B004MMEIOG EBOK (10 page)

Chapter 20
Looking for Matisse

How oddly the light suffuses the covered arcades which abound in Paris in the vicinity of the main boulevards and which are rather disturbingly named passages, as though no one had the right to linger for more than an instant in those sunless corridors. A glaucous gleam, seemingly filtered through deep water, with the special quality of pale brilliance of a leg suddenly revealed under a lifted skirt.

LOUIS ARAGON,
Paris Peasant

W
e don’t know enough millionaires, but Tim is one. An easygoing Australian, he had the good sense in the 1960s to look around a sleepy beach resort on the far north coast of New South Wales and realize that with a coat of paint and a little light carpentry, those bungalows would make ideal holiday homes. Nor did he lack buyers. People from Sydney and Brisbane were drawn to the area. Some enjoyed the climate and the proximity of the ocean, where whales swung into the bay on their way north to breed. Others were attracted by the potent weed cultivated in nearby bushland. Within a decade, Tim had three offices selling and leasing real estate and could afford to spend his spare time globe-trotting.

One Saturday, his last in Paris for this trip, we were eating breakfast on the terrace.

“I was thinking,” he said, “of taking something back for the wife.”

I dunked the corner of my
pain chocolat
and thought about what kind of gift a millionaire’s wife might like but not already have.

“Hermès scarf? Chanel handbag?”

“Got those,” he said, confirming my suspicions.

We gave it more thought as I topped up our cups and admired the sheen of the roofs of Paris in the morning sun.

“She’s quite interested in painting.”

“Plenty of good art-book shops around,” I said. “Or we could check out the one in the Musée d’Orsay. Big stock.”

He nodded thoughtfully. Then he said, “Listen—can you just
buy
a Matisse?”

An odalisque by Henri Matisse

There may be more agreeable ways to spend a warm Parisian Saturday than strolling from gallery to gallery, seeking the graceful drawings and lithographs of Henri Matisse. None, however, immediately comes to mind.

We began in the arcades, or
passages
, that, starting behind the Louvre, trace a crooked path almost to the foot of the
butte
of Montmartre.

Passages Vero-Dodat, Vivienne, Panoramas, Jouffroy, and Verdeau date from the first half of the nineteenth century and share a common air of antique calm. Louis Aragon called them human aquariums. I’d rather say vivariums—those glass enclosures without water where slow-blooded lizards and frogs lounge in an artificial landscape, feeling no necessity to exert themselves, content merely to observe and be observed.

Slim cast-iron columns support glass roofs through which filters a soft, golden light. It encourages a slower pace, the saunter that marks a real
flaneur.
Underfoot, marble floors, ancient and occasionally uneven, match the tiny shops, an eccentric mix of hobbyism—rare books, antique postcards and stamps, movie memorabilia, dolls—with cafés,
pâtisseries
, and here and there a discreet hotel. The parents of Luis Buñuel spent their honeymoon in one such hotel. Buñuel himself, when he came to live in Paris, sought it out and slept there, in the bed where he was conceived—just the whimsical act one would expect from the director of
Un Chien Andalou
. Half hypnotized by the light, one’s mind spins fantasies. During his stay, did he visit the nearby Musée Grevin, Paris’s equivalent of Madame Tussaud’s? Wax effigies of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marilyn Monroe, and home-grown celebrities like rocker Johnny Hallyday share space with
tableaux
of Napoleon brooding outside his tent during the invasion of Egypt and the family of Louis XVI awaiting the guillotine. Might they have given him the idea for
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
, whose hero conceives a passion for a shop-window dummy that he eventually incinerates?

More to the point of what Tim and I were looking for, the
passages
also include a scatter of dealers in modestly priced paintings and prints.

Almost immediately, we found our first Matisse. The pen-and-ink head of a woman, it sat among dozens of mediocre sketches and watercolors in the window of a gallery near the complex of auction rooms known as the Hôtel Drouot. Despite the bold signature, I wasn’t entirely convinced it was authentic. Besides, the gallery was closed, and our lady was imprisoned behind the steel grilles that barred all the windows.

I used my mobile to ring the off-hours number painted on the door.

The owner didn’t sound happy. In the background, a family chattered—and was that the rattle of plates, the clink of glasses? A late breakfast or an early lunch?

“We’re closed till next week,” he said. “Can’t your friend come back then?”

“He’s leaving for Australia on Monday.”

“I don’t know . . . I’m down in Bourgogne . . .”

“He’s a serious buyer,” I coaxed. “And he particularly wants a Matisse.”

On the phone, someone in the background yelled “A table!”
—
the summons to eat that no French person can resist. If the dealer had been wavering, this decided him.

“Really, I can’t,” he said. “I have to go. Come back when I’m open.” And he rang off.

Tim looked aggrieved. “Funny way to do business. Wouldn’t work back home.”

“There are plenty more,” I said.

But there weren’t—not immediately, at least. This was partly our fault. So many side passages led to interesting little
impasses
that we frequently stopped to explore. In a shop selling postcards, I found an image of the African American dancer Josephine Baker, cheekily nude but for the skirt of velvet bananas made for her by fashion designer Paul Poiret. A few doors along, the proprietor of a tiny North African café served us coffee and an almond biscuit. Squint your eyes, and we might almost be in some Moroccan souk. . .

Our search ended back on the Left Bank, in a small gallery only a few meters from the Seine. Unlike a number we’d passed, it was open and the owner was more than happy to do business.

“Matisse? Certainly!” he said. “Please, take a seat! Coffee? A
tisane
? A glass of wine?”

Armchairs appeared. An easel was set up. From the back room, a stately assistant carried a succession of large flat boxes. Her white-gloved hands placed an etching on the easel. A woman, bare-breasted above diaphanous silk
pantalons
, lounged on an intricately patterned rug, as indifferent to her beauty as a cat. She was an
odalisque
, a harem girl, the pampered prisoner of some wealthy North African. Her impassive, dreamy face, almond-eyed, tangled in sinuous strands of hair—it could only be Matisse.

“Now
that
”—Tim rummaged through Australia’s meager stock of superlatives, and selected its ultimate expression of transcendent delight—“is
all right
.”

“Picasso said,” remarked the gallery owner, “that when Matisse died, his
odalisques
were his bequest to us
.
Picasso never saw North Africa, you know—never even left Europe—but he said he didn’t need to: he could experience it through the eyes of Matisse.”

Nothing sells a picture like a plug from Picasso. Tim produced a credit card of a sort I’d seen only once before. My actor friend, Don Davis, who’d lucked into a continuing role in the TV series
Stargate SG-1
, once took me to lunch at Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysées. The staff, already impressed by a famous face, almost genuflected at the sight of “The Card.”

“The green I know,” I said to Don. “Also the gold. I’ve seen the platinum gray,” I said, “and, just once, a centurion black. But this one’s a first.”

“Plutonium,” he grinned. “No limit.” He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling, a gesture that encompassed the high-priced real estate above it. “I could buy the building.”

The gallery owner, to his credit, accepted Tim’s card without even a raised eyebrow. After a transaction that concluded with Tim the poorer by approximately the cost of a compact car, we left his
odalisque
to be wrapped and packed.

“That was fun,” he said. “Let’s have some lunch.”

Chapter 21
Fish Story

The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The
pommes à l’huile
were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the
pommes à l’huile
were gone I ordered another serving of
cervelas
.
This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce. I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and finished it and ordered a
demi.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY,
on lunching at Brasserie Lipp

F
or lunch, we went to Brasserie Lipp. Nobody who comes to Paris should miss Lipp.

Brasserie
means “brewery,” and beer used to be brewed in the basement of the narrow building just a few hundred meters from the church of Saint-Germain des Près. Some of that spirit persists. The floors are still wood, the decor nineteenth-century mirrors and brass, the menu based on robust stick-to-your-ribs dishes. The primary beer served is one it makes itself. Between the wars, Lipp attracted artists more interested in good, cheap food than atmosphere. Hemingway was a regular. He particularly enjoyed its boiled
cervelas
sausage, served on cold sliced potatoes, dressed with oil.

Every important restaurant has its bijou spot, the table where you can see and be seen. For Lipp, it’s the glassed-in terrace, on either side of the front door, a shop window reserved for film stars and winners of the Prix Goncourt. Tim and I were exiled to the back, which, in any event, we preferred, since the noise of conversation, reverberating across the bare floor, makes it so loud that one can’t talk.

With thoughts of Hemingway, I ordered his preferred meal:
cervelas
with potato salad, washed down with a
demi—
a “half”—of the house beer, served in a large-stemmed goblet holding about half a liter.

“I’ll have the sardines,” Tim said—understandable for someone who lives by the Indian Ocean and routinely dines off fresh fish.

A few minutes later, our waiter returned, not with our food but with its accompaniments. First, a small glass jug of dark green olive oil. He placed it next to Tim’s plate, along with a dish of slivered green onions (which the French insist on calling “white onion”). With it came half a lemon, wrapped in muslin, and clenched in metal grips to aid squeezing. A few minutes later, he returned with a metal dish holding thin dry rye toast wrapped in a linen napkin
.

At last, our food arrived. My sausage and potatoes were plonked down with the lack of ceremony they deserved. But Tim had clearly ordered something out of the ordinary, which deserved the appropriate presentation. Producing a plate on which lay a napkin-covered object, the waiter whipped it off to reveal—a can of sardines.

Displaying the label to a startled Tim as he would a bottle of wine, he unrolled the lid, upended the contents onto a plate, and, with a cheery “Bon appétit!,” retired.

I should have noticed Tim’s astonishment. He’d been expecting fresh grilled sardines—a commonplace in Australian restaurants. It never occurred to me to explain that, to the French, certain canned sardines are of such quality that they achieve vintage status. The best are caught in the spring when the fish are fattest, and are reserved for “gourmet” use. Some canners roast or sauté the fish before canning. A connoisseur described their flavor as “complex, almost a non-fish thing, very nutty, deep, and enthralling.” “Label rouge” sardines are even more specialized. Guaranteed to have been landed no more than twelve hours after being caught, and arriving at the factory within four hours of landing, they are cleaned the same day, fried in sunflower oil, stored for four months before sale, and then issued with a label that lists not only the day of catch but the name of the boat that caught them. One of the main processors, Connetable, produces a “vintage” sardine that retails at $14 a can. Buyers are advised to “put down” these like wine for a few years, turning them occasionally to spread the flavor.

“What really threw me,” Tim said later, “was the fact that you didn’t bat an eyelash. I thought it was some sort of practical joke.”

He should have realized that the French, serious at the best of times, become positively reverent when it comes to food.

Animators at the Walt Disney studios in the 1930s thought it would be amusing to make a porno cartoon of Mickey Mouse.

Walt laughed as much as everyone else—then fired them all. Word soon got round: Rule number 1 at Disney was “Don’t fuck with the mouse.”

In France, the same applies to what goes in your mouth. You don’t fuck with the food. Not even the unassuming sardine.

After a Matisse and a lunch at Lipp, there wasn’t much hope of improving the day, so we didn’t try. At four, as the waiters cleaned up the tables from lunch and began to set them for the dinner trade, Tim and I were still dawdling over our third coffee and fourth (or was it fifth?) Calvados.

Of course I should have been working. But whenever a remaining scrap of Puritanism whispers that there’s something disreputable about taking pleasure in
flanerie
, I think of Catherine Deneuve.

For many years, she was our neighbor, living in a glass-walled apartment high above Place Saint-Sulpice. Occasionally we’d meet—standing in line at Poilane when Paris’s best baker had only one small shop, on rue du Four, or in one of the
brocantes
we both love to haunt. I’d interviewed her a few times, once in the salon of Yves Saint Laurent, where she arrived in a blue linen suit as crisp and unwrinkled as new money.

Deneuve was twenty-five and at the height of her blond beauty when she filmed Françoise Sagan’s novel
La Chamade
(
Heartbeat
) in 1968. Her character, Lucile, is the pampered mistress of wealthy fortyish Charles, played by Michel Piccoli. Seeing she’s attracted to a young journalist, he lets her leave him to live in his cramped apartment, gambling, sensibly, that it won’t last. Having to sell her jewels and travel by bus sours Lucile from living on, as the French say, “love and fresh water,” but, this being France, the real revelation comes from literature, William Faulkner’s
The Wild Palms—
the story, as it happens, of a man who abandons city comfort to run off to the wilderness with his lover.

During one lunch hour, she’s reading it at the counter of a café as she nibbles her
baguette jambon fromage.
One passage so strikes her that she calls for attention and, as the whole café falls silent, she reads it aloud.

    
It’s idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities—contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures—eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun—than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it. It is one of what we call the prime virtues—thrift, industry, independence—that breeds all the vices—fanaticism, smugness, meddling, fear, and worst of all, respectability.

The whole café breaks into spontaneous applause. We see what these wage slaves are thinking:
If only I dared. . .

Lucile does dare. She abandons her lover and returns to the good life. The last shot of the film, appropriately, shows her heading back to an existence of champagne, Mozart, Saint-Tropez and Saint Laurent. And being a true Parisienne, she is, of course, striding out in confidence, defiantly in the middle of the road, and—how else, in this most wonderful city for walkers?—on foot.