I used to go to Paris a lot when I was young, a dozen visits in my late teens
and early twenties, and then in a further 20 years I've only been another
four or five times. So I tend to associate Paris with youth, its pleasures,
but also its pitfalls: lugging a rucksack across an absurdly wide street;
making a coffee last an hour under the sneer of a waiter; suspecting that
your girlfriend might prefer the company of the Left Bank boys to your own.
Perhaps that's why I stopped going.
Everything's different when you have a bit of cash in your pocket, though. And
everything's different, too, when you have your ten-year-old son in tow. My
wife and daughter went skiing; my son said that he wanted to go to Paris.
Off we went.
We stayed just off the Place de la Concorde and didn't stray far. Sam took one
look at the Eiffel Tower and said: “I'm not going up there.” Having seen the
queue, I was relieved. It was a similar story at the Musée D'Orsay, a long
line of schoolchildren putting us off.
Crossing the Seine, however, we managed to get into the Louvre with a minimal
wait. My son appraised the controversial glass pyramid at the entrance.
“What would happen if you threw a rock at that?” he asked. “That policeman
over there would machinegun you,” I said. I half meant it: those gendarmes
have always looked trigger happy to me.
Sam surprised me by managing an hour before gallery fatigue set in. We did the
Mona Lisa, naturally, and, equally naturally, he asked what all the fuss was
about. I couldn't enlighten him, though we did agree the fast-rope down from
the overhead helicopter would be the best way to steal it.
“Hang on, though,” warned Sam, “there's bound to be alarms in that skylight!”
That's my boy, I said, ruffling his hair.
We spent quite a while in front of the Raft of the Medusa. Géricault's
melodramatic masterpiece impressed my son, chiefly because he had seen its
creator's grave at the Père-Lachaise cemetery the previous day.
Liberty Leading the People also caught his attention, mostly for the same
reason, although obviously the bare-breastedness was also a factor.
Delacroix is buried a little farther up the hill from Géricault, or Gerry
Cott, as Sam called him. Mind you, I'm in no position to criticise his
French, having tried to order a beer and a “potato” juice in one café.
Although I had to drag him (“Why are we going to see dead people?”), the
outing to Père-Lachaise was one of the highlights of our three-day stay.
Once there, on a serene Sunday afternoon, Sam was delighted by the graffiti
covering Oscar Wilde's tomb and got into the spirit of it.
In fact, catching the morbid campiness of the occasion, he became quite the
ham, insisting on laying a spray of pink carnations in remembrance of Wilde,
of whom he had never heard until ten minutes previously. The word gay is
currently ubiquitous as a playground pejorative. I explained that here was a
gay man who had been locked up, ruined, and was pleased to see a flicker of
guilt cross my son's face.
We bought a map and made a game of visiting as many celebrity stiffs as
possible. Indeed, as an introduction to French culture, there is no better
place to start than Père-Lachaise: besides Gerry Cott and Delacroix, we paid
our respects to Piaf, Bizet, Caillebotte, Molière and Balzac, plus of course
James Douglas Morrison, 1943-1971, and Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the
pharmacist who persuaded the French it was OK to eat potatoes.
I hummed snatches of LA Woman, La Vie En Rose and the Toreador aria from
Carmen, Sam told me to shut up and busied himself plotting the best route.
The spring sunshine, the weathered stone, the ancient trees, it really was
extremely companionable. By the end, Sam had become used to the notion of
creative types dying tragically young. We would arrive at another tortured
soul and see his dates. “Drugs?” Sam would suggest, “Drink? Murder?”
After the most famous cemetery in the world, the Parc de la Villette was a
disappointment. It was billed as a science park, but we struggled to find
any science, though, to be fair, all that trudging around between the
headstones had taken its toll. We shared a taxi back to the centre with a
nice man from Valence, showing his son around as I was showing mine. I tried
to split the fare, but he wouldn't hear of it. “You are guests here in my
country,” he said, waving my euros away.
It struck me that, as with New Yorkers, Parisians may be in danger of losing
their hard-won reputation for rudeness. An indulgent smile from a waiter,
the charm of the old boy who rents out toy sailing boats in the Tuileries -
the happy encounters easily outweighed the irritable ones. Aside from the
Taleban, wealthy Parisiennes surely form the most frightening subculture in
the whole world.
Certainly, and again like New York, over the past 20 years Paris has become
slower, cleaner and far less aggressive than London. It lacks some energy
and bustle as a result, but to be treated as a fellow member of the human
race is compensation enough.
Old habits persist, however. One taxi driver asked me whether the weather was
as nice as this en Angleterre. I said, “mais non, c'est plus froid”, and he
gave a huge, inexpressibly contented sigh, rejoicing in the thought of the
damned English shivering on their murky little island.
Later in the journey he took offence at something I or Sam did or said. It may
be dissipating, but there is still that latent sense with the French that
you're breaking some unexplained, unknowable rule. They do pursed lips,
huffy sighs and impatient exhales better than any nation on earth.
What else? Well, we watched a lot of films and ate a great deal of steak and
chips. Sam had a quarter glass of red wine each night, though it has since
grown in the retelling to half a bottle. He learnt the difference between
tartare, bleu, à point and bien cuit. Conversation rarely faltered.
“If you had a whole bottle of Tabasco sauce, would you literally explode?”
“What would happen if we ran off without paying?” and, most often, in shops,
in restaurants, in cafés, “is this coming out of my money or yours?” Mine,
of course, but it was well worth it.
NEED TO KNOW
Eurostar (0870 5186186, www.eurostar.com
) offers return fares from London to Paris from £59.
Stay Hotel Sofitel le Faubourg, 15 rue Boissy d'Anglas, 8-ième (0871 6630625, www.sofitel.com),
has double rooms from £330.
