’ start from an already ‘black’ point — the crime, usually violent — and descend into an even darker universe as we get inside the mind of the culpable, the Maigret novels use the fait divers as a trigger for a search for understanding, and an excuse to return to the world of a sensitive hero, Maigret, whose encounters with Paris, France, and occasionally other places are elevated and rich, steeped in the culture of the particular place, as it was in the middle of the 20th century. (One of my favorite passages occurs when, sur place investigating a theft and murder in a suburb, Maigret ‘pique’s the lobster delivered to the local bar from the hapless Sgt. Lucas for his own dinner, and pauses to call HQ. “Stay there!” he says, then, “I’m talking to the lobster,” which is trying to escape.

Speaking of food, in one of the archival interviews Simenon offers a ‘how-to-survive when you have no money’ story that rivals Dolly Parton’s claims that when she first started out, she made ketchup soup to economize. The 20-year-old George Sims, just arrived in Paris (at the Gare du Nord in my old neighborhood, which still, 86 years later, fits Simenon’s description as ‘the endroit ‘le plus raid’ in Paris), had taken a chamber in a boarding house where it was forbidden to cook. Here’s his advice for surviving on very little: “You buy a round of camembert — not a good one but the cheapest you can find. You eat a little morsel, and then you put it in the cabinet. Every day it gets bigger.”

Taking liberties

Okay, so let me get this straight: Factory workers at an auto plant faced with lay-offs threaten to blow up their workplace unless the patron forges over 30,000 Euros to each employee (if this isn’t extortion, what is?), and the government sends in… the industry minister, to re-assure the workers. Meanwhile, in Montreul, a working-class suburb of Paris, citizens hold a peaceful demonstration to protest the police taking out the eye of another demonstrator at an earlier demonstration by firing a paintball gun into it, and the police charge them, firing paintball guns at four more demonstrators… while the interior minister remains silent. Meanwhile, until today (when the Green deputy Noel Maniere introduced a law that would ban police using tasers and paintball guns), the parliament is talking about neither of these abuses of liberty but appears to think the greatest threat to French society is women covering themselves with long dresses. (I’m much more worried by the attack on separation of church and state wielded every night on public television, where the weather broadcaster ends his forecast by exhorting everyone — Catholics, Muslims, Jews and atheists — to not forget to kiss the day’s patron saint.)

Man asks for dog’s papers

For my French readers, I should explain the headline: In American journalism, the phrase “Man bites dog” is applied to news stories which aren’t (news), a sort of inversion of “Dog bites man,” an event which would not be news. Or to put it another way: I was shocked!, shocked! to learn, on France Culture radio this morning, about a new study which confirms that if you’re Black or of Maghrebian (Arab) descent, you’re 6.8 or 7.8 times more likely, respectively, to find yourself asked for your papers here in France than if you’re white.

When one thinks about the actual term, “control (or check) d’identitie,” the implications are profound. Taking the commission literally, what’s being questioned — or if you want to be neutrel about it, verified — is whether you’re part of the national identity (although technically speaking, you could also be a foreigner in which case your papers just need to be in order). So theoretically, the implication is that if you’re not white your 7 to 8 times less likely to be French. (Even if in fact the presumption is that you’re more likely to have committed or be about to commit a crime.)

The study was conducted by researchers from the CNRS attached to the Centre des Recherches Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Institutions Penale. It was commissioned by George Soros’s Open Society Institute, based in the United States, where race-based criteria is known simply as ‘profiling.’ The French study was conducted between October 2007 and February 2008 in two Paris locations, the Gare du Nord and Chatelet. And there’s the first flaw in the study, in at least two respects; 1) People of color are more represented in these two places than they are elsewhere; 2) In the Gare du Nord, which has in fact been a magnet for, if not ‘gangs,’ at least rival youth groups from the suburbs more likely to be constituted by people of African or Maghrebian origin, the police scrutiny may actually be justified.

The uber-conclusion from the study — which clocked 525 controls out of 37,000 which traversed the two places during the periods of observation — is that, ‘the police read the signs of the person more attentively than his comportment.” (The two guests appearing on France Culture, Fabien Joburd and Rene Levy, were not always clearly identified, which is why I’m not attributing the remark to one or the other.) Those indicators were not confined to skin color; the researchers also looked at the sex, age, type of sack and, most intriguingly, clothing, in particular paying attention to whether someone attired a la hip-hop was more likely to be questioned. And indeed, the study found that a white person in hip-hop attire was more likely to be stopped than a black person with no particular wardrobe signifier.

Profiling is not a scourge particular to France. But here’s where the French exception comes in: Elsewhere in Europe (and, I can confirm, the States as well), “Circulate!” (or “Disperse!”) is the premiere contact the police are likely to have with the populace. In France, it’s “Your papers!”

La vie du passé en rose

It’s amazing how a past that’s not even my own, but rather a memory of how profoundly I felt another culture’s past when I lived in Paris from 2001 to 2007, pulled at me again early Friday evening as I dashed down the winding, chestnut-tree shaded rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre, stopping only to pay tribute to that well-known cat designer and lover Theodore Steinlin as I passed his house and jet my eye at the atelier where Toulouse-Lautrec once drew Suzanne Valadon. This was after, further up the Butte, I’d paid my respects to Erik Satie outside the one-story apartment building where he’d lived from 1890 to 1898, to Valadon at the now-shuttered restaurant where a plaque reminds us that she and Utrillo dined there for some 20 years, and before I madly scurried across the bridge over the Montmartre cemetery like Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel and his pal had done in “The 400 Blows” with a typewriter they’d stolen from Antoine’s father’s office, setting Antoine off on a path of flight that would last 20 years, countless women, and four more Truffaut films.

I wasn’t the only one in Montmartre Friday night channeling ghosts. On the rue Rustique, down the street from the ancient chez Valadon-Utrillo outside the back entrance of a resto, a hyper-spirited pony-tailed young woman with an infectious smile that bared all her teeth was bouncing along in jeans and sky-blue blouse, accompanied Django-style by a guitar and bass player as she sang and snapped a jump version of Gainsbourg’s “Javanaise” and then a jazzy version of “La Vie en Rose” that totally changed its mood from melancholic to celebratory.

Saturday it was more Piaf — have I mentioned that I’m living up the street from where La Mome was born? — as my pal Luc suggested we RDV at noon at the Cafe Edith Piaf, so named because it faces the plaza at the exit of the Metro station Porte Bagnolet dominated by her statue. (On the front of which some connard has poured red paint.) The Resto is decorated with photos of Piaf and her performance posters of the epoch. She’s even playing on the juke. If this sounds like a set-up designed for tourists, it’s not; it’s a local cafe that’s somehow both a tribute to and an authentic living embodiment of an earlier era.

My adventure, though, started earlier, as I rushed (I rush a lot — I may be the fastest man in Paris; I moved here to stop rushing but it hasn’t worked) through the Saturday market stalls. Apparently it’s fete your market week-end in Paris, as I was reminded when I came upon a stand where a man with a mike and a smiley woman seemed to be giving away goody-stuffed sleek blue and white canvas bags inscribed in multi-color with “Les marchés de Paris.” I hovered, but they just kinda looked at me as if to say, “Et alors?” Then they stopped another guy and asked him a question about General de Gaulle; apparently you had to pass a quiz to get a goody sack. I cursed my luck, as Le General is one of my specialties. (I like to regal my Les Eyzies potes Bernard and Stephan with my recording of his greatest speeches when they stop by at night to regard the pre-historic cliffs, drink Panaché ((no, all French ‘paysans’ don’t sit around drinking marc)) and try to get me to adopt a mutton or convince me that the moon has disappeared.) But I persisted in hovering, and I guess they realized they’d have to give me the chance to win a bag to get rid of me. The guy stuck his mike in my face and pointed at my beret. At first I didn’t understand (my French is not that bad, really, but my level drops dramatically in high-pressure situations), but then I caught “Hergé,” and when he again indicated my hat, I realized he was referring to my Captain Haddock (tr.: Craddock) pin. He asked me if I was a Tintin fan, I nodded, and then, with an “Oh yeah?” look in his eye, he popped the question:

“How many volumes of Tintin did Hergé write?”

Merde. “Uh… 12?”

(I realized later that our little interview was being broadcast throughout the ten-block market.)

“That’s right!” he said, giving me a break and handing me a sack. Then he asked where I was from — is it *still* that evident that I’m not from around here? — and instead of f*cking with him as I’ve been doing with a lot of Parisians by answering, “Sud-ouest. Dordogne!” I answered “America.” “Yay Obama!” he said. This gave me confidence, so before I walked off with my loot I said, “Thank you for myself, and also on behalf of Captain Craddock,” which must have been understandable, because the smiley woman laughed.

In the bag was a wide-brimmed straw hat, baseball hat, and tee-shirt, all plugging the marchés, plus a big ‘ol bag of potatoes, tomatoes, onions and garlic. I contributed two of the onions to the veggie feast Luc had prepared for his daughter and me, after we’d picked up two heaping boxes of old books a local bookstore owner, Jose, had given to Luc for his ‘boite’ on the Seine. — he’s a bouquiniste or bookseller along the Seine. Luc stacked them under a big empty box inside his doorway, but as soon as he’d disappeared into the kitchen I delved in, finding treasures like a complete set of the Dos Passos “U.S.A.” saga and a clothbound 1950s circa collection of Tennessee Williams, both in translation of course.

While we were eating, Jose, who’d turned down Luc’s invitation to join us, was digging out his Boris Vian books for me, “Elles ne rendent pas compte” (rough tr.: “These women don’t realize what they’re doing”) and “Les Fourmis,” (“The Ants”), a collection of novellas. Vian books besides “‘J’irai cracher sur vos tombes” (“I’ll spit on your graves”) are hard to find, so I’m sure Jose’s 5 Euro apiece price was just, but a)I’m on a budget which I’ve already exceeded and b)the plain white covers and that these were recent additions didn’t do much for me. “I like the old pocket-book covers!” I explained to Luc. “It’s the title that matters, not the design!” At today’s vide grenier (neighborhood-wide garage sale; vide = empty, grenier = attic) on the rue Marie and Louise near the canal, I scored both these books and a third, “Trouble dans les Andains” (completed in 1942-1943 but issued posthumously in 1966, thus both the first novel Vian wrote and the last published). The cover for “Les Fourmis” features Boris in kaleidescope, wearing a black shirt and four different expressions; ‘Andains’ has him pressing a fist to his chest and regarding the reader with wry menace; and the last has a full-color Vargas Girl kicking up her heels from a reclining position as she starts to remove her stockings. Total price: 3 Euros. Earlier, at a vide grenier nearer to my apartment, I’d picked up sealed DVDs of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” for 2.60 total. Bi-continental schizophrenic stuck in other people’s pasts: C’est moi.

L’Algerie au coeur

With his long gray hair, Marc Garanger looks like an ex-hippy. But in fact, at the beginning of the 1960s — 1960 to be precise — he found himself at war in Algeria, assigned to photograph thousands of Algerian women who the French authorities had decided should have ID cards, the better to control them. So the women in his book, “Femmes d’Algerie 1960,” mostly regard him with defiance, if not outright contempt. Photographed again 45 years later, when he returned to Algeria to find his memories and them, some of the same women have joyous expressions as they regard their younger selves and share the photos and another time and ambiance with their grandchildren.

Garanger and photos from both of these books were on display at the Cafe Social de Belleville — a sort of cafe for senior citizens — for the commencement of “L’Algerie au Coeur,” the first of an evening of events that terminated tres tard with the local premiere by Belleville’s own Lyes Salem of his “Mascarades,” itself a light-hearted tale of changing family values in an Algeria where native tradition often confronts the modernity of a shrinking world. (“Mascarades” was selected best film in the 2008 Dubai Film Festival awards and is Algeria’s nomination for best foreign film for the 2009 Oscars.)

Giving a soundtrack to the whole evening was Said Aichel-Fi and his Groupe Idebbal-en playing traditional Berber (?) party music. (The band is available for marriages, circumcisions, and concerts: 01-43-49-32-94.) The taste that I retain comes from the carrots in harisa and spicy chestnuts served at and outside the cafe social (7, rue Pali Kao in Paris’s 20eme arrondisement; the photos will be there for another three weeks.) in a real street party. But also, in a world — and a France — whose very shrinking has sometimes made for inter-community fractures, there were some simple signs of hope: Hearing the music, the residents in the social housing above the cafe opening their windows included a young black woman and a Hasidic Jewish gentleman who could not resist smiling. Later, when the party moved up the street to the Place Alphonse Alias for the screening of Salem’s film and a sort of travelogue by Claire and Reno Marca that traverses all Algeria, it proved a challenge to deplace the teenagers — evidently residents of the social housing that surrounds the square — batting a soccer ball around the square. Tant mieux, I thought; wasn’t this the youth of the greatest French Algerian of them all, Albert Camus? Looking up at the well-kept housing project, I transformed the trees into lemon groves and imagined myself in Oran.

The new king of the Luxembourg Garden

If France is a nation of rules, the Luxembourg Garden is where rules rule. I once made the mistake of moving one of those handy green metal chairs a few feet so that I could sit right next to the central fountain that faces the Senate building. Within 20 seconds a long shadow loomed over me; when I looked up, a tall guardian was wagging his finger at me — interdit! (Forbidden.) And then there was the time my brother Aaron, visiting with his family, refused to believe it was interdit to picnic on the little patch of grass near the Medici Fountain. “But look, everyone else is!” Wistfully shaking my head, I conceded. We’d barely had time to crack the hard-boiled eggs and pour the drinks when the whistle blew.

Why do I keep going back to this Forbidden Planet, you ask? I who hate rigid rules? For the rigid statues. So having written Saturday that life is too short not to spend more of it in the Luxembourg Garden, Tuesday, despite some heat + pollution produced minor heart pains that counseled me to rest indoors, I took the subway and a very crowded RER to the garden. But boy did my heart jump a few when I saw the monstrosity the guardians have let be introduced among the circle of limestone former queens of France statues that form a demi-circle around and hover above the fountain.

There between Marguerite of Angouleme, queen of Navarre (1492 – 1549) and Valentine of Milan, duchesse of Orleans, someone had inserted a giant, 6.5 meter tall, several meter wide bronze head. It’s called “The Prophete,” but it looks more like a bald, sleepy-eyed Tutankamen re-imagined by a mid-20th century modern artist. It’s apparently the culminating life’s work of one Louis Derbre. (You can see a picture of it here: www.derbre.com .) What I don’t understand is how, on the one hand, the guardians of the Luxembourg can get so upset if I disturb the equilibrium of the Senate by moving one metal chair next to their fountain for ten minutes, and on the other hand, allow this modern monstrosity to be inserted amongst the queens, instantly dwarfing Marguerite and Valentine and making them look like handmaidens to “The Prophet.” The pristine, limestone circle has now been broken. The head also now dominates the view from the fountain.

As you may have noticed, many of these queens have spikes where their crowns should be. That’s to prevent the pigeons from sitting on their heads and pooping on them. How the guardians can be so (rightly) concerned about pigeon poop and then let some modern artists plop a giant head down amongst the queens that instantly disrupts this classic and eternal picture and indeed the whole landscape of the Luxembourg at its center I just don’t get.

I have nothing against Mr. Derbre and his life-long dream. Maybe he could put it next to that giant bronze-colored flower pot in front of the Pompidou Museum, a haven for 20th century art and thus a more proper home for his achievement. But for God’s sake, save the queens, call the guardians and get that modern monstrosity out of the Luxembourg Garden.

PS: Ohp! Good news. In researching a link for an image of “The Prophete,” I see that he’s only supposed to be at the Luxembourg Garden through this month; after it’s off to the front of the Madeleine Church and then the United States. Bon voyage!

The Chevalier de la Barre: Le suite

It’s amazing how certain traits of a society never change. About 230 years ago, a young man refused to take off his hat for and hurled impudent ditties at a passing parade of nobles and notables in Paris; for this they cut off the hands that refused to to take of the hat and the tongue that sang the ditties, and then they burned him at the stake. Later they put up a statue of and monument to the young man who became known as the Chevalier de la Barre in a park in the shadow of Sacre Coeur and named the street that encircles this church — itself a symbol of repentance imposed on the losers of the Paris Commune by the federal authorities — after him.

60 years ago, in “The Stranger,” Albert Camus wrote of a nondescript civil servant who is persecuted not because he kills an Arab (to stick with Camus’s nomenclature), but because he doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral — in other words, not for the criminal act he actually committed against society, but for not conforming to societal norms.

Six months ago, frustrated by her department’s inability to capture those responsible for a series of rail sabotages and threats of sabotage, the French interior minister ordered the arrestation of an anarchist activist, Julien Coupat, his girlfriend, and a few members of their coterie, all of whom lived in a collective in rural southwest France reading and writing about anarchist theory. Absent sufficient proof linking them to the rail sabotage (Coupat and his girlfriend, Yiddune Levy, had allegedly been seen in the vicinity of one of the rail targets) the interior minister accused them of belonging to an ultra-left organization with links to terrorism.

The thinness of the evidentiary trail became clear to me when French authorities said they’d started tailing Coupat on the basis of a tip from the FBI, which consisted of saying he’d been seen at a meeting of alleged anarchists in the States.

In other words, for the past six months, Julien Coupat has been kept in prison not for any crime which, at this point anyway, is provable, but for what he thinks, writes, and reads — and, to be fair, for being at two meetings and taking part in two demonstrations. And, by implication, for being and thinking different.

On Thursday, the French parquet finally realized they had no choice but to release Coupat, albeit keeping him under ‘control judiciary,’ meaning he has to report in every day, post a 16,000 Euro bond, has to stay in the Paris area where his parents live and can’t associate with any other members of the supposed cell (all of whom had been previously released).

As for the not so extreme Left, it has been typically slow to respond to the government’s extreme treatment of Coupat; only now, after the damage has been done — and, conveniently, a week before the European parliamentary elections — are prominent leaders coming forth and denouncing a ‘judicial fiasco,’ with one, Socialist deputy Arnaud Montebourg, going so far as to demand the resignation of interior minister Michele Alliot-Marie, and the Greens, meanwhile (finally), demanding a parliamentary investigation. The French daily Liberation, which reported these belated gestures in its Friday editions, appropriately made Coupat’s liberation its cover, with the fitting headlines: ‘Coupat freed; Investigation into a fiasco.’ “One has the right, in a Democracy,” the paper’s editor Laurent Joffrin wrote, “to deliver a radical critique of democratic society, to denounce the State, to lambast a system of power that one judges oppressive. It’s even one of the conditions of the existence of a democratic society.”

The question, then, isn’t whether one supports anarchy — I don’t, because under the guise of threatening just the government, it ultimately attacks the security of us all, a contempt for civil society underlying all the fancy rhetoric — but whether one supports plurality of thought. (Where anarchy moves beyond thought into acts of violence, there’s a solution: You prosecute for the criminal acts, adding ‘conspiracy’ to the charges where that applies.) One of the many things I love about France is that it ultimately does encourage multiplicity of political thought, much more than my own country. At the primary school down the street from me — as at the schools throughout Paris which will also serve as voting places next Sunday — 27 metal panels with messages from 27 different political parties with candidates for the European parliamentary elections are on display, the Socialists falling about in the middle. (When I was the student member of the San Francisco Board of Education 30 years ago, supposedly apolitical school system authorities accused me of being a ‘radical Socialist’ just for denouncing planned program cuts.) In the last French presidential election, 11 parties presented candidates in the first of two rounds. In the last U.S. presidential election and in U.S. elections in general, there are essentially two parties, one marginally to the Left and one extremely to the Right of the political center. Yes, there’s a Green Party and there’s even now a Socialist member of the Senate, but unlike in France, there aren’t any rules assuring equal advertising time for and thus equal exposure to the Greens and other ‘minor’ party candidates — indeed, the Democrats, Republicans, and major television networks have repeatedly colluded to exclude candidates from any other parties from the presidential debates. So the question isn’t whether, absent actual proof of illegal acts, one agrees with anarchists like Julien Coupat, the question is whether one wants a society that prizes freedom of ideas.

39 with a bullet

Could any day have been more perfectly Paris than this one, or rather the one that started at 4 p.m. yesterday in the heights of Belleville, spent two hours in the Andre Malraux library in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-pres with its patron saint, Boris Vian, had a 7 p.m. thermos coffee staring up at the fountain Delacroix’s admirers had erected for him in the Luxembourg Gardens, paused to watch two mimes performing in this week-end’s Mime in May festival rehearse “Le Mort du Signe” in the Luxembourg’s bandstand, took its time at pal Luc’s bookstand on the Right Bank of the Seine under the watchful eyes of 100 year war hero Etienne Marcel, and finished with a late night picnic with Luc on a marble bench on the Ile St. Louis looking at the light reflected in the Seine and across at Notre Dame? No really, could any day be more perfectly Paris?

I used to be sad that Boris Vian died at just 39 years old, ten minutes into a film version of his infamous “J’irai cracher sur vos tombs” novel which he wasn’t happy about. But after perusing the “Real Boris” exhibition at the Malraux library, I realized that Vian had not just one heckuva full life but several before he left us 50 years ago next month. Wrote about a dozen books, plus contributed regular jazz and other columns, plus played a mean trumpet or, as he preferred, trompinet, acted as a general jazz impresario, famously welcoming Duke Ellington into this country in 1948, made several movies, including one which, never mind that it featured him tossing knives at cardboard cut-outs of keystone cops, was funded by the Higher Education Ministry. And on top of that, he wrote 500 songs! (His singing career, by contrast, was short; his one tour was cut short by veterans who objected to his song “The Desserteur.”) In his free time, he translated Chandler and others into French and co-founded the society of Pataphysiques, which held regular parties on the connected terraces of Vian and Jacques Prevert. It was almost as if, learning at 15 that he had a serious artery problem, Vian knew he had little time and packed as many lives as possible into his stay on Earth. He’d already had a rich childhood, living next door to the son of Edmund Rostand and with Yehudi Menuhin as a playmate. Also coté personal, his second and last wife, Ursula Kubler, danced for Bejart and Petit.

After a couple of hours with Vian, I strolled over to the Luxembourg. Instead of my usual refuge the Fountain de Medicis, I stopped at the Delacroix Fountain, and it was there I realized: Life is too short not to spend more of it in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Then at 8 p.m., the Sun still shining brilliantly, it was down a teeming St. Michel, across the Ile de Cité to Luc’s stand opposite the rear of the Hotel de Ville. I haven’t written about Luc before because I feel that by doing so, I’m turning our relationship into fodder for another tale of a typique Parisian, which prompts the question: How much is his metier a factor, on my side, of our friendship? That I think it’s cool to have a buddy who’s a bouquiniste, which thus immerses me in the fabric of an eternal Paris? But maybe that’s okay; on his side, maybe my being an American in Paris is part of the pull. Enough angst; it is cool to be so immersed in this vanishing part of life of traditional Paris. Vanishing, yes, because notwithstanding the myth of ‘the romance of the bouquiniste,’ it’s a tough metier. During the winter months, Luc has another boulot. When it rains, he can’t open his stand. When it’s sunny, he stays open late. As we slowly made our way to the Ile (it wasn’t until two hours after I met Luc that we finally arrived at a miraculously unclaimed bench), Luc explained to the friend of another bouquiniste at whose stand we’d stopped to catch up, and who asked what his specialty was, that he used to sell just art books but got tired of seeing them sit there unsold and unappreciated. (And Luc’s prices, by the way, are great; I got a complete collection of Vian’s jazz writings for just three Euros.)

So many workers in different sectors have been complaining the last two years, and not always with reasons; the punky young doctors who don’t want to be forced to install themselves in the country and petit villages, never mind that these villages need them; the train workers who seem to go on strike once per month, with absolutely no conscience about how train stoppages can strand people in the country or commuting workers in the city; and worse of all, the university and high school students, who seem to think it’s a game,their singing manifs seeming more like parties or football 0rallies. Yet the bouquinistes just quietly go about upholding a fundamental tenet of French tradition, a way of life — and a literary one — but that’s hardly sustaining, with no complaints. I think they should get a subvention, in recognition of how essential they are to the firmament.

Danny le Rouge ne rougé pas

As I was wandering along the rue Belgrand off the rue de Pyrenees Saturday, lost in the world’s longest outdoor market, a flyer pasted to a telephone pole caught my eye: Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a.k.a. Danny le Rouge, leader of the May ‘68 student riots in Paris, and lead candidate for Europe Ecology a.k.a. the Greens for the Ile de France in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections (what does that parliament actually DO, by the way? It doesn’t seem to be able to impeach the betises of Brussels, nor permitted to propose new laws.) would be speaking in my neighborhood that afternoon, in a ‘debate’ on the topic “L’outre-mer c’est aussi l’Europe.”

L’outre mer or outer Ocean isn’t actually in Europe, being constituted by French domaines and territories like Martinique, Guadalupe, the Ile of Reunion and Guyane. It’s also sometimes referred to as the DOM-TOM, which I think stands for domaines outre mere and territories outre-mer. They’re former slave colonies in which, in the eyes of some — notably many of those who struck for two months earlier this year to protest high prices — the lighter-skinned descendants of slave-owners now own most of what’s ownable even if they constitute a minority of the population, and the darker-skinned descendants of slaves work for them and have to buy their over-priced goods at stores owned by the descendants of their ancestors’ slave-masters. In other words, the DOM-TOM’s are a relic of colonialism.

If that wasn’t enough, even though they’re not in Europe, the DOM-TOM countries, or at least the DOM, are also strapped by Brussels, a.k.a. the European Commission. So, as one representative explained at the debate Saturday, a DOM country can find itself bound by, say, different rules of the Ocean than the island right next door.

Danny le Rouge showed up an hour late for the debate in a small club here in the trés cosmopolitan 20th arrondisement of Paris, in time to hear some of this and to deliver a rather pat polemic (“Europe needs to take a look at the ex-colonies.” Duh!) which began by his admitting that he’d actually never been to any DOM or TOM countries. It was also a bit bizarre to hear the most famous student leader of the 1960s this side of Mario Savio and Tom Hayden excuse a memory lapse by a reference to Alzheimer’s.

I’d have been curious to learn what Danny the Rouge thinks of his putative descendants, the students who for four months this Spring were not content to just boycott school themselves, in a vague protest of new policies proposed by the government including autonomy for the universities (uh, what’s wrong with that?), no, they had to BLOCK access to classes by any other students — many of whose parents had paid dearly for the privilege of an education for their children — even those not in accord with them. (Whatever happened to Democracy?) This so-called movement seems a perversion of May ‘68, with, from what I’ve seen on t.v. and heard on the radio of the manifs, the students seeing it as just one big protest party.

Out of the past

“Je ne suis que ‘pour le moment,’ comme je le chant. Je me passioné pour l’air du temps, pour le succes de l’heure, pour l’esprit de l’instant.”

– Juliet Greco, Para Vendu weekly newspaper, May 22, 2009

Of all my collections, my assemblage of Pastis 51 carafes, ashtrays, glasses, key-chains, serving trays, ice-tongs, and mirrors is emblematic of how for eight years (at least) I’ve taken refuge in a secure past — not even my own — to avoid the risks of trying to secure a vivant present, specifically with someone else. I don’t even like Pastis, except as a traditional Frenchy thng in which to indulge now and again, especially now that I live in the south (when I’m not in Paris). But one day at a vide grenier (literally: empty the attic; kind of like a neighborhood-wide garage sale) I found an orange Pastis 51 carafe at a bargain price and bought it intending it to be a gift for one of my brothers the next time he visited; as it was plastic, I figured it would be good for travelling. Five years later, the old stone house where I live in an isolated village in southwest France is crowded with the Pastis 51 memorabilia enumerated above, and its sister memorabilia from two other Pastis marks, one gentiane brand, Aveze, Pelforth brune and various Belgian beers, Martini, etc., etc. Some of the stuff I’ve found in eight years of ‘chine-ing’ at the vide greniers (literally, empty the attic; kind of like neighborhood-wide garage sales) of France is actually useful: My raclette maker (I left two behind in Paris when I moved to an isolated village in Southwest France in 2007), my fondue maker, my vintage churro maker with a Franco-era family on the box happily eating the fried dough, the three thermoses I just got in Paris for 5 Euros, two of them so vintage they’re closed by corks, and the three mixer-babies I got, hand-held blenders with various attachments.

But….

My collection is not life.

It’s a museum in which I’m interred.

And which scares women away. (I thought it might impress French women with my engagement in their own history; in the past two days two French lady friends have confirmed that my ’stuff’ is more likely to send the messages that I live in the past and that I don’t have room for them.)

So when I saw that glass Pastis 51 carafe on sale at a bargain price at a vide grenier in the Latin Quarter last week-end, I passed.

It was the best deal I never made.