FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
My first time in Paris was with Eadie, my late sister. One summer Eadie drove home from Geneva, where she worked, in a small, red Fiat. Her first car. She surprised us by her arrival and she then surprised me by producing a ferry ticket to France. “You,” she smiled, “are coming back with me.” And I did.
And my heart was in my mouth for most of the journey as Eadie, a novice driver, negotiated the hair-pin bends high up in the Jura mountains. Scary.
Our first stop on this marathon drive to Switzerland was Paris. And once again my heart was in my mouth as we drove up and down, and up and down, the Champs Elysees trying to locate our hotel in a Rue de Bac as the French drivers blew us out of it for ‘crawling’ around the main boulevard of Gay Par-ee.
The second time I was in Paris was different. For starters I was with my wife, not my sister. And we weren’t driving. Thank God. We found ourselves in Paris in the springtime for a short city break. It had to be springtime because it was March and it had to be March because we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day there. In Montmartre. We hadn‘t come to Paris to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. The French don’t march down the Champs Elysees on March 17. Mon Dieu! What do you take them for?
Mind you our hotel made some small gesture towards the day that was in it by supplying green napkins and a special offer on Irish whiskey!
We had arranged to celebrate St Patrick’s Day in the French capital with a fellow Irishman, a Galway man, called Seamus who was, so to speak, our man in Paris. I met Seamus, and his Welsh girlfriend, in a pub in Connemara the previous summer.
Seamus told me that he was a librarian in the Sorbonne in Paris and, if ever I was in the capital, to give him a ring. I did and we arranged to hook up for Patrick’s Day. But first we needed to find some place to eat. Seamus wasn‘t exactly a minefield of knowledge when it came to restaurants (he was a student after all). However, he had a flat-mate, a canny Scotsman called Dave, thanks to whom, my wife and I ended up in a lovely restaurant with a brilliant view of Notre Dame Cathedral on our very first night in Paris. Not bad, considering I didn’t know the city from Adam and was only in the place a few hours.
And so we felt we owed Seamus one and arranged to treat him, and Dave, to a meal the following day, St. Patrick’s Day.
We met Seamus in our hotel (Dave was unavailable) and headed for Montmartre, choc-a-bloc with bistros, eateries and artists. Seamus suggested we take the metro, “just for the experience”. And an experience it was. Seamus, it transpired. didn’t know the Metro as well as he thought and we damn near ended up in Belgium!
Two taxis later we arrived in Montmartre and settled for Chez Catherine’s whose ruby-red interior enticed us in. We were not disappointed. Chez Catherine’s was typically Parisian or at least what we green, innocent Irish tourists considered to be Parisian. Indeed our impression was further enhanced by Pierre, the
violin player, who serenaded the diners for the price of a drink.
“We’re celebrating Patrick’s Day,”I told Pierre when he came to our table and we jokingly asked if he knew any Irish tunes. Did he what? Mais oui, he did and broke into a medley of just about every Irish tune I knew and several more that I had never heard of. It was like a private audience with Pierre. Needless to say we were chuffed by his prolonged attention and also by his knowledge of Irish music.
As we toasted his good health and his violin playing par excellence we left him, not just with the price of a drink, but with the price of several drinks. Pierre, the fiddler of Montmartre, had not just made our night out but quite simply had perfected our celebration of Patrick’s Day in Paris.
