Thursday, May 10, 2012
Hotel Voltaire

I arrive at my next hotel, the Excelsior, at 4 rue Lancry off Boulevard Magenta after a surprisingly good breakfast at the Voltaire. "We make your breakfast great and you pay less for the room" says one of the advertisements for the hotel in the basement dining room, which is a relative improvement on the first floor. A cab is called and I head to the Hotel Excelsior, where a prim, petite blonde woman with tortoiseshell glasses takes my passport and charges me for the room in advance. The hotel will not accept American Express, which is annoying, as I reserved the room with it. I pull out a Visa debit card, and hope I will have enough funds to last me through the end of the trip.

I go up to the room, which is on the fourth floor. I open the door and enter a small room, with two large windows, one in the bedroom, the other in thebath room. In Paris, maids were typically housed on the top floor of an hotel particuliere, and frequently had not even running water with which to wash. My room looks as though it might be a converted chambre de bonne. I walk into the bathroom, which at least is not a handicapped bathroom --as was the case with the room at the Voltaire. It is clean and pleasant-enough. The open window looks out onto an airshaft, where I have an unobstructed view of --the peeling paint, which is virtually an installation, big slices of dried white paint, curling over, suspended, one after the other, all the way down the shaft.

My immediate task is to find Marie-Jose Mengs, my elderly Parisian friend, who lives on rue Ponthieu, not far from the Rond Point des Champs-Elysees and the Elysee Palace, where the French president resides. I am near Place de la Republique, so I walk there, find rue Turenne and follow it to Place des Vosges, where I pick up rue de Rivoli and walk its length to the Champs-Elysees and the Rond-Point.

I have Marie-Jose's phone number in my cellphone, but I must have entered it incorrectly, because I get a message saying the number is out of order. I have tried e-mailing, without also without success. I know the block she lives on on rue Ponthieu, but not the number: however, the cafe she frequents off the Rond-Point --where I met her first-- might be able to help.

I reach the cafe, the Carre du Rond-Point at about 1 p.m. No one knows here at the bar, so I walk on, thinking I will find her on rue Ponthieu. A manager I had not seen follows me: he knows Marie-Jose and says he has not seen her today, "She has her habits--" he says, but agrees to keep a note for her if I cannot find her on rue Ponthieu.

I walk to rue Ponthieu and stop at the first cafe: Marie-Jose has a little poodle, Biscotte, four years old and very frisky, who accompanies her everywhere. The woman at the bar remembers her, but hasn't seen her. She suggests I try the cafe across the street --Marie-Jose tends to frequent them more.

At the third the woman knows Marie-Jose, but has not seen her. When I ask to verify the number of her building, she and the man sitting at the cafe bar, both indicate it is number 34, right across the street. I go there and fiddle with the security code: I am admitted on the first try.

I walk over to the intercom and am able to dial up "Mengs". I press the intercom, and after a moment, I hear Marie-Jose say

Who is it?

--It's Marta, your friend from America, Marie-Jose.

Oh! --Well come on up then.

Marie-Jose is in the middle of unpacking from her trip to the family home in Burgundy, where her family has its roots. She tells me everything is a mess, there's no place to sit--

Which is true, because Marie-Jose is a hoarder. Every possible inch of her Parisian garret is packed with books, post-cards, old tin containers lined up in a row, tiny plastic dolls, rubber toys, porcelain dolls.

I sit down, and Marie-Jose offers me a Coca-Cola. She sits down and has a Marlboro gold. She is about seventy-five, and a real Parigotte, as women quintessentially Parisian are known.

She rents the other attic room throughout the year --Un vrai business-- she says, which keeps her busy, when she is not driving to Burgundy, or going to auctions and flea markets. Her politics are firmly Socialist. She voted for Hollande in both the first and second rounds of the election. Her preferred candidate a few years ago was Laurent Fabius. She never could stand Nicolas Sarkozy.


Yes, I'm glad Hollande won. And I like his woman --Valerie Trierweilier. She has a lot more on the ball than Carla. --I like Obama's wife, too.

We go to a local cafe where everyone knows Marie-Jose and we have a bite to eat. She has a glass of wine, a piece of pastry and a cigarette. She has one of those medieval faces --a strong nose, flinty eyes, longish blonde hair, not particularly styled --she doesn't care much about how she looks. She wears a caramel suede vest with a fur trim over her t-shirt an jeans, her usual outfit.

She is a widow, and alone. Within ten years she lost five members of her family: two of her sisters and her daughter, along with her husband and a brother. She keeps furiously busy, having "turned the page", as she says. Her main preoccupation is her granddaughter, who lives in a housing project in Norway with her father, who makes a living selling sex toys and films on the Internet. Her granddaughter is now twelve years old, and it is Marie-Jose's hope that she will be able to bring her to France eventually, where she will inherit Marie-Jose's considerable patrimony. Norwegian law does not care particularly what a father does, as long as it is legal, so despite her efforts, Marie-Jose has had little luck in bringing her granddaughter to Paris. She retained an attorney, but nothing came of that, so all she can do is wait.

Now that we have found each other, we make a plan to go to the enormous bi-annual flea market at the Place de la Bastille tomorrow. While we are determining where to meet, I get a phone call from Elise Becker in Besancon. I have offered to take her son Theo Thouvet, a former physics student and now at a circus shool, to dinner at Jadis, a nice restaurant on rue Croix-Nivert in the 15th arrondissement. Elise makes the arrangements, calling the restaurant, confirming that Theo and his Harvard-educated copine will meet me there between eight o'clock and eight-thirty, depending on the traffic into the city. (The circus school is in the outskirts of Paris.) Marie-Jose and I decide to meet each other tomorrow at eleven in front of the Opera de la Bastille on the Place de la Bastille, near the ticket windows.