Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Society but which proved upon closer inspection to be the new Paris opera house, I spent three-quarters of
an hour trying to get from the Rue de Lyon to the Rue de St-Antoine. The problem is that the pedestrian-
crossing lights have been designed with the clear purpose of leaving the foreign visitor confused, humiliated
and, if all goes to plan, dead.
This is what happens: you arrive at a square to find all the traffic stopped, but the pedestrian light is red
and you know that if you venture so much as a foot off the kerb all the cars will surge forward and turn you
into a gooey crepe. So you wait. After a minute, a blind person comes along and crosses the great cobbled
plain without hesitating. Then a ninety-year-old lady in a motorized wheelchair trundles past and wobbles
across the cobbles to the other side of the square a quarter of a mile away.
You are uncomfortably aware that all the drivers within 150 yards are sitting with moistened lips
watching you expectantly, so you pretend that you don't really want to cross the street at all, that actually
you've come over here to look at this interesting fin-de-si￨cle lamppost. After another minute 150 pre-
school children are herded across by their teachers, and then the blind man returns from the other direction
with two bags of shopping. Finally, the pedestrian light turns green and you step off the kerb and all the cars
come charging at you. And I don't care how paranoid and irrational this sounds, but I know for a fact that the
people of Paris want me dead.
Eventually I gave up trying to cross streets in any kind of methodical way and instead just followed
whatever route looked least threatening. So it was with some difficulty and not a little surprise that I
managed to pick my way by early afternoon to the Louvre, where I found a long immobile queue curled
around the entrance courtyard like an abandoned garden hose.
I hovered, undecided whether to join the queue, come back later in the faint hope that it would have
shrunk, or act like a Frenchman and jump it. The French were remarkably shameless about this. Every few
minutes one would approach the front of the queue, affect to look at his wristwatch and then duck under the
barrier and disappear through the door with the people at the front. No one protested, which surprised me.
In New York, from where many of these people came, judging by their accents and the bullet holes in their
trench coats, the queue jumpers would have been seized by the crowd and had their limbs torn from their
sockets. I actually saw this happen to a man once at Shea Stadium. It was ugly, but you couldn't help but
cheer. Even in London the miscreants would have received a vicious rebuke - 'I say, kindly take your place
at the back of the queue, there's a good fellow' - but here there was not a peep of protest.
I couldn't bring myself to jump the queue, but equally I couldn't stand among so much motionless
humanity while others were flouting the rule of order and getting away with it. So I passed on, and was rather
relieved. The last time I went to the Louvre, in 1973 with Katz, it was swarming with visitors and impossible
to see anything. The 'Mona Lisa' was like a postage stamp viewed through a crowd of heads from another
building and clearly things had not improved since then.
Besides, there was only one painting I especially wanted to see and that was a remarkable eighteenth-
century work, evidently unnoticed by any visitor but me for 200 years among the Louvre's endless corridors.
I almost walked past it myself but something about it nicked the edge of my gaze and made me turn. It was
a painting of two aristocratic ladies, young and not terribly attractive, standing side by side and wearing
nothing at all but their jewels and sly smiles. And here's the thing: one of them had her finger plugged
casually - one might almost say absent-mindedly - into the other's fundament. I can say with some certainty
that this was an activity quite unknown in Iowa, even among the wealthy and well-travelled, and I went
straight off to find Katz, who had cried in dismay fifteen minutes after entering the Louvre, 'There's nothing
but pictures and shit in this place,' and departed moodily for the coffee shop, saying he would wait there for
me for thirty minutes and no more. I found him sitting with a Coke, complaining bitterly that he had had to
pay two francs for it
and
give a handful of centimes to an old crone for the privilege of peeing in the men's
room ('
and
she watched me the whole time').
'Never mind about that,' I said. 'You've got to come and see this painting.'
'What for?'
'It's very special.'
'Why?'
'It just is, believe me. You'll be thanking me in a minute.'
