Five days in Paris after twelve years away. I feel like I renewed my vows with my beloved after being a serial cheater, travelling to other places in the intervening years. I have had the good luck to have lived in Paris not once but several times, at different stages of life, and to have visited often. This has been the longest I’ve stayed away.
I can mark the passages of my life through time spent in Paris—stays that lasted from days to years. Tourist. Student. Researcher. Business person. And now invisible older person wandering the boulevards overwhelmed by the relentless forward march of time. I walk holding my husband’s hand, willfully making room for new memories in a head full to bursting with old ones.
Nôtre Dame is covered with scaffolding. There is so much supporting structure to preserve the past that the very shape of the thing is concealed. My memories used to have a definitive shape to them, with crisp outlines of people and things. Now I can’t string together a coherent story, with a beginning, middle, and end, about anything that happened to me in Paris. Wandering the city does bring back sense memories: walking single file down narrow sidewalks, the curbs lined with metal poles; the sulphur smell of the Châtelet métro station; pharmacies advertising nervous pills and creams for heavy legs; pools of tungsten yellow light from Parisian street lamps at night. The rest are jumbled feelings that can’t be put into words.
I walk down a well-loved Paris street and I see it through the prism of all my past visits. I do remember how it felt to find that street, and see it again all the times that followed, like the next sips from that perfect cup of something warm. But can anyone locate the moment when one is no longer moving through the world as if for the first time? But when does memory overtake discovery? I have searched and searched for that exact tipping point when almost everything became something remembered.
There is a secret Paris that I knew years ago, but if it’s still there, it’s now invisible. On this visit I was fixated on the massive portes cochères, because of what I knew they concealed. There was once a gritty, fascinating Paris inside those doors. In older neighborhoods, an elegant apartment building often hid a second building at the bottom of the courtyard, with kids running around and sheets on clotheslines. Attic apartments, too, called chambres de bonnes, single rooms filled with the poets, travelers, students, and dreamers who are only visible to each other. Some of the people I knew as a young person were French, but they were mostly foreign: Martin the Polish film student; Saskia, an America mime; Fiona, the Irish student who read the news in English during the Irish music hour on the radio and who once took me to a céilidh in Bercy; Hugo the antique book dealer; a white Zimbabwean artist whose name I cannot recall.
Do places for such people still exist? The Paris of those days is long gone. There used to be old ladies who appeared on the streets the first day of May to sell lilies of the valley. And Parisian taxi drivers who drove around with their little dogs asleep in the front seat. There used to be flea pit movie theaters in the Latin Quarter, where an ouvreuse with a flashlight would pull down a folding seat in return for a franc. And there were elegant old women in boiled wool tailleurs, high heels, and silk carrés.
What does this have to do with writing family history? I’m not sure. Memory is so ephemeral, and I am an incompetent archivist of my own life. I can still collect and make sense of the lives of people who came before us. Perhaps I can pull some lost cities, and a few of their attic-dwelling dreamers and travelers, out of the immense undesign of the past.
I feel the same about London, a city I moved to 40 years ago, and that I am about to leave. It seems the hidden, shabby areas have all disappeared. In winter there used to be carts on the street selling chestnuts in paper bags, and old ladies selling violets, the first flowers after winter.
These memories are part of the small history of our lives. If we do not recall them then the chestnut and violet sellers may be forgotten.
Lisa, thank you for introducing me to Substack. When I created the account today, your Substack was immediately recommended to me, so I didn't even need to go looking for it!
What a great piece of writing. At the end, you pose the question to yourself, "What does this have to do with writing family history?" I would say most of all that your connection with Paris and other cities has helped raise your intuition, which is a key skill for a researcher, akin in some ways to a detective. You know what to do with the clues you find and where and how to ask more questions to make progress toward the heart of the matter! Cela a donc beaucoup à voir avec l'écriture de l'histoire familiale!