EVERYONE KNOWS...

PARIS IN AUGUST.

RUE ROI DE SICILE, 4th arrondissement.

            One of my favourite scenes in Groundhog Day begins with Bill Murray clawing desperately at the taps in a shower. Outside the bathroom, he complains to the BnB proprietor that there’s no hot water.

            “Oh, no,” she says with a giggle and that “everyone knows” tone. “There wouldn’t be… today.”

            Last night, I had a dinner date with our daughter Louise. We’d booked into a restaurant in the Marais, received a confirmation by email and a warning that we might be rung on the day just to make sure we still wanted the table.

            Walking along rue Roi de Sicile, I stopped to check out a few of the novelty boutiques that line it. (Do people really drink coffee from mugs shaped like a skull?) The French call this lèche-vitrine – window-licking – which captures the sense of suppressed appetite  “window shopping” lacks.

That all were closed, something almost unknown in the Marais as long as a potential customer might pass, should have alerted me, but it wasn’t until I found Louise fuming on the sidewalk in front of our restaurant that I discovered why.

It was closed. And not only closed, but closed for the entire month. Well, of course it was. How stupid of us. It was August. So naturally it would be closed. Everyone knew that.   

To abandon Paris in August is less a custom or a habit or even a tradition than a compulsion, a need. Most restaurateurs and boutique owners will tell you that they’d prefer to stay open, given that tourists are even more numerous in August than the rest of the year. It’s just that…well, they feel this itch to be on a beach at Etretat or in a field in the Dordogne or the terrace of this little hotel in Alsace.

And even if they could force themselves to stay, their staff and suppliers and the people who do the linen and even the men in green who wash down the sidewalks and collect the garbage would not, since they all suffers from the same unassuagable urge.

Everyone knows that. And  “everyone” in French is tout le monde – the whole world. No exceptions.

But what is there in Etretat or the Dordogne or Alsace that one can’t find in Paris? Books have been expended on this question, without offering a satisfactory answer. Most agree that it has something to do with returning to one’s roots, reaffirming one’s heritage. Because that beach is the one where your parents took you when you were a toddler and the field used to belong to the farm of your great-grandfather and the terrace is in the hotel where ….

You get the idea.  Everywhere else may belong to tout le monde. But this spot, just for a week or two in August, is for you alone.

Nor is it about the place, its beauty or luxury or remoteness from where one usually lives. If that were so, half of Paris would be in the Greek islands or Australia or Disney World. No, it’s…

Well, there’s this story. About a man who gets off the train with his bag and trundles it down the road from the gare into the sunlit town square and across the cobbles to the Hotel Splendide (one star) where he is greeted as an old friend by the proprietor and handed the key to the room in which he has stayed every August since the burly young man who takes his bag was a toddler looking wonderingly up at him and sucking his thumb.

Settled in and changed into t-shirt, jeans and sandals, he crosses the square again to have lunch in the café where he doesn’t need to order, so well do the owner and his wife know his tastes. Over an express, he opens that new novel he just hasn’t had time to start.

And so on, to the end of the week, when he packs up, trundles back to the gare, catches the train – and gets off two stops up the line, where he lives the rest of the year.  

I leave the moral to you.  For myself, I have a train to catch. All next week you’ll find me in a village called Fouras, on the estuary of the Charente and the Gironde, where my wife’s family has owned a house since her grandparents retired there a few wars ago.

We’ll eat langoustines in the garden under the wisteria, and walk down to the beach in the evening to watch the sun set and hope to catch that fraction of a second when, as the colours of the spectrum fade in order, one may glimpse an instant flash of green. Some writers have used it as a metaphor for that fugitive ideal to which all of us aspire but few achieve. It might have been what Fitzgerald was thinking of when he imagined the green light at the end of the jetty in The Great Gatsby.

You haven’t heard of the rayon verte? I thought everyone knew that.