1
OVERHEAD IN A BALLOON
It was a chill spring dawn in the mid-1800s when a tattered gas-filled balloon heaved into the sky outside the bastions of Paris. Quivering, the sphere's onion-shaped, tasseled silhouette floated toward the sprawl of glistening tin and tile roofs. Rain, hail, and the year's last snow had swept Paris clean during the night.
A crumpled chessboard of canyons crawling with pawns, knights, and castles appeared below the balloon's dangling wicker basket. In it a lone passenger crouched, shivering, stunned by the view. As the light grew, the mist dispersed. The chess pieces focused themselves into miniature men and women, toy horses and carriages. The canyons turned into a strangely wonderful cityscape of dusty work sites, half-ruined churches, half-built boulevards or train stations, medieval turrets, towers and gargoyles. Symmetrical, freshly finished off-white apartment houses and massive old ocher monuments spiraled outward from the Seine.
Sinuous and slow, the river wore the same indefinite blue-gray tint as the sky. Instead of clouds, whitecaps flecked the surface. The river broke around islands, rejoined itself, split again around riverboats and bridge pilings, and then curved out of the camera frame to east and west.
From under a black canvas hood the young Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known as Félix Nadar, released the shutter, counted, then twisted around quickly, developing his photographic plates. After a half-dozen failures from a tethered balloon, he had puzzled out the problem. The process worked, the plates retained their ghostly images, and his balloon could float free.
The most daring of early photographers, an unapologetic Romantic, Nadar had decided one day in 1855 that it was time someone invented aerial photography and that he would be the man. A gifted jack-of-all-trades full of impractical ideas, he had evolved from bookseller, smuggler, spy, caricaturist, painter, novelist, and journalist to would-be revolutionary, marching from Paris to Warsaw in 1848 to fight for Polish independence-though he had no connection to the country. With equally madcap passion he had mastered the art of photography and reached the top of his newborn trade in less than five years. Then he had taken to the sky. Ballooning was big. Why not turn a wicker basket into a photo studio and lab?
As sensitive as his plates, Nadar had Paris on the brain. He sometimes imagined the city from romantic heights-but with no skyscrapers or Eiffel Tower to look down from. With a pigeon's-eye view in his head, he had prowled the streets, alleys, and parks, then had climbed down and explored the catacombs and the sewers of Paris-and one day would invent flash photography to record their lightless depths.
Nadar was also famous as a professional nomad and heartbreaker. Standing six feet tall when other Frenchmen were a head shorter, he habitually tossed his head to keep his luxuriant russet hair out of his slightly walleyes. Life was a lark, an endless chase. He had changed his name to Nadar after the Gothic fashion. It sounded vaguely medieval, bohemian, and provocative, and went with his lifestyle. He and his unruly comrades decamped from one dive to the next a day ahead of the eviction squad.
It was Félix Nadar who starred in the original cast of La Bohème before it migrated from Paris garrets to the realm of operatic art. He loved and immortalized the flesh-and-blood Mimi, the consumptive beauty of Puccini's masterpiece-or one of her many sisters. Mimi was a made-up name. Nadar and his comrades the poet Charles Baudelaire and the novelists Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas knew the artists' studios and unheated rooftop rooms of Paris better than just about anyone.
Nadar's life inspired legions of latter-day romantics, among them a kindred spirit from San Francisco: me. Nadar was my hero. When I first saw his photographs and learned about his life I did not know I was a Romantic. But I felt an affinity for the Old World and its characters, a world of old monuments, old books, old photos, and old movies, a sophisticated world of exquisite naughtiness filled with romantic garrets and ruined castles surrounded by wineries and restaurants serving sinfully delicious food Europeans enjoyed without guilt.
Like them, I did not understand the meaning of guilt. I also suspected there might be more to the Old World than hedonism or nostalgia for times past, though I could not articulate why.
When not waiting on tables at a self-consciously romantic French restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, or clumsily overexposing rolls of black-and-white film in a fruitless effort to become a photographer, I wrote never-to-be-published stories set in European locales and indulged my fulsome imagination. One summer I volunteered as an usher at the San Francisco Opera and was swept up and away by La Bohème. I followed its roots from Puccini to its origins and discovered Scenes from Bohemian Life, author Henri Murger's bittersweet autobiographical book the opera was based on. Then I found the connection between Mimi and Murger and their friend Nadar. I dreamed of merging life and art, the romantic world of these long-dead men and women, a world of books and photography and wayward balloons in a black-and-white Paris where flowers when distilled into poetry by Charles Baudelaire could be both sweet-smelling and evil. I began to wake up at night with my arms thrown out, calling for Mimi.
Like others in San Francisco I watched vintage movies about Paris when they came to town or ran on late-night TV. I wore a beret, bought baguettes, and considered buying an old Citroën 2CV. Troubled by constant drought and blinded by unrelenting sunshine, I imagined myself singing in the rain on a Paris street full of bobbing old cars with yellow headlights. In my head I was the bad guy played by Jean-Paul Belmondo seducing Jean Seberg on the Champs-Élysées in Breathless, or Jean Gabin trailing Michèle Morgan on the quai des Brumes. I devoured secondhand French books. Their lusty, lichen-frosted fantasies featuring Gustave Flaubert's heroine Madame Bovary ravished in a bouncing carriage, or Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and Esmeralda entangled among the gargoyles of Notre Dame, seemed engrossing, outlandish, and mercifully disconnected from the deregulatory orgy that had overtaken California.
Then one day I made my way east across America and did not stop traveling until years and several putative career changes later, I crossed the Seine on the Pont des Arts and moved into my own opera-set, seventh-floor walk-up cold-water garret on the Right Bank in rue Laugier. Too excited to unpack, I found a wooden ladder in the plank-floored hallway and propped it into the shaft below a small rectangular skylight. Clutching a map of Paris, I climbed up and stuck my head out.
Transfixed, surrounded by pigeons, I balanced on the ladder and blinked. Snow fell. It was April 5, 1986, April in Paris. That tune played in my head but was soon replaced by a Puccini aria. My room was windowless and even smaller and colder than the one in La Bohème.
The scene seemed strangely wonderful. The only thing missing was an apparition-Nadar in his balloon, for instance, with Mimi in his arms. No balloons were overhead, however, not even the little helium-filled character from the short movie shown to us in kindergarten, The Red Balloon. This short movie had provided my first vision of Paris, lodging in my brain.
Summoned by sympathetic magic, a blimp eventually glided into view. Advertisements flashed on its flanks. Following its trajectory I made out the crown of the Arc de Triomphe. Belching chimney pots, black iron balconies, and pockmarked Art Nouveau turrets gently crumbled into the gutters between me and the Champs-Élysées. Farther out on the south side of the Seine stretched the lacy swan's neck of the Eiffel Tower. I blinked the snowflakes out of my eyes. The light was soft, the air scented by baguettes and croissants, coffee beans and chickens roasting-and fuel oil and cabbages from the other maid's rooms on my floor.
The blimp's vapor trail joined the dots between the sights of Paris, the same ones Nadar had seen from his balloon. They were still here. I unfolded my map and traced lines to Montmartre and Belleville, the Marais, the banks of the Seine, the graveyard at Père-Lachaise, the Latin Quarter, and Luxembourg Garden. They were places I had read about or seen on celluloid, places I had passed through on other short visits to Paris in the 1970s and early '80s. Now I could possess them. Paris would be mine.
I wonder if I knew on that first April morning that this would be it: I was stuck and could not leave, indeed would spend decades prowling the streets seeking Félix Nadar's gallery of images-the romantic men and women of Paris' finest hour. Did I realize I would lose myself in libraries, cemeteries, house museums and administrative offices, pestering bureaucrats, getting married, battling the spinners of red tape over birth certificates and driver's licenses, voter registration and noisy neighbors, unwittingly attempting to penetrate the mysteries, the secrets of what might well be the world's most enigmatic, compelling, paradoxical, maddening yet seductive city?
Copyright © 2015 by David Downie
