Opinion: RHETA JOHNSON: Paris - attack on food, beauty, the sheer joy of life
Tishomingo County, MS
I am in my quiet spot on this earth today, but thinking only of another place, another country, a good friend.
One of my vivid Paris memories – there are many – is of a cozy apartment on a sleepy street called Popincourt, not far from the Clown Bar, so-named because it is near the winter home of the circus, Cirque d’Hiver. The Clown Bar is also a restaurant, decorated with antique circus posters and clown busts, kaleidoscopic bursts of color that make one imagine a perfect and exotic childhood.
My best friend in Paris, Marie-Helene, lived on Popincourt at the time, and it was as if charm had an address. It was the most creative use of space I’d ever seen. A big bathtub was in the center of the guest bedroom, accessed by a hatchlike entrance and its long ladder. Decorative lights on the floor outlined your way and cast magical shadows. I stayed one night but could not sleep for excitement.
When I am blue, I think of that Parisian place, the meandering streets, clown art and cozy cafes, the brisk pace of pedestrians who, at day’s end, hoist a baguette and a bouquet, the flags of French priorities: food, beauty, the sheer joy of life.
I remember with something approaching love another restaurant in the same neighborhood. Marie-Helene and her friend Peggy once met me there, along with my sister and niece. They brought us a gift, a big, coffee-table-size book of black-and-white photographs called “Paris: Mon Amour.”
The restaurant was Astier, and its patrons were regulars, who all seemed to know one another and gladly squeezed into the tight confines to experience more than a meal. There was rich French fellowship. But, oh, the food. From the chestnut soup to the pots of chocolate, it was memorable. The cheese course wasn’t so much served as delivered. It arrived at the table on a cheese wheel the size of a temporary spare tire.
In walking from Astier to my own apartment late that night, I felt the thrill of knowing I was safe, that in all probability I would not be mugged or shot or robbed in the streets of Paris.
Not far from that artistic apartment, from the Clown Bar, from Astier, is the Bataclan theater, where religious zealots last week murdered trapped young music lovers listening to a concert on an unseasonably warm Friday night. The concert hall, a historic one where Edith Piaf once performed, was stormed and terrorized and became, as we would hear again and again, a “scene of carnage.”
The murderers called out to their god as they killed viciously and randomly. Then, to escape punishment, they killed themselves, leaving only DNA dust for identification. All around the City of Light, simultaneous crimes were perpetrated against Parisians enjoying the good things in life.
Yes, such scenes have become almost commonplace in a world now ruled by weapons and terror. But somehow the Paris targets were reverberating strikes at what’s deepest in all of our hearts, at what remains the best of civilization: music, beauty, art, food, cultural fellowship. Terrorists killed people, many of them young, with the best of their lives ahead. But they attempted more. They struck at what the French call “joie de vivre,” the joy of life.
I heard from my friend Marie-Helene, who is safe. Two nights after the attacks, she was headed to her old neighborhood, and to Astier, her personal rebuttal to those who would kill joy. And I am going with her, in spirit, at least, to thumb a nose at those misguided lost souls who think their way is the only way and bullets are how you win.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s most recent book is “Hank Hung the Moon … And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts.” Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@aol.com.