Lauren Elkin - Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

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To Trivia

goddess of crossroads

She is the wanderer, bum, migr, refugee, deportee, rambler, strolling player. Sometimes she would like to be a settler, but curiosity, grief and disaffection forbid it.

Deborah Levy, Swallowing Geography

On a street in Paris, a woman pauses to light a cigarette. She holds up a match with one hand, its box and a glove in the other. Her tall figure aligns with the shadow of a lamp post, two forward slashes on the wall behind her as a photographer closes the shutter. She is fleeting; pausing; permanent.

There are clear instructions on the wall: Dfense dAfficher et de faire aucun Dpt le long de ce and the warning is interrupted by the frame. Dfense dafficher , the walls of Paris often protest. No Advertisements, a late-nineteenth-century ban intended to prevent the city from becoming a wasteland of billboards. Above the sign, some letters are stencilled defiantly? Or were they there first? announcing that charcuterie could once have been obtained there, or nearby. Below that, someone has drawn the crude outline of a face.

It is 1929. Women smoking in public has become more of an ordinary sight. But the photograph still retains an element of transgression. The day will end, the woman will move on, the photographer will move on, the sun itself will move on, and the lamp-shadow with it. But for us, this is all we can see of this place in the past: a woman, visible against the wall behind her, in a field of proscriptions and defiances, about to light up a cigarette. She stands out in her anonymous, immortal singularity.

Ive always been struck by the black-and-white urban photography from this period, especially by women Marianne Breslauer, who captured this image, or Laure Albin-Guillot, or Ilse Bing, or Germaine Krull, Walter Benjamins friend, who liked to skulk around the arcades with him, and without him, photographing them, haunting them. These women came to the city (or perhaps they were born there, or came from other cities) to pass unnoticed, but also to be free to do what they liked, as they liked.

I have constructed other, similar images in my minds eye, moments that lacked a photographer, recorded in diaries or novels. Theres one of George Sand, who dressed like a boy to walk through the streets, lost in the city, an atom in the crowd. Or Jean Rhys, whose female characters walk past caf terraces and cringe as the clientele follow them with their eyes, knowing theyre outsiders. Breslauers photograph, and the others I have in mind, set out the key problem at the heart of the urban experience: are we individuals or are we part of the crowd? Do we want to stand out or blend in? Is that even possible? How do we no matter what our gender want to be seen in public? Do we want to attract or escape the gaze? Be independent and invisible? Remarkable or unremarked-upon?

Dfense dafficher . Do not advertise. And yet there she is. Elle saffiche. She shows herself. She shows up against the city.

Where did I first come across that word, flneur , so singular, so elegant and French with its arched and its curling eur ? I know it was when I was studying in Paris, back in the 1990s, but I dont think I found it in a book. I didnt do much required reading, that semester. I cant say for sure, which is to say I became a flneur before I knew what one was, wandering the streets around my school, located as American universities in Paris must be, on the Left Bank.

From the French verb flner , the flneur , or one who wanders aimlessly, was born in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the glass-and-steel-covered passages of Paris. When Haussmann started slicing his bright boulevards through the dark uneven crusts of houses like knives through a city of cindered chvre, the flneur wandered those too, taking in the urban spectacle. A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention, the flneur understands the city as few of its inhabitants do, for he has memorised it with his feet. Every corner, alleyway and stairway has the ability to plunge him into rverie . What happened here? Who passed by here? What does this place mean? The flneur , attuned to the chords that vibrate throughout his city, knows without knowing.

In my ignorance, I think I thought I invented flnerie . Coming from suburban America, where people drive from one place to another, walking for no particular reason was a bit of an eccentric thing to do. I could walk for hours in Paris and never get anywhere, looking at the way the city was put together, glimpsing its unofficial history here and there, a bullet in the facade of an htel particulier , leftover stencilling way up on the side of a building for a flour company or a newspaper that no longer existed (which some inspired graffiti artist had used as an invitation to add his own work) or a row of cobblestones revealed by roadworks, several layers below the crust of the current city, slowly rising ever upward. I was on the lookout for residue, for texture, for accidents and encounters and unexpected openings. My most meaningful experience with the city was not through its literature, its food or its museums, not even through the soul-scarring affair I carried on in a garret near the Bourse, but through all that walking. Somewhere in the 6th arrondissement I realised I wanted to live in a city for the rest of my life, and specifically, in the city of Paris. It had something to do with the utter, total freedom unleashed from the act of putting one foot in front of the other.

I wore a groove into the Boulevard Montparnasse as I came and went between my flat on the avenue de Saxe and school on the rue de Chevreuse. I learned non-textbook French from the names of the restaurants in between: Les Zazous (named for a kind of jazzy 1940s hepcat in a plaid blazer and a quiff), Restaurant Sud-Ouest & Cie, which taught me the French equivalent of & Co., and from a bakery called Pomme de pain I learned the word for pine cone, pomme de pin , though I never learned why that was a pun worth making. I bought orange juice on the way to class every day at a pretzel shop called Duchesse Anne and wondered who she was and what was her relationship to pretzels. I pondered the distorted French conception of American geography that resulted in a TexMex restaurant called Indiana Caf. I walked past all the great cafs lining the boulevard, La Rotonde, Le Select, Le Dme and La Coupole, watering holes to generations of American writers in Paris, whose ghosts hunched under caf awnings, unimpressed with the way the twentieth century had turned out. I crossed over the rue Vavin, with its eponymous caf, where all the cool lycens went when they got out of school, assertive cigarette smokers with sleeves too long for their arms, shod in Converse sneakers, boys with dark curls and girls with no make-up.

Soon, emboldened, I wandered off into the streets shooting out from the Jardin de Luxembourg, a few minutes walk from school. I found myself up near the church of Saint-Sulpice, which was under renovation then, and, like the Tour Saint-Jacques, had been for decades. No one knew if or when the scaffolding around the towers would ever come down. I would sit at the Caf de la Mairie on Place Saint-Sulpice and watch the world go by: the skinniest women Id ever seen wearing linen clothing that would be frumpy in New York but in Paris seemed unreplicably chic, nuns in twos and threes, yuppie mothers who let their small boys wee on tree trunks. I wrote down everything I saw, not knowing yet that the French writer Georges Perec had also sat in that square, in that same caf, during a week in 1974, and noted the same comings and goings taxis, buses, people eating pastries, the way the wind was blowing all in an attempt to get his readers to notice the unexpected beauty of the quotidian, what he called the infraordinary : what happens when nothing is happening. I didnt know, either, that Nightwood , which would become one of my favourite books, was set at that caf and in the hotel upstairs. Paris was just beginning to contain and to generate all of my most significant intellectual and personal reference points. We had only just met.