PARIS – “We will always have Paris.” It turns out that the most famous rule in the movies was wrong.
Paris is over for now, his lifeblood has been cut off by the closure of all restaurants, his nights have been silenced by an evening clock at 6pm aimed at eliminating the national pastime of the aperitif, and his cafe bonhomie is lost due to domestic morosity. Blight took over the City of Light.
Taboos fall. People eat sandwiches in the drizzle on city benches. They deliver – oh, the horror! – to take off in the form of ‘le click-and-collect’. They eat earlier, a horrible Americanization. With resignation, they are considering the chalk-on-blackboard offering of long-listening restaurants that still promise a veal or a beef bourguignon. These menus are fossils from the pre-pandemic world.
The museums are gone, the tourist-filled riverboats that have left the Seine are gone, on the sidewalk terraces that offer their pleasure in the twilight, in the cinemas, in the relaxed pleasure of wandering and in the most northern southern cities . In their place a gray sadness descended like mist over the city.
“Parisian gloom is not just climate,” Saul Bellow wrote in 1983. “It is a spiritual force that not only acts on building materials, walls and roofs, but also on your character, your opinions and your judgment. It’s a powerful contraction. ‘
However, Bellow was still able to stop for a sauvignon blanc and a plate of charcuterie when the ‘Paris grisaille’ – the deep monochrome that can envelop even the Eiffel Tower – gave him the January blues. Not in this humid Parisian winter, because the toll of Covid-19 mountain and the city’s ghostly streets follow each other like Eliot’s “boring argument.”
I’ve seen sunlight three or four times since I arrived from New York about seven weeks ago. A glint, a life call, disappeared quickly enough as if it were real. New York does not rain and it is not weeks without uninterrupted gray air.
So my adjustment was hard, especially for a Parisian with his soul torn out. “It’s absolutely sad,” said Alain Ducasse, the celebrated chef, when I asked how Paris feels these days. ‘It’s a terrible prison sentence. The Frenchman is not used to life without his social side, a drink at a cafe, a tap, a kiss. ‘
Yes, even the ‘bisou’, the small kiss on both cheeks that is a greeting or farewell, is gone.
With more than 74,000 people killed across France due to the pandemic, everyone understands the restrictions that have been put in place. Almost all the major cities around the world have had to endure lost lives, lost jobs, and lost lifestyles. Paris is far from alone.
But each city changes in its own way. In New York, the absence that feels strongest is of the energy that defines it. In Paris, the hole in his heart is the absence of the sensual sociability that makes people dream. It is the disappearance of pleasure that the French have spent centuries refining in the belief that there is no limit to it.
Life is monotonous. There really is nowhere to go. ‘We will only Paris, ”grumbles a friend who now feels claustrophobic. He bought a dog because he is allowed to walk after the evening clock.
Frédéric Hocquard is in charge of tourism and nightlife in the mayor’s office. He told me that the number of tourists in Paris decreased by about 85 percent last year. Visits to the Louvre and Versailles, both now closed, decreased by about 90 percent. “It’s catastrophic,” he said. The hotel occupancy is about six percent.
One bright spot: the number of Parisians who went up with the Eiffel Tower last year has doubled. “One of the characteristics of a true Parisian is that he or she has never ascended the Eiffel Tower,” he said. Hocquard said. “We started changing that.” All that was needed was the elimination of alternatives.
There are other disadvantages to this Paris misery. Traffic flows. The markets are exposed with their glittering oyster shakers, their butchers taking five minutes to tie up each quail, their soaking Camembert cheeses giving rise to debate about ripeness, their rum baby cakes with small syringes to inject the rum.
The islands of the city still show their arches to the low hanging bridges of subtle fulcrums. The 19th-century chandelier lamps along the deserted Rue de Rivoli cast a dreamlike procession of light, as if in a film noir. (With a press pass it is possible to go out to the evening clock). Paris silenced is also Paris in a memory.
“A hundred days,” Mr. Ducasse said. Then he insisted that the revival would begin. I asked if he had traveled. Only to Bologna in Italy, he said, to recruit a master producer of gelato. After starting a successful chocolate business a few years ago, it’s his ice cream.
Mr. Hocquard also monitors April and May and plans concerts and other outdoor activities in parks, on the banks of the Seine, even at airports not in use.
Such optimism leaves behind the problem of dealing with the present. On a recent snowfall, I went to the Tuileries in search of distraction. I have always liked the formality of this garden, of the gravel paths, of the uprooted trees, of the geometric patterns. One attraction was still functioning. A carousel!
Colorful horses, an ostrich, a car, an airplane, a ship, and some Cinderella carriages passed by. My partner and I chose horses. The music was North African. There were some kids. The carousel, a small miracle, spun me in my alternating Parisian years and stretched until the mid-1970s.
Paris would return one day, if not this spring. I saw a crow advancing, a discarded French braai weighed into its beak, and flew on a bench to the seat. I look at a wall with plates for French fighters who were killed during the liberation of Paris in 1944. The youngest, Jean-Claude Touche, was 18.
The pandemic imposed war conditions in times of peace in certain ways. That too will end. With his famous war series from ‘Casablanca’ – ‘We will always have Paris’ – Humphrey Bogart also told Ingrid Bergman to leave him, stay with her husband and comfort her with memories of the city of their love. It was an invitation to the imaginary. Now, more than ever before, you have to imagine Paris.