Part I. Quest for the Lost Proust
Sic transit gloria mundi: the Proustian "Temples of Immodesty,” the oddly hospitable little hotels and Turkish baths of Paris that a Baron de Charlus might once have frequented, have nearly all disappeared, decreasing slowly in number while Paris working-class boys, with higher wages in a more affluent society, are now modernizing their homes even in the poorer neighborhoods and supplying themselves with bathing facilities of their own, with water-heaters and showers. Besides, nearly all factories in the Paris industrial suburbs now provide showers for their workers, so that public neighborhood bathhouses are no longer as popular as they used to be. A few of them can still rely, however, on a sufficient number of regular customers over weekends, especially in neighborhoods where large numbers of North African Arab workers congregate live, mainly in slummy and overcrowded hotels that offer no bathing facilities.
On Friday evenings, Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, many of these Arabs still go to a neighborhood Turkish bath, some of which also offer launderette facilities. In Winter the regular patrons often spend several hours there, meeting their friends, discussing the news, listening to Arab radio broadcasts or reading Arabic newspapers together in a well-heated lounge where they wait until their laundry is dry or until closing-time. Then they must go out again into the inhospitably cold streets of Paris. Such bains de vapeur thus serve in Paris much the same social and spiritual purpose, for the city's Arab expatriates, as the hammam attached to a mosque in a traditional Moslem city or as the House Tamboran club-house for men in a Sepik River village of New Guinea...
Instead they can be met, together with others who come for this purpose over the weekend from the provinces, in a few more elegant and centrally located Paris baths that are notorious meeting-places for homosexuals. But the Paris police also sends, to most of these baths, an occasional agent provocateur or stool-pigeon. Every once in a while, some unfortunate homosexual is thus arrested in a Turkish bath for flouting French law, which permits homosexual relations between consenting adult males, but forbids "indecent exposure" and behavior that might shock the more modest customers in any public place. The wiser patrons of these establishments have therefore developed a practice of lavishly tipping one of the attendants, generally the bartender, before engaging in any activity that might be considered reprehensible. In exchange, the gratified attendant then utters a discreet warning if any known stool-pigeon of the police happens to turn up that day.
Over long weekends when London is celebrating a Bank Holiday, the more notorious Paris baths, especially the one known as the Duchesse de Penthièvre because it happened to be in the Rue de Penthièvre, used to be crowded with English customers and to resound with shrill exclamations uttered in the purest BBC accent. Catering mainly to such foreign tourists, a few Paris Arabs, most of whom are were Algerians, had developed in the city's better baths over the years a kind of respectable practice that should perhaps have earned them some official recognition from the French Ministry of Economy as earners of foreign exchange or as a source of invisible exports that contributed towards maintaining the stability of the national currency. One of these Algerians, in particular, was generally known for many years, among patrons of the baths in the Rue de Cambronne that have now been demolished in order to build a more profitable high-rise apartment-house, as "the Prince," because of his lordly physical appearance and his scrupulous honesty and courtesy. He thus had a considerable international practice of regular clients, many of whom would warn him by letter or telegram, from as far as Hollywood, Buenos Aires or Tokyo, of their forthcoming visit to the French capital and of their requirements. The Prince was indeed appreciated both for the quality of his own superlative performance and for the reliability of his services, similar to those of Albert, as a procurer of equally satisfactory Arab playmates. But I doubt whether he ever received as complex written specifications as those that I read in some of Albert' s letters from Proust. Nevertheless, the Prince's practice included a number of well-known foreign actors, writers, artists and politicians, so that he may well have been immortalized by now in poetry or prose that is destined to be more widely read than mine.
Another Paris Arab, a handsome grey-haired elder state man of the café-terraces of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, had long specialized in entertaining Scandinavian visitors, generally unmarried Swedish career women or divorcées, though he also had a small but select practice among elderly Stockholm homosexuals, from one of whom he once learned the rudiments of Swedish which have proved to be so useful in his subsequent career. But he no longer frequented the Turkish baths. Instead he had established his headquarters in one of the more respectable Left-bank cafés, where he collected his mail daily, tipped waiters generously for his abstemious orders of drinks, and spent a couple of hours very ostentatiously reading Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter, which he purchased from the news-stand by the Café des Deux Magots, disdaining the more vulgar and crowded news stand of Le Drugstore on the opposite side of the Boulevard, where a veritable riff-raff of prostitutes of both sexes always loitered.
Sooner or later as he sips his coffee, his reading matter attracts the attention of some new Scandinavaan customer, or of a friend of a friend who has been told in Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Oslo, Bergen, Helsinki, Tampere or Copenhagen, to look out for him in Paris and so identify him by his appearance and his reading habits. A graduate of Saïd academy and of the vanished baths of the Rue de Cambronne where the Prince had first recruited him, he had struck out on his own as an independent self-employed businessman whose stock-in-trade was himself. Like Madame Sesostris and Albert, he too has learned discretion because "one must be so careful these days." The offbeat hotels and Turkish baths of Paris thus prove that they can develop in a gifted individual, as in any other competitive market economy, a sense of private enterprise that contributes towards promoting upward social mobility, on which every true democracy must be founded in order to stave off Communism and other totalitarian regimes and also to and avoid the kind of feudal class distinctions that might otherwise become too rigid and permanent.
On Friday evenings, Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, many of these Arabs still go to a neighborhood Turkish bath, some of which also offer launderette facilities. In Winter the regular patrons often spend several hours there, meeting their friends, discussing the news, listening to Arab radio broadcasts or reading Arabic newspapers together in a well-heated lounge where they wait until their laundry is dry or until closing-time. Then they must go out again into the inhospitably cold streets of Paris. Such bains de vapeur thus serve in Paris much the same social and spiritual purpose, for the city's Arab expatriates, as the hammam attached to a mosque in a traditional Moslem city or as the House Tamboran club-house for men in a Sepik River village of New Guinea...
Instead they can be met, together with others who come for this purpose over the weekend from the provinces, in a few more elegant and centrally located Paris baths that are notorious meeting-places for homosexuals. But the Paris police also sends, to most of these baths, an occasional agent provocateur or stool-pigeon. Every once in a while, some unfortunate homosexual is thus arrested in a Turkish bath for flouting French law, which permits homosexual relations between consenting adult males, but forbids "indecent exposure" and behavior that might shock the more modest customers in any public place. The wiser patrons of these establishments have therefore developed a practice of lavishly tipping one of the attendants, generally the bartender, before engaging in any activity that might be considered reprehensible. In exchange, the gratified attendant then utters a discreet warning if any known stool-pigeon of the police happens to turn up that day.
Over long weekends when London is celebrating a Bank Holiday, the more notorious Paris baths, especially the one known as the Duchesse de Penthièvre because it happened to be in the Rue de Penthièvre, used to be crowded with English customers and to resound with shrill exclamations uttered in the purest BBC accent. Catering mainly to such foreign tourists, a few Paris Arabs, most of whom are were Algerians, had developed in the city's better baths over the years a kind of respectable practice that should perhaps have earned them some official recognition from the French Ministry of Economy as earners of foreign exchange or as a source of invisible exports that contributed towards maintaining the stability of the national currency. One of these Algerians, in particular, was generally known for many years, among patrons of the baths in the Rue de Cambronne that have now been demolished in order to build a more profitable high-rise apartment-house, as "the Prince," because of his lordly physical appearance and his scrupulous honesty and courtesy. He thus had a considerable international practice of regular clients, many of whom would warn him by letter or telegram, from as far as Hollywood, Buenos Aires or Tokyo, of their forthcoming visit to the French capital and of their requirements. The Prince was indeed appreciated both for the quality of his own superlative performance and for the reliability of his services, similar to those of Albert, as a procurer of equally satisfactory Arab playmates. But I doubt whether he ever received as complex written specifications as those that I read in some of Albert' s letters from Proust. Nevertheless, the Prince's practice included a number of well-known foreign actors, writers, artists and politicians, so that he may well have been immortalized by now in poetry or prose that is destined to be more widely read than mine.
Another Paris Arab, a handsome grey-haired elder state man of the café-terraces of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, had long specialized in entertaining Scandinavian visitors, generally unmarried Swedish career women or divorcées, though he also had a small but select practice among elderly Stockholm homosexuals, from one of whom he once learned the rudiments of Swedish which have proved to be so useful in his subsequent career. But he no longer frequented the Turkish baths. Instead he had established his headquarters in one of the more respectable Left-bank cafés, where he collected his mail daily, tipped waiters generously for his abstemious orders of drinks, and spent a couple of hours very ostentatiously reading Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter, which he purchased from the news-stand by the Café des Deux Magots, disdaining the more vulgar and crowded news stand of Le Drugstore on the opposite side of the Boulevard, where a veritable riff-raff of prostitutes of both sexes always loitered.
Sooner or later as he sips his coffee, his reading matter attracts the attention of some new Scandinavaan customer, or of a friend of a friend who has been told in Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Oslo, Bergen, Helsinki, Tampere or Copenhagen, to look out for him in Paris and so identify him by his appearance and his reading habits. A graduate of Saïd academy and of the vanished baths of the Rue de Cambronne where the Prince had first recruited him, he had struck out on his own as an independent self-employed businessman whose stock-in-trade was himself. Like Madame Sesostris and Albert, he too has learned discretion because "one must be so careful these days." The offbeat hotels and Turkish baths of Paris thus prove that they can develop in a gifted individual, as in any other competitive market economy, a sense of private enterprise that contributes towards promoting upward social mobility, on which every true democracy must be founded in order to stave off Communism and other totalitarian regimes and also to and avoid the kind of feudal class distinctions that might otherwise become too rigid and permanent.