Settling Down in Paris
JACOBS, NORMAN
NOTES FROM A NEW YORKER Settling Down in Paris BY NORMAN JACOBS Paris "Meshugana, meshugana," I could hear my father crying out from the other world, "what are you doing? Stop before it is too...
...La Samaritaine delivered a broken ar-moire...
...Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no shortage of flats in desirable neighborhoods provided you can manage the price...
...French friends visiting us in New York and watching our television could never fathom how Americans tolerated so many interruptions for commercials...
...As in the United States, smaller grocers charge substantially more...
...Walking the Crottoir...
...At Montparnasse, La Defense and in the 15th arrondissement, monstrous towers have disfigured the traditional harmony of the cityscape...
...The English-language daily, published in Paris, can be read from beginning to end in less than an hour, without causing any of the drowsy side effects that are often suffered by Times readers...
...Since neither the Herald Tribune nor Le Monde publishes on Sunday, I no longer devote that morning to ploughing through a newspaper...
...Rentals in France normally entitle the tenant to possession only of an apartment's bare walls...
...These prices, by the way, are from a supermarket...
...From there on you are on your own, although the place we took, in the 16th arrondissement, did happen to have an ancient kitchen sink...
...Caveat Renter...
...others include Galeries Lafayette, Le Printemps, Bon Marche, and Les Trois Quartiers...
...The first time I saw Paris was May 1945, the week World War II came to an end...
...Despite nearly 50 years of addiction, I kicked the - SCAN ALL INCORRECT DATA IN ALL TXTS Times habit almost immediately after arriving in Paris...
...What French television needs is the competition an independent network would provide...
...To Americans at home, the fortunes of the dollar in the world markets are of little immediate consequence...
...Why Parisians, who discipline their children much more strictly than Americans do, are so permissive with their dogs is a mystery...
...This French text adorns the window front of our neighborhood boulangene...
...In the range of services they offer, and the sheer quantity and variety of their merchandise, the Parisian emporia are second to none...
...Actually, there was no alternative: I simply couldn't afford to spend the more than two dollars the daily paper costs, much less pay five dollars plus for the Sunday edition by airmail...
...Overall, it does not compare with American television in talent, variety, imagination, vitality, creativity, or freedom of expression...
...And, of course, the fabled croissants (made with or without butter), the irresistible brioches, and many more kinds of petit pains (rolls or buns) pour forth from the oven in a seemingly endless stream...
...The greatest devastation has been wreaked by the automobile...
...It is no wonder: The only certain way to avoid sullying your shoes in many of the city's residential neighborhoods is to keep your eyes focused straight down on the pavement in front of you...
...When we removed the paper wrapping that had been carefully glued to a rug purchased from Galeries Lafayette, chunks of the rug came off with it...
...Services are equally costly: It takes about $1.43 to wash an eight-pound bundle of clothing in an automatic self-service laundry, and two dollars to clean and press a pair of pants...
...the figure is too low...
...The High Cost of Living...
...But the core of the city is largely intact and Paris is still the most beautiful of the great metropolises of the Western world...
...Some weeks after we had received everything in good shape, BHV truckmen appeared at our door with a new shipment of the same order...
...Frankly, if I were forced to choose between French and American television, I'd take the latter, commercial breaks and all...
...It is tempting to speculate, though, that a citizenry beset by an intrusive and often arrogant bureaucracy finds a minor release for its own frustrations in permitting canine pets to leave their crottes where they choose...
...I'm sure this would have made an impression on him, for he was an inveterate bread eater from way back...
...And those who know their way around the city can enjoy a superb dinner with wine for $12-$15...
...Efficiency and quality control are another matter...
...I have since lost my parochialism...
...Looking at the French Tube...
...I had anticipated these items in my budgetary projections, but it was not until 1 was about to sign the lease that I learned of two additional charges without parallel in New York: a lease tax of 2.5 per cent of the monthly rent...
...and an annual municipal tax, levied on every tenant...
...that we accomplished within a few weeks, thanks to the help of friends and the good offices of a real estate agency...
...Living Without the New York Times...
...Not much less distressing is the discordant clash of new commercial buildings and apartment dwellings with their elegant surroundings...
...The saleslady returned to the table where seven similar lamps were on display...
...yet there I was at an age when, as my father would say, I was old enough to know better, heading with my wife for the Old World to take up permanent residence in Paris...
...For those whose habit is still unsatiated (and who can read French), there is Le Monde, the Parisian counterpart of the Times...
...For example, the price of a baguette, (the standard loaf of bread, comparable in size to an American "French" bread) is 22 cents, as is a ride in the marvelously efficient Paris metro if you buy a book (carnet) of 10 tickets...
...There are the thin, crusty ficelle and other variants of the same family, thicker or longer or heavier: the baguette, batard and pain...
...Again and again, my heart has leaped with joy and delight at the beauty of what I saw...
...Dazzled by a fragment of a torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke concluded a sonnet describing it: "Your life must never remain the same...
...a dozen eggs for $1.40...
...The experience was not atypical...
...The cost of central heating and garbage pickup are not usually covered by rents in France either...
...In Paris, I invariably turn to the financial section of the Herald Tribune, where I hunt out a little box labeled "Currency Rates" that is usually buried in a mass of other financial quotations...
...My wife paid eight dollars for an office visit to her doctor, and I had a tooth filled for $12...
...From that initial encounter I carried away an image that has forever after haunted my memory...
...Later he would repeatedly tell my brother and me: "Coming to America was the smartest thing I ever did, and don't you ever forget it...
...While there are commercials here as well (even though French television derives most of its revenue from a tax on owners of TV sets), the time allotted for their presentation is carefully limited, consuming at most a few minutes of every hour...
...They come under the heading of extra charges, as do gas, electricity and, in our case, hot water...
...New arrivals here should be prepared to pay East Side Manhattan rents to secure anything like equivalent accommodations unless by some miracle or other they are able to land a rent-controlled apartment in a dwelling that was built before 1948...
...This, perhaps, is the best feature of French television...
...As our good luck would have it, our boulangerie is also a patisserie, offering an assortment of cakes, pastries and other treats of a sophisticated deliciousness that beggars description and puts every American pastry shop to shame...
...Freely translated, it invites pas-sersby to patronize an establishment that bakes its wares in a wood-burning oven...
...1 don't believe it...
...Walking the Streets of Paris...
...In Le Printemps, as I was about to pay for a ceramic lamp, my wife noticed it was chipped...
...Viens Chez Moi, II y a du Feu de Bois...
...The reasons for the move are part of another story...
...Finally, in this, the granary of the European Economic Community, food is very high...
...To Americans abroad, living on dollars from the States, the ups and downs of the currency have an immediate impact on their standard of living...
...Stop before it is too late, or you'll be sorry...
...We made major purchases in all of these stores and had serious problems in four of them...
...But other than that, which had to be replaced anyway when we outfitted the rest of the kitchen down to the cabinets, there was nothing else not even a single clothes closet, necessitating a considerable investment in armoires...
...What made my withdrawal pains easier than expected was the International Herald Tribune...
...A crotte is the dropping of certain small animals...
...The 1976 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States puts the cost of living in Paris at 124 (compared to New York City, rated at 100...
...Butter sells for nearly one dollar a pound...
...now that the guilt feelings have worn off, I am able to relax and enjoy my freedom...
...Every one was chipped...
...When Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev recently visited France, the government abruptly forced the cancellation of a scheduled program featuring a French philosopher interviewing Soviet dissidents A reminder of the control, always latent and sometimes overt, the government wields over a system whose budget it provides...
...Dollar Watching...
...Unfortunately, there is not much else to praise French TV for...
...I suspect American public television would reject most of them as too "highbrow" for its audience...
...What follows is an account of experiences encountered in the settling-down process, and of the differences between life in New York City and Paris...
...Having emerged virtually unscathed by the War, the city of Paris was never lovelier...
...But we have also been very impressed by the uncompromisingly high intellectual caliber of some of the serious programs...
...Nevertheless, for all the exceptions, prices are high in Paris absolutely as well as relatively...
...French bakeries need no seductive wiles to attract Americans like me, who scorned the mushy, packaged, flavorless stuff that passes for bread in America...
...Since then much has happened to Paris, to the environment and architecture, and most of it has been for the worse...
...True, there are important exceptions to the shockingly high level of Paris prices...
...In our experience, most manufactured merchandise here whether clothing, furniture, household appliances, television sets or hi-fi equipment is from 50-100 per cent more expensive than comparable goods in New York...
...With the dollar's value declining in recent weeks, dollar watching has become much less fun than girl watching...
...Does BHV tell Samarl BHV (Bazar de I'Hotel de Ville) and Samar (La Samaritaine) are two of Paris' great department stores...
...Moreover, they are shown in a block at the beginning or end of a program...
...That beauty derives not merely from the obvious things: the architectural masterpieces, the monuments, the parks and squares, the Seine meandering through the heart of the city...
...If my father could only hear me, I should tell him that the baked goods alone were sufficient reasons to move to Paris...
...Fresh breads issue from the ovens of our boulangerie in a tempting range of shapes, sizes and styles...
...Walk the streets of Paris and you will understand what he meant...
...On the second try, the store delivered the wrong model sink, requiring a second pickup and third delivery...
...Aged by time, mellowed by weather, these creations seem to have grown out of the very ground they stand on and integrate the rest into a whole...
...I have walked not only the main and well-known boulevards, but crossed and crisscrossed the smaller, more obscure streets...
...The city was abloom with the greenery of spring, and because of wartime restrictions, few automobiles traveled the streets...
...Since coming to live here six months ago, I have tramped hundreds of miles, systematically exploring its different parts...
...The sidewalk (trottoir) in Paris is frequently referred to as the crottoir...
...Le Monde is an evening paper remarkable for its worldwide reporting, news analysis and commentaries, and extensive coverage of French intellectual life...
...The message is also a play on a familiar salutation employed by prostitutes seeking to entice potential customers to purchase a quite different line of goods...
...Norman Jacobs, long associated with the NL, recently retired as editor of the Foreign Policy Association...
...When I opened my Times in New York, I usually turned first to the editorial pages, to see which columnists were worrying about what...
...Beyond these treasures are the dwellings that line the streets, their facades and the perspectives they offer as you approach them or as they recede in the distance...
...Johnny Carson, I miss you...
...and in mid-July the cheapest peaches were 80 cents a pound...
...Nine decades have elapsed since my father fled Imperial Russia and its pogroms for the United States, or what he always referred to as "die goldene medina...
...I have never forgotten...
...As for the general quality of French programming, suffice it to say that most evenings the prime time hours on the three French networks are taken up mainly by movies, many of them worm-eaten American Westerns...
...Before getting to know these stores well, I would have asserted without the slightest fear of contradiction that Macy's and Bloomingdale's are the supreme exemplars of the species...
...Our most urgent task upon reaching Paris was locating an apartment...
...It requires a strong act of will to walk some of the city's prettiest avenues because of the unceasing din of passing cars and the sickening exhaust fumes...
...a good quality chicken for two dollars a pound...
...The kitchen sink and cabinets we bought from BHV arrived damaged and had to be returned...
Vol. 60 • August 1977 • No. 17
