Paris by the Book(39)
Then it was down rue Julien Lacroix and up the staircase that felled Asif. I can see why Ellie was so interested in the location; the stairs here look much like those in Lamorisse’s film, but were actually built much later, around the same time as the terraced Parc de Belleville that the staircase threads through. A couple of young men, smoking, looked up at me from a bench as I passed, one of those long, focused stares that I have become somewhat more accustomed to while living here—France is the land of the frank appraisal—but they didn’t smile. I kept moving.
At the top of the stairs, I suddenly found myself short of breath but told myself it was from the steep climb. Still, Lamorisse had been here. Pascal had walked there. The cat, that lonely, long-ago cat, the first living thing the film chooses to put on view, had sat right there while Pascal meandered into frame from my left at 00:00:05, endured the boy’s friendly scratching at 00:00:16, and stayed put once Pascal, at 00:00:30, headed down (roughly) the same stairs Ellie and Asif had found. (Part of what’s always delighted me about the film is how improvisational it is, and how lucky Lamorisse had gotten with his improvisers, be they cats, kids, or balloons.)
They’d all been right here. My daughter, too. Had Robert? I gripped the railing and breathed. Robert would love this, I thought, and thought of Ellie. I love this. I took in the view Ellie had sought.
In the film, the panorama is wreathed in smoke and fog, but today was startlingly clear. It’s a shame tourists flock instead to the views a kilometer or so northwest in the pickpockety heights of Montmartre; it’s quieter here, and the Eiffel Tower easier to spot.
But I wasn’t thinking of tourists. I was thinking of Ellie.
And Daphne. Not long after we first arrived in Paris, Daphne stopped on the sidewalk of some street—somewhere in the Left Bank, narrow, residential, pretty enough, but nothing notable in view—and said, “I think I’ve been here before.” After some requisite talk about reincarnation, time travel, and wormholes—both Ellie and Daphne love Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time—we chalked it up to another Madeline, Bemelmans’s, and of course The Red Balloon, and all the girls’ years of French immersion schooling. For much of their childhood, these girls had lived in Paris in every way but the real way.
So had I. But I’d never felt quite as Daphne did about any spot in Paris until I’d reached this one. Here was the view I’d first seen from Wisconsin thirty-two years earlier, when I’d first seen the film, first read the book. I wanted to shout; I felt shaky. I went into a bakery to steady myself, to tell the baker, bonjour, hello, I’m back!
Instead, I just stood there, breathless, grinning stupidly.
He said nothing. Neither did the only other person in the store, a customer clutching a very full paper bag.
Seconds passed. Reality spasmed. The customer vanished.
And the baker began to explain that I’d interrupted a holdup.
But I was already out the door, not thinking, just running, because the thief—the other customer, with the full bag—had also stripped me of my purse.
Behind me came the baker. Ahead of me, the thief.
And then, just behind the thief, closing in much faster than I, someone new. Unfortunately, the first thing that came to mind was an idiom I’d just learned for driving fast: appuyez sur le champignon, step on the mushroom. (Another reason I don’t drive in Paris: I understand that certain older French cars have pedals roughly the size of dimmer switches—or mushrooms.) The idiom wasn’t necessarily appropriate here, but I didn’t have time to reflect on that, only enough time to dub this new person Monsieur le Champignon—if nothing else, the word sounded like champion, and this he proved to be.
Down we plummeted through Ménilmontant. One staircase, two. The baker disappeared.
A landing or so below, the two young men who’d been staring at me earlier roused and tackled the purse snatcher.
And then they seized my ally-of-the-moment, Monsieur le Champignon. I couldn’t tell why, although politicians had been battling with each other, and the police, about racial profiling; I hoped I wasn’t on the front lines of a skirmish here.
They released the thief first. He ran off, leaving behind the bag of money he’d stolen and my purse. They released Monsieur le Champignon second, who stood his ground and reached for the purse to give to me. They shouted at him; he shouted back. One held him at bay while the other went into bag and purse and extracted fifty euros from each.
They smiled and spoke. French, but with an accent I couldn’t source nor entirely understand. What’s more, their smiles, menacing, somehow deafened me, and Monsieur le Champignon, whom they were once again restraining—now with the help of a small knife—had to translate.
Monsieur le Champignon I understood easily: his English was perfect, as would befit a valedictorian from Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa. These details I learned later, along with his name, Declan.
At this point, though, Declan had more important information: he says this is their “pourboire”—their tip? Their finder’s fee. Have you called the police? You’re getting robbed twice. He turned to the men. Leave her alone, he said.
Then something happened, and suddenly Declan was bleeding, they were running, he was running after them.
And he would have caught them, too, had not two women from an Accueil et Surveillance squad, park rangers of a sort, stopped Declan. I caught up and tried to explain who really was at fault, but unfortunately played my role—frightened, confused American—too well, and they started shouting at Declan. He answered them evenly. They frowned. I frowned. I’d understood what he’d said well enough to know his French was letter-perfect.