AND ANOTHER THING
Paris is still worth a Mass, just
PAUL JOHNSON
Ashort trip to Paris to see the Geri- cault exhibition at the Grand Palais. No one ever painted horses better, and the show was crowded with tweedy provincial ladies, up from Anjou and Normandy, chat- tering about les coupes and les ecourtees (Gericault was particularly good at doing rumps and tails). Deluging rain all the time, and it was annoying to discover that they' had not bothered to move the artist's mas- terpiece, 'The Raft of the Medusa', to the Palais, so we had to tramp to the Louvre to see it, further irritated by the sententious remark in the catalogue, 'The walk will be good for your health'. President Mitter- rand's monstrous glass pyramid outside the Louvre never fails to enrage, especially when seen in the wet. Like the pharaohs, he built two small, ancillary pyramids by the side of his own, principal one. The first is for Madame la Presidente, no doubt. But the second? Perhaps for Edith Cresson, the tricoteuse Mrs Thatcher.
The French socialist regime, having abandoned Marxism, and forgotten the working class completely, is fiercely nation- alistic. The atmosphere inside the Louvre is one of French cultural triumphalism, echoed in the Metro station below, which is superbly decorated. Not all these Metro face-lifts come off: the Bastille has a vulgar historical mural, badly drawn, garishly coloured, inaccurate; and above it, of course, is the new opera house, another eyesore built to Mitterrand's ego. But there are compensations. The big mid-19th cen- tury church of the Trinity, one of my favourites, is being completely restored, not before time. They have also just finished rebuilding and modernising the immense 1862 organ of St Sulpice, and we went to the inaugural concert there.
There are 250 major church organs in Paris, 24 classified as historical monuments, and this one, built by the great Cavaille- _co.11, must be the loudest, having inspired w!dor's tremendous organ symphonies. Wiclor was one of many famous composers (another was Francois Couperin) who were organists at St Sulpice. He held the job for 2 years, retiring only when he was 90. Most of the programme thus consisted of local' works, including one by Cesar Franck, who often played on this magnifi- cent instrument. St Sulpice is the only church in Paris, apart from Notre Dame, which will seat over 5,000 people, and it was packed: hierarchs, ministers, le gratin,
two choirs, one of over 200 voices, the vast, rapt audience huddled together in glisten- ing raincoats, umbrellas dripping; the dark- ness in the cavernous old church almost total except for a spotlight or two, huge waves of sound rolling over our heads and shaking the massive pillars of Caen lime- stone — quite an occasion. Afterwards we went to Le Balzar, now said to be the smartest place to eat on the Left Bank, but it was after ten, full, and I was not prepared to wait in the bar for a table. There was another reason. In these fashionable joints, they push the tables close together and this means that, just as you are about to tuck in, the people on either side of you light up their Caporals and think nothing of puffing smoke right in your face. In this respect the French are totally unreconstructed: they are all nico- tine addicts still and their smoking-manners are frightful. Draconian anti-smoking laws have now been proposed by the socialists. As in Britain, they proclaim that the nation's health is their prime concern. But Messrs Kinnock and Co. might note that rows between the government and health service employees are much fiercer in socialist France than over here. Only last week, they did not hesitate to use water-
`It's the label you pay for.'
guns and tear-gas against protesting nurses, one of whom had her eardrums permanent- ly damaged by the high-pressure hoses.
While socialist ministers gun down ill- paid nurses, they have high-spending lifestyles which would make even Tarzan Heseltine raise his eyebrows. Women min- isters, in particular, were kitting-up at the fashion collections, which were raging last week. Martine Aubrey (Employment) goes to the top Japanese designer, Kenzo; her pretty young colleague at Sport, Freddie Bredin, patronises Yves St Laurent, as does Elisabeth Guigou (Europe), while Cresson herself favours Dior. The mind boggles at what these women must spend on their clothes.
Marigold and I visited some of the bou- tiques on the Place des Victoires which is now, under the disapproving gaze of Louis XIV on horseback, a hub of the fashion industry, though by no means the most expensive one. The prices were astronomi- cal. Outfits are £1,000 up. When Cresson took office, her prime ministerial trousseau, I calculate, must have cost at least £20,000. Nobody seems to mind. But I recalled that, only a generation ago, the French socialist party was run almost entirely by small-town schoolteachers. Now it attracts the hard-faced go-getters, the ultra-ambitious, the grabbers and the suc- cessful. In Britain, the radical rich patron- ise socialism. In France they run the show.
Nor do they scruple to have their outrid- ers push ordinary commuters off the road to make way for ministerial corteges in the rush-hour. Paris is now a ritzy, poshed-up city, kept beautifully clean, which puts Lon- don's dingy streets to shame; but its traffic jams are horrible. Everyone keeps a car in central Paris, and uses it, all the time. They park their cars, with apparent impunity, right across the pavement so pedestrians have to walk in the roadway at their extreme peril. The jams into and out of the city are much worse than in London or New York. Arriving at De Gaulle airport, we took the best part of two hours by taxi to reach the Rue Cambon. Going back, we did a 50-mile detour to avoid the Saturday night foul-up in the west of the city. The plane was full of well-behaved, middle-class rugger fans, some of them clutching very small union jacks. 'We beat the froggies', they said quietly. Well, so I should think. Not much else for the British to rejoice in at present.
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