I discovered, could still assemble a ring of listeners. No one was in too much of a hurry to stop for a while. Their repertoire of sentimental or melancholy little songs was pretty much as it had been back in the 1930s, back in the 1920s. Afterwards they sold the sheet music to their audience. Coins thrown from the surrounding windows clinked on the pavement.
Wandering haphazardly around I came on obscure courtyards and alleys in which artisans were working at tasks I had never known existed—manufacturing by hand brass nails to be used in restoring antique furniture, piercing holes in pearls, stringing them (a separate craft), moulding fantastical masks, making wigs out of human hair, carving pipebowls out of ivory. I discovered the passages, the covered arcades—the Passage Choiseul and the Passage Vivienne and the rest of them. They were lined with odd little shops which looked as though they had the same stock as they had had in 1900. The few customers looked as though they, too, had been there since 1900.
Above all, I surrendered wholeheartedly to the peculiar spell of Paris cafés. There are probably only half as many now as there were forty years ago. Then there seemed to be one every hundred yards or so. The Australian pubs I had been used to were places where you went for a drink. You didn’t actually sleep in the cafés (although one charitable proprietor did actually allow me to do just that when I had nowhere else to go) but for the rest you virtually lived there.
Some of the cafés were too like Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome for my taste but these were in the minority. The bulk of them—and these were the most enticing ones as far as I was concerned—were dingy little places in dingy little streets, the walls and ceilings dark with smoke, the benches upholstered in the red cloth known as ‘moleskin’. These were the cafés where men stopped for a coffee at seven in the morning on their way to work (although the coffee so soon after the War was concocted from roasted barley), where they played dominoes or draughts or cards in the evening and were given messages which had been left for them during the day and where towards the end of the week they borrowed a few francs from the owner.
Winter was the best time to be in the cafés. The terraces were glassed in and large wood-burning stoves created the sort of stifling atmosphere one needed and the condensation on the window somehow made you feel even warmer. There was a sort of malignant pleasure to be derived from seeing people outside hurrying through the sleet. Periodically the coffee machine emitted reassuring little jets of steam. There was a comforting racket—uninhibited but amiable arguments, cards being slammed triumphantly down on table-tops, dice rattling and the winner bellowing exultantly when he scored the all conquering 421, the patron yelling at someone that he was wanted on the telephone. Chestnut-sellers would drift in and newspaper boys with L’Intransigeant-L'Intran, if you were a genuine Parisian—and L’Aurore. Cops and whores and factory hands mingled fraternally.
I got to know a good number of cafés and was happy in all of them but in the end I had to choose one particular one for my personal club: it wasn’t done to spread oneself around. My café was mostly frequented by workers. They wore the same blue overalls that French workers had worn for generations together with the berets that before long were only to be seen on the heads of tourists. I was broke by this time and sufficiently scruffy to be admitted as a member of the guild. I never learnt to play belote, the universal card game, but that was overlooked when I proved myself an expert thrower of the dice. I made some good friends there. The patron’s wife used to sew an occasional button on my shirt and—this was the ultimate proof that I had been accepted—the patron would help me out with a small advance or let me run up a bill when things got too tough.
Already during that ride from the airport I had an unformed feeling that I would stay in France. There was no theory behind it, no solemn renunciation of my native land. Simply I was glad to be in France and couldn’t imagine why I would want to leave. As weeks and then months went by I knew, again without making any solemn decision, that I never would leave.
I surmised that problems would arise but the only one to which I gave any thought was finding somewhere to live. Accommodation was in short supply like everything else. Some of the furnished rooms I occupied caused even my adoration of Paris to waver a bit. They were dark sepulchres furnished with great looming wardrobes which I never dared open for fear that a desiccated corpse might tumble out. Almost invariably a crucifix was pinned to the wall, presumably to discourage the vampires and werewolves who normally hung out there.
During a brief marriage, my wife and I lived in a crazy Left Bank hotel. I wrote about this fantastical establishment in a book which I published some years ago but since nobody read it there can’t be any harm in repeating myself. It was a ramshackle place with a lift permanently stuck between two floors, with telephones which had apparently not worked since they had first been installed (a friend of mine used to summon his breakfast by blowing a powerful blast on a hunting horn), with doors which didn’t lock and taps which didn’t run, with a brass plate at the entrance arrogantly announcing that English was spoken when my wife and I were the only people in the place who spoke it.
The Florida was eccentric in plenty of other ways, in every way—the maddest box of tricks I ever came across. All the credit for the prevailing zaniness belonged to the proprietor. When we first met him, he struck us as a bit lugubrious. That was a mistaken impression if ever there was one. Before long we realised that Harlequin was lurking under that chapfallen exterior, only waiting for a chance to bound out and start dancing. Things that would have driven any other hotel proprietor out of his mind were just what Louis relished most. Whenever we inadvertently set fire to the curtains or broke window, he was frankly delighted. Mishaps of the sort were clearly what he had been hankering after for years past to interrupt the monotony of existence. The lengthy periods when I was unable to pay the bill didn’t worry him in the least. During such periods I not only failed to pay his bill, I borrowed money from him. He thought this reversal of normal procedure was hilarious. And on my birthday he presented me with a bottle of brandy.
Other Australians—writers and painters mostly—began to install themselves at the Florida. They were the sort of company Louis liked best. They were fellow-lunatics. Somebody came back one day with a collection of water pistols. Presumably Louis had had a deprived childhood; he had never seen water pistols before. He took to them enthusiastically. Ambushes were constantly being laid thereafter along the corridors and whether he was drenched or did the drenching Louis had the time of his life.
At fairly frequent intervals we would throw boisterous parties. You couldn’t have kept Louis away from them—not that we would have dreamed of excluding him because he was more boisterous than anyone else. Wine spilt on the carpets, cigarette burns on the furniture and similar minor accidents made the hotel even more dilapidated than it had been before. Our cavortings eventually drove the staider guests in the place to go elsewhere. Louis was only too pleased to see the last of them although he didn’t admit it. ‘This used to be a respectable hotel,’ he would say, trying hard to sound querulous. ‘You’ve turned it into a mad house.’ But he couldn’t conceal his pleasure at the transformation. He was much more at home in a mad house than in a respectable hotel.
I would have happily stayed at the Florida for the rest of my life. I knew I would never find anything like it again. But there was Louis’s wife. She was a cheerful old girl who was always ready to down a glass or two of wine with the rest of us. But she was not a madcap like Louis. He was too busy playing with water pistols to worry about the finances of the Florida. Berthe, on the other hand, fretted a good deal over the declining receipts. Decent bill-paying clients were increasingly rare. Those that did come never stayed long, not with water pistols being discharged along the corridors.
Berthe took over. Almost tearfully Louis announced one day that Berthe had determined to impose a more conventional existence on him. He was to be exiled as manager of a café on the outskirts of Paris. We tried to reason with him. Away from the Florida he would be lost, an orphan. What sort of fun could he expect with a lot of suburban clerks and shopkeepers as his only clients? What would he do without us? True, true,
