Badaude

What to do in Paris on Valentine's day on your own...

What do you do on your own on Valentines' day in the City of Love?

Paris is making it as easy as possible to fall in love. In shop windows and newspaper editorials there are pictures of all the things you can buy in order to induce a coup de foudre.

Laduree's vitrine is full of heart-shaped macarons, in boxes begging Please love me flavoured with (and I quote their English translation) 'cream and strawberry jam' or ganache créme de menthe. Le Palais des Thés offers a Thé des Amants, mélange de thé noir, pommes, vanille, amandes, cannelle, gingembre dans une boîte édition limitée, 12,50 Euros la boîte de 100 g,  There are chocolats aphrodisiaques, heart-shaped bouquets, bras with heart-shaped cups, heart-shaped handbags, necklaces and vibrator/candles to brighten up the dinner table.

But these presents are all for eating, drinking, paying and displaying. I have a supicion they're not about love, or even about sex, which is not really a very material pursuit (according to Anita Loos, France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun.). Gifts can take your attention away from love. They're about other things you might do instead.

I've finished an illustration commission for a lunchtime deadline. I need to go for a walk. Crowds surge out of the metro, crossing at the lights at the Place Saint Sulpice, where the panneaux lumineux are pulsing out Mairie-sponsored messages of electronic love. The particles of neon light dance out to the commuters, hitting them all equally with state-approved amour. Maybe they are putting out a little warmth too but, a few centimetres away from them, Paris is still icily crisp from the morning frost.

I decide to go to the only place you can get truly warm in Paris in winter - the hammam.

Paris has lots of hammams.That is, traditional steam-baths, which cost 39 euros per session max, (including massage and pastries) not chi-chi hotel spas.  There's one down a tiny sidestreet in the Marais; a large, cleanly-white building in the 20th. But today I'm going to the hamman at La Grande Mosquée de Paris.

It's easy enough to hand over the notes to the cashier at the till in exchange for a handful of different-coloured paper raffle tickets and a mysterioius plastic envelope full of squishy black stuff. I know what this is. I know that it's savon noir. I've seen it for sale in big plastic tubs in the marché at Place des Fêtes in Belleville. What I don't quite know is what to do with it. Or when. Just like love, a visit to the hammam might make you warmer, but they don't hand out an instruction booklet.

Past the cashier, it's too dark for my outside eyes to map the patterns on the tiles. If you look up through the steamy light filtering down from the small, domed window in the ceiling, you see cobwebs. Suddenly eveything's asleep. It's like a Dulac illustration of Sleeping Beauty. I have bought a ticket for '1 seance' or session. In English the word is used for a session communicating with the dead - those shabby genteel 19th Century Madame Blavatskys using French to lend their activities an air of glamour.

There are four massage tables in the centre of the room. (You take your shoes off - I can work that one out). I follow the clothed clients between them. There are two women working at the tables, one fat in a some sort of white chemist's or nurse's coat: one thin wearing an adidas cropped top and tennis skirt. The fat one is staring into space. The thin one is vigorously massaging a customer. She looks up at me. She has light-dark skin with dark freckles. She says:

Ces't votr' premiere fois?'

Oui, madame.

On change la-bas.

She comes from the modern world. You can imagine her walking down the street, in daylight. Maybe she could guide me through this dark, dreamy seraglio place.

The changing room is a long corridor, just wide enough for one person. A shock of strip-lighting. There are lockers but no cubicles. If you stand by the old-fashioned radiator, you can balance your clothes on it so they don't fall wetly onto the floor. I don't have a bikini (it's not that I didn't bring one: I just don't have a bikini, or any other kind of swimwear at the moment). So I just take off my outer clothes. At least I have matching underwear...

..which, very quickly, become semi-transparent with the steam. I wander back to the main room. Even more like a fairy-tale, there are doors with no signs and no handles. Which one should I pick?

One of them leads to a brightly lit room with a shower and a door back to the changing rooms. It's empty. This is not the right way.

The other door leads past another - empty - table into a darker room with hidden showers behind partitions. There's nobody in them. Is this where I use the soap? The next room is getting hotter. The walls are plain concrete with a concrete bench - slightly too high for comfort - at one end. There's a high-pressure shower-gun with a lesbian valentines couple giggling as they hose each other down and a line of other women waiting. Then there's another of the sleepy rooms, hotter than before, with a central platform and booths at the side lined with blue vinyl cushions. There are plastic scoops and buckets which you fill from a tap in one of the alcoves and empty over yourself to prevent dehydration. That's how hot it is. There are women in pairs and small groups; friends, sisters, mothers and daughters, lovers. I'm the only one here on my own...

There's one more room.

It's almost unbearably hot and so steamy it's nigh-impossible to see what is happening in there. There are three concrete steps at one end, ranked like an amphitheatre overlooking a very hot bath. The women in here are older - the only ones who can stand the heat. I can't stay in there for more than a couple of minutes. It's for a different species: cold-blooded and slow-moving, wrinkled with rubber-capped heads. It's one of those medieval engravings of hell where the fiery pit is constructed, in a disturbingly everyday fashion, from half a cooper's barrel. I'll be there one day. But not yet. There's no noise but somehow the steam is deafening.

I still have the, now wet, tickets and the little packet of soap.

The room with the hose seems much colder now.

I go back through the showers. I use the soap just to get rid of it.

I have a ticket for a massage and gommage. The massage table room now seems positively chilly; the girls talking together better occupied than I am. I go back to the changing room for a book. I pretend to read but I'm not really interested.

Then, after about 15 minutes, I notice women who are coming in writing their names on a paper in the corner. It's obviously a queue for massages. I add mine. The list is very, very long.

There's a smaller queue for gommage and I soon find out why. After sandpapering  my back with a hard loofah mitt, the masseur turns me over like a side of meat and attacks my breasts. Then - no, she can't be.

Yes, she does do faces too.

I'm sure this must be doing me good.

OK, that's enough. I think I'll have my mint tea now and leave.

At the papiterie on the rue Daubenton I leaf through the valentines cards. In Paris, just like in England, they show babies, small children and animals: beings who don't know what they're doing, who can express the most extreme emotions without taking responsibility; whose expressions can't be understood, but are always taken kindly. I hesitate. Should I pick one? Should I say ga ga, miau miau, or meuh meuh, or should I frame what I want to say in retro terms? There are cards with pictures in black and white or old-style technicolour, the characters and vocabulary self-consciously kitch and ironic. Surprisingly in the city of amour, no-one wants to say it out loud...

A beautiful girl comes out of the business end of the Mosquee. She's wearing a hijab and her clothes completely cover her skin, but they're close-cut and sexy. A group of mecs walking in the opposite direction turn to stare. One of their looks lingers. And there it is - a genuine, unmediated St Valentin contact. I can go home happy.

The panneau lumineux on boulevard St Jacques winks at me: Ajoutez deux lettres à Paris: c'est paradis. (Jules Renard). Someone else spending valentine's day alone has sent a message of love to the city. I'm warm now. I'm getting warmer...

Every day was like sunday...

I've never really understood what Frehel was singing about in her heartrending tribute to Pigalle from the 1937 movie, Pepe le Moko. Exiled from Paris and from her former beauty and fame (at least in the movie), she remembered that, on the Place Blanche, every day was to be like Sunday.

I've always found Sunday the most difficult day to be in Paris. The day where you really have to be a Parisien to fit in. It's the day when all the French disappear from the streets. Unlike most Anglo-Saxon countries, the metal shutters are down on almost all the shops. In a city which celebrates eating out and just being out, all the best bars, cafes and restaurants are closed because everyone's dining chez Mamie.

I'm in Montmartre. The white winter sunshine makes it warm enough for tourists and locals to sit outside the cafe on the Place des Abesses. There's a Breton market. People in fancy dress handing out samples of Koug Anan, the Breton speciality, which seems to be formed from a huge, compacted croissant, soaked in syrup. Outside the 'grenier à pain' bakery on rue des Abesses, windows piled high with different varieties of pain d'epices there's a huge queue for fougasses. I'm with someone. And this is where we have a quarrel.

It's a Sunday quarrel. It's not about anything. There's none of the urgency of a weekday argument. I say, do you want to have lunch? He says, I'm not hungry. Are you? I say, Not really. I am hungry and tired from being at the Clignancourt market early this morning. But after a large, late dinner last night I somehow don't want to admit to being hungry again so soon. He says, Ok, lets just get something from the bakery. So we queue. And queue. I want to sit down (We could get fougasses and sit at the cafe next door. Look - they're doing it. No-on seems to mind). But we're at the front of the line and he says, Look, she wants to serve you. And I know that already, but I have to turn away from her to hear what's he's saying. And at the same time the serveuse says, Qu'est-ce que vous vouliez, Madame? and I'm looking at the choice of fougasses and I have to turn again to say to him, Which one do you want? and he says, I don't know. He takes his time... Maybe the one with lardons. So I say, Une fougasse avec lardons, s'il vous plait, Madame, and he says, Aren't you having anything? But there's no time to ask for anything else as by this time I'm paying. And then we're walking down the street and I'm hungry and he's not and he has the fougasse with lardons.

So I say, Didn't you have some work to do? You could go and finish it if you like. I'll go for a walk. And, as we try to find the entrance to the metro disguised by the fake Breton stalls I say, You're not angry with me, are you?

In Place des Abbesses, there's a "Mur des je t'aime" created by Frederic Baron in 2000. I scan it as he goes down into the metro. It's blue. Its tiles are made of lava. Something hot and red solidified a long time ago. The phrases escape and scrawl themselves across boudaries of the tiles, each with different caligraphy; each written by a different person. Their differences proving the reality of the sentiment; each real and specific to a person, a relationship. The wall  says, 'I love you' in 80 languages. I can't even say it in one.

A graffiti artist has stencilled a 1940s screen siren above the 'love wall' and has added an inscription: 'Soyons raisonnables - exigeons l'impossible!' (let's be reasonable - demand the impossible!) which seems appropriate. The combination of fille and philosophe looks like the work my favourite bombiste, Miss Tic, whose pochoirs appear all over Paris (including outside Espace W half-way down rue des Abbesses, but the style of drawing is different. Also she usually signs her work. This one is unsigned. Does this make the sentiment invalid?

Alone, I walk down rue des Abbesses toward rue Lepic.

Relieved to be alone.

Unable to be that alone. I'm looking for something to read in a cafe. The Journal de Dimanche is full of the latest Kervial revelations. I've had enough editorial. On any sunday in Paris you can't buy: a novel (except a the small selection of romans policiers at the papiterie), milk, clothes, toilet rolls, groceries, face cream or bottled water. I buy L'homme a l'envers by Fred Vargas from a tabac on Place des Abbesses.

I pass the bakery again. I think about going in but don't. The bakers will shut up shop soon for the afternoon and Sunday will enter that dead phase before the working week wakes up again. I stop at a cafe to drink a hot chocolate overflowing with mounds of chantilly. It's not lunch is it? Not really. I begin to read my book. The Americans at the next table talk loudly as if I can't hear. They think I'm French. Maybe. Their language discreetly marking them out from me. They don't know I can understand them just as well as if I were a pepper pot at their intimate breakfast table in Saint Louis.

I think of what a friend once said to me: You are allowed to be hungry sometimes.

On any Sunday in Paris you can buy: bread (a.m. only); newspapers; Chinese takaways; medicines from selected pharmacies and, most of all, flowers. Apart from bakeries, florists are the only other type of shop reliably open on a Sunday morning. The stall on rue des Abbesses has big waxy camelias and amyrillis looking like the china flowers on tombs; tulips at 10 euros le botte de 50; hyacinths in mini watering-cans; narcissi - 2 bottes; 1 offerte - offering a fragile hope of spring.

You can also buy poupées gonflables.

This means inflatable dolls.

I've taken a left from Abesses down the hill to Place Blanche, then along towards Place Pigalle.  It's the boulevard where Artur takes Odile to a shooting gallery in Bande a Parte.

Godard's voiceover tells us Ils marchent dans le noir jusqu'a la place Clichy,surement l'un des plus belle le soir avec sa lumieres de charbon. Tous ceci rappelle artur et odile elle-meme au present, aux passee et au futur plein d'aventure. (Then they walked to Place Clichy, surely one of the most beautiful in Paris which reminded Arthur and Odile herself of the present, the past, and the future, full of adventure.)

And here it is, in all it's tawdry glamour.

Odile tells Artur she's in love with him (this rings a little hollow: really Sami Frey has no competition. Godard makes girl's movies, where you're always being asked to make the choice between, say, Jean-Paul Belmondo and someone else almost equally eligable). Then:

Artur dit que parler d'amour comme ca c'est tellement foutu(?)

Odile dit que ...c'etait vrai.

My ex-companion is a confirmed Godardophobe. Not only is Bande a Parte a Godard but, according to Amy Taubin of the Village Voice, it's "a Godard film for people who don't much care for Godard". So not even a very good Godard. A Godard for people who can't even appreciate his more interesting work.

Ensuite de quoi, ils descendent au centre du terre.

If you watch Bande a Parte, you'll see in the shooting gallery scene, Artur and Odile pass a shop called Nouvelle Vague. I can't see what's in it but it seems to be some kind of clothes shop, maybe one of the ones I saw along the Boulevard Clichy, which runs between Place du Clicy and Place Blanche. You can't buy Frehel's 'cornet de chips' here - not at this time on a Sunday - but you can buy 'dessous en vinyl!', 'dvds adultes!', and 'jouets-sexy!  The sex shops, like all the other shops in Paris are offering their 'deuxieme demarque' on the contents of small, suspicious-looking medicine bottles and patent leather leopard-print heels in extra-large sizes. Only, unlike the regular shops, they seem to have special dispensation for Sunday opening. As I walk toward the mouth of the Pigalle Metro, one of their operators calls after me, Je veux t'embrasse sur la bouche! I walk on. Why would he bother, with all that is on offer just a step through the vinyl strip curtain behind him. Does he presume that everything for sale on Sunday on the Boulevard Clichy, or is he expecting it for free?

.....

LISTINGS: BREAD: LE GRENIER A PAIN 38, Rue des Abbesses, 75018 Paris France. Phone number: 01 42 23 85 36; FLOWERS : L'atelier vegetale, 1 Bis rue des Abbesses 75018 Paris Tel : 01 42 55 75 42 ; PAPITERIE: Place des Abbesses;