Paris: 1973

Nonfiction Paris: 1973 · Albert Guerard The imagination may accept the certainty of everyone's death but one's own. Not for a moment have I visualized the vulnerable San Francisco skyline surviving me, or the Los Angeles freeways coiling under deathly smog, or a Manhattan decaying so muchfaster thanmyself. It was instead in 1973 inParis, a warm May afternoon on the quiet upper reaches ofthe Boulevard St. Michel, that I did momentarily acknowledge the certainty of my own death. I had to, since I suddenly knew these stolid six-story buildings would be here when I was not. Not Notre Dame white as in its first centuries, not the unchanged Luxembourg with its donkeys and donkey carts and the very sailboats I rented in 1924, but the unbroken respectable facade of a Hausmann Boulevard finally convinced me Paris was more indestructible than I. The awareness, dizzying yet not unpleasant , gave me a richer sense of place captured in time. For the deep past of Paris was also a future extending beyond the curve of my life. Plus ça change . . . Paris has an immutability of tone and pace that London lacks, or even Rome beneath its layers of time. Under siege during the Hundred Years' War, invaded by hungry wolves, Parisians complained (as in 1945) of the quality ofthe bread and the wine. And the rioting students of 1848 as recorded by Flaubert, asserting police brutality, are children of 1968. (It comes as a shock to learn that the police.were housed, in 1828 as today, at 116 rue de Grenelle, the station surviving three revolutions and many crises and the great wars.) This year it was- the lycéens, in revulsion against the "loi Debré" on military service, who promised disorder: le printemps sera chaud. Day before yesterday, strolling near the Bastille, I came upon a long line of police cars discreetly parked in readiness for still another manifestation: this one against the abortion law. I had not come so very far from my first Paris of 1924, and the dark crowds in front of the Pantheon, honoring or reviling Jaurès. Sunday, one of the hottest days of the year, I went to the races at Auteuil (less successful in my computations than in 1928, losing on every race), where still a last few owners wore top hats or gray bowlers, and one even a gray swallowtail, as they watched the saddling procedures from their private enclave now reduced to four meters square. That evening we went to the Comédie Française for Les Femmes savantes, whose sprightly thin grace reached across the centuries, uncorrupted by modem interpretation. During the intermission we looked out on the lovely illuminated fountains, and the white pools of the streetlights, and the lights of the Café de la Régence, once a favorite of Franklin and Napoleon, Diderot and Voltaire. It has been a period of personal détente, and a time for writing affectionate reminiscences of 1928 and 1944, between a quarter's teaching at Stanford-inFrance and the summer we are to spend in London, with more complex writing tasks ahead. I intend, I say it with trepidation, to write on Dostoevsky and especially on The Possessed. Dostoevsky looms darkly before me, as he has for a number of years. I even once had a vivid daydream of his appearing from the The Missouri Review ¦ 89 grave at the back of my class, the filthy head bleeding, to protest my misinterpretations. I want to pin down in fifty or seventy-five pages this richest and most complex of novels, a novel so multiform and insubordinate that it seemed bent on destroying its author.* Terrible désordre, he himself exclaims in his notebook: a disorder I must try to encompass and describe. Over a hundred years ago Dostoevsky had his own Paris time, unhappier than mine, which darkened his notions of western anarchy. And from sidewalk café tables this spring I have watched unmistakably Dostoevskyan conspirators walk by: the little beards, the tight trousers, the burning hostile paranoid eyes scornful of materialists and their glasses of beer. We lunch with Professor Mercier the physicist, very old yet youthful in spirit, who...