In about a week, I am leaving for a week-long trip to Paris, the ultimate tourist destination in France, the city where everyone assumed I was going when I said I was moving to France for 7 months. (It’s the same way non-Canadians seem to think that Canada is just Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver, and constantly buried under snow). I’ve been to Paris twice before: the first time was for a day and a half, six and a half years ago (and that half day was spent on a perspiration coated coach bus); the second time was a “prolonged” visit of 4-5 days at Christmas time, during which I visited the Christmas market along the Champs-Elysées twice, drank a lot of steamy, mulled wine, nearly froze on a Seine river cruise at night, and saw a lot of Place Vendôme in the dusk, thanks to winter and daylight saving time. It wasn’t enough. (C’est jamais assez). My landlady’s “Le guide du routard de Paris, 2007 Edition” tells me that one can consider each arrondissement in Paris to be an individual village, and there are twenty of these. How can anyone fathom seeing twenty small villages in a day and a half, or even in 4-5 days? I didn’t even get to sit down at a café and have a café last time! (Too cold).
This is why, when I pondered where to go for my April vacances scolaires, and for my birthday, I knew I had to go back to Paris. I’d read that April was one of the best months to be in Paris, so the timing was lucky. Maybe I’ll see more daylight for once! And this time, I don’t want to spend half the day in bed, or on a cramped coach bus tour. This time, I am determined to wander as far and wide as I can, with a lightly packed suitcase and a head full of cultural/historical anecdotes and the borrowed dreams of long-dead alcoholic writers.
In the scattered development of my arsenal of Parisian lore, I have watched Coco Avant Chanel, the short films on the Inside.Chanel.com website, snippets of Madeline, Midnight in Paris, Anastasia (in French!); and read the L’Histoire on the Inside.Chanel.com website, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Mazzeo’s The Secret of Chanel No. 5, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. (I also contemplated and gave up in the same breath, the attempt to read Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
I have immersed in the phenomenon of Chanel’s rags-to-riches biography as an an exemplification of Paris’ magical abilities of social transformation. I have tasted – and still desire – Hemingway’s retrospective and nostalgic ex-pat American memories of bistro bread, pâté, wine, dry white wine, oysters, wine, books, St. Émilion wine, escargot, Cahors wine, winter, champagne, hunger, and wine; made fangirl level plans to make a touristic pilgrimage[*] to the celebrated tomb of Oscar Wilde in the Père Lachaise Cimitière; and sunk into an apéritif and windowsill-sunshine induced stupor over Fitzgerald’s sinfully delicious portrayals of a hedonism that was not exclusive to a fictional New York society, but was representative of the 1920s overall – the same era Chanel released Chanel No. 5, thus cementing her name in the history books of 20th century Paris.
Alongside my reading, I have scribbled inky purple lists and quotes about Paris in my Moleskine pocket cahier (the “legendary notebook used for the past two centuries by artists and thinkers, from Vincent Van Gogh to Pablo Picasso from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin”). Late at night, I have trawled amateur blogs and Pinterest boards, become enamoured of fashionable images on The Sartorialist, Garance Doré, and Easy Fashion Paris, and become almost obsessed with visiting 31 Rue Cambon, Rue Mouffetard, and 12 Rue de l’Odéon. I mean, who cares about the Eiffel Tower? After all, Hemingway never once mentioned it. No, the Paris I seek is the Paris of Gabrielle Chanel, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald, Picasso, of Hemingway and his hunger, which “was good discipline” and could be briefly satiated by a two hour promenade in the Jardin du Luxembourg; even the gray, gloomy wartime Paris of Judith Kerr’s semi-autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Is a visit to the Arc de Triomphe as anti-climactic now, as it was then – even with the threat of an approaching war – for a ten year old German-Jewish girl? I wonder.
For my quarter century birthday, I extravagantly gifted myself with another layer of Francophilia – a glorious, perhaps globally over-purchased bottle of Chanel Coco Mademoiselle. (So I can smell grown-up, even if I don’t look it!) Chanel’s Site Officiel says it is “L’essence d’une femme libre et audacieuse” and “Le portrait d’une femme prête à écrire sa destinée avec audace.” Now, I don’t know who writes these cheesy fragrance descriptions, but they can have my vote for “unintentionally motivational quote.” This write-up is partly what inspired me in the making of an enormous decision this past week to delay my studies and my return home after my stay in France, and to move to Montréal for a year, to become a jeune fille au pair and pursue god knows what else. Je me sens très folle. But this perfume description had me thinking, Yes, I want to be the kind of woman who is supposed to smell of this apparently audacious scent. Yes, I want to be free and ready to write my own destiny while smelling like an expensive cocktail of dead flowers, fruit and privilege. So, now I am, and now, I will be. And maybe it will give me the confidence to scuttle around Paris alone without reservations, or at least, I can sniff myself with pleasure in the quartiers that purportedly stink.
Alors, I’ve seen things on a screen, greedily absorbed wistful words off of (imaginary Kobo e-reader) pages, and I smell of a famous Parisian perfume. Du coup, I almost want to break out into Ariel’s near-lament about wanting to be “where the people are, I wanna see, wanna see them [in Paris]”…I just want to be “part of that world”! I leave off with a quote by Hemingway that continues to sustain my idealism about Paris:
“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy – at home and in Paris.”
On verra!
And if I sound like I’m rambling too much, forgive me for taking the dubious advice often mistakenly attributed to Hemingway,
“Write drunk; edit sober.”
[*]A pilgrimage is only natural, after all,
“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
…and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
…Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”!
auds & ends 