Casual
Casual Not Just in the Summer, When It Sizzles It snowed for the first time in three years in Paris, and it was freezing cold, to boot. But how glad I was to come out of the Mus?e d'Orsay at 9...
...That was true especially of waiters in good restaurants...
...And that can't be right, can it...
...Unfortunately for them, in July and August they've generally met their quota by the time they arrive at the office in the morning...
...Most Frenchmen will gladly devote a half an hour a day to helping tourists read maps or find the Eiffel Tower...
...if that bothers you, you can-shocking thought-move to a seat across the aisle...
...I began to think that there's no such thing as the often-remarked French frostiness, only what sociologists call compassion fatigue...
...That is, at eye level, an uninterrupted row of plump buttocks...
...Take the jerkwater town of Valen?ay...
...Walking out onto the lawn, we became aware that there was a working bestiary (and has been for decades), with water buffalo, kangaroos, llamas, and reindeer running about beside and behind us...
...The castle-bestowed on Talleyrand by Napoleon-was closed...
...It was Mary McCarthy who first fessed up that tourism was the central modern fact of Europe's great cities-that "the authentic Venetian experience," "the Venice the natives know," was the Venice of the gum-wrapper-strewn plaza and the busload of drunk English hooligans...
...I'm even inclined to say the one word I'd use in comparing French society to American would be "freer...
...Maybe only in the off-season...
...To walk around Talleyrand's empty house in a town like a Guatemalan flea market, with no entertainment but a Boulevard of Rumps, and no company but peacocks, kangaroos, and llamas...
...And if you're nice to people, people are nice to you...
...Who would believe any of this stuff...
...For a foreigner to be in France now, he must really want to be there-because he likes the food, or admires the people, or whatever...
...The caf?s were full of tired-looking women and dangerous-looking men...
...Dogs are allowed on the subway...
...Hundreds of thousands of Americans this century have sat at a table in front of the Closerie des Lilas and pretended to be Ernest Hemingway...
...Or my wife and I? We drove through on market day, a Tuesday...
...On the Seine, barges were combing their searchlights through the snow, and the long south wall of the Louvre had a gauze-like glow across the river...
...But you can tour the grounds for 8 francs...
...In fact, it was abandoned...
...This was three or four battered old trucks parked in the town square, haphazardly, as if they'd skidded to a stop and set up where the whimsy struck them...
...third with 25 million...
...This isn't tourism: It's some anorexic grad student telling her dreams to her shrink...
...So I had a novel tourist experience in Paris, and don't think that's easy...
...We walked through the wrought-iron gates and were immediately surrounded by several dozen peacocks...
...This wasn't market day for Julia Child...
...Who's seeing the real place-the summer tourist who knows a sunny, lively market town next to one of Europe's most elegant castles...
...But few can have seen the Seine running milk-white through a pitch-black city in the middle of a winter storm...
...Spain is second with 30 million, the U.S...
...So we found ourselves in Talleyrand's front yard, with no one around for miles...
...One more area in which I probably shouldn't believe the evidence of my eyes: France does have non-smoking sections-but it doesn't have a national government that forbids restaurant owners from allowing their patrons, or airlines their passengers, or businessmen their employees, to smoke...
...So as not to sound naive, let's assume it had something to do with the strong franc...
...But how glad I was to come out of the Mus?e d'Orsay at 9 o'clock on a Thursday night, into a full roaring blizzard on the Quai Anatole France...
...Christopher Caldwell...
...It was nylon bibs and refrigerator magnets and black velvet paintings and questionable fish...
...A horseshoe-shaped hallway around the internal courtyard was filled with classical sculpture-but we were in the courtyard, not the hallway, and could only see the backs of the statues...
...In fact, I begin to fear I've missed the "real France" and got it all wrong: For instance, if I were to use one word to describe the Parisians I met, it would be "nice...
...Meanwhile, the one word I'd use for the French pedestrians we pestered for directions would be "kind...
...But that can't be right, can it...
...The same, of course, is true in spades of France, which receives twice as many foreign tourists per annum (60 million) as any other country in the world...
...The French also have this madcap idea that parents can somehow control what their children watch on television without creating a federal regulatory apparatus and mandating the rewiring of every television set in the country...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 27
