An “Alte Kaker” in Paris

Been in this city before—but never stayed anywhere near this long, six weeks—and never before was I this old.

In the half-century or so during which I have been coming to Paris, I saw a generation of old men, often having lost an arm or a leg to the war, fade away, along with their berets. We old folks now must shoulder responsibility for being similarly out of date (if not similarly brave). I did my part by humming some Jacques Brel and wearing a cowboy hat most days. (And, no, I was not the only person rocking such a hat in Paris . . . but almost.)

The attraction of finally learning to speak French—never easy for me—has further receded as the number of years left in which I might do that speaking has shrunk and as the Parisians have continued to learn English. (I should note that these factors have in no way deterred my wife, who actually had her French complimented, in a good restaurant, by a genuine French person, who, we are pretty sure, was not kidding.) However, I am able, at least, to stumble my way through many of the articles in Le Monde.

Over the decades, I have witnessed the sharp decline in the number of grand newsstands in Paris or at least in the portion of printed things they sell. I’ve seen a similar decline in the number of people pouring over Le Monde or Le Figaro in the cafés. On the other hand, there are still many fewer people staring at their iPhones or laptops in those cafés than are to be found in the set of new cafés in New York City. The denizens of French cafés often engage in conversation. They provide the street with its audience. They rarely seem to be engaging in “remote work.”

And knowing that work has its place, but it is a limited place is one more crucial ingredient in Paris’ secret sauce. They mostly don’t rush. They don’t work late. They don’t work weekends. They do not work too much. One little owner-operated café we frequented not only was closed on Saturdays and Sundays; it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. That meant le monsieur made less money. Yeah.

     You can imagine how hard this is to write for a New Yorker.

And they take the time to be polite. My wife forget once to preface a request with, “S’il vous plait.” She was sternly rebuked. And you don’t want to neglect your “bonjours.”

How does this connect with the remarkable artistic and intellectual work Parisians have done? I have nothing original to say there. Politeness helps even radical thinkers. Not working too hard leaves extra time for thought.

The world-remaking artists, philosophers and writers who had long gathered in Paris were already beginning to be spoken of in the past tense during my first visits. Sartre had become and remained a staunch Communist somewhat past the point when the evidence on the Soviet Union was in. Camus had died young. Now, in lieu of the statues granted to Voltaire and Diderot, Sartre and Camus live on in photographs at the Deux Magots café. Beauvoir is with them there, but she lived longer and, in the end, is much more deserving of a statue.

The clutch of thinkers who dutifully carried on the struggle against bourgeois thought in the second half of the 20th century—Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida among them—are mostly gone with that century, without even photos in cafes to commemorate their quixotic crusades and efforts out-bizarre each other, as John Lennon did to Paul McCartney on Revolver.

And just about all this new century has been able to produce in the way of a charismatic French intellectual engagé is Bernard-Henri Lévy, and he’s a year older than I am. Perhaps the bourgeoisie have indeed triumphed.

I walk maybe more now than I did when I had more places to go. And Paris—with its extraordinary 19th-century, Haussmann-liberated beauty and its exuberant café life forever spilling into the streets—probably was and remains the best walking city on earth. Its walkability has even been upgraded a bit by some strict new restrictions on cars in the city’s center. (The proliferation of bicycles, some on green-colored paths that share some sidewalks with pedestrian paths, is, however, a new peril for the peripatetic.)

One of the secrets of aging with equanimity, I thought (when it was others who were doing the advanced aging), is to look less at your subject-to-diminishment self and more at the still-vibrant and out-and-about world. And, of course, Paris offers a particularly engrossing performance of out-and-about. I can’t, however, say I was particularly adept at living through it, at carousing vicariously.

Nor did I manage the thing itself. Indeed, this version of me—the one which finally got a chance to spend these weeks in Paris—drinks less, eats more carefully and turns in earlier than earlier iterations.

C’est dommage, non?