I was the loneliest man in Paris if that’s possible. It was 6 A.M. and raining and I took the airport bus into the city, to near Les Invalides, then a taxi in the rain and I asked the driver where Napoleon was entombed because I knew it was someplace around there, not that it matters, but after a period of what I thought to be surly silence he finally pointed and said “là” (there).
I was all hot to go see the Sainte Chapelle where St. Louis, King Louis IX of France, had installed a piece of the True Cross. I never even made it except ten days later zipping by in Raymond Baillet’s cab and he mentioned it. I was also all hot to see St. Louis de France church on the island of St. Louis in the Seine River, because that’s the name of the church of my baptism in Lowell, Massachusetts. Well I finally got there and sat with hat in hand watching guys in red coats blow long trumpets at the altar, to organ upstairs, beautiful Medieval cansos or cantatas to make Handel’s mouth water, and all of a sudden a woman with kids and husband comes by and lays twenty centimes (4¢) in my poor tortured misunderstood hat (which I was holding upsidedown in awe), to teach them caritas, or loving charity, which I accepted so’s not to embarrass her teacherly instincts, or the kids, and my mother said back home in Florida “Why didnt you then put the twenty centimes in the poor box” which I forgot. It wasnt enough to wonder about and besides the very first thing I did in Paris after I cleaned up in my hotel room (with a big round wall in it, welling the chimney I guess) was give a franc (20¢) to a French woman beggar with pimples, saying “Un franc pour la Française” (A franc for the Frenchwoman) and later I gave a franc to a man beggar in St.-Germain to whom I then yelled: “Vieux voyou!” (Old hoodlum!) and he laughed and said: ‘What?—Hood-lumT’ I said “Yes, you cant fool an old French Canadian” and I wonder today if that hurt him because what I really wanted to say was “Guenigiou” (ragpicker) but “voyou” came out.
Guenigiou it is.
(Ragpicker should be spelled “guenillou,” but that’s not the way it comes out in 300-year-old French which was preserved intact in Quebec and still understood in the streets of Paris not to mention the hay barns of the North.)
Coming down the steps of that magnificent huge church of La Madelaine was a dignified old bum in a full brown robe and gray beard, neither a Greek nor a Patriarch, just probably an old member of the Syriac Church; either that or a Surrealist on a larky kick? Na.
4.
FIRST THINGS FIRST.
The altar in La Madelaine is a gigantic marble sculpt of her (Mary Magdalena) as big as a city block and surrounded by angels and archangels. She holds out her hands in a gesture Michelangeloesque. The angels have huge wings dripping. The place is a whole city block long. It’s a long narrow building of a church, one of the strangest. No spires, no Gothic, but I suppose Greek temple style. (Why on earth would you, or did you, expect me to go see the Eiffel Tower made of Bucky Buckmaster’s steel ribs and ozone? How dull can you get riding an elevator and getting the mumps from being a quarter mile in the air? I already done that orf the Hempire State Building at night in the mist with my editor.)
The taxi took me to the hotel which was a Swiss pension I guess but the nightclerk was an Etrus can (same thing) and the maid was sore at me because I kept my door and suitcase locked. The lady who ran the hotel was not pleased when I inaugurated my first evening with a wild sexball with a woman my age (43). I cant give her real name but it’s one of the oldest names in French history, aye back before Charlemagne, and he was a Pippin. (Prince of the Franks.) (Descended from Arnulf, L’Évêsque of Metz.) (Imagine having to fight Frisians, Alemanni, Bavarians and Moors.) (Grandson of Plectrude.) Well this old gal was the wildest lay imaginable. How can I go into such detail about toilet matters. She really made me blush at one point. I shoulda told her to stick her head in the “poizette” but of course (that’s Old French for toilette) she was too delightful for words. I met her in an afterhours Montparnasse gangster bar with no gangsters around. She took me over. She also wants to marry me, naturally, as I am a great natural bed mate and nice guy. I gave her $120 for her son’s education, or some new-old parochial shoes. She really done my budget in. I still had enough money the next day to go on and buy William Makepeace Thackeray’s Livres des Snobs at Gare St.-Lazare. It isnt a question of money but of souls having a good time. In the old church of St.-Germain-des-Pres that following afternoon I saw several Parisian Frenchwomen practically weeping as they prayed under an old bloodstained and rainroiled wall. I said “Ah ha, les femmes de Paris” and I saw the greatness of Paris that it can weep for the follies of the Revolution and at the same time rejoice they got rid of all those long nosed nobles, of which I am a descendant (Princes of Brittany).
5.
CHATEAUBRIAND WAS AN AMAZING WRITER WHO wanted early old love affairs on a higher order than the Order was giving him in 1790 France—he wanted something out of a Medieval vignette, some young gal come down the street and look him right in the eye, with ribbons and a grandmother sewing, and that night the house burns down. Me and my Pippin had our healthy get-together at some point or other in my very calm drunkenness and I was satisfied, but next day I didnt wanta see her no mo because she wanted more money. Said she was going to take me out on the town. I told her she owed me several more jobs, bouts, jots and tittles.
“Mais oui.”
But I let the Etruscan fluff her off on the phone.
The Etruscan was a pederast. In which I have no interest, but $120 is going too far. The Etruscan said he was a Mountain Italian. I dont care or know if he’s a pederast or not, actually, and shouldna said that, but he was a nice kid. I then went out and got drunk. I was about to meet some of the prettiest women in the world but the bed business was over because now I was getting real stoned drunk.
6.
IT’S HARD TO DECIDE WHAT TO TELL IN A STORY, AND I always seem to try to prove something, comma, about my sex. Let’s forget it. It’s just that sometimes I get terribly lonely, for the companionship of a woman dingblast it.
So I spend all day in St.-Germain looking for the perfect bar and I find it. La Gentilhommière (Rue St. André des Arts, which is pointed out to me by a gendarme)—Bar of the Gentle Lady—And how gentle can you get with soft blonde hair all golden sprayed and neat little figure? “O I wish I was handsome” I say but they all assure me I’m handsome—“Alright then I’m a dirty old drunk” —“Anything you want to say”—
I gaze into her eyes—I give her the double whammy blue eyes compassion shot—She falls for it.
A teenage Arab girl from Algiers or Tunis comes in, with a soft little hook nose. I’m going out of my mind because meanwhile I’m exchanging a hundred thousand French pleasantries and conversations with Negro Princes from Senegal, Breton Surrealist poets, boulevardiers in perfect clothes, lecherous gynecologists (from Brittany), a Greek bartender angel called Zorba, and the owner is Jean Tassart cool and calm by his cash register and looking vaguely depraved (tho actually a quiet family man who happens to look like Rudy Loval my old buddy in Lowell Massachusetts who’d had such a reputation at fourteen for his many amours and had that same perfume of smoothy looks). Not to mention Daniel Maratra the other bartender, some weird tall Jew or Arab, in any case a Semite, whose name sounded like the trumpets in front of the walls of Granada: and a gentler tender of bar you never saw.
In the bar there’s a woman who is a lovely 40-year-old redhead Spaniard amoureuse who takes an actual liking to me, does worse and takes me seriously, and actually makes a date for us to meet alone: I get drunk and forget. Over the speaker is coming endless American modern jazz over a tape.
