TRANSITION

       

 

             Maurice de Talleyrand, the extraordinary statesman who served both Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte often extolled ‘the sweetness of life’ under the French monarchy.  Of course Paris was the center of everything.  So too, after the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, the capital witnessed rebirths of gaiety and splendor.  Once again the city experienced a similar period of magnificence after World War II.  Much like the expatriates of the 1920s, those of us who spent time in Paris in the 50s and 60s were privileged to have known a metropolis clinging to a few final moments of post- bellum joy. That was before urban blight, street crime, pollution, inflation, racial disruptions and the general malaise that permeates all of France today came along.

 

            When I first came to Paris, the city was majestic.  Sylphs and sorcerers had taken turns to bless her with celestial stardust.  Emerald leaves floated through enchanted trees. Golden ashes descended onto the arcades facing the Rue de Rivoli.  Fountains of spectral mist sprayed the obelisk at the Place de la Concorde.  Atop Montmartre, Sacre Coeur glowed in cool pink mornings.  Lovers, passionate and serene, stopped to embrace in gardens and parks.  Café sitters dozed in halos of dazzling light.  With loud clicking heels, chic demoiselles glided on starling wings.  Men and boys fished behind long wooden poles while elderly ladies, busy with needles and wool, occupied long green benches. Beneath a blue-gray sky, Parisians, individually and en masse, were frozen in a motionless tableau, joyously confirming the countless gifts bestowed upon their incomparable city. 

 

I was an insomniac when I started playing poker.  No matter how late I went to bed I could not sleep past five in the morning.  That’s the time Paris wakes up.  There is a poker expression for that.  You won’t find it in any dictionary or guidebook.  A heart flush is composed of five hearts, ‘cinq coeurs’ in French, homonymous with cinq heures or five o’clock.  If you ever hear anybody at a French card table say: ‘Paris s’eveille’ (Paris is waking up), you can be sure he is announcing a heart flush.

 

The metro starts running at five-thirty.  Cafes and newspaper kiosks open slightly earlier.  As in any major metropolis, working class people dominate the early morning hours.  Around five-fifteen I would buy the Herald Tribune, before going for coffee and croissants at Le Rallye, a café on the Place Saint-Andre-des-Arts.  Michel the night man stayed on until nine in the morning.  He and I liked to play a French dice game called four hundred twenty-one.  We played for drinks, not for money.  Every weekday morning Roger and Toto, a pair of brothers-in-law would arrive at the café with the first metro.  Invariably, they drank a few glasses of melicasse, a combination of rum and red currant syrup.  One day Toto stayed late instead of going to work.  He wanted to play dice with Michel and me.  The man had a hot hand.  The bartender and I had to cough up dough for cocktail after cocktail.  None of us was aware of the hour.  Just before Michel was due to get off, Toto collapsed to the floor.  Neither Michel nor I knew what to do.  Another client called the fire department.  Toto was taken across the river to the Hotel Dieu Hospital.

 

He was absent the following morning.  Roger blamed Michel and me for getting him drunk.  He called us every name in the book.  Didn’t we know that Toto had a bad liver?

 

“You rats,” he concluded.  “You could have killed him.”

 

Michel made a Gallic shrug.   All his clients had bad livers.  Roger would not be appeased.  He and Toto stopped going to Le Rallye.   For a while they went to the tobacco bar next door.  Then they abandoned the Latin Quarter altogether.  Shortly afterwards, Michel was fired.  Not because of what had occurred with Toto, but because he was caught with his hand in the till.

 

The new night manager of the Rallye was a deadbeat.  I started going to the café Jacques Coeur instead.  Antoine, the owner thought I was wealthy.  A lot of people in the neighborhood agreed with him.  In those days, the French were convinced all Americans were loaded. 

 

One morning Antoine accused me of coming on to his wife.  Far from the only person on his list, he pointed an accusing finger at a dozen other customers.  The crazy bastard went so far as to shoot a local tradesman.  Pretty Beatrice was the only waitress at the café.  While the victim had no reason not to be friendly with her, such logic made no impression on Antoine.  He was sent to prison, but only for a year.  Crimes of passion are treated lightly in Mediterranean Countries.  Even though Paris is a long way from the sea, French thinking pays no attention to detaisl such as distance.  Similar examples of so-called Cartesian logic worked out to my advantage at poker.  My opponents were so lousy, I couldn’t miss winning nine games out of ten. 

 

            Not long after he regained his freedom, Antoine attacked another client for making eyes at Beatrice.  As far as the French were concerned, there was nothing unusual about that.  Nor were they surprised by my continuous success at poker. As the locals like to say: 'the more things change, the more they remain the same.'  But that is not so.  Today the Café Jacques Coeur is a souvenir shop, the Rallye is a secondhand bookstore and the poker games I frequent take place thousands of miles from Paris.