I have recently returned from a fleeting visit to the City of Light. As usual, Paris itself was a delight. It is an architectural and historic marvel that nevertheless manages to offer the best food and wine in the world at all kinds of prices, and somehow also has a respectable number of quirky and interesting independent shops and boutiques amidst the more anticipated international names. In other words, any trip to the French capital should be an alloyed pleasure. So why, when I arrived back at St Pancras, did I all but sink to my knees in gratitude that I was once back in rainy old Blighty, and that the land of the Belle Époque was a distant memory?
The answer, as usual, comes in the extraordinary awfulness of the inhabitants of the world’s finest city. Other similar places have their flaws. New Yorkers are brusque, Romans prone to lascivious wolf-whistles, and Londoners are a grim, glum bunch on the whole, until you steer them into the nearest pub and watch them light up. But it is hard to think of any bunch of types as rude, arrogant and generally obstreperous as the Parisians. If you do not live up to their self-appointed standards of beauty, sartorial chic and – this is the crucial part – fluency in their native language, then you will be treated with as much disdain as la merde beneath their ever-elegant chaussures.
Sometimes, this just takes the form of straightforward hostility. I attempted to visit a brasserie for lunch one day, on the tourist hellhole that is the Boulevard de Sébastopol. My presence was noted, I was brusquely sent to a table in a miserable, practically Arctic corner of the room, and then that was the end of that. The closest that the staff came to communicating was when one waiter dropped a fork on my wife’s face, an outrage for which no apology was forthcoming. Instead, when she tried to pick up the offending item, he waggled a finger at her, as if she were a naughty child, and said ‘Non!’. We left shortly afterwards, unfed and insulted.
But then this was the same trip as when, after queuing for half an hour in the rain to see the glories of the Louvre, we were denied entry because we had booked le mauvais billet, and would have been sent back to the ticket desk, there to shell out another thirty-odd euros and to queue, in the rain, for another half an hour or more. Even the Mona Lisa isn’t worth that amount of effort. If this information had been communicated with the slightest kind of compassion, or even a shrug, a smile and a ‘desolé’, then the disappointment might not have been so grave. But instead, it was presented with a sneer and a look of contemptuous incredulity at how un rosbif could have been quite so stupid to fall foul of the institution’s byzantine website.
On and on it went. We stayed at a hotel with a swimming pool, which was located on the top floor. (There was no view but never mind.) In order to visit the swimming pool, you had to leave your room, head down to the reception, obtain another ticket from the sullen receptionist, head back to another floor, get changed, leave, and then head two floors up to the pool. It was a staggering task, and I am afraid to say that, when the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest broke, I simply abandoned the idea of a relaxing dip altogether and instead immersed myself in an altogether different kind of deep water.
Paris is a city where those who live and work there seem to take a perverse pleasure in making the lives of tourists and visitors less pleasant. There are endless queues, countless miserable examples of pettifogging bureaucracy that make no sense – on my way out of Gare du Nord, I counted no fewer than three separate queues at one point, none of which were making any progress – and a pervasive sense that the Parisians would be perfectly happy if they never had to speak to anyone who was not French ever again. If they deign to utter a few words to you in English, it is done with the withering disdain of someone lowering themselves to vulgarity. It comes as a faint surprise that they do not spit at you in the process.
I shall, of course, be back before too long. The awfulness of the locals cannot take away the great aesthetic, artistic and culinary glories of Paris, and even if, like a character out of the Wodehouse novel, I must adopt the look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French, I shall bone up on Duolingo and attempt to take on the escargot-munchers on their own turf. But the next time I visit, it will be with a sense of grim determination to restore British honour in a fashion not seen since the glory days of Agincourt. The Louvre, and that mediocre little bistro on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, had better watch out.
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