We'll Always Have Paris

La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas ...

Nostalgia, as the historian Thomas Dodman has shown, was once considered a disease.¹ It no longer is, yet I still suffer from it acutely. The Paris virus inhabits me, and from time to time it awakens to wreak havoc on my hapless soul. A recent bout with the malady sent me seeking the only cure: a return to the city I first visited in the mad summer of 1968, 57 years ago, when I was 21.

I stayed then in a hotel whose lobby window had been shattered by cobblestones pried out of the rue Gay-Lussac. The hotel, having since changed its name several times as well as risen several notches in le classement national, remains, but the cobblestones are long gone. The government belatedly thought it wise to deprive any future rebels of such a handy source of ammunition and now seeks to slow climate change by planting trees and setting aside room for bicycle lanes.

As Baudelaire said, la forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur d’un mortel. And yet my heart still leaps when I return to this theater of my youthful dreams. I lived for a year in what was then, in 1977, a fleabag hotel with but a single toilet and single salle de bain per floor, situated just off the staircase landing. One had to reserve time for a weekly bath.

In those days I read widely—more widely than I do now—and learned from some dusty tome that Jean Calvin had once occupied a room in the same spot (or so I persuaded myself), a room so cold in winter that he had to chip the ice that formed on the surface of his water pitcher in order to perform his daily ablutions (standards of cleanliness had apparently declined in the interim). Yet the Val de Grâce, the valley of grace, was just steps away, beckoning with promise of ultimate compensation for the suffering student's woes, then as now.

La forme d’une ville change, yes, but, reassuringly, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the laundromat where I sat in steamy warmth with a book in my lap as my wash revolved for what seemed hours on end remains exactly as it was. Yet other parts of the neighborhood have rapidly upscaled. An undistinguished apartment building a couple of blocks from the old fleabag served as a set for Emily in Paris and now draws crowds, while the Eglise Saint-Médard, where Jansenists high on the holy spirit once laid claim to so many unauthorized prodigies that the archbishop had to post a notice to the effect that God prohibited the performance of miracles in the vicinity, stands forlorn and neglected by tourists distracted by the admittedly enticing boulangeries, fromageries, épiceries, and poissonneries of the lately refurbished rue Mouffetard, touted by all the guide books.

The city changes, and yet, and yet … my heart still leaps when I walk these familiar streets. Paris has the knack of mingling grandeur with homeliness, sublimity with intimacy. I covet the surprise that comes when, following my nose down some inauspicious alleyway, I abruptly emerge into a vast and unsuspected square or yet another of the countless parks on whose benches the weary flâneur can rest his tired bones.

The city reminds me of those paintings where saints and heroes and emperors go about their business in the center of the canvas while, in the lower righthand corner, a child pulls a dog’s tail or a cutler hones his knives or a monkey dances to the organ's grind: la Patrie professes to be grateful for the heroes enshrined in its Panthéon, but my gaze is drawn to the pretty girl sipping her Aperol spritz on the café terrace or the grimy clochard wrapped like Joseph in a blanket of many colors on a side porch of St.-Sulpice.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford,“ Dr. Johnson wrote. One could say the same thing of Paris. There is exhilaration when one first ascends into the City of Light via the off-ramp of the Périph. The long ride in from the airport might be compared to a passage through Purgatory in anticipation of the Heaven beyond. The beauty of Paris is defended by interminable ramparts of ugliness. Every modern city is ensconced in the logistical earthworks essential to its survival: railyards, warehouses, depots, entrepôts, dumps, slaughterhouses, what have you. But the French, it has always seemed to me, excel at sucking all the life out of these exurban landscapes. It is as if the the vitality of the capital must batten on the decaying flesh that surrounds it.

There is something terribly dispiriting about the very architecture of these orphaned Paris suburbs. Of course, what is warehoused in these places is not only the material sustenance on which the inordinately fortunate residents of the capital depend but also the human support. The names of these working-class dormitory towns constitute a familiar litany of recurrent trouble spots: Bondy, Sarcelles, Aulnay-sous-Bois, etc.: le fameux 93, the hinterland of Seine-Saint-Denis. places where the “children of immigration,” as the French say, clash with police or torch cars or are driven to their death by overzealous cops.

If Paris is Paradise, it is a paradise well beyond the reach of the millions of people condemned to live in its shadow (the population of central Paris is just over 2 million, while Greater Paris is home to 13 or 14 million, many of whom never visit the relatively compact center whose streets and sounds and smells are burned into my memory). How easy it is to forget their existence once one is liberated from the periurban vale of tears into the center's valley of grace. And yet a bitter aftertaste remains. Liberté, égalité, fraternité is a fine slogan, honored more in the breach, however, than in the observance. This dissonant thought intrudes on my efforts to savor the incomparably sweet pain of nostalgia for a youth receding ever more rapidly into an irretrievable past.

1. Thomas Dodman, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (U. of Chicago Press, 2022).