Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (36 page)

Loneliness is a big part of the equation. The other is control. Those many proper little baby-boomer Parisian
jeunes filles
and
garçons
with names like Louis-Amadéus, Marie-Astrid, Jean-Luc, and Paule-Andrée have grown up and left home; and they just might have families of their own one day, families whose tyrannical only-child offspring’s references will not be the choir stall or the centuries-old estate in Burgundy, where vacations must be endured. No. Their references will be the cellular telephone and other hand-held devices,
le texting
, social media, body piercing and tattoos, reality TV, Arabo-French hip-hop and rap, and independent travel to distant places where English is spoken and junk food is considered gourmet fare. But good old coiffed Samba, Uranus, and Vénus will never abandon
maman
and won’t listen to French techno music, either. After several thousand dollars’ worth of obedience schooling, they will wear their ribbons and collars until the day their little paws no longer make that pitter-patter on the parquet.

What most Parisians do with their
chiens
, I discovered, in part by taking care of lithe-tongued Randy, is precisely what other nations do with children—and husbands, wives, or lovers. Want a romantic stroll? Take your partner but don’t forget your dog: the Bois de Boulogne is
the
place to show off your Yorkshire, Westie (West Island Terrier), or accordion-muzzled Tibetan Shih Tzu in his new houndstooth coat. The chihuahua is back—in a big way—but forget Fifi the passé poodle. The above-mentioned quartet of dog breeds is the rage among Parisian pedigree lapdog lovers. Labradors and bulldogs continue to top the purebred Big Bowser list for the central-city bourgeois set, with border collies like Randy down the roster but not entirely unfashionable. Pit bulls and mastiffs are de rigueur for tough guys and gals, particularly those in
la zone
—the dreary ring of suburbs and satellites swirled around the city by visionary 1960s planners.

Here is a further handful of statistics and prices I’ve come across and found particularly revealing, given the state of the French economy, with its chronically high unemployment, and the country’s increasing variety of complex social ills related to mass immigration, urban alienation, globalization, and the ingestion of beef-based fast food in combination with foie gras and goat cheese. France has an estimated three thousand canine beauty salons, hundreds of them in Paris, and they all seem to be prospering. The fishmonger’s or dry goods store, not to mention the authentic local bistro we all once loved, are things of the recent past, but the dog salon trade is booming. Most coif shops are modest neighborhood operations. One of them I heard about, however, is famous for organizing runway fashion shows for hoity-toity hounds. It’s called Marie Poirier, after its chic owner, and is located on Boulevard des Batignolles in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, one of those deeply bourgeois arteries in the vicinity of which well-fed, well-bred dogs abound. At this salon a haircut for Uranus will run you somewhere in the vicinity of 130 dollars—or so I was told when I telephoned to inquire. In addition to doggie fashion items like coats and booties costing many hundreds of dollars, you can also purchase swish four-digit accessories such as gem-studded collars and designer leashes.

Should you need to ride across town with your pet after an intense coif-fashion experience, the cordial woman at the other end of the telephone line added, the salon’s management will gladly call you a Taxi Canine, Taxi Animalier, or Taxi Dog. I asked her what they were. “Possibly the world’s first taxi services specifically conceived to cater to dog owners,” said the helpful woman. Apparently people use Taxi Canine and others because not all standard Paris taxis accept dogs, especially big dogs, and even Bowser-loving cabbies sometimes make a fuss about the mess, the smell, the fleas, and so forth.

That explains why so many taxi drivers have refused to pick me up over the years: they’ve been mistaking me for a large, frumpy mutt, probably some kind of Saint Bernard–German shepherd cross.

I didn’t believe this next item until I started getting to know the local pet world, and had several remarkable encounters of the third kind with canine-o-philes apparently visiting from another planet. To satisfy the country’s countless upscale dog owners there are not only dog kennels and the like. There are also dog-friendly hotels and dog-receptive restaurants, most of them luxury properties. Parisians routinely dine out with their pets, and travel with them, too. Once, at the celebrated, centuries-old Pavillon Ledoyen restaurant near the Champs-Elysées, the movie star Jean-Paul Belmondo came in carrying two lavishly coiffed sleeve-dogs, one cupped in each bejeweled hand. Alison and I soon tired of watching the aging heartthrob—he was one of my film heroes for his roles in
Breathless
and
That Man From Rio
—but we, the wait staff, and most of the other diners at the restaurant remained fascinated throughout our hideously expensive meals by Belmondo’s eerily doll-like dogs and the perfect fit they made with the mirrored, gilt décor. It harks back to an earlier age of decadence, the Ancien Régime.

It’s a fact that the Michelin red
Guide France
identifies establishments that do
not
welcome
toutous
or
clébards—
French colloquialisms for “doggie.” It is assumed, therefore, that all other hotels and restaurants in the land will throw open their doors at a dog’s approach, and perhaps even provide a comfortable basket so that old Hector or young Troika can settle in under your starred table, or nestle at the foot of your Queen-Marie-Antoinette–size bed. I have never been able to confirm rumors of gastronomes ordering starred meals for their animals and feeding them surreptitiously with the approval of the chef.

Certainly, Parisian butchers stand to attention when they see a dog owner. As our local meat wizard on Rue Saint-Antoine, the late, great Monsieur Lefebvre, put it so poetically, most of his Parisian dog-loving clients nourish their animals as well as, and often better than, their own families. “Scraps?” Lefebvre gasped when I spoke the dreaded word signifying something cost-free, in other words, a product he couldn’t sell for a profit. “No, no, they want filets, rib steaks, ground round …”

Oh, and should your pooch get tired after touring the City of Light, or in case you need to slip off with your human friends
sans
chien
, you can park your precious pet at any of several dog day-care centers, such as City Canine or CaniCrèche. Playgrounds, canine company, and professional entertainment are provided with TLC.

Le shopping
has become a worldwide leisure activity so it came as no surprise to me to learn that the dog fashion business is big business here. At the top of the gift scale there are real diamond-studded collars or lavish leashes from Chanel, Gucci, and Hermès, as you might expect. But what about a dog carry-case from Louis Vuitton starting at about fifteen hundred dollars? When out for a stroll with Randy one day I heard from a fellow dog-sitter about a website called
toutouboutique.com
, with fabulous leashes, clothes, collars, dog couches, and more. At the BHV department store’s new doggie boutique, La Niche, in the Marais, you’ll also find everything for your darling, from rubber chew toys to luxurious canine outfits costing hundreds of dollars. Two other luxury dog-accessory boutiques also operate out of the Marais, a flea-hop, skip, and a jump from where we live. I surprised and even shocked myself one day when, instead of looking for a welcome-home gift for Randy’s owners—a bottle of champagne or suchlike—Alison and I actually trolled the stores looking for that perfect gift for him, Randy, which we knew would in turn please them. Dog-mania is insidious.

That was when we found out that in Paris you could at the time experience a real doggie-department-store extravaganza at Le Printemps, that venerable establishment I usually associate with people’s grandmothers. Le Printemps became a dog-lover’s paradise, one of the hot spots in town where you could buy Oh My Dog! perfumes and pelt-care products, or Good Doogy good-luck charms, by a company called Dog Generation. While browsing there we found out that, just in case Randy was feeling neurotic or depressed because his owners had left him in our hands, he could see the in-house vet-psychiatrist for a session. I buttonholed a Madame Titus coming out of the canine shrink’s office and was assured by her that the therapy session was not mere doggerel. “Titus is much calmer now,” she said deadpan, stroking the heavy jowls oozing slime from his massive head. So, apparently, was she. Sadly, the service was shortlived, and eventually Le Printemps discontinued its experiment with dog fashion to re-center on human beings.

“You must absolutely be in touch with Le Chien du Monde,” insisted a certain Madame Quantum we befriended in the Bois de Vincennes on Paris’s eastern edge, and saw many times thereafter one summer. This boutique, apparently, was
the
source for custom bejeweled collars ($250 to $1,300) or silk canopy dog beds (about $2,600), and, what was better, said Madame Quantum, all profits went to worthy animal-welfare causes. The only rub was, you couldn’t just pop out to the shop—it wasn’t in Paris. “You know, the Riviera is where people live who are really passionate about dogs,” assured Madame Quantum. “We keep an apartment in Cannes …” For the dog? “Well, not just …” The boutique in question turned out to be in Nice. “The weather is so much better down there, so much healthier for your
toutou
, isn’t that right, Quantum dear?”

As we walked Randy through the
bois
later that day, Monsieur Odalisque, the affable owner of an aging German shepherdess we’d gotten to know, told us that the time had come to immortalize his beloved companion.
“Vous savez,”
he sighed, “Odalisque will not live forever …” So he had arranged for a renowned animal portraitist to capture Odalisque while her canines and incisors were still in place.

“Why is that important?” I asked dimly.

“So she can smile,” replied Monsieur Odalisque.

The pet painter, it transpired, ran a shop called Pour Sourire, meaning, literally, “for a smile,” and was noted, said Monsieur Odalisque, for her ability to transform a snapshot, even a digital one, into a cheerful oil painting, for a mere five hundred dollars and up.

Several months later we bumped into Monsieur Odalisque again near the Lac Daumesnil, a favorite lacustrine rendezvous among Bois de Vincennes dog-walkers. He’d changed his hairstyle and now led on a new red leash a yapping puppy whose name, we learned, was Underdog. We shared with him the sad news that Randy had recently gone to the boneyard in the sky. “Odalisque too is gone,” he confided. Apparently the excitement of having her portrait taken had proved too much. Monsieur Odalisque, now Monsieur Underdog, had accordingly telephoned Taxi Canine and requested that they arrange for cremation and transport of Odalisque’s ashes in a decorous dog funerary urn—one of the many services they provide. “They drove us to the pet cemetery in Villepinte,” he recalled. This graveyard, it turned out, is the resting place of beloved Parisian blueblood hounds and suburban mutts, the Père-Lachaise of the capital’s canine world. “It’s a dog’s life we live,” added Monsieur Underdog, giving the leash a tug. “Now come along boy, enjoy it while you can.”

Why the Marais Changed Its Spots

Je voulais parler de Paris et voilà que je raconte ma vie
. (I wanted to talk about Paris but here I am telling you the story of my life.)

—D
ANIEL
H
ALÉVY

ong before moving to it I knew the Marais: as an adolescent I’d read in the crime novels of Georges Simenon about this patchwork of neighborhoods on former marshlands between Beaubourg and the Bastille, Temple, and the Seine, in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. Simenon’s Marais was a dark, sinister place of dilapidated townhouses, where prostitutes plied their trade and murderers lurked in the shadows.