I’ve Fallen in Love With a Dead Man
There’s this woman. She owns a women’s clothing boutique on the rue du Poteau. She’s a Woman with a capital “W,” kinda like the Women Of FIP, but Flashdance-style. She wears off-the-shoulder blouses and off-the-shoulder dresses, and off-the-shoulder shirts and sweaters and cardigans, too. Her voice is off-the-shoulder radio-raspy and her hair is sex-hair sexy, and around her, off the shoulder, there is never a shortage of men. Of men who, in appearance at least, are 20 years younger than she. We’ll call her Jolene.
Jolene’s shop, her women’s clothing boutique, has been there for years, decades even, and for years and even decades has specialized in some things off-the-shoulder and many things sequined, and all things suitable for wear if one were to suddenly dye one’s hair and toenails and fingernails and eyebrows an especially vivid orange and jet off, on a moment’s notice, to Vegas or Reno or Atlantic City for drinks and dancing and debauchery and dinner and drive-thru weddings and loose slots. It’s unclear as to whether anyone on or near or beside or in-and-around the rue du Poteau has ever done this––jetted off to Vegas or Reno or Atlantic City on a moment’s notice, that is––but these, these are the kind of clothes that Jolene’s been selling. For decades and even years.
The rue du Poteau––on the Right Bank, in the 18th arrondissement, over the hill from Montmartre, down past Lamarck, right by the Mairie du XVIII, just off the Jules Joffrin Métro––is what you might call typique: a throwback, lined with cafés, a brasserie, a tabac, a handful of butcher shops, one still exclusively dealing in horse meat, a bakery, a fish shop, a cheese shop, several wine shops, a traiteur Chinois for quick lunches, an épicerie for late nights when you forgot the Bordeaux, a quincaillerie for all of your hardware needs, a bazaar for odds and ends you may or may not need, the GigaStore––a sort of mini Parisian Wal-Mart––a couple of stands selling everything from batteries to Super Glu to leg warmers to gloves, a Franprix supermarket for discount groceries and a Monoprix for more luxurious ones. And there’s Jolene, of course, and her beloved canine, Myrtille (Blueberry); the soft-spoken-but-not-without-humor independent bookseller next door; and the fruit-and-vegetable guys just up the street who, late in the day, burst into song to boost their beet sales. There’s Alladdin The Flower Guy, arguably the most enterprising of all the enterprising Sri Lankan flower guys whose lot it is to––after purchasing their wares from their one source, the Indian Flower Mafia––peddle long-stem roses, some red, some white, some slightly withered, from bar to bar in hopes of seducing those who are trying to seduce into purchasing one, or maybe two, or maybe more, to slide the seduction along. Yes, the rue du Poteau is très typique.
As was, once, the rue de la Huchette, just barely hanging on to the Left Bank, and described so lovingly by Elliot Paul. If one could write like Elliot Paul, the rue du Poteau would shimmer and shimmy in the freezing cold air, would warm you like new gloves from the basement of Monoprix.
Except that in Elliot Paul’s time there was no Monoprix––or just the one, but it was in Rouen. Nor, come to think of it, were there any Franprix. And while today there is a Greek épicerie on the rue du Poteau, the rue de la Huchette of Elliot Paul’s time was as yet unsaturated with Greek restaurants. There was Mary the Greek, but that, as they say, was that. Now, where neon-lit nightspots for unadventurous tourists take over when the t-shirt shops shut down, the rue de la Huchette has been transformed. Back when Elliot Paul lived there, this was a back street of backwater brothels and by-the-month hotels with bathrooms down the hall. There was a threadbare thread shop, and the taxidermist’s window showed stuffed rats at play. You had to go elsewhere to buy a postcard.
The Last Time I Saw Paris is Elliot Paul’s memoir of Paris, and more specifically, of the rue de la Huchette between World Wars One and Two (and which, by the way, has nothing to do with the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor). Another memoir of Paris written by an American expat, you sniff? Yes. And one of the best ones I’ve read.
Because here’s the thing: Elliot Paul looked to see and therefore he saw and when he saw, he saw beautifully, even if whatever he was looking at wasn’t associated with beauty at all.
Take the take that he took on Madame Mariette, the “madame” of Le Panier Fleuri (The Flower Basket), the local house of ill repute: “I liked Madame Mariette. I think of her as a friend, an interesting and beautiful woman with genuine understanding, wide experience and something deep inside her that no man has yet aroused or even touched and but rarely suspected…” Damn!
And then there’s Hyacinthe. Fiesty, inquisitive, inquiring little Hyacinthe.
“She was perfume and morning and rest and atmosphere and sky, and she honored me with her friendship because, a stranger from a distant land, I wandered into the little street where she, too, was a stranger…” Who doesn’t want to be written about like that? And then there’s Paul choosing dining spots whose interiors complemented her somber clothing, since poor Hyacinthe, who adored the brightest colors, was in mourning, perpetually, thanks to a steady stream of distant dying-or-dead relatives: “Not that she was not ravishing in black, so pale and demure, with those haunting hazel eyes and curved lashes, not too long. But black does not compose well with pastel colors; so I selected for Hyacinthe the best cafés where the chairs or benches would supply her black clothes and white skin with a strong intermediary red, ultra-marine, gold––or corn––yellow, and sometimes royal purple or violet…”
It was not long after their first encounter that Paul began taking Hyacinthe to the children’s theater in the Jardin du Luxembourg:
“Little Hyacinthe did not like the show at all. It was not romantic. But the day I took her to a matinée in a variety theatre and Loïe Fuller’s girls performed their scarf dance, I began to love Hyacinthe whole-heartedly, forgiving freely her snobbishness, her relentless practicality, her selfish outlook on the social world. Her intensity was touching and tremulous. Then and there she resolved to be an actress…”
The Last Time I Saw Paris isn’t easy to get your hands on, and Paul’s follow-up, Springtime in Paris––which recounts his return in 1949––is out-of-print. They have a copy in the reading room at Shakespeare & Company that’s yours to peruse on premises, but good luck finding it because I haven’t finished it yet and have therefore hidden it in the stacks. With a fake dust-cover, a deadly dull cookbook-y one, something about Culinary Delights From the North of England. It’s a damn shame. Because the reading public is missing out. And not on culinary delights from Northern England.
“Only the boors Americanize themselves,” Paul once remarked to Hyacinthe as they chatted about foreigners in America, “as the worst type of Americans here imagine they have become French.” In Paris, it’s apparently permanently true that the worst type of expats imagine themselves to be French, and there are some––this I have heard with my own ears––who declare it outright. But there’s another type of expat who, while maybe not so belligerently-bold-brut as to proclaim themselves to be one of the natives, certainly consider themselves to be a notch or two or three or five or eight higher. They wouldn’t call them natives, per se––not in public––and if you called them on it they’d turn it around and label you racist. With these people, you can’t win. You just have to feel sorry for them. For those who attend their dinner parties, you feel even worse.
Because the thing about some people, some people who are not from Here, the thing is they come Here and stay Here and live Here and exist Here, only to spend much of their time, Here, wishing that things were the way they are back There. They announce that they have to take the last Métro home just as the party’s getting started. They hold up their hands in a stop-gesture when one pours them a second glass of wine. They say things like, “my French friends,” they way that some people, some people we hate, say, “my gay friends.” They influently correct your fluent French incorrectly. They cough––cough!––when someone lights up a smoke. They cough! Out loud! And they’re smug about the smoking ban. Couldn’t wait for it to be enforced! It must be stated, right here, right now: these people must be avoided.
And Elliot Paul did. Avoid the annoying brand of expat, that is. Or at least he didn’t spend much time writing about them. Oh sure, he hung out with his fair share of foreigners. People like Picasso and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Joyce, and Stein; and even Louis Armstrong, and even especially Josephine Baker. (Damn!) And even though it’s hard to imagine any one of them turning down a second glass of Bordeaux or Beaune or Bergerac or Brouilly or anything else, for that matter; and even though it’s hard to imagine any of them announcing they need to catch the last Métro home just as the party’s getting started; and even especially though it’s next to impossible to visualize any single one of them coughing––coughing!––when someone lit up a smoke, some of them or at least a few of them or a couple or them or maybe at least one or two of them could surely most certainly be a little annoying. I mean, anyone who’s ever flipped through A Moveable Feast has gotta admit that ol’ Ernie H. was one helluva dishy bitch. Miaow!
Sure, Elliot Paul hung out with and danced with and drank with and debauched with a great number of expats. But he also chatted with and chatted up and dined and drank and danced and debauched with real French people too. When Paul wrote, “my French friends,” that’s what he actually meant. And as the irreplaceable stars of his book, they were twinklier and glitterier in their grime and grit and grease than any protagonist of the lost Parisian jet set. They were, astonishingly and uniquely for a book about Paris written in English, not merely bit players, but the original starring cast. But not everybody gets it. A 1942 Time magazine review of The Last Time I Saw Paris (which, by the way, was the first book to make the first slot of the first edition of the first ever New York Times Bestseller List) notes, in typical, telltale, tacit, taciturn Time-ese, that Elliot Paul was, “…one of the rare writers who has been able to turn an amiable yen for the gutter into pay dirt…” Damn straight he was rare, O ye dead-and-dusted anonymous Time-keeper! And damn straight he did! But the silly touristic tendency toward disdain for anything that doesn’t depict Paris in all of its bright City of Light, un-gritty, un-greasy, un-glossy, un-grimy, all-glittery-all-glowy Gay Paree glory is, apparently, Timeless.
Ah, but let’s come back to Hyacinthe. She became an actress, you know. A successful actress, a screen actress, a budding star. One who made several films. Not long before, just prior to Hyacinthe stepping up to the spotlight, right before it all went up and came down, Paul takes the seventeen-year-old ingénue for oeufs à cheval at the Café de la Régence. You know, one of those joints that went well with her pale skin and dark clothes. “Hyacinthe adored eggs on horseback, and watching her enjoy herself is one of the lost pleasures I mourn from the bottom of my heart…”
I won’t honor you with a spoiler alert when I tell you that in the end, on the final page of The Last Time I Saw Paris, Hyacinthe dies. A purely perfect Parisian of her time and place, a girl who turned her black mourning dress into spring pastels in the mind’s eye of the one writer who’s written better and more beautifully of Paris in English than any I’ve ever read. Committed suicide, along with her mother and ailing grandfather, a few months after the Nazis took Paris. Elliot Paul doesn’t reveal who Hyacinthe really was, and today, at No. 32 rue de la Huchette, amidst the t-shirt shops and Greek sandwich shops and the late-night neon tourist bars, there is no plaque. Her obituary, the one slated for Les Dernières Nouvelles, was omitted by the Nazi censors.
Perhaps they thought it killed the romance.
First published on Running In Heels in 2010. This version has been edited for length.
