Because of what Freud called "the narcissism of minor differences," all these open fields, battlegrounds since ancient times, were the landscapes of contending armies, a gory example of civilization and its discontents. And so whatever else one could say, it was a fact that the route of this railway, once soaked in blood and thick with the graves of dead soldiers—millions of them—had been serene for the past half century, perhaps its longest period of peace.
We crossed a river with a tragic name. One day in July ninety years ago, where the soft rain fell on the lovely meadows and low hills, in sight of the distant spires of Amiens on one side of the train and the small town of Péronne on the other, the valley of this river, the Somme, had been an amphitheater of pure horror. On that first day of battle, 60,000 British soldiers were killed, plodding slowly because of the 66-pound packs on their backs. They advanced into German machine-gun fire, the largest number of soldiers killed on one day in British history. In the four months of this bloodbath, the first battle of the Somme, which ended in November 1916, more than one million soldiers were killed—British 420,000; French 194,000; German 440,000. And to no purpose. Nothing was gained, neither land nor any military advantage, nor even a lesson in the futility of war, for twenty-five years later—in my own lifetime—the same armies were at it again, warring in these same fields. All of them were colonial powers, which had annexed vast parts of Africa and Asia, to take their gold and diamonds, and lecture them on civilization.
The colors and clothes of the pedestrians on the streets nearer Paris reflected French colonial history—Africans, West Indians, Algerians, Vietnamese. They were kicking soccer balls in the rain. They were shoppers in the street markets, residents of the dreary tower blocks and tenements, the public housing at the edge of Paris that the Eurostar was passing and penetrating. We entered the city of mellow cheese-like stone and pitted façades and boulevards. London is largely a low city of single-family homes—terraces, cottages, townhouses, mews houses, bungalows, semi-detached villas. Paris is a city of rococo apartment buildings, bosomy with balconies, not a house to be seen.
With my small bag and a briefcase I looked such a lightweight that the porters at the Gare du Nord ignored me. I passed through the station to the front entrance, in the floodlit glow of the lovely façade with its classical-looking statues representing the cities and larger towns of France. They were sculpted in the early 1860s by (so a sign said) "the greatest names in the Second Empire."
The streets were thick with unmoving cars and loud honking and angry voices. I asked a smiling man what the problem was.
" Un manifestation" he said.
"Why today?"
He shrugged. "Because it's Tuesday."
Every Tuesday there was a large, riotous demonstration in Paris. But for its size and its disruption this one was to be known as Black Tuesday.
THE OTHER ORIENT EXPRESS
A NATIONAL CRISIS is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness. Purgatorial as a crisis sometimes is for a traveler, it is preferable to public holidays, which are helclass="underline" no one working, shops and schools closed, natives eating ice cream, public transport jammed, and the stranger's sense of being excluded from the merriment—from everything. A holiday is an occasion for utter alienation; a crisis can be spectacle, seizing the stranger's attention.
The reason Paris has the luminous quality of being a stage set is that it was redesigned with that theatrical aim in mind, around 1857, by Georges Haussmann (hired by Louis Napoleon, calling himself emperor), who destroyed its houses and slums in mass evictions, flattened its alleyways and lanes, and gave it wide boulevards, soaring mansion blocks, monuments and fountains, and the big-city conceit of seeming to be at the center of the world. The city was remade in a single style.
Paris's ornate backdrop of beautiful biscuit-colored buildings and extravagant arches and obelisks—the imperial city, complete with floodlights—is so fixed in people's minds, especially people who've never seen it, that describing it is irrelevant. And anyway, who bothers? In the fiction of Paris, it is enough for the writer to state the name of a boulevard or a district. Take Simenon. I happened to be reading his novels, for their portability and their oddness. "He returned to Rue des Feuillantines by a long detour in order to go to Montsouris Park"—no more than that; the place is taken for granted, as fixed as a picture on a calendar. The mention of evocative names is description enough. Nothing to discover, nothing to show; the city looms, but instead of feeling dwarfed, the big-city dweller feels important.
Yet this apparent familiarity, one of the powerful attractions of Paris, is an illusion. "Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations," Nabokov once wrote, "and local color is not a fast color." The brilliant Parisian stage set has a long history of insurrections, mob violence, unrest, and the extreme humiliation of foreign occupation—in the experience of many Parisians alive now, the memory of Germans in charge, the betrayals, the shame of surrender. Once a city's boulevards have been marched by triumphant Nazis, they never look quite so grand again. Like many of its decorous women, Paris, while appearing inviolate, has had a turbulent past, been raped and pillaged and bombed and besieged, and has gone on changing, like its sister city, London, and the other cities on my itinerary: Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul, Ankara, Tbilisi, Baku, and the rest of the glittering anthills of Asia, as far as Tokyo.
I seldom feel uplifted in a city; on the contrary, I feel oppressed and confined. In my travels I have been more interested in the places that lay between the great cities than the cities themselves: the hinterland, not the capital. It is my suspicion that people who are glamoured by big cities and think of themselves as urbane and thoroughly metropolitan are at heart country mice—simple, fearful, overdomesticated provincials, dazzled by city lights.
So the car burnings of a month before and the present crisis in Paris were revelations. I don't believe in the immutability of cities. I think of them generally as snake pits, places to escape from. But this manifestation—a huge noisy mob at (so the smiling man had told me) the Place de la République—had brought the city to a halt. Perhaps something to see—certainly a rowdy mob was more of a draw than anything I might look at in the Louvre.
I found a taxi. The driver was sitting comfortably, listening to the radio, his chin resting on his fist.
"Place de la République," I said, getting into the car.
"Not easy," he said. "It's the manifestation."
"What's the problem?"
"They're angry," he said, and he mentioned the debonair prime minister, who wrote and published his own poetry, and who wanted to change the labor laws.
More minutes passed, during which the driver made a call on his cell phone. Predictably, he reported that he was stuck in traffic.
"Also, it's raining."
Recognizing a fellow taxi driver, he leaned out the window and began bantering. Then he interrupted himself, saying to me, "And there's road-work on the Boulevard Saint-Germain."
When we had gone nowhere and the meter showed 10 euros—$13, for about fifty yards—I said, "Then I think I'll go to the Gare de l'Est."
"Better to walk there—it's just past that street and down some steps."
I got out, walked back to the Gare du Nord, bought a newspaper, and saw signs to the Gare de l'Est. Crossing the street, I was distracted by a pleasant-looking restaurant, the Brasserie Terminus Nord, the sort of warm, well-lighted, busy eatery that made me hungry on this cold wet day.