Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
a British paper in which executives had been asked to list their most despised things in the whole universe
and the three top ones were, in this order: garden gnomes, fuzzy dice hanging in car windows and the
French. I just loved that. Of all the things to despise - pestilence, poverty, tyrannical governments, Michael
Fish - they chose garden gnomes, fuzzy dice and the French. I think that's splendid.
On my first trip to Paris I kept wondering, Why does everyone hate me so much? Fresh off the train, I
went to the tourist booth at the Gare du Nord, where a severe young woman in a blue uniform looked at me
as if I were infectious. 'What do
you
want?' she said, or at least seemed to say.
'I'd like a room, please,' I replied, instantly meek.
'Fill this out.' She pushed a long form at me. 'Not here. Over there.' She indicated with a flick of her
head a counter for filling out forms, then turned to the next person in line and said, 'What do
you
want?' I was
amazed - I came from a place where
everyone
was friendly, where even funeral directors told you to have a
nice day as you left to bury your grandmother - but I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You
would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would
never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a
long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter.
'No, no,' you would say, hands aflutter, 'not a dead beaver. A loaf of
bread.
'
The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and
address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this
person here, this
American tourist,
had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a
dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn't want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The
other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no
choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in
Brussels and probably able to eat again.
The other thing I have never understood about the French is why they are so ungrateful. I've always felt
that, since it was us that liberated them - and let's face it, the French Army couldn't beat a girls' hockey
team - they ought to give all Allied visitors to the country a book of coupons good for free drinks in Pigalle
and a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. But they never thank you. I have had Belgians and Dutch people hug
me round the knees and let me drag them down the street in gratitude to me for liberating their country, even
after I have pointed out to them that I wasn't even sperm in 1945, but this is not an experience that is ever
likely to happen to anyone in France.
In the evening I strolled the eighteen miles to the ￎle de la Cit￩ and Notre-Dame, through the sort of
neighbourhoods where swarthy men in striped Breton shirts lean against lampposts cleaning their teeth with
flick knives and spit between your legs as you pass. But it was a lovely March evening, with just the faintest
tang of spring in the air, and once I stumbled onto the Seine, at the Pont de Sully, I was met with perfection.
There facing me was the ￎle St-Louis, glowing softly and floating on the river like a vision, a medieval hamlet
magically preserved in the midst of a modern city. I crossed the bridge and wandered up and down its
shuttered streets, half expecting to find chickens wandering in the road and peasants pushing carts loaded
with plague victims, but what I found instead were tiny, swish restaurants and appealing apartments in old
buildings.
Hardly anyone was about - a few dawdling customers in the restaurants, a pair of teenage lovers
tonguing each other's uvulas in a doorway, a woman in a fur coat encouraging a poodle to leave un doodoo
on the pavement. The windows of the upstairs apartments were pools of warm light and from the street gave
tantalizing glimpses of walls lined with books and sills of sprawling pot plants and decorative antiques. It
must be wonderful to live on such streets on such an island and to gaze out on such a river. The very luckiest
live at the western end, where the streets are busier but the windows overlook Notre-Dame. I cannot
imagine tiring of that view, though I suppose in August when the streets are clogged with tour buses and a
million tourists in Bermuda shorts that SHOUT, the sense of favoured ecstasy may flag.
Even now the streets around the cathedral teemed. It was eight o'clock, but the souvenir shops were
still open and doing a brisk trade. I made an unhurried circuit of Notre-Dame and draped myself over a
railing by the Seine to watch the bateaux-mouches slide by, trimmed with neon like floating jukeboxes. It
was hopelessly romantic.
