Paris Revisited After 31 Years

My wife Ilka and I lived in Japan for three years, and have traveled abroad several times. But we had not been back to Paris for 31 years, and decided to return there for a month. We had kept a diary during our first trip, those many years ago, and read it aloud before we left home. It brought back memories of that August stay, and it was our intention to re-explore old haunts.

The day after arriving, we walked from our apartment in Montparnasse to St. Germain-des-Pres, stopping along the way to shop at a food market, Parisian-style. We passed rue de Buci, where remnants of the day's street market—vendors' wares not yet packed away—were still evident. We made our way down our old street, rue de Seine, searching for and finding our old haven and digs, an apartment at 31 rue de Seine. There, those many years before, we had lived for a week with my college French professor and tennis coach.

The apartment was in fact Raymond Duncan's art studio, on the top floor, six floors up, with no elevator. Raymond Duncan was the expatriate artist brother of the famous American dancer, Isadora Duncan, who usually performed barefoot in a Greek tunic and with a flowing scarf. She died a ghastly death in 1927 when her scarf became entangled in the spokes of an automobile wheel, and she broke her neck. On several occasions during our stay, Ilka had spoken casually with a woman who lived on a lower floor, and was presumed to be Raymond's mistress. She was a tall, dark, middle-aged woman with her black hair pulled back in a chignon. They talked about routine things, until one day she told Ilka that, sadly, Raymond had died in Italy. The very afternoon we departed, they were bringing his body back.  As a matter of fact, when we looked now at a plaque on the side of the building, it stated that he had died during the year of our visit.

As I gazed up at the open windows of the old garret, I thought about our sojourn there. Distant relatives of the wretched mosquitoes, who had set out to drain us 31 years earlier, were doubtless cruising in and out of those same windows. I was also reminded of that memorable bed, and the week we passed in it. We had displaced my professor and coach from that bed in the bedroom, and he slept in either a lawn chair or a bathtub, we cannot recall which, or perhaps it was a lawn chair IN a bathtub. In any case, his loss of the bed proved not so great a one, because this bed was hardly normal. It was a double bed, and to say that it was soft down the middle is an understatement. We would start the night clinging to the firm edges, but as we drifted into slumber, we would slip down toward the center where the bed descended, and so did we. It was August, and the nights were hot and sweaty, and when we arrived at the bottom, we would stick together, until we woke up enough to struggle back to the edge, only to start the whole tiring process again. A week sleeping in this bed was a week of turmoil.

And then those mosquitoes. They would hum, purr, and whir in the hot night air until I couldn't stand it any longer. I would jump up, switch on the light and dispatch them, always full of our blood, against the slanting ceiling and walls of the garret. Unless those walls have been painted, our blood still remains there, a symbol of the conflict. Couple the mosquitoes with the bed, and after a week of rest there, we were exhausted.

I took a long last look at those high windows, and was nostalgic about our visit, but happy that we were in our new apartment in Montparnasse. We departed rue de Seine and strolled several blocks to rue des Ciseaux (Street of Scissors), in search of another of our favorites from the past. But there we were met with an unexpected discovery.

To be continued…

James Priest

This is Part One of a two-part series on our long-overdue return to Paris. Part Two, “Search For The Boneless Man,” will be the next article to appear.