Rue the Day (7/9/2009)

It was late Tuesday afternoon on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and the Parisian traffic was whipping by in the waning time that it could move somewhat steadily before rush hour. My friend Chuck and I had just alighted from the Odeon Metro, burdened with 50 pounds of luggage, overtired, and lacking any idea where the hell we were.

This was, perhaps, our fault. Theoretically, London and Paris should be the most easily connected European capitals, though we had gone to significant lengths to make the trip as complicated as possible. We’d caught a cheap (like, 15 pound cheap) flight out of distant and obscure Luton airport, which required us to be out of our Kensington hotel before 4 a.m., catch a Tube to a regional train that might as well have taken us to the Industrial midlands as far as we were concerned, only to have to run to our general-admission-seating flight, and had been ripped off by buying more expensive train tickets than we’d needed to get into Paris. Added to that, it was cloudy. Louis XIV had not drawn it up this way.

Paris had always been the dessert that I was content to save. My designs – probably like yours — had been purely romantic – a sip of wine in the Latin Quarter with my lady love, or if that didn’t work, Sophie Marceau. A drive through the Provence countryside in the spring … a twilight gaze at Mont Saint Michel at high tide … a trek up the Rouen Cathedral…

And now, I’m stranded on the curb at rush hour. In March.

With my roommate.

Paris marked, in effect, the first time I had been anywhere without being able to get by with English, German, or Russian. As a language student – and one who could read rudimentary French but not form a diphthong to save my life — this frustrated me to no end. The best I could do was name drop some Montreal Canadiens lineup and recite untranslated passages from Les Mis, which needless to say, did me little good here.

Our hotel – which we’d found through a friend – was tucked away in an alley off a side street, roughly halfway between Odeon and Pont Neuf. For all we knew, every hotel in Paris may well have been between Odeon and Pont Neuf. We flagged a cab: “Rue de Nesle, si vous plait!” “Non,” the cabbie responded, rolling off. Pedestrians, maps and tour books didn’t mark alleyways… finally, we ducked into the post office, a few minutes before it closed. They drew us up a map on goldenrod scratch paper. Success.

Hotel de Nesle is an independent travelers’ hotel, one owned and run by a proprietor who, despite the fact that one reviewer confirms that “La clientèle est en majorité anglo-saxonne,” speaks no English. In retrospect, this was hysterical and, perhaps, defied logic or common sense. She was a very polite, extremely nutritionally gifted woman who collected daily bills in cash and didn’t budge from behind the desk in the back corner of the lobby, which strategically always remained in the shadows. The only indication that she moved – or was moved – was her periodically changing muumuu.

There are about 20 rooms, give or take, off the spiral staircase up the building’s backbone, up which, of course, we had to schlep 50 pounds of luggage. Each room, furthermore, was painted with murals that depicted famous figures from French history. I was crossing my fingers for Victor Hugo, and thought fleetingly, that reciting some of Enjolras’ lament might woo the matron, though quickly dashed the thought when realizing that, no exceptions, you never sweet-talk anyone wearing a muumuu. Climbing the stairs, I tried to guess.

Marie Antoinette … an endless supply of cake.
No, too much of a downer. How about de Gaulle and governing in exile…
Nah. Too modern. But Napoleon would be fitting of a small hotel…
Athos. Porthos. Aramis … Richelieu … Voltaire… Rodin, I think…
We climbed to third floor and threw open the door: Paul Gauguin and the conquest of Polynesia.

The fact that this rang like a PBS miniseries aside, the decor added to the peculiarity. Plastered against the wall were two four-foot Polynesian women who looked sort of like Mulan, dressed only in flower wreaths and grass skirts. Because you can never have enough blanket stereotypes. Gauguin himself occupied maybe a twentieth of the space – just a head peeking out of the upper left corner, his tongue from a promiscuous grin.

And so, my first two hours in Paris taught me that you can run an Anglo-centered business without knowing Anglo, that cab drivers would rather blow you off than earn easy cash, that no one can differentiate the “numerous” hotels that sit between Odeon and Pont Neuf, that the French penchant for nudes extends to cartoony wallpaper, and above all, that Mr. Synthetism was a peeping tom.

Sacre bleu, this was going to be a fun week.