PARIS – “We will always have Paris.” It turns out that perhaps the most famous phrase in cinema was wrong.
Paris is gone for now, its vital force cut off by the closing of all restaurants, its nights silenced by a 6 pm curfew aimed at eliminating the national pastime of the aperitif, its bonomony of coffee lost to domestic sluggishness. Blight took the city of light.
Taboos fall. People eat sandwiches in the drizzle on city benches. They give in – oh, what a horror! – to take in the form of “click and collect”. They dine earlier, an abominable Americanization. They look with resignation at the chalk offerings on the blackboard of restaurants with long shutters that still promise a veal blanquette or a boeuf bourguignon. These menus are fossils from the pre-pandemic world.
It was the museums, the river boats full of tourists sailing the Seine, the terraces on the sidewalks offering their pleasures at dusk, the cinemas, the casual delights of strolling and the raucous games of the cities further north of the south. In its place, a gray sadness settled in the city like a fog.
“Parisian darkness is not just climatic,” wrote Saul Bellow in 1983. “It is a spiritual force that acts not only on building materials, on walls and roofs, but also on its character, its opinions and its judgment. It is a powerful astringent. “
Bellow, however, could still stop for a sauvignon blanc and a delicatessen dish when the “Parisian grisaille” – that shallow monochrome that can envelop even the Eiffel Tower – gave it the January blues. Not this humid Parisian winter, when the Covid-19 toll rises and the city’s ghostly streets follow one another like Eliot’s “tedious discussion”.
I’ve seen sunlight three or four times since I arrived from New York, about seven weeks ago. A glimpse, a call to life, disappeared soon enough to leave doubts whether it was real. New York has no drizzle or weeks of uninterrupted gray skies.
So my adaptation was tough, especially for a Paris with its soul ripped out. “It is an absolute sadness,” said Alain Ducasse, the celebrated chef, when I asked how Paris felt today. “It is a terrible prison. The French are not used to living without their social side, a drink in the cafe, a touch, a kiss. “
Yes, even the “bisou”, the kiss on both faces that is a rite of greeting or farewell, is gone.
With more than 74,000 killed across France due to the pandemic, everyone understands the restrictions imposed. Almost every major city in the world has had to endure lost lives, lost jobs, lost lifestyles. Paris is far from alone in its deprivations.
But each city changes in its own way. In New York, the absence that seems most acute is that of the energy that defines it. In Paris, the hole in your heart is the absence of sensual coexistence that makes you dream. It is the disappearance of pleasures that the French have spent centuries refining in the belief that there are no limits for them.
Life is monotonous. There is really nowhere to go. “Good only have Paris, ”a friend feeling claustrophobic grunted the other day. He bought a dog because he is allowed to walk with him after curfew.
Frédéric Hocquard is responsible for tourism and nightlife in the city. He told me that the number of tourists in Paris fell by about 85% last year. Visits to the Louvre and Versailles, both now closed, fell by about 90%. “It is catastrophic,” he said. Hotel occupancy is around 6%.
One positive point: the number of Parisians climbing the Eiffel Tower last year has doubled. “One of the characteristics of a true Parisian is that he never climbed the Eiffel Tower,” said Hocquard. “We started to change that.” Eliminating alternatives was enough.
There are other advantages to this Parisian misery. Traffic flows. Markets are discouraged with their shining-eyed oyster shells, their butchers taking five minutes to tie up each quail, their dripping Camembert cheeses stimulating the ripening debate, their rum baba cakes with little syringes to inject rum.
The city’s islands still point their prow at the low bridges of subtle fulcrums. The 19th century wrought iron lampposts on the deserted Rue de Rivoli launched a dreamlike light procession, as if in a film noir. (With the press pass it is possible to leave after the curfew). Calm Paris is also Paris in reverie.
“A hundred days,” said Ducasse. Then, he insisted, the revival would begin. I asked if he had traveled. Only for Bologna, Italy, he said, to recruit a master gelato maker. After starting a successful chocolate business a few years ago, his next venture will be ice cream.
Hocquard is also eyeing the months of April and May, planning concerts and other outdoor activities in parks, on the banks of the Seine, even in underutilized airports.
This optimism leaves the problem of dealing with the present. One Sunday with fresh snow, I went to Tuileries in search of distraction. I have always liked the formality of this garden, the gravel paths, the trees caught, the geometric patterns. One attraction was still working. A merry-go-round!
Round and round, colorful horses, an ostrich, a car, an airplane, a ship and some Cinderella carriages. My partner and I chose horses. The music was North African. There were some children. The merry-go-round, a small miracle, made me spin in my intermittent Parisian years, which date back to the mid-1970s.
Paris would be back, if not this spring, someday. I watched a crow advance, stick a discarded potato chip in its beak and fly to perch on a bench. I looked at a wall with plaques of French warriors killed during the liberation from Paris in 1944. The youngest, Jean-Claude Touche, was 18 years old.
The pandemic, in a way, imposed conditions of war in times of peace. This will also end. With his famous war phrase “Casablanca” – “We will always have Paris” – Humphrey Bogart was also telling Ingrid Bergman to leave him, stay with her husband and console himself with the memories of the city of his love. It was an invitation to the imaginary. Now, more than ever, Paris must be imagined.