Finding Fontainebleau by Thad Carhart

Author:Thad Carhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-01T16:34:38+00:00

CHAPTER 20

PARIS

Paris in the fifties looked very different from the sparkling face it presents to the world today, but to us it was all new and engaging. The biggest transformation in modern times was simply the cleaning of the stone edifices of the center city, initiated in the 1960s by de Gaulle’s minister of cultural affairs André Malraux. No change could have been more surprising, or more deeply satisfying. When we lived in Fontainebleau, I was convinced that all of the buildings in France—the châteaux, the cathedrals, the monuments—were made from the same special dark stone, quarried in some remote part of France, black as night and so softened by centuries of wood and coal dust that the surface was a felt-like matte whose edges looked as if they would soon crumble. This was the “atmospheric” Paris of all those voluptuous black-and-white photos, the ponderous Paris of Buffet prints and countless tourist posters.

Then the government started to clean the major monuments one by one—Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre—and the transformation was shocking, almost troubling in its strange newness. The buildings of Paris weren’t black after all, but very nearly . . . white! It took almost two decades of careful cleaning and restoration, but Paris emerged from the process the albino twin of its former self. To appreciate the contrast, buy a vintage postcard aerial view, dating from 1970 or earlier, at one of the bouquiniste stalls along the banks of the Seine, then compare it with the present-day aerial shot: the era of dirt and grime looks like a photographic negative of the light and airy Paris that current tourists will recognize as the “real” Paris.

Paris smelled different in those days, too. In the winter the odor of coal smoke permeated the air, and a fine layer of pure black dust settled everywhere; after a single day, a clean surface would show the swipe of a finger. Most buildings were heated by coal-fired furnaces that powered a system of water-filled radiators.

I had imagined that this system of heating had disappeared entirely since I had lived in Fontainebleau in the fifties, but I was astounded to discover that it persisted in certain parts of Paris as recently as twenty years ago. When we moved to Paris with our two infant children at the end of the eighties, we lived in an apartment in a Haussmannian building not far from the Arc de Triomphe. At the time I worked a corporate job that periodically involved both long trips and long hours. On one occasion during our first winter in the sixteenth arrondissement, I was returning home shortly before 2:00 a.m. after a long series of meetings. I let myself in to the entrance hall of our building and crossed to the elevator. As I pushed the button, the adjacent door to the basement opened and a tall man stepped into the hall. It’s fair to say that each of us startled the other: we both let out cries of surprise and stepped back.

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