Paris at the End of the World Read online

  In 1900, Oscar Wilde, hiding in France after his release from jail, succumbed to meningitis in a hotel on Paris’s rue des Beaux Arts that was not only decorated in appalling taste—“This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes,” he said, “or I do”—but also overpriced. “I am dying as I lived,” he joked, “beyond my means.” That was true of France in general. Weakened by lax government, financial mismanagement, and institutional graft, the country was sliding toward bankruptcy. But that just made life in Paris more exhilarating.

  To see the end approaching like a distant train but do nothing to step off the tracks has always held, for some intellectuals, a perverse appeal. In Paris during the French Revolution of 1789 and in Berlin and Vienna in 1933 under the threat of Nazism, artists and aristocrats felt the same delicious languor—Cocteau’s “concern with something other than life and death.”

  In Austria during the early 1930s, the finest theatrical talent of his time, Max Reinhardt, ended each season of the Salzburg Festival with a midnight soirée at his château, Leopoldskron. As the horse-drawn carriages drew away at three or four in the morning, he would whisper to a few close friends, “Stay for an hour.” The playwright Carl Zuckmayer recalled, “That hour often stretched on to five or six in the morning. Once, at a late hour, I heard Reinhardt say almost with satisfaction, ‘The nicest part of these festival summers is that each one may be the last.’ After a pause, he added, ‘You can feel the taste of transitoriness on your tongue.’ ”

  Not all Parisians were aristocrats and artists. Most never saw the gratin—the upper crust. Historian Jean-Pierre Gueno has listed some of the concerns of ordinary people in the years leading up to the war; concerns that seldom make it into social histories, so seductive is the world of the salon and the atelier.

  “It was the time of the Montmartre painters,” he writes, “and the Bateau-Lavoir.” The Bateau-Lavoir was a studio in an old Montmartre factory, shared by Picasso and Braque, and so named because in bad weather it creaked like the floating laundries moored along the Seine. It was the time of “the flooding of the Seine”—in 1910, the Seine overflowed and paralyzed the city for a month—“the passage of Halley’s comet; the appearance of the first tangos; the first music halls; the inauguration of the Gaumont Palace [a cinema] and the Vél d’Hiv”—the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor stadium that housed bike races, circuses, wrestling, and other sports, including events of the 1924 Olympic Games—“the theft of the Mona Lisa”—in August 1911, an Italian worker in the Louvre walked off with the Leonardo, smuggled it into Italy, and, a year later, gave himself up, along with the painting—“the end of the Bonnot gang”—an anarchist group that robbed banks between 1911 and 1913, pioneering the criminal use of automobiles; most members were imprisoned or executed in 1913—“the publication of The War of the Buttons”—Louis Pergaud’s 1912 novel about gangs of village kids who begin by cutting buttons from rivals’ clothes, then escalate to going naked—“the meeting of Yvonne de Quiévrecourt and Alain-Fournier under the trees of the Cours la Reine; the edition of Le Grand Meaulnes that only just failed to win the Prix Goncourt”—in 1905, Henri-Alban Fournier fell in love with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt while walking by the Seine; they never married, but she inspired him to write, as Alain-Fournier, his only novel, which narrowly missed achieving France’s highest literary honor—“the appearance of the first public telephone boxes; the electrification of the railways; the first Michelin road maps; the fashion for peaked caps and straw boaters; the invention of Esperanto.”

  This France was no less affected by the war—in which, as it happens, both Louis Pergaud and Alain-Fournier died. Although both Le Grand Meaulnes and La Guerre des Boutons would become classics, filmed repeatedly and never out of print, the France in which they were set, of country romances and childhood games, didn’t survive. Neither did anarchy, the political creed that drove the Bonnot gang and the Serbian assassins who, indirectly ignited the war, nor Esperanto, the synthetic language intended to break down barriers between nations. Nobody was speaking Esperanto or preaching anarchy in the trenches of the Somme. Both had gone the way of boaters and bike races. Evil, as always, proved more durable. The Vél d’Hiv flourished. Under Nazi occupation, it became a holding center for French Jews about to be deported. In 1946, it reopened as a sporting venue and operated successfully until 1958.

  8

  Has Anybody Seen Archie?

  O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate,—

  What goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate;

  For what offense the Queen of Heav’n began

  To persecute so brave, so just a man;

  Involv’d his anxious life in endless cares,

  Expos’d to wants, and hurried into wars!

  VIRGIL, The Aeneid, translated by John Dryden

  For two hundred years, the Baxters have been reluctant travelers. My ancestors arrived in Australia from Germany, Sweden, and Scotland during the nineteenth century—in some cases not without a struggle—and decided they’d gone far enough. None ever went back. My mother and father left Australia only once in their lives. In their eighties, they visited France to inspect our daughter Louise, the family’s only grandchild. Having established to their satisfaction that such a rarity could exist, they returned home and never left again.

  This tendency to put down roots and cling to them makes the experience of my grandfather, Archie Baxter, all the more puzzling. Not only did he spend three years in France between 1916 and 1919. He volunteered to do so.

  Even more mysteriously, when he returned to Australia, he refused to rejoin his wife Stella, his daughter, and his son Jack, my father, nor return to his job as a grocery salesman. Instead, he rented a house in inner Sydney and started making and selling what our skimpy family records describe only as “condiments.”

  Almost inevitably, this enterprise failed. If there is such a thing as a business gene, the Baxter DNA conspicuously lacks it. Resignedly, Archie went back to his wife and children, and a dead-end job in the grocery trade. But nostalgia for Europe infected him like a disease. The rest of his life, he was tormented, it seems, by a desire to return to France, and in particular to Paris.

  He scattered French words and phrases through his conversation, not troubling to explain why or to translate. As a boy, my father memorized these. After Archie died, he continued to use them, though with little comprehension. I learned them too. “Dans la cité des ténèbres,” my father would mumble after three or four beers, “je cherche la verité.”—In the city of darkness, I search for the truth.

  What city? What truth? He never said. The words had become a mantra.

  Another phrase was even more puzzling.

  After he sold his shop, my father built a cabin in the garden behind his home in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. Instead of the traditional names for such retreats, Mon Repos or Emoh Ruo (hint—spell it backwards), he chose a French phrase, or at least his own father’s version of it. Hearing it repeatedly, my dad came to see it as the condensation of his father’s hard-won wisdom, as well as his testament of despair. So significant did he find the words that he had a local carpenter cut out a phonetic approximation of them and hung it over the door of his retreat.

  What Archie had seemed to mumble was “San Fairy Ann.”

  “But he meant ‘Ca ne fait rien,’” said my French wife, Marie-Dominique, when I told her this story. “In English, you would say, ‘That doesn’t matter,’ or rather ‘It means nothing.’ ”

  “Yes. I know that. But why would Archie have found those words so important?”

  She shrugged. “Everyone feels that way from time to time. It is le malaise du temps.”

  I doubted that anybody in Australia ever heard of le malaise du temps, the unease of our time, let alone suffered from it. If they did, they probably thought it was the flu. The French believe everything can be explained with reference to what obtains in France. So deeply ingrained is their love of the country, its cultu
re and its language, usually lumped together as la patrimoine—heritage—that they don’t understand how alien this can appear to foreigners, particularly to those who come from less sophisticated societies.

  Even after a lifetime’s exposure to French culture, I’d found relocating there a troubling and sometimes painful experience. How much harder for the American, British, Canadian, and Australian recruits, mostly uneducated, uncultured and naïve, who flooded into Paris between 1914 and 1918. Few people could have felt more lost, more in need of a friendly word, a loving hand. For them, Paris was literally “a city of darkness,” where truth was not easily found.

  9

  The Photograph

  What’ll I do

  With just a photograph

  To tell my troubles to?

  IRVING BERLIN, “What’ll I Do?,” 1923

  When I was a child and we lived in an apartment next to the bakery in suburban Sydney, Grandfather Archie often visited us for Sunday lunch.

  I remember him vaguely, in the way one does a person who disappeared from one’s life when one was seven. He’s indistinct, a scatter of impressions: bulky, white-haired, expressionless, monosyllabic, smelling of sweat, tobacco, and age. I was too young to ask the classic question, “What did you do in the war, Grandpa?” but he probably would not have answered. With a more recent war only just ended, most Australians regarded the conflict of 1914–1918 as remote and irrelevant, best forgotten.

  Archie in the 1930s—with his wife, Stella, and his daughter Maureen (above), and on Anzac Day

  In time, I discovered that Archie volunteered for the First Australian Imperial Force in May 1916, when he was thirty-one, and sailed for France that October. I would never even have known this except that our own family, following Archie’s death in 1947, moved into the house where he and my grandmother had lived and died.

  A single-story cream-painted Victorian villa in solid Sydney sandstone, it stood behind a fence of spear-shaped iron railings on a hillside street of identical houses in the inner Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. My father and uncle inherited it jointly. Since housing was scarce, they decided to move in and share it. Disaster. Arguments between the families soon escalated into outright warfare. In the great tradition of political compromise, they partitioned the territory. Our family got the three front rooms, and my uncle the rest. Kitchen and bathroom were common ground. Any communication took place through third parties or via terse notes.

  I blamed the house. From the start, it depressed me. I couldn’t forget my grandmother’s corpse laid out in her old bedroom, white hair a nimbus around her head, face set in the weary half-smile that was her most common expression in life. The mustiness of a century hovered in the high-ceilinged rooms with their plaster moldings and varnished picture rails. Bedside cabinets held those bits of medical equipment—chipped enamel, crumbling red rubber—that furnish props for the last years of the aged.

  The parlor was dominated by a large framed black-and-white print of Millais’ The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower, 1483, showing the doomed boys, pale and long-haired, fearfully clutching one another as they await murder by Richard III. What sort of person hangs such an image on his wall? It said a good deal about Archie’s state of mind. Even more sinister was a black cast-iron doorstop in the form of a grimacing hook-nosed Mister Punch. In every way—style, shape, weight—it was made to bash someone’s head in.

  Only my baby sister was unaffected by the house’s brooding vibe. Finding the worn linoleum ideal for sliding, she rowed herself along on her diapered behind with a surprising turn of speed. We got used to her skimming down the hall and cornering expertly into the living room. Those of us with more weight, however, had problems. Dry rot was everywhere. Once, my foot broke through the boards, engulfing my leg to the thigh. The instant during which it dangled there, in what spider-infested dark I could only imagine, became a special horror I never forgot.

  The musty closets and towering wardrobes in mahogany and oak hid tin trunks, rusty and dented, inside which were relics of Archie’s war. One contained pieces of uniform, badges and buttons, and puttees in khaki wool. It also included a German military belt embossed with the slogan Gott Mitt Uns—God is with us. Our father recalled, expressionlessly, that it was with this belt that he had been beaten as a child.

  Another disclosed more militaria, including a pistol, a few rounds of rifle ammunition, and a brown felt hat. Australia has no more potent military symbol than the slouch hat, which is still worn today. A leather chin strap keeps it at a casual tilt, or “slouch,” toward the left ear. The brim is turned up on the right side and secured to the crown by a badge. Some regiments added a plume from that oddest of Australia’s birds, the flightless ostrich-like emu. Though an English cartoonist suggested that Anzacs wore the hat with the brim turned up since it allowed them to press their cheeks closer to that of the girls they met, the hat had an iconic significance emphasized in a patriotic song of the 1940s.

  It’s a brown slouch hat with the side turned up, and it means the world to me.

  It’s the symbol of our Nation—the land of liberty.

  And as soldiers they wear it, how proudly they bear it, for all the world to see.

  Just a brown slouch hat with the side turned up, heading straight for victory.

  We also found the photograph.

  Most families have at least one such image. Going to war, like getting married, was a rite of passage. It demanded a formal portrait. “Something to remember him by,” murmured relatives, “Just in case . . .” When the soldier returned, it wasn’t unusual to have another taken before he returned definitively to civilian life. (“You look so handsome in your uniform.”) Certain studios offered a confidential service to families whose son or father died unphotographed. They supplied a man of similar build, wearing the correct uniform, to pose with the bereaved relatives. In the darkroom, his face was replaced, not always convincingly, with the dead man’s features, taken from a snapshot.

  As usual with studio portraits, the photographer posed Archie and Stella against a painted backcloth. Ironically, considering what I later learned of Archie’s war service, it shows a scene in rural France. Almost hidden by a grove of trees and separated from them by a stone balustrade, a château in the style of the Second Empire stands complacently in a landscape straight out of Corot.

  Archie, in full uniform, including tightly wound puttees and peaked cap, sits on a hard wooden chair. Stella stands behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his arm. Wearing a wide plumed hat, ankle-length black dress, and small, round spectacles, she radiates will.

  Did I imagine it or does she appear to be holding Archie down? And surely his expressionless stare and the clenched fists in his lap convey, more poignantly than any written or spoken word, the mute appeal, “Get me out of here!”

  Our family was convinced that experiences in the trenches explained Archie’s erratic postwar behavior. Some believed he’d been wounded. Others suggested shell shock—today’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

  My father hinted at a less medical reason. When I married Marie-Dominique and moved to Paris, he confided, with a significant wink, “If you see anyone on the streets who looks like you, the resemblance might be more than coincidence.” Though I pressed him for details, he offered none. But the very thought that I might have unacknowledged uncles or aunts in France made the prospect of living in Paris even more enticing.

  10

  Strangers in Paradise

  As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  Tourism began with the end of World War I. Before then, few people traveled far from where they were born. Emigration was a last resort, contemplated only in cases of cataclysmic social breakdown, such as the famine brought on by the 1845 Irish potato blight or the 1880s pogroms against Russian Jews.

  The handful of Americans, Australians, Canadians, or Russians who came to Paris before 1914 did so for one of thre
e reasons: they were rich, they were poor, or they had something to hide.

  The rich were drawn to France as a flower is drawn to the sun. An American heiress or Russian princess would order her wedding dress and trousseau from such couturiers as Paquin, Worth, or Poiret and travel to Paris for fittings. At the same time, she might commission a set of silverware from Puiforcat or a service of Limoges porcelain, and perhaps acquire a French chef or ladies’ maid.

  While she did so, her father and fiancé would browse the art accumulated by successive monarchies and add to their own collections. If sportsmen, they watched thoroughbreds race at Longchamp, or hunted deer and pheasant in the forest of Rambouillet. At night, they ate and drank at Paris’s restaurants or enjoyed the company of its women, the most beautiful in the world, and the most skilled at giving pleasure.

  Another kind of hunter, or rather huntress, came to Paris hoping to acquire an aristocrat of her own. Watching throngs of heiresses cruise toward France aboard the Cunard and White Star liners, one wit christened them “the fishing fleet.” Nothing flattered these nouveaux riches more than a European title. It put a shine on the millions earned in mining, railroads, or beer, while, to an impecunious French aristo, such a marriage could mean a new roof for the family château, a town house in Paris, a box at the Opéra, and a carriage to ride in the Bois de Boulogne.

  A few such couples, after a while, even grew to like one another, but most exploited the marriage for all they could get, then bowed out. Anna Gould, daughter of railroad millionaire Jay Gould, and uncharitably compared to a chimpanzee in appearance, purchased Paul Ernest Boniface “Boni,” Marquis de Castellane, Paris’s handsomest though poorest bachelor. By the time they divorced in 1906, he’d reduced her fortune by $10 million—a modest price, she may have thought, for the right to call herself la Comtesse de Castellane.