Travelling with Ernest II - It is easy to be happy in Paris

It is easy to be happy in Paris and if you go to the Luxembourg Gardens on a clear afternoon in early Autumn the sun will be shining into the lower branches of the leaf-fallen trees and people will be facing their chairs to feel its warmth.

Every sound will be distant: the barely audible traffic from the Boulevard St-Michel, the emptying rustle of drying leaves on the trees, the crunch of fine gravel under walking feet, the slow metal scrape of heavy chairs when old women drag them over dirt into the light, and young people laughing anywhere.

In the centre is a sunken garden ringed by a stone white balustrade. The last crimson geraniums of summer bloom in large pots on the main columns.

The best charcuterie

Late on Saturday morning I tell Ian I am going to the Cézanne exhibition at the Luxembourg Museum and that I am buying a picnic in the Latin Quarter before I go.
It sounds like fun to him. His daughters are about to go with their mum, Melissa, to birthday parties for the afternoon.

He is ready in half an hour and we walk on a tree-lined path by a gentle part of the Seine to the train at Chatou. Ian always wants to know why I load my bag so heavily that cloak room attendants groans under its weight. ‘It enhances my day,’ I tell him bureaucratically. He tells me ‘It doesn’t.’ He swings his arms freely as we walk.

We take the train twenty minutes to Chatelet and from there hire Velib bikes and ride past the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre Dame to the local market where the Boulevard St-Germain intersects with Rue Monge and Rue Descartes. Here there are many fine places to buy a picnic and it is only a ten-minute walk to the Gardens.

We buy a small loaf with prunes and hazelnuts and a baguette from the Boulanger on Rue Monge and at the market we buy oysters from Normandy, cheese from somewhere and a half bottle of Bordeaux from 2001.

The best charcuterie is an uphill walk along the Rue Descartes to the Place de Contrascarpe. Madame Venus is a kind and patient woman to tourists who know only a little French. Ten years ago she gave me one of her empty terrines to take back to Melbourne. Last year I brought her a bottle of Mornington pinot.

Her rillettes of goose (rillettes d’oie) taste warm on the tongue because she seasons them with a little fine-ground white pepper, which other charcuteries do not do. For years after my first visit I believed her eggs in jelly were truly angelic. They are made of an egg poached in its shell, which is peeled and set in veal stock in a small terrine with a tarragon leaf at the base and a thin strip of fine ham around the edge; they are white angels suspended. No other charcuterie uses tarragon and its delicate aniseed flavour fills my senses so that my eyes open wide, each time anew in ecstasy. Later I discovered the eggs were not oef angelie but oef en gelée.

I am sure her charcuterie closes for lunch at 1.30 every day except Sunday when it doesn’t open, but we arrive five minutes after one o’clock to see the last blind being lowered in the window. I am acutely mad at missing this place three days running and I swear badly and I let my left foot swing with gravity into the gutter and let my right foot swing into a traffic signpost.

Ian is one of Her Majesty’s loyal diplomats and he tries to placate me by telling me there are other charcuteries in Paris and that I can always revisit this one when I return in December. He does not understand about the tarragon or the pepper, nor realise that December is months away even though it is only six weeks. He is more patient than me.

It does not take me long for me to be happy again but I cannot think of anything to say and my silence makes Ian think I am still angry. Eventually we find a charcuterie that is open and we buy some ham and two oef en gelée that are each flavoured with a slip of tomato and a chewable piece of water-based ham.

The best way to drink wine

In the Gardens we sit with a good view of the Museum. The oysters have the taste of a thin, translucent-sea brine and I wish now we had a dozen of them and some crisp-cold white wine. We eat the rest of the picnic slowly and drink the roughening red.

The best way to drink wine in Parisian parks is from ceramic yogurt pots the size of a small wine glass, which are sold in most supermarkets: they are opaque and indestructible. Buy a twin-pack on your first day and when you have eaten the yoghurt rinse out the pots with one-Euro water from a street-seller and wipe out the creamy residue with a leaf – a freshly fallen autumn leaf is ideal for absorbing moisture without crumbling.

When we are finished the picnic I take out a copy of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast I have brought to enhance my day and read out the first paragraph of the chapter Hunger was Good Discipline:

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. … 

When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy … the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens … There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. 

 I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

Ian asks me if I am in my anti-Hemingway phase. I tell him yes. I don't see why I should go hungry for Hemingway again, although I still could for Cézanne. We walk to the Museum.

I have never understood security at French museums

I have never understood security at French museums. Outside the security man radios his colleague ten metres away inside to tell him I will be checking my pocket knife with him, once I am inside. I hold the knife in my hand as we enter and the man inside is pleased to recognise it. I do not look to see if anyone else is disturbed. He smiles and tells me I must check it in the cloakroom around the corner. By the time I am out of sight the knife is back in my bag as easily as it could have been in my pocket. The attendant groans as I hand over the pack. (Later when I collect it she sways backwards as she lifts it with both hands to put it on the high counter).

The exhibition is only half a dozen small rooms and there are many paintings from overseas collections that cannot be as good as what is in the rest of Paris. The finest paintings are some early portraits showing Goya’s influence – the distortion of the body by an unseen, malevolent force – and one very fine landscape depicting a country road in the foreground that descends like a vortex into a flat middle ground, here the façade of a house with village rooftops behind it, and on the far horizon the thin smoke stacks of city industry as a portent of the future.

The people are a picture

Ian does not linger and is in the gift shop half an hour before me. He gives me a tour when I get there, pointing out the Cézanne walking canes on the wall and Cézanne marmalade with a Cézanne still life on the label.

We go back to the gardens and lament not having more wine. The people are a picture. There are groups of young people drinking wine and water and laughing or smoking, young couples pressing themselves into one another and sharing each other’s breathing.

There are many people sitting alone reading, texting, drawing, listening to music, all facing to the sun that is setting around the Tour Montparnasse. Most are middle aged, all absorbing the last of their summer.

Old people walk and sit on their own or with others.


Everyone is content or happy or in love except the people who walk with some angry or determined purpose and trail up dust clouds behind them. The clouds are as yellow as the apparitions of smoke are white from the people who sit smoking cigarettes on the khaki chairs.

***

We leave before the dark beings to settle into the afternoon and walk in the direction of the river and come to the Place Suplice. I stop and turn to Hunger was Good Discipline. Ian is already across the road and so I read it quickly with my finger trailing across the words and catch up with him and think to myself that I will come back on the day I walk into the charcuterie of Madame Venus. We take two more Velib bikes from the Boulevard St-Germain back to Chatelet and then the train to Chatou.

We walk home via the back streets. When we arrive the girls give us hugs and tell us about the things they did in the afternoon before going back to play. I tell Melissa about missing the chactuerie. ‘What did you do,’ she asks, ‘fall down on your knees and cry?’