The Chinese and The Provencal

Hemingway was right about the inexplicably “windswept Place du Pantheon” which he noted many years later in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. It was just as windswept over eighty years later, as another foreigner trudged round the great monument to French-ness, cursing himself for not putting enough clothes on and cursing the suburban morning sun for misleading him. It was always like that around midday, without fail. Anywhere else in the city might be calm, but wind would find its way to the Place du Pantheon to whip its way round that converted Church.

But I was not Ernest Hemingway, and not there to write. Not there to continue past the Cluny, round and along onto the Place St Michel to sit in a café and write. I was there to play the sport, so I stopped before the Luxembourg Gardens, slipped underground and took the RER south to run around and lift weights.

Much like Hemingway, that was when it felt good to escape the phoney people and to have the time and the resources to work on my craft. I was lucky to spend my afternoons with the genuine people, the sporting people. Some of these people were of Paris, but not the postcard Paris – they were of the unseen Paris, the suburban, quiet Paris which is the same as suburbs anywhere with the same attitudes and the same muted ambitions.

And there were some who were not Parisian in any way, who came from different lands like Alsace and who enjoyed Paris and took from it what they wanted like the nightclubs and left what they disliked and remained sceptical about.

There were no affectations – no vague aims about ‘Paris’ and the images that the very name evokes in the minds of impressionable, naive, East coast American women raised on a strict diet of liberal arts. My friends, especially those from the provinces, were here for the sport – to lift weights when they had to, to do little extras when they wanted to and sometimes when they felt they should, and most of all to run and pass and kick every day. They were the genuine people, and apart from the language, they were occasionally just as bemused by it all as I was.

That is not to say that I didn’t go and sit in cafés like the good one that Hemingway wrote in on the Place St Michel. I did once, on the Rue Auber. I must have been there to see about my bank, for I never strayed that far north unless I was going to the bank. It was a day of heavy snowfall and the city was skidding to a halt. I was probably there because my money had been stolen, along with my watch, from the changing rooms in Colombes, which just goes to show that in amongst the genuine people there were some dishonest people. That was to be expected.

It was a perfect day to be warm in a café and when I texted my kicking coach to ask whether training was still on, I knew the reply I wanted. The reply I got was sarcastic and I didn’t understand it. So I did what Hemingway would not have done, and texted my mother. She told me that the text was about ‘snow shoes’. That was all I needed to make myself comfortable and to order a croque madame. Before heading back to the suburbs I thought about the phoney people. They seemed so phoney then and being around them irritated me.

But these days, when I compare those pilgrim students from all over the world to the vacuous Home Counties students who I share things like creative writing seminars with... When I cast my mind back around the lecture theatre in the Vth Arrondissement, there was more there than I suspected, yes there were the traditional Americans looking for something that they couldn’t define if you asked them, but there was also the Chinese, on the make.

I respected the Chinese more than the Americans. They closer resembled my genuine friends from the provinces, people who came to Paris with defined goals, who were prepared to work and weren’t leaching from Paris something that wasn’t really there. Paris owed them nothing.