Country Mouse

Even I love Paris in the springtime

giles wood

There had not been so much agonising since the Gang of Four left the Labour Party to form the Social Democrats in 1981. The impasse in family talks was over which European city to take a break in. Not for the first time, Mary’s PA saved the day (just as Polly often does in Fawlty Towers).

‘Just because you can’t all agree on the same destination is no reason to end up going nowhere,’ observed our Polly.

‘Quite,’ I gulped – not realising that my elder daughter had already booked the trip to Paris and even booked a table at the 137-year-old Brasserie Lipp to help realise my ambition to sample hareng Bismarck.

I haven’t been master of my own house for many years. Wondering at what point in time my authority had begun to wane, I now concluded it was my inability to embrace internet technology that has left me stranded, digitally excluded and – in international airports and railway hubs – as useless as Mr Bean.

Having been cornered into going along with the Euro jaunt, I had to resolve one final dispute – on the vexed subject of outdoor clothing. Mary insisted that, instead of my usual disguise as a Big Issue seller, I should ditch the anorak for her late father’s more dignified ‘funeral coat’. I agreed on condition that, although no self-respecting Parisian flâneur would be seen dead in them, I could wear my hiking boots.

The gift of powered flight we take for granted, but never does it fail to impress that you can board a train at St Pancras and, just over two hours later, like Liam Neeson in Taken, be speeding along the back streets of Paris in a taxi to a hotel (albeit with steamed-up glasses from wearing a mask).

It took no more than an hour for a sense of exhilaration to replace this COVID hermit’s negative mindset. Nevertheless, city breaks can be exhausting. All that tramping across cobbled streets, undergoing mood swings from (coffee-induced) euphoria to distress, when sudden clouds threaten to eclipse the sun as we are tucking into croque madame at an alfresco table, as usual set with spotless white linen tablecloth and napkins.

Perhaps the happiest time was sitting on the steps of Sacré-Coeur with a panoramic prospect of Paris spread out below us and the scent of almond blossom all around. The wind dropped and the infamous brilliant, sometimes glaring light became more limpid the longer we tarried.

It was then I noticed the house sparrows. Central London has carelessly erased them in my lifetime and yet here they were, feasting as hardy clowns should, on tourist leftovers.

In his essay ‘The Plainest City in Europe’, Richard Jefferies states that ‘Central Paris has no character. It is without individuality and expressionless.’ (You might say the same of London now.)

But in 1884 Jefferies was objecting to the destruction, as he saw it, wrought on the city by the world’s first urban developer, Georges-Eugène (Baron) Haussmann, who ripped up the medieval, unsanitary city, replacing it with wide, tree-lined avenues, flanked with imposing buildings of neatly dressed ashlar with intricate filigree iron balconies.

Haussmann’s improvements were not universally welcome. Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables (1862), whose storyline draws on the degrading and unhygienic conditions of Paris, even accused Haussmann of destroying the city’s ‘medieval charm’.

At Le Petit Palais, a misnomer if ever there was one, there is an engaging, full-length portrait in the Realist school of Adolphe Alphand set against a building site by Alfred Philippe Roll. Alphand was a landscape architect working for Haussmann at the time Jefferies visited Paris to sketch in the Louvre.

Quelle dommage that, in a parallel universe Jefferies could not have settled his differences with Alphand over an agreeable glass of absinthe in one of the cafés that seem preserved in aspic since the 19th century, where nothing is too much trouble for the solicitous patron. But there’s no pleasing Jefferies.

Haussmann’s interventions, he griped, had brought ‘unvarying rigidity’ to Paris. ‘It is made straight; it is idealised after Euclid; it is stiff, wearisome, and feeble.’

Yet somehow Paris has miraculously retained its character and charm – just try spending an afternoon windowshopping in the historic Passage Jouffroy. Why is it that I feel civilised here – but oppressed in London?

Why were three provincial elderly ladies eating toast loaded with sardines, tuna and anchovy at 4pm, as if it were perfectly normal? Why were the Parisians generally engaged in animated conversation with one another (and not a mobile telephone in sight), as they walked the streets and populated the galleries and restaurants?

As we approached the Pompidou Centre, one daughter observed, ‘It looks like a hamster cage that needs a jolly good clean.’ Time has not been kind to the building, which now seems as funny and relevant as the Dead Parrot sketch from Monty Python. But at least this ‘most visited attraction’ acts as a sort of vacuum cleaner, funnelling in aimless folk, and thus leaving the rest of Paris relatively unvisited for those in search of the miraculous.

And yet, had not the Euro jaunt been presented as a fait accompli, I might have mouldered the rest of my life away in the cottage. It turned out to be the best shot in the arm since my COVID booster jab.

‘I’ll just pencil in some dates for cancelling the dates we just pencilled in’