ALISTAIR HORNE
AParis
funny thing happened to me on the way to l'Opera the other day. I was taking a break in the Café de la Paix. Perhaps a curious choice, but I've always wondered if the old cliché were true that, sitting there, you would see the whole world pass by; and I had spent the morning studying the surrounding artefacts of Prefect Haussmann. Under the glass-enclosed terrace I was reading a newly published French book on Paris under the German occupation. I had just paid my bill when — boom (Fr bourn) — something smashed into the plate-glass window six feet from me, on a level with my head and with considerable impact. The window, a large slab about four feet by seven, shattered from top to bottom, but fortunately it must have been of reinforced safety glass because, like the windscreen of a car, only a few fragments splintered inwards. In the centre of the spider's web of cracks was a crater, about one and a half inches across; almost certainly the mark of a bullet of some sort, probably too powerful to have been an airgun — possibly a light rifle with a silencer? It seemed unlikely to have come from the crowded street. I noticed that across the road, in the Boulevard des Capucines, on the top floor of the Commerzbank, a window was open — and it was lined up with the hole in the window, and with my head. Had it been ordinary glass, or no glass at all, without a shadow of doubt I would have had to travel home at Robin Cook's expense.
If I had been a man of action like the intrepid Max Hastings, with whom I had been dining the previous night, I would have whizzed out to see if there was a Jackal figure sliding out of the Commerzbank. reassembling his lethal crutch. However, an Italian at the next-door table moved out as quickly as Marshal Graziani in the desert, and I decided there was no point awaiting the questioning of some imbecilic Inspector Clouseau. The management did not seem unduly perturbed and there was no instant wail of sirens, such as there used to be in the good old days when the CRS would arrive to beat up a few harmless students. Brushing off the odd sliver of glass back in the safety of the Meurice (General von Choltitz's HQ back in 1944), I set to wondering what it was all about. What had the unseen assailant got against the Café de la Paix? Surely not just an excessive bill for an indifferent lunch? A protection racket? Or what had someone got against me? Had it been at a time when I was writing about the Algerian war and the OAS, it would not have been unduly surprising — some rum things did occur. But that was three decades ago. Iretell this curious incident, not out of any false sense of self-importance, or to suggest that all is not currently total sweetness and light in la yille lumiere which I so adore, but chiefly because I am fed up with the invidious comparisons constantly being made between this country and France. The Daily Wail recently told us how the French, once more, are talking about la maladie anglaise — and it's not the aphteuse, foot-and-mouth. But do the French really despise us so much? I don't get that impression either from my French friends or from a casual reading of the Paris press. Young French enarques are still flooding to London; and the Lycee in South Kensington has a two to three-year waiting-list. Many Frenchmen come here simply because that unquantifiable factor, 'quality of life', is so much better in London. I know at least one Sorbonne professor who has his second home in Kent. For myself, much as I have adored Paris over the past five decades, I seldom get away without a minor crise de netfs. Small things first. There are no taxis — at least when you want one, or when it's raining. And when you can find one, it's so small you can't get your feet in or out, and ten to one the driver is so disagreeable that you begin to understand why there are so few — because Paris cab-drivers hate passengers. Has any Parisian ever complained about a London taxi or its driver? This month strikes by railway workers have
snarled up French train services worse than British derailments. Last time I arrived by Eurostar at the Gare du Nord there were no porters, no taxis and no metros; everybody was on strike because a ticket collector had been murdered by an enraged passenger. And still, where Eurostar have spent .E130 million developing its Waterloo terminus, in Paris passengers are crammed into a nasty little entresol without adequate seating in a corner of the Gare du Nord. On our departure this time, traffic in the Septieme was held up by a demonstration of nurses; last month the quais were closed by flooding of the Seine. The museums are periodically closed by selective strikes.
The great, truly admirable, difference is that — unlike us paranoid Brits — the French have never given a foutre about what other people think of them. But a leader in Le Figaro earlier this month was ten times as gloomy as anything currently to be found in the British press: 'A rail strike without end, social plans which are turning into matters of state, the Bourse which is rolling its eyes, civil servants who are moaning, farmers overwhelmed, wage-earners who want more purchasing power, the "excluded" who no longer hope. . . . ' So what is wrong? Le Figaro continues: 'The country is living upon obsolete social structures... . The militant tendency of the CGT [leftwing union federation' and the reformists of the CFDT are now being menaced by a new factor — the anarchists. As normal in France, one strikes first and negotiates afterwards.' Le Figaro looks forward to a summer of discontent. As for sleaze, take a good, close look at the shenanigans in the Hotel de Ville, the revelations from the continuing case against the former foreign minister Dumas, or the stories of Mitterrand's wartime conduct vis-a-vis the Jews. Even President Chirac is under heavy pressure relating to corruption during his tenure as mayor of Paris, and the diverting of secret intelligence funds for party use.
The mystery of the Café de la Paix remains. Never mind. Despite the default of taxis and the odd hazard of being a fleineur on the Capucines, Paris still remains the most seductively beautiful city, and the most interesting the world has to offer. Certainly, never boring — rennui? Tamais! In the words of the old song, 'Paris reste Paris'.
Alistair Home's Seven Ages of Paris is due from Macmillan next spring. He was awarded the Legion d'honneur for his works on French history, which include The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916.
Previous page
