Now, this is what I call a sports bar. While not a bar in the strictest sense–it has no roof or walls–it does have the two required ingredients, a big-screen TV and a bunch of drunken patrons, about 15,000, I would guess.
This is a BYOB kind of place, bring your own baguette, which must, of course, be washed down with the proper wine. I have chosen a modest Pouilly-sur-Loire, which disappears after one swallow because I, in a fit of cross-cultural congeniality, offer the fellow next to me a taste.
“Merci, allez la France,” he says.
I give him the thumbs-up.
The last I see of ol’ Pouilly, it is disappearing into a succession of Gallic faces, many painted for the occasion, blue, white and red.
This is the evening of the France-Croatia semifinal, and I and my new friends are not welcome at the Stade de France, about 30 miles away, where the game is being played.
Mine is a long story and I do not know theirs, other than they are both French and Croatian, the difference being in the cosmetics. The Croats are painted like Purina boxes, red-and-white checkerboards, while the French are more, atypically, linear.
We have gathered in the open plaza next to the Hotel d’Ville, the Paris city hall, a familiarly French pile of a building, festooned with stone statues of previous Paris dignitaries and the hopeful slogan–liberte, egalite, fraternite.
High up in the far corner is Cardinal Richelieu, one of history’s hard cases, the man who invented the French language when not doing in Huguenots. One has to wonder what he might have thought of so much ecumenism below, not to mention a soccer team and a city melted together as if it were from, well, America.
The present premier, Lionel Jospin, issued a statement admiring the team as a representative of French diversity, maybe the first time those words were ever put together by a Frenchman needing votes.
“When I see blacks and immigrants with the French flag singing `La Marseillaise,’ ” Jospin said, “I find these timely images.”
It was Charles de Gaulle who lamented how difficult it was to unify a nation “that has 265 kinds of cheese.” Soccer seems to have done just that, at least for an evening, and my nose can confirm de Gaulle was right about the cheese.
Behind the huge television screen are the gothic towers and gruesome black spire of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, just across the Seine and the Pont L’Arcole. At times it appears that Zinedine Zidane is kicking a soccer ball to about the point where Esmerelda was hauled by Quasimodo, who, if memory serves, perished from an own goal.
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Down the Rue de Rivoli is the Louvre and its treasures, up the Montmarte hill is the Sacre Coeur and six stops away on the Metro is the Hard Rock Cafe. You know, the important tourist stops.
For three hours of this evening, they are empty because, without knowing exactly how or why, the French soccer team is making the country of France feel even better than it usually does about being French.
It does not take much to poke the national conceit, this illustrated no better than that day’s newspaper France Soir reacting to the news that an American might buy controlling interest in the property management company that oversees the Eiffel Tower.
A cartoon depicts the tower with two Texas oilmen watching dollars squirt out the top. I have the caption translated.
“We will not have the symbol of France run by gum-chewers,” it says.
At this moment the symbol of France is a black man, Lilian Thuram, who has just scored his second goal of the night, a crisp whack with his left foot that puts the ball in the back of Croatia’s net. It will be the blow that eliminates Croatia and send the French into the World Cup final against Brazil.
Thuram is hugging and dancing and laughing up on the big screen just as are the Parisians in the square. Several young men climb the baroque street lamps and wave the tricolor as if shaking crumbs from a tablecloth.
This continues for the remaining 20 minutes of the game and well after. Finally breaking through the edge of the crowd, I get to the street back to my hotel and I am suddenly and happily hugged by a crocked Frenchman.
I give him the thumbs-up and offer him a stick of gum. Before weaving off into the night, he takes the gum. They always do.