Paris, Part 4

My prediction of a swelled, woolly head came true. I inhaled water, juice and coffee with breakfast. Bev remained in bed. She didn’t sleep well the night before, her “cold” fully manifested. I suspect that the champagne and the late hour didn’t help. I asked her if she wanted me to stay with her to nurse her, but she told me to try to make a day of it; that there was “no point both of us being stuck in the room,” and “you’d only watch me sleep, anyways.”

I agreed, suggested that we meet at Shakespeare and Company for a late lunch if she could make it. It was close, just blocks away, not too difficult to get to, even in her state. I told her that I’d go to the Louvre, since it had been closed the day before. It too was close, also within walking distance, easy to get back to the hotel from. We decided on 2:30 pm. I promised to be back then to check on her if she didn’t make it at the appointed hour, wondering if I should contact a doctor if she worsened.

I left, crossed at the Isle de la City into the 1e arrondissement, then on to the Louvre. It’s immense, too much to take in with only three hours left to me. I didn’t even make it to the second floor (actually the third, as they referred to the ground floor and the “0” and not the first.

It’s a magnificent collection, but so large I had a tendency to not see what I was before my eyes after a time. I made a list of the things I wanted to see: Mona Lisa, The Consecration of the Emperor, The Rape of the Sabine Woman, Une Odalisque, The Astronomer, The Raft of the Medusa. I also wanted to see the Egyptian, the Sumerian, the Greco statuary, Aphrodite (the Venus de Milo) foremost among them.
Some of the paintings were bigger than my house. I had to stand way back to capture them all, and when I was that far back, the lights glossed the canvas out.

The Mona Lisa was a disappointment. Not the artwork, the display. It was smaller than expected, behind glass, surrounded by multitudes of students so thick that it took me fifteen minutes to get close enough to discover that I had a far better view of the painting in my guidebook.

I looked at my watch. Times up! I crossed at the Pont du Artiste. It turned out that it was a much shorter route.

Bev had a bit of an adventure of her own. She met a Parisian man with bad teeth at Notre Dame, a chef, who asked her for the time in French, and stayed to chat her up, and flirt. She says no, that he was only being nice, but he told her that she had a pretty face and hinted that all husbands (hinting me) have a tendency to stray whenever out from under the watchful eye of their wives. He stuck around after that, piling on the compliments. This would lead me to believe that he was telling Bev that my presumed straying gave her, as one of those neglected women, left to her own devices, the right to stray as well. Or am I being cynical? Bev said, yes. I thought, no.

We lunched at a café adjacent to Shakespeare and Company, taking a river cruise afterwards. We’d been discussing it for some days already, and owing to Bev’s illness, we thought that taking one wouldn’t be too taxing. We certainly couldn’t do much more than that. Bev got winded quickly while we walked down to the Seine. She was soon exhausted. We climbed down to the park at the tip of the Isle de la Cite, at Pont Neuf, and approached the moored boats.

We bought tickets on a covered boat. It looked like rain and I didn’t want to risk having to hide below the observation deck. The covered boat I had in mind was not the closest, necessitating the need to walk by a few “perfectly good boats,” in Bev’s opinion. Once we gained our seats, Bev cooled down and enjoyed the ride. It was a pleasant enough cruise. The expected rain did not fall, the sun came out to say hello once or twice, illuminating the bridges we pass under. The Eiffel Tower approached and then fell back behind us as we looped back the way we came.

After the cruise we were mooned by a white kid surrounded by blacks. We watched as the kid and his friends were chased and apprehended by first three and then eight cops. More tourists gathered about us to watch the excitement.

I kept finding myself returning again and again to Shakespeare and Company. It appealed to me, its halls lined with shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling, the shelves stuffed and jammed with books new and old. It smells like books. Obviously. But not like a bookstore that sells new books; it smelled like libraries and used book stores, the sound close and muffled. Magical, sacred to a book lover. An English girl manned the till. She’d begun to remember me after a time, noting which books I’d leafed through, time and again, and took the time to chat with me. Blonde, tattooed, Doc Martens. She’d done her fair share of travelling too, it turned out (go figure, what with her finding herself working at an English language book store in the heart of Paris), so we talked about places we’d been and people we’d met and where we each hoped to go. We talked about home and how we were always itching to leave but homesick when away.

I enjoyed talking to her but I didn’t want to spend all of my waning hours in a bookstore, so I decided on some Josephine Baker posters that kept catching my eye and thanked her for the chat.

Bev and I took one last leisurely stroll before returning to the hotel to set our luggage in order. We had an early start the next day.

It was quiet when we woke. It always was at 6 am. But the city would wake with first light, and soon the cacophony would build. First one car would pass, then a flurry of others. Horns would bleat and blare. Brakes would squeal. City sounds. City sights. We’d seen a fair number of homeless in the nooks and crannies throughout, the most surprising place being under the suspension bridges, with next to no footpath underneath. They lived in tents and under suspended blankets, their clothing drying on a rope, their possessions in boxes and in heaps. Some heaps were the inhabitants themselves.

We left our final five Metro tokens as gift for our chambermaid. We didn’t need them anymore. We might as well give them to someone who could put them to use. A bottle of wine too, for good measure.
It was time to go home.

Bev needed to convalesce.