Beached

Still jeudi. It looked like a very nice bed in that hotel--it is--but I figured if I crawled in, I would wake at midnight, and no Paris! So I fortified myself with a cold shower and sauntered out, humming Judy Collins. There was the Seine, and the sunlight, and all the bookstalls on the quais, just opening. Pleasantly random stuff: pages cut from antiphonaries, pictures of Jim Morrison, sets of Sartre, naughty posters from all manner of decades, cats, can cans, Ted Sturgeon in French...They drew me on. Pont Royal, Pont Neuf, and hey, what is it with this love locks thing? All the footbridges were glittering with pledges, triple-armored like tarasques.

At the Ile de la Cité, I crossed. Still no plan: I was just enjoying things as they came. I found a lovely little paper-and-pen shop, and bought a pencil sharpener--I had to mime one, as my French wasn't working--for the sheer pleasure of it. I found a café selling glaces de Berthillon and bought two boules for breakfast--chocolate and salty caramel--and ate it on a bench beside some aquiferous green ladies. There were people filling water bottles at their little shrine, and the ladies felt like the nurses of Paris.

When I came to Notre Dame, I burst out laughing. It looks so very much like itself, like its drawing in David Macaulay. Like Stonehenge, it's smaller than you remember it, so more endearing. And it's frizzy with gargoyles. ("They are leaning out for love; and they will lean that way forever...")

It was inside that the jetlag hit me. I did manage to light a candle for my mother, as the founder of the feast; I even half-murmured a fragment of the Kaddish. (The difference between English cathedrals and French ones, I note, is that people actually pray in French ones: they fall to their knees in adoration.) But I was spent. I sat for a long while on a rush-bottomed chair, vaguely thinking I should stagger on and wrap myself around some lunch. And I sat.

After some while, I got up, and started hobbling now that way, and now this, backtracking, and buzzing in circles. I came upon the bridge to the Ile de Saint-Louis, guarded by a small brown spirit. At least, a Roma boy, no more than nine or so, sat playing the accordion and nodding off, still playing. He looked chained, as if they'd sacrificed his spirit when they drove the piles. I wasn't going to cross that bridge.

Quartier Latin, I thought. Lunch. But I felt ensorcelled myself. I was walking on a pair of beehives, hirpling like a hag; I was half-conscious. Every street was a hell of jackhammers; every café, hazed with Gauloises. Just stop looking, I thought. Go down a side street. So I did, and at once came upon a pleasantly quirky little place that did tea and cream puffs, with a perfect view of the cathedral. Except as I sat down, a witch, bent double like a question mark, hobbled in among the tables, walking spells. Hooked nose, fantastical black rags: she looked like I felt.

Reading my guidebook as I drank my tea, I discovered I was just around the corner from Shakespeare & Company. Cool! Never been there. And it, too, looked just like itself, endearingly. The inside is even better; and I want to live upstairs. The children's nook is both a lair and an outlook; the back room has a disreputably grinning old piano, on which a visitor was playing soft chords and arpeggios; but the front room was a little paradise. Imagine a ceiling of mediaeval timbers; a floor of worn terra cotta; and three-and-a-half walls of old books, floor to ceiling. Against the fourth wall is a battered broad wooden table--a writer's table if I ever saw one--with an old typewriter on it, and a tall open window with a fan in it, and a windowbox of lavender, and a view of the Seine. It's kept as a reading room, in memory of Sylvia Beach. To my dismay, I was too far gone even to browse properly; but I sat on an old leather couch and breathed books, and felt Paris waft agasinst my face. And after half an hour, my soul was restored.

More anon.

Nine