“We’ll always have Paris” - Rick Blaine, Casablanca. (1942)
Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in current book publishing. I’ve always been obsessed with reading and writing about Paris, but recently on mainstream bookshelves are stories about and centred around the city. Perhaps it’s the hangover of a change in the collective psyche of the world in its focus on Paris after the terrible terrorist attacks of 2015, of the activity of the gilet jeunes, and more recently, of the tragedy of the Notre Dame fire.
I spent the whole of my late adolescence with the premise that once I had the grades I needed, I would start to ‘live’. This mindset is dangerous. It endorses the attitude that the only way of truly living and achieving happiness, is to be ‘perfect’. For me, this was having impeccable grades, looking immaculate, acting in a sophisticated and mature manner, being accomplished and going to one of the best universities in the world. Only in earning this and destroying the inner person I judged to be its antithesis, could I start to live my life. I had always known that the capability to live life to the fullest was within me, but it was that part of me that I spent my whole childhood loathing and my adolescence trying to extinguish. It was only in my gap year that I embraced it for what it was: I decided that you can be cultured, intelligent and in control, but live wildly and grab every opportunity. Paris did this for me.
I remember the first time I properly set foot in Paris. I was 18 and passing through on the way to see my first boyfriend, who was on Erasmus in Metz, North-East France. I remember stepping out of the dark, stuffy National Express coach into the bleak greyness of Gallini at 6am on an October morning, tired, disorientated and on edge. Being an inexperienced traveller and a non-Londoner, I had no idea how to use the metro to get across Paris to Gare de l’Est, where I would be taking a national line up to Metz. I walked around the dreary morning streets with a girl I had met on the ferry, trying to look for a station. I was freezing cold and had a heavy rucksack full of too many clothes for one week. We passed cafés where men in black shirts were setting out chairs in preparation for the day, and who glanced at us distastefully. The buildings had a dismal, worn down grandeur and were grey, and soulless; the cafés, without the buzz that defines them, were a faded red and eerie.
We stayed just outside of the city in a cheap roadside hotel and ate in the nearby Italian on the first night, the city too intimidating for a first night venture. I remember long and busy, traffic heavy boulevards as we walked towards the Eiffel Tower the following day. Feelings of tired feet and of being out of my depth and intimidated by both my relationship and the city I found myself in, were interspersed with flashes of wonder. He had control of all we did and I saw Paris’s majestic surface; the Louvre, Concorde, Montmartre, Tuileries, l’Orangerie. When we sat on the green chairs to rest, I briefly imagined myself as a local, sitting by the fountains reading, but I was in sensory overload. When we sat on the steps of the Sacré Cœur and looked out upon the iconic skyline view, I saw a jumble of run-down greying rooftops. I wondered how anyone could see this as the most beautiful, romantic and sophisticated city in the world.
Six months later and I couldn’t have been more passionate about that view; now, there is nowhere so beautiful, more spectacular, characterful, awe-inspiring or suited to the name La Ville Lumière, the City of Lights, than those elegant, history-stooped grey rooftops. I think I realised at the time that such a feeling was possible. But I needed to understand the city first.
Shortly after that, I moved to Paris on a whim. I au paired for a family in a suburban area on the outer ring of Paris and so it was a metró journey into the real centre. Despite its failing to live up to my exact ideal, however, I slowly began to fall in love. I would walk around the beautiful Haussmanian apartments, revelling in the splendour of the designer shops and soaking in the magnificence of Parc Monceau. I was a ten minute walk away from l’Arc de Triomphe and Camille and I would nonchalantly drive past both the Arc and the Eiffel Tower on the bus on the way to and from school. I lived in a very old but Parisian studio at the top floor of their apartment with a view out onto the scenic rooftops and balconies of those around me. I began to meet people; I gathered a group of au pairs around me from various bars and jazz nights, learning from them, exploring and having fun, both during the day and in the night. I took the time to go into the centre of the city to immerse myself in the more vibrant, artistic atmosphere.
After a series of incidents, I moved onto a new family in the 5th arrondissement, whose au pair had left them the week before. I cannot describe how lucky I was after that, and I never stopped searching for the catch. I lived next to the Panthéon, Place de La Contrascarpe and Rue Mouffetard and within ten minutes of the Notre Dame, Boulevard Saint-Michel, Saint Germain, Luxembourg, Jardin du Plantes. My window looked out onto the Panthéon.
There began the most golden five months of my life. I miss walking out of the white staircase into the dazzlingly, sunlit courtyard, the smell of flowers and the wooden table and chairs set up for dining. Stepping out of the great green double doors and acknowledging the people at the bistro beside me. The walk down Rue de l’Estrapade, reaching the Place de la Contrascarpe with its tranquil provinciality in the morning and vibrant youthfulness of busy bars and creperies at night. The walk down Rue Mouffetard itself, with its acknowledgment from the Spanish waiters working in the window of my favourite creperie; through the busy market to get to Place Monge métro. Or, when turning left outside the door, walking past the benches and trees where I would sit and write until late into the night and where a chair was once balanced jovially on top of the fountain for a few weeks after the Fête de la Musique in June. Turning the corner, to be faced with the Panthéon and its ancient majesty; to go one way, past the Eglise Saint-Étienne-du-Mont and Place Saint Geneviève and its steps, where my best friend and I once sat until late into the night during a heat wave; to your right, the English pub, ‘The Bombardier’, where I went on my first date during a brief Parisian romance. Down the Rue Saint Genevieve, ‘Le Village’ and the bars surrounding it, down the winding road until the Boulevard Saint Germain is crossed and you reach the Seine and Notre Dame. If you walk along the Seine, past Shakespeare & Co and the Ile de Cité, you reach the busy tourist area and métro Saint Michel, with its countless surrounding bars, restaurants and creperies. Within the maze is the tiny international bar where, during their Thursday jazz nights, I first started meeting other au pairs. Ascending the boulevard Saint Michel, you eventually pass the RER B entrance; walking past the ice cream stand, you escape into the shady, musty peacefulness of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Here the presence of tourists is subsumed into the tranquillity of the clink of boules and green chairs under trees on the bark; the quiet business of wine poured out at the café and the sensory anticipation of walking up to the pillared stone wall and looking out of the shade onto the brilliant whites, greens and blues in the middle of the Jardin. Magnetic boats glide on the crystal fountains, undisturbed by the excitement of the children circling. This entertainment has been carried out for hundreds of years and if you gaze at the boats, you feel suspended in time. To your left is a uniform line of emerald green trees and grass which leads up to a gold tipped gate, where once, when picnicking during the Fête de la Musique, we found ourselves inundated by a band of strolling violinists. To your right is the Palais du Luxembourg with its glassy and untouched splendour. Old men sit reading their newspapers and young women with books; groups of friends soak in the sun during their lunch break and tourists sit and chat in an amalgamation of languages. More trees if you walk past the fountain and up the stairs on the other side; more children, more young adults, more old couples, more locals and tourists, more runners; people playing, talking, smoking, picnicking, rendez-vousing, philosophising, studying, reading, writing. When you reach the gate on the other side, you’re in Saint-Germain, where the elegant boulevards are the very personification of Parisian elegance and spirit and radiate the literary and artistic heritage from which that arrondissment in particular, was borne and has held onto ever since.
Every arrondissment has its own personality, but Paris as an entity is built on and preserved by an overpowering sense of beauty, creativity and art. There is unmatched glory in the walk from the Louvre through Tuileries, to L’Orangerie and Concorde; even past the Grand Palais and up the Champs Eylsees to l’Arc; a grandeur I once perceived but now love. I understand the place of such grandeur which is one side of its people. The walk across the Seine to the gilded gold Pont Alexandre III, glorious in the day and magical at night, when it lights up from the noise and energy of the boat bars and the Parisian people sharing wine around the Seine. From there, you can walk up to Invalides and making your way through the archaically magnificent 7th arrondissent, you’ll eventually reach the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel tower. Crossing the bridge at Pont D’lena, you come up to Trocadero, with its spectacular views of the Eiffel tower, and from there you can ascend one of the boulevards to get back to l’Arc and from there, down the Champs, past the Grand Palais and back to Concorde and Tuileries.
If, however, you cross the Seine at Notre Dame and walk across the Ile De Cite, past the drinkers and picnickers on the Seine, you reach Pont de Sully, where my best friend used to live; past that, the Bastille, and up to the 4e and 3e, the elegant courtyard and jardin, the Place des Vosges. This is in the centre of the stylish but youthful Marais; there lies the bar I used to frequent with my friends. From there it is possible to walk to the 10th and 11th arrondissements; the soul of the up and coming right bank. There is the Canal Saint-Martin, where we would spend many an evening drinking and picnicking in big groups before heading off to Le Comptoir Général, or another club. A Parisian boy I dated lived just next to the canal; I met him and some other friends at a party at his apartment near the beginning of my stay and I cannot go back there without thinking of it and the time we spent there. Just behind the Canal is the Rue Oberkampf and crossing that, the Boulevard Voltaire, two streets packed with cheap and local bars and clubs, which I would frequent every weekend with my friends. On Boulevard Voltaire lies the Bataclan, the concert hall and club where 89 people were killed on November 13th, 2015.
Following the Boulevard up, you get to the Place de la République, where a statue of Marianne, the personification of the French Republican, stands “holding aloft an olive branch in her right hand and resting her left on a tablet engraved with Droits de l’homme”. Since 1879, she has personified the liberty, equality, fraternity at the heart of the French people; she is a “Monument to the French Republic”, established 90 years after the French Revolution ended. With easy access for pedestrians, I have only ever known it to be blanketed by graffiti, flowers, candles, notes, expressions of love, politics and revolution. Every time I go back to Paris, this blanket has grown. It is an expression of past and contemporary confidence in all that Parisians stand for and a platform on which the young can express their dissatisfaction, the privilege the French people fought for.
I came to Paris a few weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and fell in love with the city as it rebuilt itself on the strength of its people and the nations supporting them. I don’t think anyone suspected that the Paris would be subject to more brutality so soon afterwards. It is sickening to think that the city I built myself around – indeed, a city with its very identity based on elegance, beauty, wonder and art, would once again be shattered by the hatred, cowardice and bullishness that is its antithesis. Everyone connected to Paris remembers how they felt after the November 13th attacks. I was a month into my first term at Cambridge and had nestled Paris away in a part of my heart, untouched by my immediate surroundings. But as I turned my phone on and saw the numerous texts from my mother and sister telling me to contact my best friend living in Paris, and as I looked at Facebook and saw notifications from fifty friends marking themselves as ‘safe’, I was there with them all. I scrolled through, checking the au pair friends I had been close to, my little children; the French people I had befriended; my ex. I scanned the news and sobbed for their city – my city.
I was one of the millions who joined in mourning with Paris that night, putting the Tricolour filter on my profile picture on Facebook and posting the sign of solidarity on Instagram. I was mourning for something that will forever be deeply rooted in my life and character; for the people who died and the young locals they represented, who had been my friends. In that way I was mourning on a very personal and unpolitical level.
Social media is one of our modern age’s most powerful tools, and after the Paris attacks, it enabled another level of worldwide unity and strength in sympathy, and an understanding of the personal effect the deaths of those poor people would have upon their loved ones. In Britain and France’s other surrounding countries, there was a projection and greater understanding of our history and brotherhood. Love and support came flooding into France from all over the world within minutes of the reports, and this was enabled and streamlined by social media. I, with so many connections to Paris, was able to immediately check that my friends were okay and to grieve with the city on the same night, as if I had been there.
Has the normalisation of terrorism and its vast coverage on media displaced some people so far from fellow feeling with a country we are so bound to, that they cannot but, unconsciously perhaps, use suffering as a platform for egotism? It was telling and gut-wrenching that there was certainly more coverage of what happened in France than there was in war-striken countries further-afield. But this doesn’t null our heartbreak for a city which, over the past years, has experienced unthinkable horrors that those within it had never known prior to this. A city that has maintained its basis in appreciation, proximity and understanding of beauty and freedom through the French Revolution, Nazi occupation and two World Wars. A city based, above all things, upon love. A city which attracts lovers from all over the world; a city that we are all in love with; the city I love; the city of love. Let it keep the humanity it bestows on itself, but also that which we bestow on it. It is what it was made upon and how it is sustained. Love is the stability Paris needs, to go forward in the way it has done for time immemorial.
hollyhamiltonwrites 