Making Money in France

My father was born in 1904, and I was born 42 years later.  For many years when I was young, I tried to catch him up.  I chased after him, having stitched together for myself a pair of patchwork sneakers, made of pieces of life I understood and pieces I did not, which served to keep my feet protected as I ran. 

 

In 1904, in Paris, urban development created the conditions by which the City of Light would become even more the center of European art than it already was.  Having become so much more the center, by 1928, it would also be a target for my father, allowing him to explore its demimondaine enticements.  Here’s what happened in 1904.  Paris’ boulevard Raspail led south from boulevard du Montparnasse and out of the city.  In 1904, urban development “crossed the T” and cut boulevard Raspail through boulevard du Montparnasse, so that it ran northward also.  This made what had always been a quiet neighborhood much easier to find. 

 

The artists who had subsisted in that neighborhood because it was cheap found their way northward into Paris’ heartland, and those on the Right Bank who wanted to find them were now able to do so, by strolling south.  Picasso settled in Paris in 1904.  Modigilani was there.  Braque was there.  The Steins were there by 1905.  The Dome café, of which many expatriate Americans were habitués, is on the corner of boulevard Raspail and boulevard du Monparnasse.  I don’t know if Dad ever hung around at the Dome, though it seems likely.  Later, wearing my sneakers, I did. 

 

The Dome is the single location at which I ever made any money in France. 

 

It was 1965, and I was very conscious of being on the terrace of the Dome.  I was alone, and in Paris for the first time, and in love with that fact.  My French was almost non-existent, but after four years of prep school and college Spanish—and after several recent weeks wandering in Spanish Morocco—I was exceedingly pleased to be told by a Dome waiter that he assumed I must, indeed, be Spanish, for I spoke my hesitant French with that sort of accent. 

 

Hot stuff!

 

            So there I was, sitting in the sun, wearing a turtleneck and a beret.  I was mustachioed, like Hemingway, and I was drinking vin very ordinaire, like Modigliani…absinthe unfortunately having been discontinued as poisonous some years before.  I was reading (trying to read) a French newspaper, as I had seen photographs of Proust doing…though of course his table should have been set for tea and madeleines. 

 

At the table next to mine sat an American couple of Midwestern middle-age, enjoying their European vacation.  I had overheard them trying to make themselves plain when ordering, but I had scorned, of course, to assist them in any way.  Certainly, they were no fellow countrymen of mine!

 

            After a time, I realized that the wife of the couple was trying to catch my eye.  I deigned to give her a slight nod, whereupon she rose and made her way to my table.  She did her best to communicate that she desired to sit at my table and to have our photograph taken by her husband.   After all—this was the Dome, and I was evidently an artist of some kind, and here we were in Paris.  Once I managed to grasp her meaning—her French was poor and, after all, we had no English—I gravely allowed that this might be permissible. 

 

The thing arranged itself.  She sat; her husband manipulated the camera.  Voila!  It was done.      

           

            Her thanks were profuse, and in them her husband joined.  I was gracious, though cool. 

 

            “Harry,” she whispered, nudging her husband, “he wants some money.  Give him some money.”

 

            Harry had the obligingness to reach into his pocket and to withdrew a five franc coin.  He offered it to me, and, with a condescension that became me very well, I accepted it. 

 

            I had a career! 

 

I ordered another vin, and the sun smiled down on the intersection of boulevard Raspail and boulevard du Montparnasse.  Later in the day, I would order an omelette jambon avec pomme frites (which is all I ate for ten days because it was all I knew how to say), and the evening would come on with a smatter of new faces, like petals on a wet black bough.  (Pound’s phrase, not mine; but apropos.)

 

I believe Toulouse Lautrec, in his disinterest, would have enjoyed me with a sharp pencil.  (Another steal, slightly altered, from Dad this time.)

 

            As a nineteen-year-old, I was in Paris chasing after my father but, at the same time, looking for something to say of my own.  I wanted to stop stealing phrases.  I wanted to say something that hadn’t been said before.  Back in the States, though, I spent most of my time on stage.  Being there was the safest place I could find.  Since, alas, I had no lines of my own to say—and maybe, I despaired, I never would have—I strove to say Shakespeare’s, or Ibsen’s, or Chekhov’s, or Bolt’s at least well.  For example, as Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya, I was required to declare love for, and sensuously to kiss, a faculty-wife actress whom I found particularly attractive.  I had managed to kiss a girl or two of my own age before then, but this was the big time.  Eight performances; eight masterful kisses.  (Plus rehearsals!) 

 

I loved the theater; it gave me experience without requiring of me responsibility. 

 

As it turned out, it wasn’t hard to meet girls in Paris.  Indeed, there were many, many girls in Paris—quite lovely to look at.  Many of them came up and desired to meet me, for a fee.  But in Paris it was hard to find words to say of my own.  I had no pal to go around with, and that may account for it.  I had Paris, and I had a career, but I was mute. 

 

            Years and years before, while peddling south out of Paris on his way to Provence, Dad had “felt a very god,” as he put it.  He wasn’t very much older than I was, but he was already a songster entire. 

 

 

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Reach me directly, if you like, at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com.