I sat there, in a creaking jury-person’s chair, entranced by this Cartesian demonstration of good hope and good humour. A professor of Theology quoted from the Biblical ‘Song of Songs’; a professor of Jurisprudence sagely mocked the ‘Kleenex society’ with its disposable spouses; and a professor of Sociology neatly and forensically defined the two types of modern emotional commitment in the world wherein we live: ‘le couple conjugal soluble et le couple parental indissoluble’. But as I slid out at the end of the day on to the roaring boulevard, for my bon ballon de rouge with Rose, I was left wondering what the Paris poets, or the European philosophers, or even the Japanese nightingales might have made of it all.
II
We close our shutters at midday, as if we were in the Midi. The tin thermometer on the wall beneath our geraniums stands at 33°. Monsieur le Concierge has stripped to the waist, and is dozing in a shimmering corner of the cobbled courtyard, wearing a yellow Tour de France cap. The cats are slumped under the Peugeots. The Champs Elysées is a molten mass of Adidas leisure-wear, Häagen Dazs ice cream, and Ambre Solaire cleavage, like a brassy Mediterranean beach. In the shops everyone is buying William Boyd’s L’Après Midi Bleu because it sounds so cool; and Peter Mayle’s Une Anné en Provence because it sounds so ridiculous. The cinemas are showing American B movies. Our café-tabac has closed. It is August in Paris.
The dreamy heat has its virtues. The Nouvel Observateur has cut back on book reviews, and is running an airy series on ‘Les Ecrivain-Voyageurs’ – Bruce Chatwin in Afghanistan, Pierre Loti in China, Joseph Conrad in the Southern Seas. The ‘revelation’ of the season, that the notorious Histoire d’O was written by the ageing mistress of the French critic and Academician Jean Paulhan (‘the most ardent love-letter that any man has ever received’), has been limply applauded, as it is just too hot for erotica. No reaction from the Brigade Mondaine (the French vice squad), merely the Propriété de Paris with their bright green vans and bright green brooms hosing the streets and gutters, where fat pigeons paddle. The crowds at the Louvre are sitting ankle-deep in the fountains that triangulate Monsieur Pei’s glass pyramid. And in between our sweating writing-stints, we have gone in search of the perfect, shady Paris park: a series of short summer-holidays, what Alphonse Karr once called ‘Le Voyage autour de mon Jardin’, strolling like castaways among the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, the Bagatelle, the Montsouris, the Buttes Chaumont, the Jardin des Plantes, the Monceau …
Every park or garden has its tutelary deity, and we have collected them into a private pantheon. In the Tuileries, for example, it is Aristide Maillol (1861–1944), the old bearded satyr-sculptor from Banyuls, whose massive bronze nymphs and graces besport themselves under the chestnut trees. One impudent Guide likens them to an English Ladies’ Rugby team. But they are tender, voluptuous creatures whose huge, somnolent, gleaming limbs sink towards mineral abstraction, and clearly inspired Henry Moore. You can sit at an open-air café, dedicated to the goddess Pomona, and raise your glass with respect. Robert Doisneau once photographed one of them being manhandled into place by a solemn group of municipal workmen, a pair of gallic hands supporting each mighty breast, the whole delicate operation directed by a tiny round woman in headscarf and dark glasses who turned out to be Maillol’s original model. Editions Albert Skira have just published a wonderful album of his work, and one of the glories of the autumn will be the opening of the Musée Maillol at the Hotel Bouchardon, 61 rue de Grenelle.
At the Jardin des Plantes, the home of the Paris Natural History Museum down by the Seine, you will find many marvels among the sanded walks: a tropical glasshouse, a Chinese panther, a Corsican pine dating from 1774. In the Systematic Botanical Garden we stood like children beneath the rainbow spray of a ticking automatic hose, and admired fourteen different kinds of cabbage. The great founder-figures were Buffon and Cuvier, but the presiding spirit seems to be that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. He is known by all French schoolchildren as the romantic author of Paul et Virginie, an eighteenth-century best seller of love in the New World, but his proudest achievement was as Director of the ‘Jardins du Roi’, when he introduced the first zoo animals. His statue gazes out cheerfully into the rue Cuvier, with Paul and Virginie at his knee; but behind him in the bushes is a large bronze lion thoughtfully devouring what looks unmistakably like a human hand. ‘It is’, said one of the zoo-keepers, ‘a dialectic.’
Our pantheon has grown eclectic in the heat haze. At the Montsouris (where the designer committed suicide when its lake dried up on the morning of its inauguration by Napoleon III) the genius loci seems to be Yves Montand, who popularized a louche ballad about the lovers on its benches. (It is conveniently next to the Cité Universitaire, and there is an RER train station in the middle to facilitate les rendezvous.) At the Buttes Chaumont, on the precipitous edge of Belleville where the unemployed workers sunbathe fearlessly on the forbidden lawns, the spirit is still that of Jacques Prévert who set anarchy in rhymes, and loved the little Greek temple at its centre which is mounted proudly on an artificial cliff composed largely of horses’ bones from a nearby knacker’s yard. From here you can wave mockingly at the distant white cupolas of the Sacré Coeur.
But our final choice has fallen on the parc Monceau, a small miracle of tranquillity and golden gravillon, hidden not five minutes away from the centrifugal roar of the Arc de Triomphe. Shaped like some magic kidney-bean, it is a masterpiece of extravagance and economy, designed of course by a Scotsman. Its subtle, curving circumference is almost exactly a thousand yards, around which executive joggers plod discreetly in the cool of the evening with Mozart on their Walkmans. Originally conceived by Baron Haussmann, perhaps in mitigation of his grandiose boulevards, it is now planted with a spectacular canopy of tulip trees, copper beech, magnolia grandiflora and giant fig. It is a haven of peace and eccentricity – containing a Corinthian colonnade, an Egyptian pyramid, a Belgian merry-go-round, an English rose-garden, and a series of sportif streams and waterfalls like the plot of a Tintin adventure story. One of its umbrageous alleys is dedicated to Charles Garnerin, ‘the first parachutist’.
Its tutelary spirit is perhaps the most unlikely of all. For five years the young Marcel Proust lived in a sedate mansion overlooking the park at 45 rue de Courcelles, working on parts of his early and unfinished novel Jean Santeuil (which was eventually disinterred by André Maurois and the young Proustian scholar Bernard de Fallois, now one of Paris’s leading publishers). Proust’s writing-room, not yet corked, gazed across the pink pagoda of Loo et Cie (Oriental art dealers) to the Rembrandt gate into the park. According to his French biographers, a surprisingly athletic Proust used to ‘refresh his hay-fever’ with little daily expeditions through the Monceau, complete with gold-topped cane and lemonade-coloured chamois leather gloves.
When we returned from the Monceau the other evening, the telephone was ringing drowsily in our twilit apartment. Writers of course are always slightly ashamed at not being at their desks, especially in Paris, where they might be out – having a good time, mon dieu. Rose picked up the telephone crisply, and gave a proper novelist’s explanation of our absence. ‘Ah non, non; nous faisons le jogging avec Marcel Proust.’
III
IT’S AUTUMN IN PARIS, and we are miserable. Fin de saison, fin de bonheur: we are packing to go home. The city has never looked so beautiful. The leaves are falling in the place Furnstenburg, where a quartet is playing Vivaldi on the pavement. The shop windows of the rue Saint Honoré are full of brown and gold. At the café Washington the wicker-work chairs are pulled inside, the glass doors are closed, and people are drinking hot chocolate, brown Pelforth beer, and rum St James. The schoolchildren run to the lycée wearing bright red scarves, and the Tuileries is carpeted with gleaming conkers which we collect like so many souvenirs of le temps perdu.
Melancholy rises like a mist from the Seine. Brigitte Bardot has celebrated her sixtieth birthday, Françoise Sagan has published her fortieth book (Un chagrin de passage – a passing grief
), and Jean Dutourd of the Académie Française has written a brilliant, lugubrious essay about old age, entitled – with a nod to Hemingway – Le vieil homme et la France. Even President Mitterrand has been on television, as pale as a ghost, talking about death like a character out of Racine. We wander about our flat like displaced spirits, folding up maps, collecting odd socks. Our extra suitcases from PrisUnic are packed with 98 kilos of books, and stand like four little tombstones in the hallway, encore un chagrin de passage. It’s time for a little philosophy.
If one can learn to be happy anywhere, it must be in Paris. In the gardens of the Palais Royal, there is a little brass gun known as le petit-canon, which was invented by an eighteenth-century clock-maker to fire automatically on the stroke of midday. The ingenious mechanism works by means of a large magnifying-glass, adjusted to concentrate the rays of sunlight on a powder detonator, when the sun is exactly at the zenith. But of course it will only fire on sunny days. On cloudy days it remains silent, as if the hour had never struck. So round the plinth is this Latin inscription: Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas – I only count the happy hours. It seems the beginning of wisdom. We have both put it into our Paris notebooks.
Voltaire (1694–1778), who is celebrating his 300th birthday this autumn, was perhaps the greatest philosopher of rational happiness that Europe has ever produced. He was born near the Palais de Justice and died in an elegant hotel overlooking the Pont Royal. His mischievous grinning statues can be found all over Paris, perched at some unexpected angle, bringing a sudden touch of wit and cheer to some solemn corner – high up in the façade of the Louvre, across a crowded room in the Musée Carnavalet, in the stony depth of the Pantheon’s crypt (he is winking across at his old rival Rousseau), and most mockingly in a little shrubbery outside the mighty Institute.
Candide’s injunction that ‘we cultivate our garden’ might now seem a trifle complacent; but only when one forgets all the horrors that the tender hero of that marvellous conte moral had actually experienced, including the terrible earthquake of Lisbon. Voltaire also wrote this wry commentary: ‘people who go looking for happiness are like drunken men who cannot find their way home, but who know that they do have a home somewhere.’
It has begun to rain: a fine, light Parisian rain that makes all the umbrellas glow in perfect accordance with the Impressionist pictures now on display in the Grand Palais. We are walking through Monet and Caillebotte. We go down our little street, very soberly, saying goodbye at the boulangerie, le pressing, le fax shop, and the tiny librairie where Rose’s new novel, Le Royaume Interdit, is proudly on display. At the Felix Potin grocery store, Madame Felix shakes hands thoughtfully. ‘Tout a une fin,’ she says, handing over a last exquisite camembert. ‘Which means,’ says Rose as we head towards a certain bench in the parc Monceau, ‘that it’s time to begin again.’
VOLTAIRE’S GRIN
HIS ENEMIES SAID he had the ‘most hideous’ smile in Europe. It was a thin, skull-like smile that sneered at everything sacred: religion, love, patriotism, censorship and the harmony of the spheres. It was a smile of mockery, cynicism and lechery. It was the sort of smile, said Coleridge, that you would find on the face of ‘a French hairdresser’.
It was certainly the most famous smile in eighteenth-century Europe. But reproduced in a thousand paintings, statues, busts, caricatures, miniatures and medallions, you can now see that it was more of a tight-lipped grin. Voltaire himself rather tenderly called it the grin of ‘a maimed monkey’ (un singe estropié). And he wrote to his fellow philosophes, ‘let us always march forward along the highway of Truth, my brothers, grinning derisively’. To understand just something of that celebrated monkey grin – which symbolizes both Voltaire’s intelligence and his mischief – is to understand a great deal about the Europe he tried to change.
This last year, 1994, has been Voltaire’s tricentenary. Learned foundations have been celebrating his birthday in Oxford, Geneva, Berlin, St Petersburg and Paris. He has been, especially, the toast of the French intellectuals, publishers and media men. He has appeared (by proxy) on the influential Bernard Pivot television show, ‘Bouillon de Culture’ (‘Culture Soup’). A great exhibition of his life and times, ‘Voltaire et l’Europe’, has been running for two and a half months at the Hôtel de la Monnaie, Paris, organized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The deputy editor of Le Monde, Edwy Plenel, has christened him ‘the father of investigative journalism’.
The publishers did him proud. New critical studies (Voltaire Le Conquérant, by Pierre Lepape), new anthologies (Le Rire de Voltaire, by Pascal Debailly), new paperbacks (Voltaire Ecrivain de Toujours, by René Pomeau). Candide appeared as a cartoon strip by Wolinski. The Pléiade library completed the publication of his correspondence in thirteen volumes. The Voltaire Foundation (by a quirk of fate, based at Oxford) continued its monumental edition of the Complete Works in 150 volumes, the Life in five volumes, and Voltaire for the desktop on CD-ROM. The magazine Lire sold terracotta busts of his monkey head by mail order, price 3,500 francs plus postage on the 8-kilo package.
Although much of Voltaire’s life was spent in exile (England, Holland, Switzerland and Germany), he has become a palpable presence in Paris. A street, a lycée, a métro station, a café, a bank note, and even a style of armchair (upright, for hours of reading) have been named after him. His grinning statues can be found everywhere, in unexpected corners of the city, bringing the touch of irony to some grand historic purlieus: gingerly seated in the Comédie Française; niched like a Bacchus upstairs at his old Quartier Latin haunt in the Café Procope; hovering downstairs in the musty crypt of the Pantheon; genially hosting a reception room (‘La Salle des Philosophes’) in the Musée Carnavalet; or peering mockingly out of a little shrubbery outside the Institut de France at the bottom of the rue de Seine.
But there is a paradox in this stately, official spread of his works and influence. Voltaire was, par excellence, the free intellectual spirit. All his life he hated organizations, systems, canonizations, state authorities and scholarly apparatus. He quarrelled continuously with the Church, the Government, the Law, and the intellectual Establishment of his time. He even quarrelled with his fellow authors of the great Encyclopeédie, that monument to the French eighteenth-century Enlightenment, because he thought the edition was too big and too long for the ordinary reader, whom he championed.
Though Voltaire began his professional life as an author of epic poems (La Henriade, 1723), of vast histories (Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1740–51), and mighty verse tragedies (Oedipe, 1718, La Mort de César, 1735), his true genius emerged as the master of brief forms. Speed and brevity are the hallmark of his gift and style. His great work is always scored allegro vivace. The short story, the pungent essay, the treatise, the ‘portable’ dictionary, the provoking letter, even the stinging single-sentence epigram: these now appear as the enduring and popular vehicles of his art.
Almost everything he has to say is somewhere touched on in the twenty-six contes philosophiques which he wrote between 1738 (Micromégas) and 1773 (The White Bull). All were the fiery distillations of age, observation and bitter experience: an eau de vie of literature. They are set over the entire globe, and also out of it; and many of them take the form of fantastic travellers’ tales. They were frequently published anonymously (like Candide), and while delighting in their success Voltaire often continued to deny authorship, and mocked the whole enterprise. His modesty was perverse. He once wrote: ‘I try to be very brief and slightly spicy: or else the Ministers and Madame de Pompadour and the clerks and the maidservants will all make paper-curlers of my pages.’
His bons mots have travelled more widely than anything else, though their precision is often difficult to translate. They give some measure of the man. ‘Use a pen, start a war.’ ‘God is not on the side of the big battalions, but of the best shots.’ ‘In this country [England] it is thought a good idea to kill an admiral, from time to time, to encourage the others.’ ‘The superfluous, that most necessar
y commodity.’ (‘Le superflu, chose très nécessaire.’) ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ ‘We owe respect to the living, but to the dead we owe nothing but the truth.’ ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ This often-cited dictum of free-speech is actually an attribution, and has no precise French original. It is a paraphrase of Voltaire’s letter to Helvétius (on the burning of Helvétius’s De L’esprit in 1759) first made by S. G. Tallentyre (E. Beatrice Hall) in her book The Friends of Voltaire (1907).
Perhaps most famous of all is Candide’s wry philosophic conclusion about the lesson of his terrible adventures: ‘That is well said, replied Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.’ These, and many like them, have remained part of that mysterious European currency of the ironic. They are the verbal equivalents, the linguistic icons, of Voltaire’s mocking grin.
Brevity, irony and a particular kind of fantastical logic were Voltaire’s chosen weapons. They might appear curiously light-weight for his chosen targets: the great armies of the European night – fanaticism, intolerance, persecution, injustice, cruelty. But Voltaire was a natural-born fighter, an intellectual pugilist. He relished combat, and he committed himself absolutely to the battle of ideas. Like a later master of the ring, he ‘floated’ and danced like a butterfly but stung like a bee. For all his elegance, he could strike with stunning ferocity. A convinced anticleric, he could write of priests of every denomination who ‘rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God’. He never pulled his punches, and he made enemies all his life, and he made them after it.