We came in through one of the portes of Paris, the doors that are now merely exits from the peripheral expressway but that still keep the names of the real gates of the old walled city. It was probably the portes d’Orleans. I saw a girl lean over to kiss a friend on a stopped motorbike on the cheek, twice, here and then there. The trees cast patterned light on the street. We went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had the best meal I had ever eaten, and most of all, nobody who lived there seemed to notice or care. The beauty and the braised trout alike were just part of life, the way we do things here.
We had spent the previous three days in London. Though the taxis were black and the buses red and Regent’s Park green, the familiar street names seemed curiously to belong to another civilization, as though the city had been occupied once by another and more vivid, imperial race and had then been turned over to the pallid, gray people on the streets, who ate sandwiches that turned up at the edges. Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed—mysterious, uninviting.
We settled in for a long winter. While my parents taught, I spent most of my time going to the movies with my cousin Philippe. You are supposed to be in love with Paris and Philippe and I were both in love. I was in love with Jacqueline Bisset, and he was in love with Dominique Sanda. We went to the movies all the time, looking for them both. I remember finding a fifth-run movie theater someplace in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, deep in a poor Algerian neighborhood, just in order to see Jacqueline’s brief, heart-searing part in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.
Almost incidentally, in love with Jacqueline Bisset, I fell in love with Paris. Paris—and this is the tricky thing—though it is always and indubitably itself, is also in its nature a difficult city to love for itself alone. What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you. A city of vast and impersonal set piece architecture, it is also a city of small and intricate, improvised experience. My favorite architectural detail in Paris is the little entrance up the rue de Seine, a tiny archway where, as I have since found out, you can push a poussette right through and get to the grand Institut de France. You aren’t looking at it; and then you and the poussette are in it, right in the driveway where the academicians go. For a moment you are it. The Institut belongs to you. Ten steps more and you are on the pont des Arts. The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small—to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways—to get it.
What is true for academicians is true for adolescents with a fixation on Jacqueline Bisset. I saw Paris out of the corner of my eye, on my way to the movies, and so a love for Paris came to be one of the strongest emotions I possess. In addition, my father’s friend the literary critic and pioneer deconstructionist Eugenio Donato brought me to a seminar that Roland Barthes was giving that spring. I didn’t understand a word. (A few years later I met one of the French students in the class, and found out that she hadn’t understood a word either.) Then we went home, back to Montreal, where my brothers and sisters returned to that French academy, and I kept my French sharp by reading the sports pages every day about the Montreal Canadiens.
Two years after that first year in Paris, I used the tiny lever of my knowledge of the city to induce—I still won’t say deceive—a girl a real girl, I had fallen in love with into running away to Paris with me. Martha, who became and, twenty-five years later, remains – and I write these words with a stunned disbelief, shared only by her mother—my wife, loved Paris as much as I did, even though many of the advertised attractions—the seminar with my friend Roland Barthes, for instance—that I had promised her were suspiciously missing from our trip. If she noticed this or was bothered by it, she hasn’t mentioned it yet. We spent a happy week in the Hotel Welcome on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The hidden humanism of the classical style, the idea of the intellectual as magician and stylist, and sex in a hotel room: These were the things I took away from a childhood spent continually in a made-up Paris and an adolescence spent, fitfully, in the real one.
For a long time New York intervened. Then, in the late eighties, we began to think about Paris again. We sat on the deck of a rented house in Cape Cod and, listening to old Charles Trenet records, thought… why not? (This was neither a hard leap nor an interesting one, since the Trenet songs we were listening to had the theme of Paris pretty much to the exclusion of every other human concept.) We watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg over and over. We visited Paris whenever we could, as often as we could. We weren’t Francophiles because we didn’t know anything about France, and still don’t. We were just crazy about Paris.
When our son, Luke Auden, was born, in September 1994, we knew that we would have to go to Paris soon, or we wouldn’t go at all. In five years, everybody told us, he would no longer be “portable.” When we were in Paris, we had hung around the parks and gardens, watching the carousels turn and the children play and thinking, This would be a nice place to be a child or have one. We also saw all the aspects of a New York childhood that looked less delightful. You would see the five-year-olds at a friend’s house already lost in the American media, simultaneously listening to a Walkman, playing with a Game Boy, and watching a video on the VCR. Perhaps, we thought—however foolishly, however “unrealistically”—we could protect him from some of that if he spent his first five years in Paris.
“You can’t run away from (a) reality, (b) American culture, (c) yourself,” our friends all said, compositely. “But you can run away,” we said under our breaths, and we did. We thought we might stay for good, but we knew that we would certainly stay for the last five years of the century; “We’ll stay till the millennium,” we could say grandly, and mean it cautiously. The New Yorker, where I worked, was ready to hear what I had to say about Parisian scenes and, more important, was willing to keep sending non-Parisian subjects, from Groucho Marx to the Starr Report, my way too, which let us pay Parisian rates. Martha, for her part, had become a filmmaker, and she had the great portable occupation of the late twentieth century, a screenplay to write (and rewrite and rewrite again). So we went.
The New Yorker has had lots of good writers in place in Paris, but it was James Thurber, whose blind eyes in a photograph on my desk stare at me every morning, whose writing moved me most. Thurber, though he hardly spoke a word of French, wrote once that the surface of manners in France seemed to him the most beautiful in the world, and he was right. The romance of Paris was my subject, and if it is a moony or even a loony one, it is at least the one I get, a little.