La vie parisienne
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
Mlle Claude Bessy is not, and short of a terpsi- chorean holocaust will never be, the greatest ballerina in Europe. But she is an enchantingly pretty blonde, has a sweet and unaffected stage presence and, on evenings of inspiration, can dance like an angel. Last week, in blue and pink frillies designed by none other than Chagall, she gave such an account of Ravel's Chlod as to make an entire Parisian audience rise to its feet in vociferous tribute. For what seemed an eternity, and could not have been less than five minutes, she in the parted curtain and I in an orchestra stall wept together with simple grati- tude for the compensations of life and art.
Damnable administrative incompetence or sloth had come near to robbing me of this emotional experience. Always the most soigneux of travelling consumers, preferring to plan meti- culously ahead rather than to risk disappoint- ments, I had telephoned the official French tour- ist office in Piccadilly to find out what would be playing at the Opera. 'Alas!' cried the pleasant woman at the other end of the line, 'we do not know; they have not told us; is it not sad?' I agreed that it was and, taking the bit between my teeth, determined (if you will per- mit a soupcon of mixed metaphor) to get the information straight from the horse's mouth. Easier said than done. Only the previous after- noon I had called up the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, to be greeted at once by an excited and efficient box officer with 'Hi, there! How are you, old boy? Is it raining in London?' But the Parisians were un- concerned with our weather, my health or any foreigner's aesthetic inclinations. For four hours the largest theatre in the world could not, or would not, and certainly did not, answer.
In the last year for whicli I have the statistic handy, tourists contributed nearly 4,500 million francs to the French economy. A high propor- tion of this must have been spent in Paris, whose prices have become the raw material of endless anecdotage and just now are well-nigh prohibi- tive for us currency-starved British. Yet it is not this aspect of the scene that troubles my spirit. Paris is still the most civilised, most glori- ous, most rewarding of all capital cities. It is entitled to charge what the traffic will bear. For the best seat in an opera house £3 3s is, in fact, far from extortionate; a theatre programme is almost worth 7s when it has among its outline plots such fractured franglais as Don Jose let- ting Carmen escape because she has subduced him with a subtile music; and though a night- cap of whisky and ginger ale at 30s a go without the tip made me fall off my chair, I was drinking it in a hotel whose resources would have allowed it to be commanded at 5 a.m.
What really saddens me about the Parisians is not that they make me pay so much, but that simultaneously they seem to care for me so little. The incommunicativeness of the Opdra, though a poor start, was a minor tribulation. But why should a Francophile foreigner be in- stantly manhandled because he lights a cigarette at the entrance to the Grand Foyer? Why should be be shooed away without apology from restaurant doors because he wears a blue tie instead of a black one? Why should he be abused, for innocently parking a car outside the Flea Market, as (to epitomise the racy string of colloquialisms) a Franco= phobe pig? It is all very well for Nigel Buxton, whose travel journalism has set new standards for us all, to say that Gaullism causes us to translate any lack of positive courtesy into an unpardonable insult. I am not easily insulted, and never unpardonably. I expect that the emis- saries of Ho Chi Minh, arriving hot-foot from the wen-known tourist amenities of Hanoi, will prove equally tolerant. But not all consumers are stoics.
Of course, as The Times has been reminding us this week, Chauvinism is nothing new for Faris. The very word is French, deriving from the Napoleonic veteran, popularised in Cog- niard's Cocarde Tricolore. One of the genuinely inexpensive pastimes of the metropolis (highly recommended when your £50 begins to run out) is to count the number of tricolore flags hanging from or affixed to its buildings: there are, for example, seventy-two on the short walk from the Place Vendome to the Crillon. I find this exhibitionism psychologically interesting. It is exactly on a par with having your initials em- broidered and prominently displayed on your pyjamas and betrays, or so I suspect, the same basic lack of security. Do the truly well-adjusted have to insure against the danger that as dawn breaks neither they nor, worse still, whoever they happen to be sleeping with, will remember who they are?
Previous page
