The Next Time I See Paris, 2003, by Carter Jefferson

From MemoryArchive

Who: Carter Jefferson
What: Chance meeting
When: 1957-8, 2003
Where: Paris, Boston

The Next Time I See Paris

by Carter Jefferson

March, 2003

My wife Lucy, looking through a pile of sketchbooks in an art supply store the other day, told another searcher that a place nearby had a better selection. They talked. The woman, young and well dressed, had an accent.

"Where are you from?"

The fellow shopper looked at her, hesitant.

"Paris," she finally said. "I suppose I shouldn't have told you that."

"Paris is wonderful!" Lucy said, not missing a beat. "Only ignorant people would give you a hard time."

The woman started crying.

Collateral damage, I guess you'd call that.

When I heard the story, I choked up. Most Americans would, I think. Obviously, however, not everybody had been polite to our foreign visitor.

We spent eight months in Paris forty years ago. The Parisians weren't very nice on the surface. They tended to be in a hurry. They acted, in fact, exactly like New Yorkers, who also weren't very polite to strangers. We got used to their rhythm, though.

When I did research at the Bibliotheque Nationale, the librarians didn't waste time with me, but they helped. In the little grocery store down the street from our cheap apartment, the manager, an imperious older woman, acted impatient every time one of us came in. We noticed, however, that we weren't the only ones treated like stupid children; she treated everybody that way.

In London I had asked someone for directions to the nearest drugstore. I got a polite, but hardly informative, wave--somewhere over there. That sort of thing happened more than once.

In Paris, I asked the same question of a man on the street. He grabbed me by the arm and started to propel me up the block. "You'd think the government would do something about these street signs," he began, and didn't stop complaining about everything in sight until he let me go three minutes later--right in front of a big pharmacie.

My wife and I both marvelled at the office girls clicking rapidly down the streets in their high heels, every one blindingly neat after a hard day's work. Every day, on my way to the Bibliotheque, I stopped in at the Louvre--it was free then--just to take a quick look at the Winged Victory. After a while the attendant touched his cap whenever he saw me come in.

On sunny days we'd go to the Luxembourg Gardens with our one-year-old child. She loved to chase the pigeons, but passersby clucked and told us she should be in her pram, not running around loose. They had notions, those French women, and brooked no opposition. But the restaurants fed us exquisite food, and the galleries showed us spectacular art we couldn't afford.

We left during the nervous days of DeGaulle's 1958 coup, when hundreds of troops thronged the streets, but we hated to go. You don't live long in Paris without becoming part of it. People we knew, like the big butcher who laughed at Lucy's French every time she came into his shop, said, "Come back! Things will be better again!"

He knew what he was talking about. Long before we got into World War II, 166,000 of those "surrender monkeys" died fighting the Germans, many more per capita than the US lost in that war. The Occupation was a dismal affair. But France survived; things did get better. We've been back since then. Paris has changed, but it's still dripping with history and legend and grandeur. The people actually seemed to have gotten nicer.

Nowadays their government kowtows to the will of big business, and that put Jacques Chirac against us in the UN. We bow to different big businesses. Of course, that might not have been it at all--maybe, just possibly, it was because he was right and we were wrong.

Still, I want to go back to Paris, to the Riviera, even to little towns like Auxerre. Perhaps I'm not enough of an American patriot to have the right attitude. But I don't think that's it. A friendship that's lasted more than two hundred years won't just disappear.

The next time I see Paris, I don't know how we'll be welcomed. With any luck though, we'll do better than that poor young woman looking for a sketchbook here in Boston.

[Category: Life][Category: People][Category: years: 1957-58, 2003]

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