Parisians

Three Snapshots with Captions

It is toward the end of the century, at a modish Parisian wedding party. The daughter of one prominent philosophe-as the French still call a miscellaneous essayist with an opinion about everything; we call them "journalists," ruining the effect-is marrying the son of another. The reception is held in a cabaret club on the rue Princesse.

It is a happy occasion.

Everyone making a toast says the same thing. "I thought of you not as my child, but as my friend." "I remember the day at thirteen when we had lunch together, and I saw with joy that I could count on you as a friend, an advisor, a bringer of wisdom." "Tonight no longer a child-but for me you have never been a child. You have been my equal." Just the opposite, of course, of what we Americans would say. "When I see you tonight it's with a pang that I remember the little girl/boy who ."

We are heartsore that children must change. Parisians admit without shame that they are glad to see them get grown up. We want to have our children around forever at dinner; they see someone who may one day be invited for lunch, and whose company they will enjoy. (And wanting them around perpetually for dinner, they insist, is really a sublimated American way of having them to lunch.) One by one, people rise, and unironically toast the child's ascension to a seat at somebody else's table.

People in Paris are more like people than they are like Parisians-they eat and sleep and suffer and scratch themselves just like people in Perth Amboy. (We used to say they ate better, but now that Perth Amboy probably has its own New American Grille, even this may not be true.) Nonetheless it's thesecondary, made-up parts-the difference in a toast, an inflection-that interest us and move us.

The tiny differences are the important differences, and they are real-more real now, perhaps, than they have ever been, at a moment when the entire world seems to belong to the American imperium.

Paris is the one big, rich, modern city where life is organized differently than it is elsewhere-Goscinny & Uderzo's vision of Asterix, the small Gaul confronting the Empire, has turned out to be prophetic.

This puts the Romans (i.e., Americans) in an ambiguous, awkward, but still significant place. We go to photography and reporting first of all for news, and there is not much news to give from Paris. No new civilization rises here, and though American writers and photographers are duly lectured to find the pockets that look new or different, the surprise most often lies in their sameness. Rap is as much a part of the imperium as McDonald's, and both have become part of Paris. What the light of Paris now gives us is the possibility of comparison, the view of a civilization that, though sharing a base with the American capitalist one, has a different surface. And the light on the surface matters there.

Peter Turnley works within a French tradition of seeing that he has made into an American manner of comparison. His idols-and one of the nice things still possible in Paris is that your idols can become your friends; the circles of public relations have not yet closed around artists, and few are more than a phone call away-are Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau and Boubat. Turnley works within the same living room, but he is on the other side of the looking glass. Two great differences, one to do with age and one with pleasure, fill his pictures, as they fill the Paris streets.

The first great difference is the one already mentioned-the preference in Paris, puzzling to an American, for adulthood over adolescence. There are very few Americans-and very little American culture-not haunted by youth and the idea of the superior happiness of teenage life, by memories of happiness found and lost (or happiness just lost, and now too late to recover). Americans like to remain seventeen for as long as they possibly can, they grant enormous credit to whatever seventeen-year-olds believe, and they have built a culture around the needs-and, some might say, reflecting the wisdoms-of adolescents.

This is because Americans are generally very happy when they are young: teenagers have sex, freedom, drugs, music, some money, and not very much schoolwork. Things tighten only a little in college, there is a summer off, and then suddenly they are plunged into a brutal, insecure work world. There are few shocks as great for an American at twenty-two as the first day of work, when arbitrary power and rampant insecurity invade a largely carefree Eden. This is why careworn Americans listen again and again, unto death, to the music they heard when they were teenagers. It explains a sight so ludicrous to Parisians: middle-age Americans strolling in the city in sneakers and shorts or jeans, dressed like the children they wish they were. They are not immature; they've just been knocked cold by the realities of grown-up life that their culture hides even from itself.

In France, on the other hand, it is the very young who seem anxious and adult and careworn. You see this in the long, pale, equine faces of French schoolchildren, that respectful fear of the universe in their eyes. Their day is so long: I see them emerge from school at four in the afternoon, clutching at a pain aux raisins held out by a parent, starved for a little sweetness. They are taught as children the thing that Americans learn only in age, and that is the unappeasable power of arbitrary authority. (When my three-year-old, who has known only Paris as a home, was given a whistle by a friend over the summer on an American beach he said, "Good. Let's play that we're in a park. I'll be the surveillant-you pretend to do something naughty, and I'll whistle for you to stop.")

It is adult life in Paris on the other hand that seems, on the whole, to be the place of release, full of pleasure and license. Paris is a place where the forty-five-year-olds are having all the fun. It is after you have graduated from school, passed your Bac, passed through one of the haute Ecoles, moved out, gotten your job, and settled into your career that the wine and sex and money and security begin. (I am speaking here, of course, of the luckier bourgeois, but then Paris is still a bourgeois city.) I see the same look on the face of a forty-year-old Parisian having a two-hour lunch on the rue de Sèvres that I see in New York only on the face of a eighteen-year-old adrift in Tower Records. The bistros and brasseries that pleasure-seeking Parisians frequent usually remind me of what used to be called a "high school hang-out." They lack the anxiety and social ambition that cloud every New York restaurant. People have come to be amused, to take pleasure, and anything that comes between the client and his pleasure-ambition, show, social competitiveness, and even, it must be said, an ambition to cook in a new or more original way-is, well, just a little absurd.

In Paris, it is possible to see faces that are aged without seeming worn. (There are a lot of them in this book.) The cliche of the lecherous octogenarian is ever present, and far from false; but more interesting (and more evident in Turnley's pictures) is the sexy fifty-year-old woman. My own not yet middle-age wife was thrilled to find herself looking a little gaunt, a little weathered in the sober black-and-white photo on her carte de sejour. "I look like a French author," she said with glee, "as though I'd just written a cryptic novel, L'Amour inconnu or something, published by Gallimard."

A single summery spot on the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue de Seine confronts you with a kind of small-scale Choice of Hercules. One side is a cafe that advertises on its awning the presence, within its doors and even to take away, of Berthillon ice creams, brought over the river from the great ice-cream maker on the Ile Saint-Louis. (At Berthillon the flavors are sharp and clear, and they close for the month of August, for fear of being inconvenienced by too much business.) Just a strong step away from the Berthillon cafe is an American ice-cream store, called Le Mandarin, I think.

It's a Haagen Dazs "outlet," just as you would find on Second Avenue or at the Cherry Hill Mall: the same bland but rich dairy-intense ice cream. You get a million choices: whipped cream or jimmies or fudge sauce. In five years, the crowds and lines have moved-irresistibly, and right here in the center of Paris-away from the French ices and toward the American creams.

An American family approaches it time and time again, before turning down the rue de Seine on the way to go watch the boats.

It is a test of resolution, to be undergone all through the summer.

The American appeal is not meretricious, or not strictly meretricious. American ice cream overwhelms by sheer richness and by the abundance of its accessories. It is hard to resist, and every summer for five years the family fights a bit and ends up buying the simple cone with the single clear bite of cassis, then keeps on going toward the river.

The American in shorts behind them in line takes his little cup and whipped cream, only to greet the stony faces of the French, who sit in their cafe and eat an ice, watching the tourists, not seeing the point of the favorite American pastime of walking while eating, accomplishment and infantile pleasure.

As a city of organized fun, Paris can seem a little depressing, even provincial. The mobs of in-line skaters who have taken to the streets every Friday seem forced-and, with their police escorts, oddly conformist. As a city of improvised pleasure, though, Paris is still peerless. The presence of pragmatic pleasures, negotiated pleasures, stolen kisses is what counts.

We think of Paris as a romantic city, and of course in a certain sense it is. But pleasure in France has not, in the historical sense, been entirely romanticized-in the sense that it has not been made subject to absolutes-and this is its other great remaining difference. You take your pleasures where you find them.

Americans romanticize private life; the French romanticize only politics. In American public life, we accept, without controversy, pragmatic change and liberal compromise, the eternal pragmatic muddle. But we are romantic about private and personal life-we dream of love forever, of happily ever after, of the perfect family vacation, no matter how many disappointments are put in the way of this dream.

In France everything except private life has been romanticized. Politics may still be regarded as if they ought to be an arena of principle and historical inevitability and philosophy in action-there is still a secret longing for the absolute principle of glory or idealism.

Not long ago one saw in the French daily Liberation a plea for the

Left in power to at least pretend to have an ideology, a coherent philosophy. Americans secretly believe in their songs; the French still secretly believe in their schoolbooks.

Yet by romanticizing public life, the French saved the pragmatism of the pre-revolutionary period for their private pleasures, which protects the French from the constant disappointments Americans feel. They are already disillusioned. Popular romanticism, in its vulgar form, leads to the American cult of fun-the always unfulfilled cult of ecstatic pleasure, whipped by commercialism. But Parisians prefer amusement to ecstasy, pleasure to fun. For "fun" is something we have, but pleasure is something you find-and therefore something that is as likely to turn up in small things as in large. Parisian faces tend to be unimpressed, improvisatory, deflating, unsmiling, intelligent,

and possessed by a private sense of pleasure.

It is the last total eclipse of the century, and if you had not bought your glasses by the morning, you were going to have to keep your eyes down or go blind. The French government has handed out, through various routes, enough eclipse glasses-paper sunglasses with mylar film, which filtered out all the ultraviolet rays and let you see the sun as a dim small silver coin with a black bite in it-to fit eighty percent of the population, and if you hadn't got one from the government, you could stand there and go blind. The glasses belong to the discourse of health, not merchandise; anyone who was out on the street trying to sell them got arrested, and the signs posted that morning on the outdoor changing signboards said, simply, "The Eclipse is dangerous. Consult your health professional." Though it would have been hard to find a doctor, since they were all out watching the eclipse.

It is not hard for an American to imagine what an eclipse in New York would have been like: the barkers and their temporary tables everywhere, the "Eclipse This" shorts with "The Moon Covers Everything" on the back; the "Eclipse '99: Bite Me" T-shirts; the Moon and Sun T-shirts for women; not to mention the hundreds and thousands of eclipse glasses on sale, safe or not. The eclipse in Paris has been marked only by a mild, semi-ironic interest in the prediction, which the very minor fashion designer Paco Rabane claimed to derive from the prophet Nostradamus, that the MIR spacecraft would fall on Paris in the midst of the eclipse, and destroy everything. No one actually thought that Paris would be destroyed or that Nostradamus was a prophet of anything or that Paco Rabane could interpret him.

But the pretense of pretending that you did was amusing, for a moment.

A nice small crowd at the Palais-Royale. Calm, calm, calm, calm in the French manner, calm in the Colette manner, high calm. Was the light of an eclipse different once, in the days before artificial light?

This one doesn't go really dark at all, but just changes the light in the gardens into the light you see just before a thunderstorm, that dark sky, light ground Tintoretto light. Then, at the apex, it is as if a single cloud has passed briefly across the sun and then, half a moment later, a bit of darkness, and then it is over.

We watch it with two perfect French women, in suits. D. and M.

"The socialists would have managed it better, don't you think?

Every natural phenomenon has disappointed me," D. says, a little mournfully. "Comets, waterfalls, canyons. And yet on the radio a man said he had an orgasm at the time of the last eclipse."

"He didn't say what he was doing while he watched," M. says acidly. "He eclipsed the truth." We watch for a few minutes more as the Palais-Royale turns stormy and a little gray. "What a bore this eclipse is. Well, it's my birthday," she adds at last, after the peak of the eclipse had passed, no more than a cloud passing in front of the light. "Let's have champagne as consolation. We can have toasts.

The light will never go out, some suns are never eclipsed-an occasion for a graceful compliment." We all walk toward the arcades.

"I don't see the fuss," she adds calmly as she walks away.

"We know what night is like."