We were getting late for a dinner party. Yet, I could not tear myself away from François Truffaut’s nouvelle vague film Jules et Jim I was watching on television. I had seen it several times and was still mesmerised. The film catapulted the French director to the top echelon of the celluloid pantheon in 1962. And me, watching it for the umpteenth time, to my salad days as a student in Paris in the late 60s. May 1968 had happened months earlier: the earth had moved and things would never quite be the same again.
The aftershocks were still rippling out when I reached Paris to study comparative literature, hang around the Latin Quarter and, most memorable of all, discover the hedonistic pleasures of red wine and inhale the indefinable aroma of freshly baked baguettes.
It was a heady place, where impassioned and cheap wine-fuelled conversations lingered on well after the moon was high in the sky. With age on our sides, we had the energy and will to walk, after the last Métro had gone, to the Cité Universitaire where many international students lived.
It was nothing less than the temporary takeover of the city by the youth. An air of je ne sais quoi filled the air, as did the sense of a world or a way of life on the threshold of change.
Cynicism had not yet spread its tentacles. The future beckoned, like a promising dawn and another country. Whiling away our time over endless cups of coffee, we talked about how we would change the world order. I learned to drink the bitter, tiny espressos because they were cheaper than cafés crèmes. And, yes, existentialism, something we barely knew how to spell let alone understand, was a word added to our lexicon.
It just sounded important, earthshaking. Phrases like “Under the cobblestones, the beach” became catchphrases and expanded our vocabulary further: it was used after students uprooted the pavement stones and threw them at the police. It was a brief spring of buoyancy and hope.
Capturing imaginations
However, the youth quake did not endure; nor did the relevance of torchbearers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But it did capture imaginations in Europe and elsewhere.
A tectonic shift occurred in Old France. The French had used the more formal pronoun vous to address others, family members, and even lovers.
Post-1968 many switched to the more inclusive and informal tu . (‘Tu’ is almost comparable to the Hindi or Punjabi pronoun, generally used while speaking to children or domestic help.)
Moreover, a sort of sexual revolution piggybacked on the student one: barricades of many kinds were knocked over — free thinking and free living took over as the new règle du jeu .
In a sense, Jules et Jim was ahead of its time — as was Henri-Pierre Roché’s book on which it was based, written nearly a decade earlier.
The central character in this quasi ménage à trois , Catherine (played by a luminous Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s film) has antecedents in Europe. She has echoes of Lou Andreas-Salomé, the German-Russian writer, muse and a lot more to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the guru of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Baked on site?
Fast forward to the present. As for those baguettes of my youth: alas, these days bread is mostly baked elsewhere and brought to the boulangeries before dawn. Strictly speaking, a place selling bread can only be called a boulangerie if the baguettes and croissants are baked on site.
I wonder about the existence of a ‘bread’ perfume that shrewd Parisian bakers spray on bread to simulate the aroma of rising bread to lure customers.
And Paris? Parisians and old Paris hands refer to the ‘city of light’ as a ville-musée. They lament not just a city spilling over with monuments and tourists but one whose original inhabitants have fled; no longer able to live where they were born. Men with berets walking down cobbled streets with baguettes under their arms — a worn-out cliché, no doubt — have disappeared. As, indeed, have the tiny boutiques and small bookshops skirting the Luxembourg Gardens, and elsewhere. You now see more McDonalds, KFCs and Burger Kings in Paris.
Listen carefully and you will hear the French speaking English with a bit of an American twang and not a British accent just across the channel. Perhaps, American movies have everything to do with this.
Forget les baguettes: often, food is not cooked on site in several seemingly quaint Parisian restaurants but cooked in massive kitchens elsewhere before being brought to restaurants and reheated. I am not sure the sign is still up, but Les Philosophes, a landmark restaurant located in the long-trendy Marais, used to have a sign declaring its food was cooked on site. In the afternoons you could see a truck unloading vegetables, and you were assured that something was cooking in the kitchen.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go to Paris to buy a baguette or an almond croissant in Delhi. Apparently, L’Opéra, the high-end bakery and Salon de Thé, imports its flour and yeast from France.
So, as Humphrey Bogart famously said to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca : “We’ll always have Paris.”
The writer, who is the Editor of The Indian Quarterly , loves totting up experiences and writing about them.
