FRDH Podcast

Forget about the misery of summer 2020 and let FRDH host Michael Goldfarb tell you a summer story about Bastille Day 1970 in Paris. This departure from the usual subjects of FRDH podcast will take your mind off our present troubles.

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Transcript of this episode:

Fifty years ago, I left an America smouldering in the aftermath of Kent State for a junior year abroad. The idea was to bum around Europe with my best friend Dan, then I would go to Oxford and he would head to Prague to work with two prominent neurobiologists.

We flew to Paris overnight on a charter. Our initial plan was scuppered. A friend, Diane, had dropped out of Antioch, was living in Paris, had given me her address and said I could stay. In the spirit of the Age, without consulting her, I invited a couple of other people to join me. We rolled into Paris’s morning rush hour backpacks and duffels smacking into irate commuters every which way we turned, then marched down Boulevard Port-Royal to the building where Diane was living and traipsed up one flight of steps after another til we reached the very top floor and there under the eaves knocked on her door. Her room was big enough for a bed, a desk and chair and space for someone to roll out a sleeping bag. There was a squat toilet down the hall shared by the half a dozen denizens of the top floor. For a shower one had to go to the local piscine. Diane looked at the four of us and apologised.

Rush hour thickened we made our way across town to the east slope of Montmartre by the Sacre Coeur to a hostel. Checked in and then, wired from sleeplessness and the excitement of being in Paris, went out for the day.

A day or so later Dan and I headed back to the Left Bank to the Porte d’Italie which we had been told was the best place for “faire du stop” – hitchhiking —if you were headed south. Well it was if you were a pretty young woman. We stood out in the sun for several hours before a guy driving a soft top Triumph Herald gave us a lift. He was English, Bernie Mearth, a night desk man at Agence France Presse. Bernie drove us as far as Vezelay where we hooked up with Pascal and Patrice, a couple of French med students. They offered to drive us as far as Castellane as they were planning on walking the Route de Napoleon.

I am eliminating a lot to get to the point of this post but somewhere in the middle of the hours by the side of the road and sleeping on the beach just west of Cannes I had what can only be called a nervous breakdown. It might have been cumulative sleep deprivation/jet lag in combination with a delayed adverse reaction to some very nasty home made drugs I had taken just before leaving Yellow Springs for my big adventure. That Kent State spring I was living in a farm house off campus with a group of people who included a chemistry major who mixed batches of hallucinogens and some top class speed in the Science building’s labs. I have no idea what was in that stuff but it probably wasn’t entirely good for me.

In any case, I left Dan in the South at a rendez-vous with the French guys and I managed to get on a milk train back to Paris.

I had no choice but to try and heal myself. My conversational French in those days wasn’t bad and during the hours and hours in the unairconditioned compartment of the slow train I took myself out of myself by speaking in another language. Searching for words and phrases was like being half-drowned and seeing just above the water’s surface a person handing you a pole, and trying to grab onto it.

I arrived back in Paris and ended up at a hostel in Charenton-Ecoles. It was in a monastery not far from the site of the asylum where the Marquis de Sade had been kept and where the action of the play Marat/Sade unfolds. It was a Friday. I arrived after dinner had been served. I must have looked as wrecked as I felt inside. One of the young monks – don’t know what order, they weren’t wearing habits – took me to the kitchen and gave me a plate with mackerel and some potatoes. Then someone gave me their room for the night. The monk who had taken charge of me explained they all thought I looked too unwell to be in the dormitory.

The monk spoke to me softly, about my troubles, the timbre of his voice was suffused with the most basic human to human warmth and empathy. At a moment of total vulnerability someone I didn’t know – in a setting that a Jewish boy felt a bit awkward in, crosses everywhere – reached out and kept me from falling further.
I slept for many hours, the first real sleep I had had in the week or so since arriving in France. I felt restored a bit and went up into town.

Found some people to hang out with in a bar at the bottom of the Rue St. Jacques. le Petit Bar. And through them met a girl. She was 16, her mother English, her father Chinese, and she was being educated privately in Paris. She hung around Shakespeare & Co bookshop, part of a small coterie of attractive young women the toothless owner of the place George Whitman let have the run of the place.

The 14th of July arrived and we went out for the day. Dan had returned from the south and we had moved in with Bernie at his place near Sevres-Babylone. We spent the late afternoon drinking (actually nursing drinks, not proper drinking) in le Petit-Bar. Some army pals of the owner turned up after the parade for some real drinking. A young Arab picked a fight with a couple of them. They went outside. It didn’t last long. One punch and the young Arab was on the ground. He shouted a curse at the guy who had decked him. The soldier turned around and looked down quizzically. “You want more?” a genuine question rather than a threat. From flat on his back the Arab spat a huge gobbet that hit the soldier in his face. A severe kicking ensued.

The three of us decided to head out for some culture, walked – more like flowed – to the Comedie Francaise. I’m not sure I have ever been as care-free as I was on that walk. It was a long glorious evening, virtually cloudless, the honey stones of the city burnished by the red-orange sunset. We bought cheap seats for whatever Moliere was being performed that night. A production long-jellied in Aspic, unbelievably dull. We left at the interval and flowed along to the Place Bastille to see what was what.

A riot was what was what. Ritualised in the French style. There was no spark. It kicked off because the 14th of July is the perfect day for a riot at the Bastille and the circumstances: two years after the events of 1968, Paris remained an armed camp. Vans with national police were stationed all over the city, ready to control any crowd that might form.

Where the barricades came from I don’t know, but they went up faster than the scenic machinery erects them at the end of the first act of Les Mis. Cobblestones were dug out from the thin layer of tarmac – moist from July heat – around the Bastille monument. They were flung towards the Flics. The Flics sent back volleys of teargas. Two months earlier I had been tear-gassed in front of the White House. If nothing else I can claim to have been tear-gassed on two continents in 1970.

A group of people ducked down a side-street off the place Bastille, the cops in full pursuit. I heard a shout and turned. A fellow had tripped and fallen. Around six cops had jacked him up and were whaling on him with their night sticks. We ducked into Bofinger, a fin-de-siecle restaurant and brasserie. The waiter at the door and maitre d probably would have thrown Dan and I out, but as I said, the young woman was really very pretty and sweet with it and no man in France would have been so ungallant.

We waited out the storm – a very short one as it turned out – and joined the youthful throngs along the Rue St. Paul with war stories to tell as they headed back to the Latin Quarter for celebratory drinks.

I spent a few days with the lovely young woman and then left Paris for more travels. I could happily have spent the whole summer with her but I had in my head this ridiculous post-adolescent idea of myself as a lonely artist on a rocky solitary path. I blame it on reading Nietzsche at too early an age.

Back on the road my troubles returned but I had a better handle on them. I understood now that when you do the kind of traveling where you wake up and don’t know where you will sleep that night or if you will even exchange a single word with a human being, and all form and routine are lost, the highway blues will claim you.

Summer over, I had the young woman’s phone number in England and I visited her at her parents house in Stamford, Lincs. Her mother was very upper middle class English. Her Chinese father spoke in an unintelligible accent. I began my year of study at Harris Manchester College, Oxford and thought about her a lot (and other girls to be honest).

Then, one day, out of the blue, I got a call from her asking if I would come to her wedding the coming weekend! She hoped I would because she was moving to Canada just after. She had just turned 17. It really made no sense.

I couldn’t make the wedding. I was playing lacrosse for Oxford University that weekend.
A few months later I got a letter from Canada. The saddest letter you can imagine. She knew she had made a mistake. She was completely alone and stuck living with the consequences. I was someone she could tell about it and once she had finished writing the letter to me she would make herself a cup of tea and put on some music she liked as her husband was out and she could have some private time. I wrote back but she didn’t.

Post-script:

As you can imagine, I never forgot about her. And I often wondered how her life turned out. There was a spark inside this 16 year old and I hoped it had not been extinguished.

When Shakespeare and Co.’s George Whitman died, I wrote his obit and mentioned her, hoping she might see it. Nothing. Didn’t hear from her.

Then, about three years ago, through the FRDH website, I got an email from her. She had heard something I made for the BBC. We met in the West End and swapped life stories. Hers was much more interesting than mine, Here’s her what happened next tale:

She had child, got divorced, supported herself and daughter as a waitress in nowhere British Columbia. At the same time taught herself Mandarin, went to university, (she was well into her 20s) met a good man, had more children, earned a doctorate, spent several decades teaching Chinese history at the University of Lincoln. It turns out she is intimately connected to modern Chinese history as her grandfather was a prominent general who was for a time a liaison between the Mao’s and Chiang Kai-shek’s forces.

We’ve met up a few times. Got invited to her husband’s 70th last year. I think our spouses don’t quite get the connection. But perhaps you do. If you’ve ever been in a dark place, alone in Paris, and someone’s light found you, you would never forget either and you would delight in their company half a century later.