Paris To The Moon Page 8

  Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the left-wing daily Liberation, likes to say that Forrester's book is a "symptom." "The fears are irrational, psychological, but they are real," he says. He himself is a kind of neo-Keynesian, and like many other sensible people here, he thinks that for all the hysteria, the economic crise is not really very deep and could be soothed by a little deficit spending. But the Keynesian medicine is forbidden by the rules of the Maastricht Treaty, which is to lead to European economic union and which, for the sake of German confidence, prohibits new deficit spending.

  In any case, there's something emotionally unsatisfying about the Keynesian message. It is like going to the doctor in the certainty that you're dying of tuberculosis, only to be told that your trouble is that your shoes are too tight. In America, and even more so in England, the triumphant free market has a rhetoric, and even a kind of poetry, of its own, visible in the Economist and the Spectator and the Telegraph: witty, trumpet-sharp, exuberant, hardhearted. In France there is a knack of small shopkeeping and a high rhetoric of the state, but there will never be a high rhetoric of shopkeeping.

  By the end of February a new social movement was sweeping the papers and the streets. This one came from the left, in reaction to a new bill that attempted to appease Le Pen supporters by jumping up and down on illegal immigrants. The most obnoxious aspect of the Debre bill—named after the interior minister— was a requirement that people who had foreign guests in their homes inform the police when the foreigners left. This provision was so reminiscent of the Vichy laws, which made denouncing Jews a social obligation, that the entire French intellectual class launched a series of petitions against it. Famous artists and directors announced (theatrically, and as a dare-you-to-do-something-about-it principle, rather than as actual fact) that they were lodging illegal immigrants. The petitions flooded the newspapers and were signed by groups: directors, actors, philosophers, and even dentists. A massive demonstration was held, drawing as few as thirty thousand people (the government counting the marchers) or as many as a hundred thousand (the marchers counting themselves).

  The provision was immediately withdrawn, but everyone agreed it was depressing that the government had been swayed by Le Pen's absurd notion that France's economic problems have to do with the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal. Many people, including numerous petition signers, also thought there was a depressing element of coercive self-congratulation about the marchers. The protest reached its climax when protesters, got up as deportees, arrived at the Gare de 1'Est to reenact the deportations of the forties. This struck even many sympathetic watchers as being in mauvais gout.

  On a recent Saturday, at the first children's concert of the season at the beautiful new Cite de la Musique, the union of part-time artists, which had been threatening to strike over their pension predicament, decided instead to educate the audience. Before a Rameau pastorale began, a representative of the union harangued the five-year-olds for fifteen minutes on the role of itinerant workers in the arts, and about the modalities of their contributions to the national pension fund, and how the government was imperiling their retirement. The five-year-olds listened respectfully and then gave him a big hand.

  In the midst of the economic gloom Bill Gates came to France. Not since Wilbur Wright, back in 1908, has an American arrived in France quite so imbued with the mystique of American inventiveness, industry, and technological hocus-pocus. Bill Gates came here with a masterpiece, the Leonardo Codex, and it has gone on display in the Musee du Luxembourg, but his visit seems unlikely to produce a masterpiece, as Wilbur Wright's did. Wright became the subject of one of the great portraits by the boy genius Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the Mozart of photography, which summed up the early-twentieth-century French view of American technological wizardry; grave, dignified, pure. Bill Gates doesn't have the bone structure, and anyway, the French cult of Gates is strangely indeterminate. He is described, variously, as the father of the Internet and the creator of popular computing—as anything except what he is, which is the head of a gigantic corporation. He is a symbol divorced from his invention, an aviator without an airplane.

  Nonetheless he is presumed to know something. "What France needs is its own Bill Gates," the governor of the Bank of France announced. Gates's message to the French, which is essentially that buying Windows will lead to mass happiness, was symbolically linked with that of another celebrated recent visitor, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. Habermas is the last of Europe's "master thinkers," and he gave a series of lectures at the College de France. His books and lectures have been the subject of reports in Le Monde and L'Express and on the television news. It seems that Habermas has replaced his old theory of the state, which was that there is no natural basis for it outside of a bunch of human conventions, with a new theory, which is that the natural basis for the state is the human habit of arguing about whether or not it has one. The argument is somewhat opaque, but it has produced a nice catchphrase, "social communication." That, rather than the social contract, is to be the basis of the new society, and a hope now faintly glimmers that between Habermas and Gates—between the German philosopher who tells you that you need only connect and the American businessman who will sell you the software to let you do it—a new, comprehensive social theory is around the corner.

  Some people just get fed up waiting. After five days in mostly happy captivity at Credit Foncier, Jerome Meyssonier decided that he'd had enough. "Ca sufit," the president announced to his employees, and that afternoon he went home. Curiously, he had become, in the interim, a kind of hero to the very people who were keeping him locked up. "Meyssonier is with us!" the employees of the Credit Foncier cried as their boss emerged into the light. (Later in the week they added to that slogan an even better one: "The semipublic will never surrender!") On television Meyssonier was seen smiling weakly. He looked worn out and about ready to quit, but then perhaps this should not be a surprise. M. Meyssonier is fifty-five.

  A Tale of Two Cafes

  I have been brooding a lot lately on what I have come to think of as the Two-Cafe Problem. The form is borrowed from the old Three-Body Problem, which perplexed mathematicians late into the nineteenth century, and which, as I vaguely understand it, involved calculating the weird swerves and dodges that three planets worked on each other when the force of gravity was working on them all. My problem looks simpler, because all it involves is the interaction of a couple of places in Paris where you can eat omelets and drink coffee. It's still pretty tricky, though, because what fills in for gravity is the force of fashion—arbitrary, or arbitrary-seeming, taste—which in Paris is powerful enough to turn planets from their orbits and make every apple fall upward.

  I began to brood not long ago, on a beautiful Saturday in October, when I arranged to meet my friend Nicole Wisniak at the Cafe de Flore, on the boulevard Saint-Germain, for lunch. Nicole is the editor, publisher, advertising account manager, and art director of the magazine Egoiste and is a woman of such original chic that in her presence I feel even more ingenuous and American than I usually do, as though pinned to the back of my jacket were a particularly embarrassing American license plate: "Pennsylvania: The Keystone State" or "Explore Minnesota: 10,000 Lakes."

  When we got to the Flore and looked around, upstairs and down, we couldn't find an empty table—that kind of Saturday— so we went outside and thought about where to go. I looked, a little longingly, at Les Deux Magots, just down the street, on the place Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The two cafes are separated only by the tiny, narrow rue Saint-Benoit. I turned to Nicole. "Why don't we just go in there?" I said.

  A smile, one of slight squeamishness mixed with incapacity, passed across Nicole's face. "I don't know," she said, at a loss for the usual epigrammatic summary of the situation. "We used to go there, I think . . . twenty years ago. . . ." Her voice trailed off, and again she got a funny smile on her face. She couldn't say why, but she knew that it was impossible.

  A taboo as real as any that Malinowski
studied among the Trobriand Islanders kept us out, though why it existed and how it kept its spell I had no idea. Still, one of the things you learn if you live as a curious observer (or as an observed curiosity) on the fringes of the fashionable world in Paris is that the Flore remains the most fashionable place in Paris, while the Deux Magots was long ago abandoned by people who think of themselves as belonging to the world, to ce pays-ci—this country here, as the inhabitants of Versailles called their little fashionable island. Somehow, at some point, in a past that was right around the corner but—to Nicole, at least—was irretrievable, something had happened to make the Cafe de Flore the most fashionable place in Paris and the Deux Magots the least.

  In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV—the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris—to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized individual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). "They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully," the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing. "C'est normal." And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revolution that have been offered by the major French historians. "Voltaire did all this!" was de La Villette's explanation (only one workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally, Foucault announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).

  "It's a good question," a friend who has been a figure in the French media since the forties, and who eats lunch at the Flore every day, told me when I quizzed him about why, and when, exactly, and how the Flore had outstripped the Deux Magots. We were sitting, as it happened, at the Flore, eating good, wildly overpriced omelets. The downstairs room was as pleasantly red and melancholy as it always is, with its square, rather than round, tables, which give the impression that all the tables are corner tables.

  In the week or so since my first inquiry I had been doing some reading. The Deux Magots and the Flore had, I knew, existed beside each other for more than a century. The Flore had long had a white marquee with green lettering, the Deux Magots a green marquee with gilt lettering. The interior of the Flore had always been decorated in red leather—what the French call moleskin— and the Deux Magots in brown. But I had only just learned that like so many timeless things in Paris, they got timeless right after the horror of the Franco-Prussian War. Although there had always been a church at Saint-Germain, the topography of the place Saint-Germain—the square itself—dates back only to the 1870s.

  The Deux Magots is the modest inheritor of a silk lingerie store of that name that stood on the spot for decades, until the 1860s, when the growth of the big department stores across the river drove it out of business. The owners eventually rented out the space to a cafe liquoriste, which kept the name and started serving coffee. No one knows exactly when the two famous statues of Chinese mandarins—the Deux Magots—were installed; Anatole France, in his memoirs, written at the turn of the century, speaks of a big picture of three magots that used to hang in the lingerie store. The Flore, on the other hand, has no prehistory; founded in 1870, it was always a cafe and was called the Flore because of a statue of the goddess Flora that used to stand outside. Then, in 1880, Leonard Lipp, an Alsatian who had fled the German occupation of his province, opened a brasserie across the street, and the basic topography of the new square was in place.

  For many years the Deux Magots was the more famous and fashionable of the two cafes. It was there that Oscar Wilde went to drink after he left England; he died about five blocks away. And it was there that Joyce went to drink Swiss white wine, with everybody except Hemingway, with whom he drank dry sherry, because Hemingway wasn't everybody. (That's how Hemingway tells it, anyway.) The presence of so much history ought to be unmanning or even just embarrassing. In Paris it isn't, not because the past is so hallowed but because it doesn't seem to be there.

  The unsentimental efficiency of French commonplace civilization, of which the French cafe is the highest embodiment, is so brisk that it disarms nostalgia. History keeps wiping the table off and asking you, a little impatiently, what you'll have now.

  Not until the 1940s—I had learned a lot of this in the course of reading Olivier Todd's excellent new biography of Camus, one of the big books here this year—did the triangle of the two cafes and the Brasserie Lipp at Saint-Germain-des-Pres become legendary. This was when the group of resistants came into being, and a culture to go with them—when Camus and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as the cliche has it, brooded in one corner of the Deux Magots while Juliette Greco sang sad songs in another. The odd thing is that the cliche is almost entirely true. It was at the Deux Magots, for instance, that Sartre saw his famous philosophical garcon, of whom he wrote, "His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly, his eyes express an interest too solicitous for the order of the customer." (I still get waiters like that.)

  Yet fifty years after the classic period, one cafe is more fashionable than ever and the other is not fashionable at all. You might not see this at once. At the Flore the fashionable people are spread out among the tables rather than concentrated in one spot or area; they occupy the place clandestinely, following the law of Inverse Natural Appeal. The terrasse of the Flore, even on a sunny and perfect day (especially on a sunny and perfect day), is off limits; the inner room, with its red moleskin banquettes, is acceptable; but by far the most OK place to sit is upstairs (I was sitting there now, with my friend), and the banquettes are made of an ugly tan leatherette. (The law of Inverse Natural Appeal is at work: The outlawed terrasse is, as it happens, an extraordinarily pleasant place to sit; the inner room is a very pleasant place to sit; and the upstairs room is reminiscent of the cocktail lounge of a Howard Johnson's.)

  The sounds of the higher French conversation, with its lovely murmur of certainties and, rising from the banquettes, the favorite words of fashionable French people, resonated all around. Perversite, which means "perversity" but is used as a word of praise, suggests something—a book, a dish, a politician—that is aristocratic. C'est normal, which means something like "No problem" and can also refer to any political or literary situation, is different from the American phrase in that its emphasis is not on a difficulty surmounted or evaded but on the return to a familiar, homeostatic atmosphere of comfort: Something that happens may seem unusual (say, the revelation that a former defense minister might have been an East Bloc agent) but, properly understood, is not shocking at all; it's normal, even if a little deplorable. And from table after table, like the sound of a tolling bell, rises the connective donc, which just means "so" or "therefore," but, when used in literary and worldly conversation, and rung with sufficient force, means "It must therefore follow as the night the day" and always sounds to me as conclusive as Gideon's trumpet.

  "But it all has to do with the character of two men, Boubal and Cazes," my friend said. Paul Boubal was the owner of the Flore from 1939 to 1983—he died five years later—and Roger Cazes was the owner not of the Deux Magots but of the Brasserie Lipp, across the street. "That is to say, both Gazes
and Boubal were from the Auvergne—they were countrymen—and though each thought the other was running a sneaky business, each respected the other and frequented the other's place. This produced, in the fifties, a natural compact, a kind of family feeling between the two places. I mean family feeling in the real sense—of dependence and suspicion and resentment. The owner of the Deux Magots was a much more timid fellow. He was left out of the compact." So the real force working was that of the Lipp; it was the third planet, perturbing the orbits of the two others.

  There it was, the explanation in terms of the romantic individual in almost perfect form, along with the bonus of a touch of terroir, the French affection for a bit of native land. Then someone suggested that I speak to the essayist and editor Jean-Paul Enthoven, who is the author of the season's most winning collection of literary essays, Les Enfants de Satume. Enthoven, I was told, would be sure to have an explanation; he could explain anything Parisian.

  "Here is my hypothesis," he announced when I reached him on the phone at his office, at the publishing house of Grasset. "You must go back to the twenties and thirties, when the Flore became identified with the extreme right and the Deux Magots, by default, with the left. Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Francaise, used the Flore as his home base." Maurras was simultaneously one of the most important stylists in French literature—a member of the French Academy, and a crucial influence on T. S. Eliot, among other modernists—and a right-wing anti-Semite. "Before it was anyone else's place, it was Maurras's. His most famous polemic was even named after the cafe: 'Au Signe de Flore.' Maurras was a malevolent force, in that everything he touched was simultaneously disgraced and hallowed."