Politique Internationale/Seine City
Taki
POLITIQUE INTERNATIONALE SEINE CITY by Taki Paris∔Papa Hemingway knew a thing or two when he wrote: "Paris is a fine place to be quite young in and it is a necessary part of a man's education....
...In May of 1958, just as the Fourth Republic was collapsing for lack of leadership (imagine, the French had a number of Jimmy Carters before De Gaulle cleaned up the mess), I arrived in the City of Light and began earnestly to look for both Hemingway and Dick Diver...
...In front of the elegant Travellers Club now lies the Bank of Dubai, and I counted three buildings in the beautiful Place Vendome that have gone oily...
...The first time I saw Paris was in 1952.1 was fifteen...
...Paris never really changes, the smells are the same, the taxi drivers are the same, the Parisians are the same...
...They don't tolerate the Hitchenses and those other trendy little girls of the left telling them what is morally correct where defense of country is concerned...
...This is mid-September, a good time to be in Paris...
...we would race back to the Right Bank, to an after-hours jazz club on rue Francois I. It might sound like an empty life, one not approved by, say, the Kennedys (yes, those very same ones who keep trying to get arrested in front of the South African embassy but occasionally get picked up for different reasons), but even today I can't think of anything better than to be young and totally hedonistic and to have Paris as a playpen...
...At the Closerie the ghosts are real...
...All the polls show that next year the French electorate is...
...In Hemingway's case Paris meant the place where it all began, where the trip really started, and as everyone knows, the voyage is what counts, not the arrival...
...No tourist need be told who is inside...
...Otherwise the Trumps of this world have failed in Paris...
...And more places in which they keep the money they have ripped off us since 1973...
...The piano player plays tunes you heard almost thirty years ago, tunes full of romance and the pain of unrequited love...
...Ergo I'm up at the time 28 I used to go to bed when I lived here...
...Under De Gaulle the French finally had begun to feel like the Frenchmen of old, something they hadn't felt under the leadership of his Gallic peanut farmer predecessors...
...And as I said earlier, the trouble with Paris is that nothing changes...
...The effect is one and the same...
...We all loved it once and we lie if we say we didn't...
...You recognize a couple of faces from way back then...
...It is not hard to understand why, either...
...Nostalgia is the city's cheapest commodity...
...We'd get up early to work the ponies, play tennis in the afternoon, and in the evening we would get together, dine, go to a party, and then head for New Jimmy's, on the Boulevard Montparnasse...
...An easy question to answer...
...I shared a flat near the Bois with two Argentine polo players, probably the best looking to come out of a country that has produced its share of good looking as well as heterosexual men...
...Our guide and mentor was Porfirio Rubirosa, a modern Robin Hood, a Dominican playboy, a polo player who married rich Americans like Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton and spent their money on himself and his poorer friends, namely us...
...As Papa said, it is a necessary part of a man's education...
...His tomb of red Russian prophyry bears no name...
...The mood of the Parisians is almost the same as it was back in 1958...
...They've ruined the vista through the Arc, but that is about all...
...those were unique days for Paris...
...But she is like a mistress who does not grow old and she has other lovers now...
...All one has to do is take them to Les Invalides, rather than a rock concert as some of us have a habit of doing...
...After all, the French have suffered in war and know what it is to be unprepared...
...The French know how to preserve their heritage...
...Or, walk up the rue Franc.ois I, and in the corner of the rue Pierre Charron there is La Belle Ferronnierre, the bistro where the Paris Match boys used to hang out, as well as all sorts of ladies of the night...
...Incidentally, why are there so many English agents posing as journalists in America these days...
...As I'm with the wife and les enfants, I am drinking little and staying away from my old haunts...
...Although I didn't know my way around, I had read Hemingway and Fitzgerald (no rock videos and MTV back then to keep even one as lazy as me from reading them) and knew instantly that they hadn't embellished the truth about the city...
...Go down the rue du Bac, turn left on the rue de Lille, and you see the tiny pension that once served as your favorite cinq a sept rendezvous during the late fifties...
...about to send a message to those that believe that socialism is the answer...
...There is no screeching, no screams, no Madonna-like crudeness...
...Best of all, drive on up the Boulevard Montparnasse and dine at the Closerie des Lilas with Parisian friends who speak of nothing except the beauty of women, a typical French habit that is full of gentility and fun...
...The message is simple, but cannot be repeated in as elegant a publication as TAS...
...The tourists are starting to head for home, the weather is still good, the girls are all bronzed from the holidays...
...Let's hope so...
...Around its base are carved the names of a dozen of his most famous battles...
...One of the waiters asks you why you've stayed away for so long, which doesn't make it any easier...
...If anything, Paris was better than they had described it...
...Unlike people who live in the present, Hemingway's emotions existed in the past, and Paris was a place that I suspect gave him more pain than pleasure toward the end...
...Our favorite visit was to Les Invalides...
...There is nothing like Paris at daybreak...
...Next year they plan to throw out of government what Orwell once called the sandal-wearing poofters of the left, the very same people who have been trying to backtrack ever since their disastrous socialization of French industry managed to make the French worker one of the poorest (in buying power) in Europe...
...This time I chose to stay at a small hotel on the Right Bank with my wife and children...
...Just as they don't tolerate people not honoring past military glories...
...My room is huge, with a large fireplace and windows that start at the floor and rise almost to the ceiling...
...My boy was open-mouthed when he saw the tomb of the great Napoleon (especially when I let it slip that we have the same birthday...
...Or, in my case, the time when I thought of nothing other than chasing girls, going to parties and night clubs, or riding off an Argentine in polo in front of the clubhouse of the Polo Club in the Bois de Boulogne...
...My visit to Les Invalides is probably the nicest thing I could have done for my children...
...Every morning I look out over the gray slate Parisian roofs and listen to the sounds of the city waking up...
...After four a.m...
...It might keep my son away from hero-worshipping the Warren Beattys of this world, and my daughter from bringing home a Keith Richards or Mick Jagger...
...The effect was terrific, even on us foreigners...
...A cynic might ask, nostalgia for what...
...I vowed to return...
...Primarily nostalgia for one's youth...
...When my little boy saw a Paris taxi of World War I vintage, there to commemorate the part taxis played in saving Paris in 1917, he asked me, "Is that Napoleon's taxi, Papa...
...French people put les affaires d'etat before party ideology...
...For one week last month I wandered around Paris seeing old friends, but mostly showing Paris to my four-year-old boy and nine-year-old daughter...
...We also saw the tomb of Marshall Duroc, the man who first approached Maria Walewska on behalf of the emperor (yet another man who betrayed Poland), and who died by taking a direct hit while galloping next to Bonaparte in the Russian campaign...
...There is a blot on the Left Bank where the Tour Montparnasse stands like an undulating middle finger to good taste, and there is Beaubourg...
...The only change I've noticed in Paris is that there are more Arabs now...
...More important, Hemingway's presence can still be felt...
...But as far as buildings are concerned, the French are light years ahead of the rest of Europe...
...Even the sinking of Greenpeace's "Rainbow Warrior" was not initially condemned by the left in France...
...And they know how to commemorate their heroes...
...Mind you, my case was easier than Papa's...
...Well, it might be hard for children to understand about glory and heroism and love of country, but not if they grow up in France...
...I didn't realize it at the time, but Tbki Theodoracopulos is a European editor of The American Spectator...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
