Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I dined modestly in a half-empty restaurant on a side street and afterwards, accompanied by small
burps, wandered across the river to Shakespeare & Co., a wonderfully gloomy English-language bookstore
full of cobwebs and musty smells and old forgotten novels by writers like Warwick Deeping. Plump chairs
and sagging sofas were scattered about the rooms and on each of them a young person in intellectual-
looking glasses was curled up reading one of the proprietor's books, evidently from cover to cover (I saw
one owlish young man turn down the corner of a page and replace the topic on its shelf before scowling at
me and departing into the night). It all had an engagingly clubby atmosphere, but how it stays in business I
have no idea. Not only was the guy on the till conspicuously underemployed - only at the most considerable
of intervals did he have to stir from his own book to transact a small sale - but its location, on the banks of
the Seine in the very shadow of Notre-Dame, surely must push its rent into the stratosphere.
Anywhere else in the world Shakespeare & Co. would be a souvenir emporium, selling die-cast
models of the cathedral, Quasimodo ashtrays, slide strips, postcards and oo
LA LA
T-shirts, or else one of
those high-speed caf￩s where the waiters dash around frantically, leave you waiting forty minutes before
taking your order and then make it clear that you have twenty-five seconds to drink your coffee and eat your
rum baba and piss off, and don't even
think
about asking for a glass of water if you don't want spit in it. How
it has managed to escape this dismal fate is a miracle to me, but it left me in the right admiring frame of
mind, as I wandered back to my hotel through the dark streets, to think that Paris was a very fine place
indeed.
In the morning I got up early and went for a long walk through the sleeping streets. I love to watch cities
wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know. One minute you have
the city to yourself: it's just you and a guy delivering crates of bread, and a couple of droning street-cleaning
machines. (It might be worth noting here that Paris spends ﾣ58 a year a head on street-cleaning compared
with ﾣ17 a head in London, which explains why Paris gleams and London is a toilet.) Then all at once it's
frantic: cars and buses swishing past in sudden abundance, caf￩s and kiosks opening, people flying out of
Metro stations like flocks of startled birds, movement everywhere, thousands and thousands of pairs of
hurrying legs.
By half-past eight Paris is a terrible place for walking. There's too much traffic. A blue haze of
uncombusted diesel hangs over every boulevard. I know Baron Haussmann made Paris a grand place to
look at, but the man had no concept of traffic flow. At the Arc de Triomphe alone thirteen roads come
together. Can you imagine that? I mean to say, here you have a city with the world's most pathologically
aggressive drivers - drivers who in other circumstances would be given injections of thorazine from
syringes the size of bicycle pumps and confined to their beds with leather straps - and you give them an
open space where they can all try to go in any of thirteen directions at once. Is that asking for trouble or
what?
It's interesting to note that the French have had this reputation for bad driving since long before the
invention of the internal combustion engine. Even in the eighteenth century British travellers to Paris were
remarking on what lunatic drivers the French were, on 'the astonishing speed with which the carriages and
people moved through the streets ... It was not an uncommon sight to see a child run over and probably
killed.' I quote from
The Grand Tour
by Christopher Hibbert, a book whose great virtue is in pointing out that
the peoples of Europe have for at least 300 years been living up to their stereotypes. As long ago as the
sixteenth century, travellers were describing the Italians as voluble, unreliable and hopelessly corrupt, the
Germans as gluttonous, the Swiss as irritatingly officious and tidy, the French as, well, insufferably French.
You also constantly keep coming up against these monumental squares and open spaces that are all
but impossible to cross on foot. My wife and I went to Paris on our honeymoon and foolishly tried to cross
the Place de la Concorde without first leaving our names at the embassy. Somehow she managed to get to
the obelisk in the centre, but I was stranded in the midst of a circus maximus of killer automobiles, waving
weakly to my dear spouse of two days and whimpering softly while hundreds and hundreds of little buff-
coloured Renaults were bearing down on me with their drivers all wearing expressions like Jack Nicholson
in
Batman.
It still happens now. At the Place de la Bastille, a vast open space dominated on its north-eastern side
by a glossy new structure that I supposed to be the Paris branch of the Bradford and Bingley Building
