+Paris Impressions

 

Paris Impressions

 

It was my first time in Paris. I was booked into a little hotel on the Rue de l’école de medecine. As I walked down the narrow street towards the boulevard, someone tapped me on the shoulder and I was feeling ill. Startled, I realized the question was in English and the spacer an old friend also attending the conference I had travelled to France to attend. You look dizzy, he said. Not at all, but all those interesting balconies and shutters, I am fascinated. He laughed.

The next morning quite early I went out of the hotel and started tow all down to the Seine. It was still half-dark, as happens in winter, there was a bluish-purple mist. I walked down one side of the river for nearly an hour, then crossed the bridge and walked back. It was true. Paris is magical, a city of misty light and muffled silence.

One day, sauntering along in front of Notre Dame, I thought to myself that lonely a big city could be even with large crowds of tourists moving along all around. Then suddenly out of a small group of lycée students stepped a man grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a proper kiss on both cheeks.  It was my friend from Vichy taking his class on an excursion. Maybe the world isn’t so big and unfriendly as supposed.

Seated with my friend William on the steps leading up a monument, I saw a tour bus draw up, stop, and disgorge a few dozen Japanese tourists,. They gathered around William and myself and started taking pictures. Then the tour guide came over and said, “Thank you, typical Frenchmen in Pairs.”

I am always nervous and shy when I come to a new city. When I arrive at the destination, it takes a while to be used to the place and, unless someone takes me out, I sit alone, quietly, letting the precious time go by. Then I venture out into the street and in gradually expanding stages explore the neighborhood.

Two things I could never bring myself to do in what is probably the most typical of Parisian activities. One is to sit at a small café table on the footpath, sip coffee and read a newspaper. First if all, I can’t stand the taste or smell of coffee. Second, it goes against the grain of some puritanical part of me to spend time all alone hovering over a drink of any kind. Two is to wait patiently for someone to come meet me at that café.  I am too nervous and get up and walk around and around the street until a friend comes. I am too afraid of missing out, trough I have to keep moving further and further away from our rendez-vous.

One of the lovely experiencers on the Paris metro is the performance of small groups of buskers, usually composed of various ethnicities and nationalities.  They enter the carriage, set up their instruments, play, and then exit at the next station. They make a few francs (or Euros now) and move on.

Forty odd years after I did some teaching at the Sorbonne, in what I was told the first cycle of a university degree, I have no idea what I was supposed to do. My friends told me it was easy and gave me a sort of student handbook called a vade-mecum. Though I read it many times, nothing made any sense. In the class during “travaux dirigés”, when students form into small groups and make presentations, I could not figure out what their topics were supposed to be; nor even how I was to mark them for their work. When I asked my friends, they didn’t seem to understand what the problem was.  Two memories stand out. The first as the day I arrived in class and there were all the students in their places. My watch said there was still a half hour to go, so I sat and read the International Herald Tribune for a while, until one young man came to me and asked why I wasn’t teaching. Then he explained that this eas the day daylight savings time began.  The second is the day when a group of young students started to give their presentations and one, a very beautiful young woman, began to blush: a deep crimson went from her forehead down the rest of the body as she sat there silently. No one else in her group or in the class seemed to notice.

Along the Seine there is the row on row of secondhand booksellers. Each book is wrapped in a heavy wax paper and taped shut. I would walk for hours from stand to stand looking at what was there. Only occasionally would I make a purchase. Not long after, when my interests had shifted, I remembered rare and wonderful treasures passed by, and now never to be bought or read,