Introducing Thirza Vallois and Around and About Paris

By Thirza Vallois

Paris Kiosque - November 1997 - Volume 4, Number 11
Copyright (c) 1997 Thirza Vallois - used with permission

---

I first met Paris in October 1958 at the Gare du Nord and was struck dumb! Filled with throbbing anticipation of glamorous models in their Dior sac dresses as seen in Vogue and other such glossy magazines against such backdrops as the Eiffel Tower or the Obelisque of Place de la Concorde, I alighted in a grotty neighbourhood where I was greeted by the unappetizing sight of fat, sour-faced working-class Parisians, dragging about their weary feet in floppy "charentaises" (woolent slippers). Chic Parisians they were not! Feeling downright cheated, I was ready to turn round and go back to green green London, so cheerfully dotted with red pillar-boxes, telephone-boxes and double deckers.

Why did Paris gardens have dusty flooring, while London had soft springy, infinite carpets of turf? Why were Parisian trees put in strait jackets? why were their branches relentlessly amputated?

How amazed was I to discover decades later, while researching for my books, that back in the 18th century the English Horace Walpole had also dismissed the lawns of Paris and likened her trees to broomsticks! And when a century later his compatriot George Moore arrived at the Gare du Nord (the obligatory gateway to Paris of all English travellers) he felt just as cheated as I did: "Where are the Boulevards? Where are the Champs-Elysées", was his cri de coeur.

Horace Walpole stayed on, George Moore stayed on and I came back.

I next encountered Paris as a budding undergraduate in the 1960s, that much older and wiser, worldly enough to know that Paris was about Left Bank garrets, bulky sweaters, Georges Brassens and onion soup at 5 am at Les Halles. Turning my nose up at the Seizieme arrondissement, I took up residence in the Latin Quarter, the right address for the right people, those in the know. The garrets turned out to be much less romantic than anticipated and there was not much existentialism about either; there was not much of a social life among French students, the professors at the Sorbonne were not all that inspiring and we did not necessarily sing along to the guitar. But there was in the air a vague lingering hotchpotch of literary reminiscences of Verlaine and Rimbaud, of Mimi and Rodolfo and of Audrey Hepburn (Funny Girl) as silly as myself! Besides, once you have lived on the Left Bank long enough, you simply do not move across the river. You just do not. So even after the Latin Quarter was mutilated in the wake of the May 1968 "Evénements" and its spirit dealt a fatal blow (no, no, no, it is not the arrival of Giorgio Armani that killed its neighbouring Saint-Germain-des-Pres in 1997 - contrary to what ill-informed reporters have been trumpeting of late, the fatal blow goes back to the 1960s), and though my student days at the Sorbonne were over, I stuck to the Left Bank.

However, career, marriage and motherhood, adulthood in short, would soon introduce me to real Paris. Venturing beyond the Left Bank village, at last, albeit without moving house, I plunged into the deep ocean of French society - to the schools in the slums of northern Paris and to those of the bourgeois west, to painfully formal dinner parties in Haussmanian buildings and to more casual meals in suburban lower middle-class homes: I crossed all segments of society and all neighbourhoods of Paris, and was astounded when finally it dawned on me how far removed mythical Paris was from the real place, how the clichés that cling to Paris betray our better judgement and perception of the place. I was equally surprised to discover a permanent ideological undercurrent permeating its history, holding together the bits and pieces, making France, paradoxically, an ultra-conservative country despite its revolutionary outbursts, or, more probably, the other way round.

What a complex place! What contradictions are concealed beneath the commonplace phrases of tourist brochures! City of romance and love, where more often than not you will see two Parisians bickering at each other. Rebellious people who will blow cigarette smoke into your face just under a "no smoking" sign, and will tell you to mind your own business if you dare to protest, yet, God forbid if your child of three trespasses on a forbidden patch of lawn: "Pelouse interdite" as against "please keep off the grass" in milder lands. How many layers of concealed information would I have to dig out before I could begin to see the light!

Thus began an 8-year-long journey into the depths of Paris, walking its every street, reading in libraries whatever came my way. Visiting friends from abroad were sure to be taken off the beaten tourist track in their turn and wear their feet off until they begged for mercy! For there is no better way than walking if one is to capture the atmosphere of Paris. How little did I know when I first arrived at the Gare du Nord that the neighbourhood has more to say for itself than meets the eye.

Dear reader, I hope you will enjoy reading the forthcoming excerpts from my books as much as I enjoyed writing them and I hope they will entice you to search deeper into this fascinating and outrageous place.

---

Thirza Vallois, long time resident of Paris, and now author of the three volume set Around and About Paris (which may be ordered here) currently lives just three hours outside of Paris in London. She may be contacted via thirzavallois@iliadbooks.demon.co.uk.