Jun. 2 - I want to write about the jihadist attack in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday but it’s still too fresh. Half of everything we learn in the first 24 hours of events like this turns out to be rubbish.
Let more facts come in. Let my own blood cool so my thoughts can marinate instead of boil over.
Hellfire and brimstone tomorrow: a calm and personal essay tonight.
Our trip to Paris was everything we hoped it would be and a couple of things we hoped it wouldn’t be.
It also fulfilled expectations so inevitable we didn’t even bother trying to hope them away. (“Let’s try to keep our costs down while we’re in Paris” said no sane and sober person ever.)
We stayed in a nice hotel on Rue Letort in the Clignancourt neighborhood of the 18th arrondisement—which is like saying we stayed at a nice hotel in Mogadishu.
If Paris is a “moveable feast,” as Hemingway wrote, then Clignancourt is what’s left of that feast after it passes through the digestive system.
We’re an easygoing family with extraordinarily low standards so we quickly acclimatized ourselves to what Eldest called “our cozy little ghetto.”
To their credit, at least the pickpockets of Clignancourt steal the old-fashioned way: the cafés, restaurants, and shops of Paris could learn a thing or two from the honest thieves of Clignancourt.
(In fairness, the Copenhagen Metro we took to the airport the day of our departure was warning passengers that there were pickpockets on the train and that we should therefore take special care with our personal effects. It warned us in Danish and in English. Funny we never get such warnings about the Danish parliament. . .)
I had just turned 18 when I first visited Paris. I can show you exactly what I looked like at the time, because I kept my Carte Orange Metro pass in a scrapbook that I digitized last winter.
I’m not blurring any of it out because (A) there is no longer any such thing as a Carte Orange, (B) my signature is no longer remotely like the one on that pass—my signature is in fact no longer remotely like anything and I myself am no longer even sure what it says, (C) that photo is now 42 years old and the man child it depicts looks nothing like me.
I didn’t make it to Paris again until 1997 (which I told you in the last post and shouldn’t have to repeat: will you please pay attention?).
I don’t know whether there were Cartes Oranges in 1997—I don’t even know whether that’s the correct pluralization of Carte Orange—because I didn’t use the Paris metro on that trip. I wasn’t even staying in Paris. I spent a couple of days at the family home of my high school exchange student Stéphane in some little village 90 minutes southwest of the city (they’d moved away from Paris) and another couple of days with an American friend who’d married a French guy and settled in Beaune, two hours southeast of Paris.
I do have photographic evidence of myself sitting in Marcel Proust’s bed at the museum named for him at his Tante Léonie’s house in Illiers-Combray.
It was wicked and disrespectful of this moron to have settled his fat American ass on the sacred bed of Marcel Proust. The tour guide made that very clear when she discovered me sitting there thumbing through the book on the nightstand.
She was absolutely correct. And yet. . . I have a photograph of my fat American ass sitting on Marcel Proust’s bed. How many people can say that (with or without fat American asses)?
In my defense, there was no velvet rope or hindrance of any kind blocking access to the bed. There were no signs advising visitors to please not touch anything or rest their weary legs on the Proustian bed. Our tour guide hadn’t given us any indication that we weren’t free to immerse ourselves in the total Marcel Proust experience.
I said as much to the tour guide in my peculiar French and she rolled her eyes.
“It is something you should just know,” she snapped in English. “Do Americans have to be told everything?”
Interesting question.
Americans assume we have absolute liberty to do any damn thing we want unless we’re explicitly forbidden from doing so (and sometimes that just adds to the temptation). Europeans seem to assume that they’re forbidden from doing anything unless they’re explicitly granted the privilege.
That’s why Americans need to be told that their toasters should not be immersed in water and that silica gel packets should not be eaten and that their tags should not be removed under penalty of law—and why Europeans don’t bathe their toasters or snarf down silica gel packets or require tags whose sole purpose is to assert the legal and metaphysical impossibility of their removal.
At the end of our brief visit I asked Stephane to be sure to pass my love along to his parents, as one does, and his mother replied a few days later with a lovely note that included this (translated from the French):
Tante Léonie’s house in Illiers-Combray has been restored and is now open to the public again. They say Marcel’s bed has been fixed up and reinforced, just in case you decide to pay another visit...
It’s nice to know I had a cultural impact on France!
As long as we’re on culture and France, let me embarrass myself a little more with a brief digression.
Back in the beforetimes, shortly after my first wife and I moved to Chicago, her boss at a big accounting firm asked us to care for their dog while she and her husband were out of town.
We agreed to do it, so they invited us down to dinner at their home in Hyde Park so we could familiarize ourselves with the house, the dog, the husband, and so on.
My wife’s boss was probably in her forties, but her husband was much older. It was one of those September-December romances. He was a septuagenarian professor of medieval literature at the University of Chicago.
I was still in my twenties and thought of myself as a budding young intellectual and desperately wanted this man’s approval. When it emerged that he had “some experience” in theatre, I saw my opportunity and pounced.
I very casually mentioned that, say, wouldn’t you know it, my wife and I had actually met at Carnegie’s drama program, and I myself had started a theatre company in Chicago back in ‘85 and our first production had been my very own translation of Eugene Ionesco’s La Lecon.
I felt like I was dropping aces on the table: I’d started a theatre! I spoke French! I had translated a play and produced it!
To my immense satisfaction, the old man lit right up.
“Darling!” he exclaimed excitedly, slapping the table with enthusiasm and glancing over at darling as she took something out of the oven, “Remember that time Gene spent the weekend?”
Not only did my imaginary aces disappear with an almost audible pop, I’m pretty sure my testicles retracted as he and darling began recounting the crazy details of their weekend visit with good ol’ “Gene.”
Retournons à nos moutons, as the French say—let us return to our sheep.
(Let us not ask why the French are always returning to their sheep.)
Stéphane is now, like me, older and and with a family of his own. They live in Fontainebleau, just a few minutes’ drive from the castle there.
We took the train out to visit them on Sunday. Stéphane met us at the little local station. After a few moments of mutual dishonesties (“you haven’t aged at all!”), he whisked us directly to the castle, the primary residence of thirty-some French kings and both emperors. We wandered around its grounds taking pictures and admiring the enormity of the thing, just as we had done with the Louvre and Notre Dame and all of our restaurant bills the day before.
To my surprise and amazement, both Eldest and Youngest expressed interest in going into this castle. So we did.
Herself and the girls got ahead of Stéphane and me—they just wanted to see things, not waste time gawking at them. So at one point we came into what had been Napoleon’s sleeping chamber and it was just the two of us.
“Here,” Stéphane said, “the bedroom of Napoleon. Give me your phone.”
“My phone?”
“For a picture, like with Proust.”
It’s been a long time since I was that tempted to do something as reckless, stupid, and obviously wrong. But I was stymied: there were velvet ropes.
I pointed at them.
“Can’t,” I said.
“Ah, oui,” Stéphane said, as though just noticing them for the first time. He added, sadly: “Pity.”
The French are wising up.
So is this moron.
And that’s why there’s no picture of my fat American ass settling into the bed of the Emperor Napoleon.
Alors.
There is, however, this picture of me enjoying a scotch later that night on the Montmartre terrace of some restaurant, café, or brasserie (I’m still unclear on the distinctions).
One of the most unpleasant surprises of our visit was the discovery that everyone still smokes in Paris. Everyone. Everywhere. Men, women, children, pets. Even the gargoyles.
There was no respite from the foul stench of French cigarettes, which are apparently a curious blend of tobacco, manure, and Agent Orange.
“Everywhere” may be an overstatement. There were défense de fumer signs here and there—on gas pumps and oxygen tanks, for example—and most restaurants were smoke free indoors, but by and large the rule seemed to be “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”
So I was shocked to see this in the news after we got back the other day:
According to that article, on a website I’ve never heard of:
France to impose a hefty one hundred forty USD fine if you smoke in an outdoor area. And yes, that includes places you probably didn’t expect—like beaches, parks, and even bus stops. The new rule is more than just a warning; it’s a major shift in how France plans to protect its public spaces, especially where children gather.
The countdown is on. Starting July 1, travelers, tourists, and locals alike must follow the new anti-smoking policy—or risk paying the one hundred forty USD penalty. Whether you’re strolling through a leafy Parisian square, sunbathing on the Riviera, or waiting for a tram in Bordeaux, lighting up in the wrong place could cost you.
And yet. . .
The ban, although not targeting café terraces. . .
The entire city of Paris is just one big network of café terraces held together by bakeries and tourist shops, so I’m not sure this is going to help the city rebrand itself as a health destination.
In tightening these laws, France is aligning itself with a growing global health movement—but also appealing to tourists who seek cleaner, safer, and more family-friendly destinations.
Tourism isn’t just about sightseeing anymore. It’s about experience, comfort, and well-being. And France is positioning itself as a leader in this shift, offering cleaner air as part of its brand.
I’ll believe that when they stop selling wine.
“Paris: a healthier place to destroy your liver” probably has limited marketing appeal.
Paris is already the fifth most visited city in the world, and apart from the expected 2020-21 covid plunge and a slight 2016 dip in the wake of the 2015 terror attacks, the number of visitors to France has been steadily increasing every year since the publication of Julius Caesar’s memoirs.
From the Department of Conversations That Ain’t Never Gonna Happen:
“Where’d you go on vacation, Jack?”
“Paris, France!”
“Fantastic! How much weight did you lose?”
I wasn’t actually in France for the experience of being in France this time. I was there to give my daughters the experience of being in France—and maybe steal a moment or two alone with their mother in the most romantic city in the world.
I got my daughters to the Seine, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, the Moulin Rouge and Pigalle, the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysées, the Eiffel Tower and Champs du Mars, the regrettable Pompidou Center, the Latin Quarter, St. Germaine, the Hôtel du Ville, and Fontainebleau Chateau. Also H&M and Zara.
They ate escargots, moules frites, tartare, duck, camembert and dried ham baguettes, and fondues savoyard and bourguignonne. They sat on the terraces of cafés, brasseries, and restaurants (and aren’t any clearer on the distinctions than I am).
The rest is up to them.
That’s how I see the job of a parent: to throw things in front of our kids and say: “Behold! Here, too, is a thing!”
And having thrown Paris at them before their brains are fully formed, I know that, like the man said, they’ll have it with them always, for Paris is a moveable feast. . . before and after digestion.