6. First days in France

We were met on the dock in Le Havre by Father Robert Sealy, a professor of French and the faculty advisor of the Junior Year Abroad program. He had arranged hotel rooms for us for several days in le Cinquieme (the V arrondissement) near the Latin Quarter, and after we had checked in we gathered in a neighborhood bistro for our first meal in France.


I had been eagerly anticipating my first meal in France since before leaving the U.S. My head was filled with images of authentically French dishes, such as bouillabaisse or l'homard americaine, but the bistro we visited on that first night in Paris had a menu that seemed quite mundane. There were steak frites, entrecote de porc, poulet roti, all things I would come to love in due course, because the French can prepare the mundane much better than just about anyone else. But I had an imaginary menu in my head, and the only item I could find on this real-life menu was pot-au-feu. To be truthful, I had no idea what pot-au-feu was, but it sounded exotic, and I had always wanted to try one since coming across the name in the Women's Day Encyclopedia of Cooking. Well, it turns out that pot-au-feu is a boiled dinner, non plus. As served in this eatery, it was a pot of boiled beef, carrots, onions and turnips. One culinary writer has described pot-au-feu as central to the psyche of French culture, but to me it was little different from the boiled beef that my mother used to cook in her pressure cooker.


The first order of business after arriving in Paris was to check the American Express office, at the Place de l'Opera. The American Express office in the '60's was a vital link for student travellers, since it served as a mail drop for those without an address in Paris. Every morning, one could see dozens of young Americans lined up to see if they had letters from home. In my case, the priorities were letters from Fordham and from Bethesda, containing checks.
The next milestone was to travel to Strasbourg to cement our living arrangements. Bob Gilleran had come to Paris to meet me and Al Airone, who would be rooming together at 1 Rue du General Castelnau, chez Kraencher. So, after a day or so in Paris, he led us down to the Gare de l'Est for the first of many train trips to Strasbourg.
This first experience with the SNCF remains in my memory not for any significant event which occurred but for the images which I have always retained: the compartments in deuxieme which we shared with some French businessmen; the lengthy passage through the Parisian suburbs, followed by the city of Meaux with its striking cathedral (which will be immortalized in my memory because of the offhand comment of one of the businessmen in our compartment "Tiens, le cathedrale de Meaux"); the picturesque towns of Epernay and Chalons-sur-Marne; the major crossroads station at Nancy; the Vosges stations of Sarreburg and Saverne; and finally Strasbourg, with its majestic yet crippled cathedral towering over the city in the distance.

Our first stay in Strasbourg was quite brief. We got a room at a tiny hotel close to the gare, which was a fairly reasonable walk from our prospective apartment, on the third floor of 1 Rue du General Castelnau, just north of the main "island" of Strasbourg. On our first visit to this building, we met Mrs. Erna Kraencher, the landlady of the building, who also lived on the third floor, just across from our apartment. She was an elderly lady, but quite energetic, with a firm grip on the affairs of the building. She seemed to be quite fond of Mario and Bob, our predecessors in the apartment, but she was not unmindful of the fact that they were typical American college students with perhaps a larger than typical social life. We also met the third factor in the apartment's equation, a Tunisian medical student named Taofik Snoussi, a short, very intense person who rarely emerged from his room except to cook, but who nonetheless was the moral center of the apartment. He in turn introduced us to his jovial and earthy friend Mustafa, who lived in the loft apartments above our floor.
After a day or two in Strasbourg, it was time for us to return to Paris. Mario and his girlfriend were driving to the south of France, and they invited us to ride with them as far as Troyes, where we could catch a train for Paris. The drive, which took about 2-1/2 hours, made us aware of the human geography of Europe and what made it so different from the U.S. During the whole trip in Bob's friend's 2CV, I don't think that I saw a single autoroute of more than four narrow lanes, just the right size for the tiny car we were riding in. There were no controlled access routes, no exits, no Howard Johnsons. We felt just an arm's length away from French towns and villages. We eventually arrived in Troyes, where we were let off at the train station. Within a couple of hours, we were back in Paris.
There followed a fairly desultory week in Paris while we waited to go south for our summer studies. Most of the Fordham crew had dispersed, and Al Airone left with Rich Golden to travel somewhere as well, so I was alone in Paris, and the solitude began to wear on me. The days were filled with a routine that involved killing time: eat breakfast in the little hotel by Boulevard Saint Germain, take the Metro to Place de l'Opera to check mail at the American Express office, then back to the V-ieme to wander through the back alleys of the Quartier Latin, inspecting the little bookstores and record shops (and noticing how expensive records were in Paris, which was a mercy since I had no way to play them anyway); check out the truly exotic restaurants in the alleys such as the Rue de la Chat qui Peche - Indian, Greek, Vietnamese and North African places, none of which I had seen in New York; eat lunch at le self service, where I learned to eat a filet au sauce Bearnaise for the price one would pay for a knockwurst and sauerkraut at the Blarney Stone; wander along the Seine River to browse the bouquinistes, the used book stalls along the river (Actually, other than quaint postcards, there was little to interest a new student from the US, but one had to make a pilgrimage to the bouquinistes, since they were immortalised in our college French textbooks).

After a day or two of this routine, I began to feel choked. For the first time, the fact of being alone in a foreign land began to hit me. The novelty of Paris had worn off, and the accomplishment of making Paris"my own" by treading the streets and sitting in cafes gave way to the tedium of occupying myself between meals in restaurants. Although I had as yet seen relatively little of Paris, I had little curiosity to see the sights all by myself, so I remained mainly in le Cinquieme, wandering the streets aimlessly. One day, as I was strolling through a street market, admiring the tufts of fur at the end of the legs of the rabbits hanging upside down in the outdoor boucherie, I looked up to see a contingent of Fordham students, Andy Kavanaugh, Rich Martin, Rich Superty and several others. Apparently they had been roaming Paris on their own for the same length of time that I had been, but we had never crossed paths. I had never felt such a sensation of relief vbefore: I was no longer alone.