* Advice, perhaps, for couples planning a romantic candlelit dinner in Paris.
** Official perfect temperature for a Champagne toast—about 8 degrees centigrade, for those who are prepared to be unromantic enough to poke a thermometer in the bottle.
*** On the hour, every hour from dusk till 1 a.m., and 2 a.m. in summer.
**** Not that this would be a good idea—one thing to bear in mind, even on the most love-crazy of evening walks, is that this is urban canal water and, as such, is seriously dirty. The poor fools who strip off and dive in on hot summer nights are risking a highly romantic bout of turista, skin disease or worse.
***** Here, the King was inadvertently showing how out of touch with everyday life he was—French shopkeepers traditionally close on Sunday afternoons and Mondays. No wonder the Parisians cut his aloof head off.
****** This was more than a decade before he legalized French brothels.
******* For more on Edward’s amorous outings to Paris, and their far-reaching geopolitical implications, see my book 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.
******** For more on the bordels, see the next chapter.
********* I’m sure Dirty Dick is just a language problem—they thought it sounded like an American saloon. It reminds me of a Parisian friend who wanted to teach pâtisserie baking in Miami and planned to call her website French Tarts in Florida. I must admit that I now regret warning her not to.
********** This banter includes trying to explain what all the dishes are to anyone who can’t read French. There may be plenty of tourists here, but there’s no English menu—it’s French through and through.
*********** The first, for those who didn’t read the earlier part of this chapter, being Stalingrad.
************ In France, the rule is: les femmes sur la banquette—that is, women on the bench, referring to brasseries with bench-like seating along the walls. Even if there is no banquette, the ladies must face into the restaurant. This is so that the woman will be the sole centre of the man’s attentions, or to put it more bluntly, so that the man will be gazing only at his lady love and not at every other woman in the restaurant.
The Crazy Horse, or ‘crezzee orrsse’ as the French call it, is the most Parisian of the cabarets. Its dancers are all the same height and have the same distance between their … but you’ll just have to read the next chapter to find out.
7
SEX
After dinner, he [James Bond] generally went to the Place Pigalle to see what would happen to him. When, as usual, nothing did, he would walk home across Paris to the Gare du Nord and go to bed.
IAN FLEMING, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
THERE’S AN old Parisian joke about the shutting-down of French brothels in 1946. When the fancy bordels closed, their furniture and fittings were all sold off at auction, and according to the joke, the parrot at one of the fanciest establishments, Le Chabanais, went up for sale along with the mirrors, beds and bathtubs.
The bird is bought by a pet-shop owner, who puts it on display with a warning that it is an excellent speaker, but prone to use bad language because of all the shady people it was associating with in its previous home.
No one wants to buy the foul-mouthed creature until one day a housewife, Madame Dupont, comes into the shop and says she’s looking for a talking parrot to keep her company. The shopkeeper says he only has the one, and he’s selling it at a discount because it swears so much. Madame Dupont decides to buy it all the same, and puts it on a perch in her living room.
‘What a shitty dump,’ the parrot squawks. ‘The Chabanais was much smarter.’
Things get even worse when Madame Dupont’s teenage daughters come in from school.
‘Cheap whores,’ the parrot squawks. ‘The tarts at the Chabanais were much classier.’
And then Madame Dupont’s husband arrives home.
‘Merde alors,’ the parrot squawks, ‘you here, Monsieur Dupont?’
Yes, Parisians like to think of their city as a ville chaude, a horny town, the kind of place where even a respectable family man has a secret sex life. Sex is meant to be everywhere—not just in massage parlours and swingers’ clubs, but just a smile away if you happen to meet the eye of the right person in the street.
When I first came to Paris, I took this erotic omnipresence for granted. I was living in an apartment that looked out into a narrow courtyard, and the place just opposite was shared by three girls who used to wander from bathroom to bedrooms completely naked. What’s more, they were allergic to curtains. I thought that this was a completely normal part of Parisian life, and after a while, I hardly even paid attention when a freshly showered demoiselle went flitting across my eyeline. Whenever friends came over from the UK to visit, they’d gasp and ask me if I’d seen the nudie show opposite, and I would nonchalantly tell them, of course, this is Paris.
As soon as the girls moved out, though, I found out how wrong I was. The next occupants were a young couple who immediately put up thick curtains, and scowled at me if I was looking out of my window and dared to nod or smile across at them, even though I was usually fully clothed.
Parisian friends regularly tell stories about sexy goings-on in their neighbours’ apartments—yelps coming through the walls or ceiling, a pair of splayed female legs poking up above a window sill, or silhouettes in a bathroom window performing a shadow play of stand-up fornication. But these, it now seems to me, are only symptoms of the sheer density of population in the city. Glancing in a neighbour’s window or inadvertently eavesdropping through thin walls are inevitable features of city life.
Even so, Paris still loves to think of itself as
