Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 15

NOT ONLY THAT BUT YOU CANT GET A NIGHT’S sleep in France, they’re so lousy and noisy at 8 A.M. screaming over fresh bread it would make Abomination weep. Buy that. Their strong hot coffee and croissants and crackling French bread and Breton butter, Gad, where’s my Alsatian beer?

While looking for the library, incidentally, a gendarme in the Place de la Concorde told me that Rue de Richelieu (street of the National Library) was thataway, pointing, and because he was an officer I was afraid to say “What? . . NO!” because I knew it was in the opposite direction somewhere—Here he is some kind of sergeant or other who certainly oughta know the streets of Paris giving an American tourist a bum steer. (Or did he believe I was a wise-guy Frenchman pulling his leg? since my French is French)—But no, he points in the direction of one of de Gaulle’s security buildings and sends me there maybe thinking “That’s the National Library alright, ha ha ha” (“maybe they’ll shoot down that Quebec rat”)—Who knows? Any Parisian middle-aged gendarme oughta know where Rue de Richelieu is—But thinking he may be right and I’d made a mistake studying the Paris map back home I do go in the direction he points, afraid to go any other, and go down the upper spate of Champs-Elysées then cut across the damp green park and across Rue Gabriel to the back of an important government building of some kind where suddenly I see a sentry box and out of it steps a guard with bayonet in full Republican Guard regalia (like Napoleon with a cockatoo hat) and he snaps to attention and holds up his bayonet at Present Arms but it’s not for me really, it’s for a sudden black limousine full of bodyguards and guys in black suits who receive a salute from the other sentry men and zip on by—I stroll past the sentry bayonet and take out my plastic Camel cigarette container to light a butt—Immediately two strolling gendarmes are passing me in the opposite direction watching every move I make—It turns out I’m only lighting a butt but how can they tell? plastic and all that—And that is the marvelous tight security around big old de Gaulle’s very palace which is a few blocks away.

I go down to the corner bar to have a cognac alone at a cool table by the open door.

The bartender in there is very polite and tells me exactly how to get to the library: right down St.-Honoré then across la Place de la Concorde and then Rue Rivoli right at the Louvre and left on Richelieu to the Library dingblast it.

So how can an American tourist who doesnt speak French get around at all? Let alone me?

To know the name of the street of the sentry box itself I’d have to order a map from the C.I.A.