Love at 6 Stories

Free to enjoy it for the first time in comfort, I found that, from the sixth floor, Paris was a different city.

In place Dauphine, we had belonged to the area rather than it belonging to us. A first floor studio with panoramic windows looking down on the square made us extras in the never-ending spectacle - especially if we came out of the shower when the curtains weren't drawn.

Up here, Paris was on show for us. Taking morning coffee on the steel-surfaced balcony with its two gnarled rose bushes and three pots of gardenias - we were already plotting to transform it into an aerial arbor of pines and trellised vines, like the balconies of Manhattan's upper west side - I became just another awed spectator.

North, the grey concrete turnips of Sacre Coeur's domes crowned the butte of Montmartre. South, just beyond the severe classic roof of the Theatre de l'Odeon, rose the feathery foliage of the marrons in the Jardins de Luxembourg.

Less than a kilometre to the east, the towers of Notre Dame floated on an ocean of metal roofs. On Sunday evenings, its bells - the bells of Quasimodo! - tolled out solemnly over the city of Francois Villon. It wasn't hard to imagine the turn of the century criminal genius Fantomas moving silently in evening dress and black domino across the roofs and slipping into one of those dormer windows left so invitingly ajar to catch the breeze of late spring. Or see oneself as the young man of Jacques Rivette's PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT - PARIS BELONGS TO US - strolling proprietorially across the softly curved roof of the Theatre du Chatelet, just on the other side of the Seine.

The show continued even closer to home. Rue de l'Odeon was so narrow that one could look straight into the apartments opposite. Curtains are rare in Paris. The instrument of privacy is the persienne, the wooden shutter that can be shut and bolted in winter or when the apartment is empty, or half-closed to shade a room against the sun. But nobody bothered much with shutters after the first of July. The apartments opposite were as open to us as the rooms in a dolls house. I could read the names on the books scattered around the floor of the apartment two floors down, and watch the maids in the flat of our richer neighbour one building further up the street as they plumped the pillows of the beds every morning or spent early evenings laying the table for twelve with what seemed like twice-weekly dinner parties.

Directly opposite, on most mornings, a slim teenager with tea cup breasts and dark hair halfway down her back drifted across a window below me wearing only a pair of black briefs. Her father followed, in a dressing gown, and her mother in just a long skirt, also naked to the waist. They subsided onto the couch with their coffee and turned on France 3 to watch the morning news. Only in Paris...

Summer light illuminated our apartment, emphasizing the stresses and subsidences of two centuries' accommodation to gravity. There wasn't a horizontal line or a flat plane anywhere. Rooms tapered, the low ceilings intersecting window frames at bizarrely narrowing angles. Under the plaster and carpet, ceilings and floors rippled, dipped, rose unexpectedly so that, even carrying a cup of coffee from kitchen to salon, one risked snagging a toe. A ball dropped on the floor would zig-zag for yards, coming to rest in a far corner as if tired of searching. Paris reversed entropy. Here, all things tended, not to a condition of rest, but to perpetual motion.

The motion was social as well as physical. At least once a week, a van pulled up in the street and extended a spidery metal framework that ended at a fifth or sixth floor window. For the rest of the day - excluding, of course, a lengthy lunch break - the platform of a small elevator whined, carrying furniture down and moving more furniture up.

One morning, we woke to a new sound, a dull reiterated thud that reverberated through the thick walls, throbbing like a sick headache. When I took my coffee out on the balcony, I saw that, almost overnight, scaffolding had appeared on half a dozen buildings. There were skips up and down the street, some of them already filling with rubble.

Marie-Do joined me and took in the chaos without surprise. 'August,' she said, as if that explained everything.

- - - - - - - - - - -

"We should have a garden," said my wife thoughtfully when we moved into our Paris apartment. She might as well have said, "We need a cow up here". The terrace, two metres deep and fifteen long, had all the horticultural promise of a four-lane freeway. Floored in galvanized steel, it was fenced off from the sheer drop to the street by some utilitarian square-section bars in Long Bay green. Two ancient rose trees, stark as crucifixes, languished in cement pots. Add the fact that it was six floors up a serpentine staircase, with no elevator, and the task seemed hopeless.

But never under-rate a Parisienne's sense of purpose. Today, we look out over the roofs towards Notre Dame through a screeen of roses and a grove of conifers. The rose trees, revived by food and pruning, explode annually with giant pink flowers which they wave deliriously out over Rue de l'Odeon, to the astonishment of the 6th arrondissement. Our cat Scotty performs daredevil gymnastics on the trunk of an acacia three meters tall. The metal floor has disappeared under Astroturf and the fencing behind ivy, honeysuckle and grape vines. Irises bloom in pots, and a mini-jungle of annuals flourishes in an Edwardian galvanized steel bathtub souvenired at midnight from a benne, which is what the French call a skip.

Getting that tub into the car, back to the apartment and up the stairs was just one incident in a decade of sweat and swearing, bad backs, blistered hands, and incredulous "You must be kidding!" stares as deliverymen with sacks of potting mix glared up the stairwell from the ground floor. Nor did the location welcome these new arrivals. Frost killed a lively wisteria, even shattering the antique stone pickling pot, 5cm thick, in which we'd planted it, and in summer we must douse the plants twice daily against a sirocco that coats the leaves with fine red dust from the Sahara.

But now we couldn't live without the garden. In spring and summer, the French windows are almost permanently open, turning the terrace into an extension of our living room. Croissants and coffee in the morning, drinks in the evening, coffee after dinner - all taste better taken in leaf-dappled sunlight and the fragrance of growing things. And on summer evenings, when we water the plants in the velvet night, Voltaire's "Cultivate your garden" seems more than simply advice to mind your own business. Maybe, as much as we are looking after our garden in the sky, our garden is looking after us.

-- John Baxter is PTEE Dean of Faculty in Paris. Join us on a PTEE "Untour" and see the view from John's balcony.