Paris, with children

   I realize it is going to be a different kind of visit to the Musée d'Orsay when I see 2-year-old Teddy toddle over to the Rodin sculpture with one hand buried elbow-deep into the back of his diaper. 

"Look what your son is doing," Hannah says to J-P, in a voice implying that, at this particular moment, she is disavowing all claims to her second-born child.

"He has an itch,"  J-P offers in mild defense.
"Ugh. Boys are so disgusting."

If J-P wants to argue, his son is not helping the cause.  Teddy finishes his excavation and happily runs across the gallery floor to plant both hands against the base of the statue.

"I guess this is why they don't like you to touch the art?" I offer. 

Hannah just rolls her eyes and walks slowly after Teddy, who has already scampered on to the next gallery.  J-P follows pushing 4-year-old Sylvia in a stroller, as she happily sleeps her way past the impressionists well into the early part of the 20th Century symbolists. 

Ah yes, Paris: City of Lights, Fruit Roll Ups, and a Big Box of Huggies.  You know the Paris you see in movies, with Humphrey Bogart holding a glass of champagne and kissing Ingrid Bergman on the balcony over looking the Champs Élysées?  Yeah, this isn't it.

"The trick with having children in public," J-P tells me, "is to know when to leave just before they throw you out."   He says this after Teddy has spent some time climbing up and down the finger-like fur-covered couch at the entrance to the museum's Impressionists Wing.  The museum guard is just about to chase Teddy off the couch with a polite but firm "No shoes.  No shoes."  J-P closes his eyes, nods his head, and pushes the stroller toward the elevator.  "I guess our time is up."

      *      *      *
Hannah had issued the invitation to me a few weeks before Thanksgiving.  "We're going be in Paris at the end of the month.  Wanna come hang out with us?"  Having received very few invitations in my life to "come hang out with us in Paris," I wasn't about to decline this one.  But I had forgotten to look at the fine print:  "Come hang out with us."  Half of "us," as it turns out, was born after 2006. 

 This finally dawns on me a week or so after buying the plane ticket from Istanbul to Paris, when Hannah asks me for suggestions for a Parisian restaurant we can go to that is "child friendly."  Now why is she looking for a restaurant that is child-frien ... uh, oh.  Yes, I see now. "Child friendly."  As in "child care" and "child resistant" and "child labor" and "child-proof safety cap."  As in Guess Who's Coming to Dîner?

Honestly I'm not sure the Parisians are really familiar with the concept of a child-friendly restaurant.  In my visits to Paris, I do not recall having seen a Chuck E. Cheese's  (I may have missed it if it was re-branded as La Fromage de Charles E. or something).  The best I can come up with for "child friendly" is a place I remember in the center of Paris near Les Halles called Au Chien Qui Fume.   In English, that's "The Smoking Dog," or literally "The Dog who Smokes." 

  Showing my inexperience with children, I reason there is no child, in any culture, who wouldn't enjoy a restaurant with paintings on the walls of dogs with naked human bodies, smoking cigarettes.  Kids love dogs! Voila: Child friendly.  (J-P later asks if the name The Smoking Dog refers to a dog with a cigarette, or a dog on fire, both of which he finds disturbing.  "No, you are thinking of 'The Smoldering Dog,'" I tell him.  "That's across the street.")

As it turned out, a baby-sitter was located on this particular evening, so we did not have to inquire as to whether Au Chien Qui Fume offers a booster seat.   But I learn that you eat differently in Paris avec les enfants.  When you say "child-friendly," I think you are essentially looking for some place loud, that serves French Fries.  French fries you can throw on the floor.

I learn also that you travel around differently with children.  Distance is not necessarily measured in yards, meters, or metro stops, but instead in possible whining and/or tantrum episodes.  If one or more child is being carried by one or more adult, this also figures into the calculation.  The walk from the Musee d'Orsay to Rue Cler in the 7th Arondissement, for example, is a rather challenging 2.5 on the whining/tantrum risk scale.

Hence the tour of the palatial grounds at Versailles could not possibly be done on foot, but could in theory be attempted by golf cart.   I had been invited to join J-P, Hannah, Sylvia and Teddy at Versailles, along with their American friends now living in Paris Kate and Jim and their two kids: James, age 4, and Mary Martin, age 2.  A perfectly nice picnic is held in the garden just below the steps to one of Louis XIV's countless fountains.   The kids, apparently unimpressed by 18th Century opulence, ignore the fountains and enjoy rolling in the royal gravel.

About midway through the golf cart tour of the grounds, we reach a point that we believe is near the entrance to Marie Antoinette's Working Farm.  See, just down the road from a chateau that one of the Louis built for his mistress is a farm that Marie Antoinette apparently kept so she could go and watch how the other half lived.  I think.  I don't know, honestly.  For reasons that will become clear, we didn't get the audiotour.

In order to reach the alleged entrance to Marie Antoinette's Working Farm, we will have to dismount the golf carts and walk what under normal circumstances with normal adult humans would have taken about 10 minutes.  With two 4-year-olds and two 2-year-olds, it turns into the preschool version of the Bataan Death March, lasting a good half hour plus.  Sylvia is down out of the gate, tripping while running in the parking lot, and requires a carry from Dad the rest of the way.  James goes on strike about halfway there, announcing he wants to go home.  He sits down in the middle of the gravel road, refusing to go any farther.  It occurs to me that I could be been witnessing the birth of Occupy Versailles, but James eventually caves before the pepper spray comes out. 

Parents keep trying words of encouragement to keep childhood morale from deteriorating any further.  "Look up ahead, Mary Martin! See that!  We're almost there!" " Look, James! Sheep! Do you see the sheep?"   James has a look on his face that tells you immediately what he thinks you can do with your damn sheep.  

Finally it seems we have almost made it.  We had circumvented the walls of the village and can see what looks like a gate house at a small bridge up ahead.  The prize of Marie Antoinette's Working Farm will soon be ours.  But as we approach the gate, we can see something is wrong.  There is no ticket taker in the gate house.  The gate is sealed tight, with a small sign announcing in French that this particular entrance is closed for the season.  Please visit the farm by paying 8 Euro at the main entrance, around the other side, a good half mile away, the sign tells us. Merci, beaucoup!

"We are not walking back the way we came," Kate announces.  "I can tell you that much."

Jim looks over at the wall around the village, at the base of what appears to be a dried-up moat.

"How high to you think that wall is?" Jim asks.  "Six, seven feet?  If somebody gives me a boost up there, and somebody hands up the kids ..."

"Sounds good to me!"  Kate says, marching down into the moat bed with no further discussion.  "Come on, kids!  Wally World may be closed, but we're going in." 

I did not expect to come to Paris to participate in a re-enactment of "National Lampoon's Vacation."  But like the Griswold family, we have come this far, and we will not be deterred.  Minutes later five middle aged American lawyers grasp and grunt their way over the retaining wall into the compound of Marie Antoinette's Working Farm, handing up children like we're getting on the last chopper out of Saigon.   We're going over the wall, 8 Euro entrance fee and potential violation of international law be damned.

Far be it from me, the single guy with no kids, to ask if this is a good lesson for the children.  The point is, we need to cut through the farm to get back to the whine-free transportation of the golf carts.  Retreat is not an option.  And besides, we have Marie Antoinette's farm animals to see.  For the record, they pretty much look like everybody else's farm animals.  Except for the goat on the tree stump.  

Let them eat grain.

Hannah and J-P later keep apologizing to me profusely, as if they had unintentionally tortured me for two and half days.   Far from it; I had a great time.  The truth is, they have two beautiful kids who some day may or may not remember when Mom and Dad took them to Paris to play on fur-covered museum furniture and climb over 17th Century retaining walls.  Being there for that?  That's worth a flight in from Turkey any day.