bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 12–14
NOTE DE LA RÉDACTION : Paris, à chaque visite, nous semble immuable: ses immeubles de pierre haussmaniens, ses grands boulevards, sa tour Eiffel trônant fièrement depuis plus de 100 ans en son centre… Cependant, c’est à la lecture de textes comme celui de Mme Taylor que bout publie aujourd’hui qu’on réalise que sous ses apparences placides de vieille dame embourgeoisée, Paris grouille tout autant aujourd’hui qu’il y a 50 ans. Les enjeux qui la rendent si vibrante ont peut-être changé, mais le plaisir de la visiter, d’y habiter, de la découvrir reste toujours intact et se renouvelle à chaque passage.
Outwardly Paris seems much the same as it did more than 50 years ago. Since the construction of the Tour Montparnasse, which aroused an outcry at the time, nothing much has altered the central skyline. Neither the Pompidou Centre nor the pyramid at the Louvre rise above it and the towers at La Défense only appear on the distant horizon. But in other ways things are very different.
Fifty years ago the streets were more colourful. Many nuns were to be seen wearing the elaborate wimples of their various orders and there were also the gypsies and the street entertainers, particularly in the spring and summer. A group of jolly Dutch men used to come round and play beneath our windows, then gather up the coins which had been tossed into the street. There was even a poor dancing bear. Wreaths were still being placed at the plaques commemorating those who had been killed during the liberation of Paris and when someone died the entrance to their apartment would be covered in huge black drapes with the initials of the deceased in silver. We were there on the day of Edith Piaf’s funeral when the nearby Boulevard Suchet was thronged with thousands.
There were no supermarkets. One bought groceries either at the local market or at any one of the little stores, the pâtisserie, the fishmonger, the butcher. Some even patronized the horse butcher, marked with its distinctive horse’s head. Not all the merchants were patient with foreigners speaking poor French. Especially at the market one’s ungrammatical requests would be corrected peremptorily. But some were very gracious. Our local butcher went to great lengths to explain unknown cuts of meat, instruct me how to cook them and even enquire later as to my success. The fishmonger across the street prepared plates of oysters all ready to eat for Sunday lunch. The produce was wonderful and varied with the season. In spring there was the first white asparagus, in summer the fraises des bois, now almost unobtainable. On the first of May bunches of lily of the valley would be on sale at almost every street corner. But for foreign tastes a few things were missing. Peanut butter, an essential as far as my toddlers were concerned, could only be bought at a health store, and foreign cheeses such as cheddar were hard to obtain. The British embassy ran a commissary, not surprisingly to the scorn of the French, where one could obtain delicacies such as Scotch marmelade and plum pudding. Our children hated the local milk and so we got a weekly supply imported from Holland for others who shared our problem.
If food often seemed quite expensive the restaurants – at least at the time of a strong Canadian dollar – were remarkably cheap. Unlike today, no menus were in English.
Not long after we arrived we celebrated a birthday lunch at the Grand Vefour, one of the handful of three star restaurants, famous for having been patronized by Collette, who lived beside it. The price was much what it had cost us for a meal at La Touraine, then one of Ottawa’s two rather modest French restaurants. A couple of years later we treated friends who were leaving Paris to dinner at Lasserre. Three courses, a good bottle of wine, cigars for the men and a view of the stars, when the famous roof was drawn back, cost three hundred francs, about today’s equivalent of their lunch for one. We still have the bill. If great restaurants like these seemed reasonably priced the more modest establishments were a great bargain. At one near us a remarkably good meal including wine cost about $5 for two. Any suggestion that in 10 years time there would be a McDonalds on the Champs-Elysées would have been treated as the ravings of a lunatic.
Just as superb meals were a bargain so too were stylish clothes. Even the great houses were almost in reach when they had their sales and it was easy for junior diplomats to get tickets to their shows. There were fewer celebrities seated in the front rows, though I once discovered that the woman sitting near me who looked remarkably like Ingrid Bergman was indeed the famous actress. For the impecunious all kinds of little shops were busy emulating the latest fashion, turning out copies which were not too different from the original. On a street nearby stood just such a boutique, which my husband passed on his way to work and where the owner used to lie in wait to tempt him with her latest offerings. Thanks to this I acquired two charming Chanel type suits. People were more conservative about what they wore. No woman would have gone downtown wearing trousers and hats and gloves were common, there were white ones for small girls; children were dressed very elaborately even in the park. One amusing memory is of a beautifully turned out little girl being admonished “lève-toi”, every time she tried to kneel in the sandbox and risk soiling her lovely dress. If ever a stranger came to the door of our apartment and found one of our children running around barefoot, they expressed great concern at this evidence of disarray. Nowadays it is all sensible jeans and t-shirts.
It was the best of times but also in some ways the worst. Then as now France suffered from the burden of its colonial past. Not long after we arrived there was a call telling us to stay in the house. An Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) regiment was said to be arriving at Orly and Général De Gaulle had called on the citizens of Paris to go out and prevent the paratroopers from entering the city. In the end it was all a false alarm, and this quixotic defence was never put into action. But from then on the situation in Algeria, and the bitterness of those who thought the Général had betrayed them by negotiating independence, would affect everyday life. The OAS, the organization radically opposed to Algerian independence, began setting off small bombs, known as plastiques all over Paris. They would cunningly set off a series at one time in a particular district thus giving people the impression that these events were more numerous than was the case and that the OAS was everywhere, just as their slogan claimed. These bombs were modest compared to today and mainly shattered glass and damaged the facade of buildings. A frequent sight were little trucks carrying large sheets of plate glass to replace these which had been blown out the night before. One day my au pair was walking with the children just as a plastique went off in the building beside them. A friendly concierge rushed out to ply the children with candies to comfort them. But no such consolation was necessary. Home they came reporting enthusiastically on a wonderful outing which had involved not only treats but a splendid explosion. Not all of us had the same reaction. Once just as I put my hand on a door knob on the Champs Elysée a bomb went off in the next building and I had the irrational feeling that I had somehow triggered it. But these were gentler times. The first serious human casualty, a child disfigured by flying glass, and a large explosion near the Renault factory, which injured many on their way to work, caused such widespread indignation that the OAS abandoned their tactics.
There were of course the other Algerians, not the pieds noirs, the European settlers, but the many Arabs who had come to Paris and who were not well treated by the French police. Ironically some had come because they had supported the French authorities and now feared they would suffer for that under the new regime. One Sunday morning I was made aware of what happened to many of them. A friend had lost a bracelet near Notre-Dame and I agreed to accompany her to the local police station in the Marais in the hopes that someone might have turned it in. We took along my three-year-old. To our horror just inside the station stood a large cage filled with dark-skinned men, who had been arrested during the night. They were perhaps luckier than they knew because years later it was discovered that quite a few of their compatriots had ended up in the Seine. But what a shocking sight for an innocent child. As with the plastique, however, we were quite wrong. For her, the idea of putting adults in a cage as if at the zoo, was an intriguing possibility. She returned to recount this fascinating experience to her older brother. Many French sympathized with the aims of the OAS if not with the means it employed. I remember a lunch given by our kindly neighbours, a retired military couple. Somehow the conversation turned to Algeria – had we in our innocence somehow provoked this – and this led to an embarrassing argument. No doubt similar conversations are taking place today about how to deal with France’s large Muslim population.
There were other important issues as well as Algeria. Reconciliation between France and Germany had been initiated by De Gaulle and Adenauer. The famous comedian Henri Tissot milked their meeting for all it was worth. A small stocky man, he amazingly transformed himself into De Gaulle as he bent forward from the stage of the small chansonnier, where he was appearing, and pumped the hands of the front row muttering a greeting in execrable German. Not everyone welcomed this new friendship. The war and the occupation were still fresh in many people’s minds, and one friend told me that she only spent time with those who like her had supported the Résistance. With De Gaulle in power some of his early supporters had been well rewarded. We were a beneficiary of his generosity since we rented our apartment from an admiral who had been among the first to bring his ship over to the Free French and who now resided in an official apartment at the Ministère de la Marine.
So Paris 50 years ago was rather different. Yet in many ways it remains the same, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, its citizens renowned for their wit and elegance, their love of language – how my modest little grocer would turn a phrase – and their supreme self confidence that there is no better place to live.
Mary Taylor is the wife of a retired Foreign Service Officer and the author of If Only I had Known and A Black Mark: The Japanese-Canadians in World War II.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 12–14. Read the rest of this issue →
