Every time I go to Paris, I buy a copy of Tender Is The Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, put it under my arm, and walk across the city from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame cathedral. It takes all day.
Along the way I stop about every half hour at an outdoor café, sit with an espresso or an apertif, and read the book. And by the time I reach the cathedral, I’ve read Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night once again. I’ve got eight copies on my shelf in Los Angeles that I’ve bought in Paris over a period of 20 years. In each one I write “Paris 1998” and so on. This is my way of taking in the ambience of Paris and enjoying our greatest writer.
There are outdoor cafés everywhere, with people outside enjoying the sun and busy talking. The Parisians are great conversationalists, great aesthetes. As I walk from café to café, I like talking to people and getting engaged with the social life of Paris. When I came for the first time in 1953, it was to write the screenplay for Moby Dick for John Huston. We sat at an outdoor restaurant, La Fouquette, on the Champs-Élysées, discussing how I would adapt Melville’s book. And along the avenue comes Art Buchwald, the columnist, who sat down with us – a wonderfully funny man.
So I have had a long relationship with Paris. I arrived one time and saw a French friend who said, “What are you doing here, Ray?” And I said, “I’ve come to celebrate your failed revolution.” He said, “What?!”
“Well, your revolution failed, didn’t it? I told him. “The French came to America during our revolution and helped us win it. But your people went home, they were inspired by our revolution, and they started one here. And of course it failed. It wound up with the guillotine. That was the final product of the French Revolution.
“In 1871 you had the Commune, when you fought yourselves in the streets of Paris and the Germans outside of Paris, and it was a failure. Then you lost the war in 1914, and General Pershing came from America to help you win against the Germans. In 1940 you lost that war, too, and General Patton came, and we rescued France from the Germans again.
“The fascinating thing is that out of all this despair, all this destruction, all this stupidity, what have you developed? The most beautiful country and the most beautiful city in the world!”
My friend threw his arms around me and embraced me – until then, he had been ready to kill me after the things I’d said – and all was well.
The country is a perfect example of politics that don’t work at all, but aesthetically, Paris is perfect. Once I was traveling by train from Calais to Rome and had a stopover in Paris until 6 p.m. I took a taxicab with some friends to Les Deux Magots, the café where Hemingway used to go.
Paris and the twilight seized and held me immediately. It was the blue hour, the hour of enchantment. As we motored past the Louvre, it was painted ancient gold by the sun. Every leaf on every bush or every tree was bronzed with twilight illumination. As we rounded the Place de la Concorde, to our right the church of the Madeleine was a fiery temple, and yet farther on as we rushed, the Arc de Triomphe burned with fading light and the Eiffel Tower was a great pure torch that showed our way, to where we sat out in the cool dusk drinking aperitifs at Les Deux Magots.
By this time I was exhilarated and in tears: I had died and been delivered to a place of golden coins that minted themselves by the tens of thousands from gods’ mouths in fountains. All of the talk I heard, though I understood none of it, was wise and mythical and rare. All of the people walked or sat with faces bright and colored into masks by the last of the sun. The drink in my hand was a vintage two thousand years old. Among legions of young men, I thought I saw Caesar stride by in his pride! My friends, seated with me, were dipped in gilt and capable of living forever.
Compass Points
Where: Located on the River Seine, Paris is the capital of France. Its cityscape, museums, gardens, culture, and monuments draw 30 million foreign visitors per year.
Backdrop: Once a garden promenade, the Champs-Élysées, linking the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe, has been called the most beautiful avenue in the world; filled with luxury shops, it is also the costliest ribbon of real estate in Europe. The literary, artistic, and intellectual patrons of the café Les Deux Magots have included Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Visitor Information: Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau: http://en.parisinfo.com.
Ray Bradbury is the author of more than three dozen books (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man), nearly 600 short stories, screenplays, and numerous poems and essays. His accolades include the National Medal of Arts, an Emmy Award, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and an asteroid named in his honor. His work exemplifies the American imagination at its most creative. For more information: www.raybradbury.com.
