It’s a good quarter of an hour’s walk from the ferry port to the city. The road runs through wasteland, across a rather windswept, lugubrious landscape, with very few trees, a typical English Channel panorama. However, it was twelve o’clock on a very clear spring day — in early May. It was so clear that from a steep point on the road I could see the shiny white, soft plaster-like cliffs of the English coast. A fresh, lively breeze made walking a pleasure — a fresh breeze that in France makes you want to stop off at successive taverns on the road for a glass of white wine.
I was intending to head straight to the Hotel Metropol that I’d been recommended. This establishment is on the other side of the city — although that wasn’t quite true, as I later realized. Once I’d walked the length of the road that, as I’ve said, cut through wasteland, I came to a walled city. I then understood that Calais lives with its back completely turned on its international ferry port. How can I put it any clearer? Calais lives with its back completely turned on England: the result of historical events that are difficult to grasp today but which have created the present situation. So you reach the wall. Then walk down dismal side streets that lead to the Place d’Armes. A quite new city begins beyond this square: cold, provincial, and very extensive. Consequently, when you reach Calais from the ferry port, everything seems as if it’s on the other side of the city.
The Hotel Metropol is built in a very exposed area where the walled city ends and the sprawl of provincial Calais begins. It is near a railway station — Calais-Ville — which is generally unknown to those traveling on international express trains because they never stop there; conversely, for people who live in the town, people who come from France, this is the only station that counts.
On first impressions, the Hotel Metropol seemed like an end-of-the-line hotel — one of those places you finish up in, by force of circumstance if you like, because your journey has come to end. A perfect, freezing terminus. They gave me a room on a top floor — because unlike the houses that backed on to the wall, the hotel was a brazenly high affair. In one way or another people had to understand that times had changed. The view from the room I’d been given was, nevertheless, very pleasant. A fascinating landscape: the striking contrast between the old and the new. I could see geometrical expanses of blackened stone wall, where small, anachronistic cannons lined up that, though practically unusable, looked pompous to the point of being comical. Beyond the military glacis, covered in lovely fresh grass that had been admirably mown, was a clump of thick, glistening trees that must have been giving shade to a cemetery. The station was next to the hotel, and I was often entertained by the grotesque childish sight of shunting trains puffing out smoke. At night the powerful beams from the town’s lighthouse hit the green windows on the platform and the mushy yellow glow from the glass panes lit up my bedroom’s window frame.
The outcome from my first trip was next to none. But any alternative was more pleasant than my depressingly tedious weekends in London whose lack of humanity was akin to a graveyard’s. Even the cinemas — the only spectacle that seemed to be tolerated — were a dead weight: I found their silent respectability and glumness stifling. I thus repeated my trips to Calais and they became frequent over a long period. It was all about getting by with very little money — and that’s relatively easy as long as you don’t expect others to serve you on a silver platter. The change did me good. It was really curious: I stepped on French soil and immediately felt lighter, more curious and eager for life. I couldn’t give a precise, rational explanation for the sudden transformation. Though it was real enough … Many things played their part: for example, a sense of inner release, tastier food, a certain ineffable chaos, perhaps those little glasses of white wine, that were so refreshing and went down so well. After a number of such trips I succeeded in writing a few pages that now follow. They are pages that fully express my own naïveté.
In Calais, so they say, there is nothing much to see. Even so, I managed to spend my time tolerably well. Opposite the Museum, on the Place d’Armes, was a restaurant run by Belgian Georges, where one ate well. Georges was over fifty, full of gout, small and round, pale, with a lovely, shiny baldpate, two small, round eyes, and a white, curly mustache. He always dressed in black, in rather an old-fashioned formal way and he made a strong impression from the very first. Once you’d made his acquaintance and seen him in action, he turned out to be a really strong character. He was the greatest, most inscrutable lazybones who had found a way to appear to be always hard at work. He snorted snuff and whenever he indulged this anachronistic, ecclesiastical vice, as he took out his box, he seemed to be taking the most decisive step in his life. He ran the restaurant with his eyes. He ate, drank, and played cards as if he couldn’t care less and was sublimely unaffected. When he talked, he never went beyond the vaguest, most porous generalizations, but knew how to contort his lips in pain as heroes do and as artists have immortalized. Like a man of great stature, he ignored praise or censure. His temperament meant that he enjoyed a reputation in Calais as an excellent citizen and an exemplary paterfamilias.
In that period my idleness allowed me to ruminate at length on the virtues of men and other enigmas of social life. As I reflected on the enviable situation of the restaurant owner I discovered that his establishment has a second mysterious and secret door — one of those doors in a provincial capital through which passes a whole underground life of romance. In France habits are peaceful and organized, and Georges, a guaranteed accomplice and indispensable companion to the community’s emancipated, hedonistic elements, was always regarded by the more inhibited, crusty folk with considerable envy. I’ve heard it said that pleasure is a matter of vitality and that’s why everyone wants what he doesn’t have. Austere people dream of delightfully voluptuous pleasures. Conversely, rakes hanker after pinkish lilies, fleeting melodies, and deeds of stern contrition. Georges was the passive, orderly, rather blank sort. In his restaurant he seemed, on the surface, to have only one task: to look the other way, to let others labor. He was thus held to be a virtuous man. His virtues were weighed on those curious scales I referred to. His lethargy and indifference, in a way, certified him as an easy-going fellow. I’m not a man for prophecies or guesses. However, my heart tells me that Georges’ virtues have increased over the years and that his reputation has thus strengthened and been extended. Virtue has a tendency to accumulate, like capital, though some childish minds deem that to be a provocation.
The restaurant’s small terrace — or its windows if it rained — had lovely views. Calais’ Place d’Armes, like many old squares in northern cities, is a delight. The tall, thin houses topped by the pointed gables of black-lined slate roofs, their façades dotted by small, irregular, impish windows, begrimed by dripping rain or snow, are cheeky, lively, and unpretentious. Not one house is straight or perfect; they lean on one another and the lightest, most delicate shades of blue, red, and green adorn their walls. An unhinged commercial hoarding hangs down over the façades. Shops, cafés, and taverns surround the square, and in the misty light, the zinc-topped tables glow vaguely. It is all very airy, quirky, and a little out-of-kilter, and that only served to emphasize the ancient, somber, and severe Town Hall, an unmistakable eighteenth-century palace, a sooty chamois-colored stone edifice, its heavy lines ornate with spirals and fleurs-de-lys, with splendid attics and a flourishing gray tower. Overhanging the building, like a sticker, was the tower of the old lighthouse, a slapdash building covered in poorly fixed tiles, topped by a glass dome like a murky dead eye, crowned by a green tin lid.