I am currently in Paris.
A city we were planning on skipping for this trip. “We can always see Paris!” I told my parents time and time again. They were flabbergasted. Appalled. Shocked.
Sally and Kirk won, we made our way here.
But enough about me. I want to share with you the column my mom wrote about their 30+ days spent in Paris in 1983. A truly, truly wild ride, and exceptionally written.
A weird time in wonderful Paris
Around the World with Sally Connell, 1983
PARIS- There wasn’t anything typical about the Paris my husband and I grew to know. So, this isn’t the ordinary travelogue.
Our Paris was dominated by a seedy caravan park in the middle of the Seine on Ile Saint Germaine, a park which housed a mangy lion and Gypsies who performed magic acts. (Europeans call recreational vehicles “caravans.”)
It was a place where a former resident, a hired killer, was always spoken of with affection. “He was always good with the kids,” explained Mary, the manager.
The park, “Camping Parile,” was a little like the rest of Ile Saint Germaine, a way station for those moving up or down the economic ladder and only temporarily standing on a lower run.
But the Louvre Museum is just 30 minutes away by a combination of bus and metro (subway). The island is bounded by a commercial area near the Bois de Boulogne on the right bank and the attractive residential area of Issy-Les-Molineaux on the left bank.
The determining factor in choosing “Camping Parile” initially was the price, which varied from $2 to $5 a day depending on Mary’s mood.
The park seemed overrun with large dogs on our first visit, but Mary told us, “You won’t worry about them after you see Kitty.” She then escorted us through a maze of caravans and vans to what looked like a trailer with its sides blown out.
It actually was a custom-made cage with a lion inside. He was very mangy and very lazy. He didn’t growl or roar, barely looking up as we walked by. He had one front pay hooked into a tire which had been hung in the cage for his amusement. The effect made him look like a lion in traction.
Mary told us her story, the lion’s story and finally the stories of most of her residents. Mary was English with a Portuguese husband living in Paris.
Her husband and some friends attended a circus animal auction in Portugal, but nobody had purchased the then young cub. They found out from the men running the auction the animals who were not purchased would be killed, and that was why Mary’s husband gave her a cute little cub.
“He was great to play with for a while, but then he grew up after a few years and got too big to play with,” she explained. That was believable since the lion seemed to be about as big as a medium-sized compact car.
Mary knew a caravan park was no place for a lion, and she stressed that she had tried to find him a better home. There was the recent abortive attempt to place him in a safari park.
“He’s too used to people, you see. He acts like people. He smells like people. The other lions didn’t take to him. They tried to kill him.” The lion, much the worse for wear, was returned to Mary. “He’s no trouble really except when he’s in (mating) season. Then, he roars and neighbors complain. The cops come round.”
The lion was there for our first two stops in Camping Parile. We used Paris as a base, stopping on our way from one part of Europe to another. We spent more than 30 nights in Paris.
Our third visit to the camp, there was no lion. The lion had a job in a small circus. It was touch-and-go for a while because the lion went into his mating season and wasn’t cooperating with the trainer. Mary was called out often to calm him down. But he made it.
The gravel-covered lot where the park is located overlooks the Seine. Mary had managed the park for a few years. She was eccentric at times, always yelling insults in three or four languages.
She boasted of how she dealt with her Portuguese mother-in-law.
“I bought a shotgun, pointed it at her and said, ‘I don’t want to hear any more talk about how I keep house.’ It took care of the problem.”
Mary also liked to talk about the hired killer, still a favorite with the many kids who can speak English. He stayed in the park a few months before we arrived.
She said, “He used to let the kids play in his place all the time. They’d tear it up, he didn’t mind. Never laid a hand on the kids.”
He even took the children of the park, all 20 or 30 of them, to one of Paris’ finest restaurants. But his reputation in the park was cemented after the day he scooped up a crying boy whose dog had just died. He rushed off to a pet store and bought the boy a beautiful new dog.
The man would, however, disappear for long periods. One day, the police closed off the bridges to the island and showed up looking for him.
“They said he was a hired killer,” Mary said. “They could tell I wouldn’t believe it so they showed me pictures of the people he killed. It was horrible. This was one of the many places he lived.”
Despite the news, Mary sneaked off the island and called the man at a message number she had to warn him.
“I shouldn’t have. But he never hurt us. The kids loved him.”
He finally was caught, but he sent $300 for a party for the kids. The women who wash their clothes in the park sinks still talk about the party. Which featured a “band and everything.”
We never debated ethical questions with residents of the park. One elderly resident had her wallet lifted at a very nearby market, and Mary was convinced that another resident married to a morphine addict was responsible. The moral debate around the sink that day concentrated simply on who really needed the money more.
We spent most of our waking hours outside of the park, seeing the sights of Paris, sampling cafes, browsing through museums and visiting bookshops. We’ll remember all the landmarks, the gargoyles of Notre Dam, the gaudiness of Versailles, the Louvre, the sheer variety of prostitutes yelling at tourists in Paris’ Saint Denis area—there didn’t seem to be any weight, age or sex limitations.
But the truth is Paris will always mean the lion, Mary and the music from the late-night Gypsy parties at Camping Parile.
