Where the Hell is Shakespeare & Company

            This isn’t exactly a cycling story, but it happened in Paris, all the way back in 1983. I was an aviation writer/reporter at the time and attending/covering the Paris Air Show, the biggest and best air show of them all. 

            I arrived in Paris a couple days before the show began and was determined to find the famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore in the Latin Quarter where Hemingway and James Joyce hung out. But damn, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, or at least where I thought it was supposed to be. The Latin Quarter is a maze of winding, narrow, cobbled streets filled with Greek restaurants where they like to smash plates on the floor to entertain the tourists, couscous restaurants and gyro stands. I highly recommend the lamb kabob with frites on top with just a touch of the hot sauce. It’s cheap and delicious.

I finally gave up on finding Shakespeare & Company and spent the next few days at the Air Show, sweating (it’s always hot there on the tarmac), interviewing people and taking notes on all the aircraft and eating as much free food as I could stuff into my face in the company-sponsored chalets without seeming like an uncouth and greedy American pig reporter. At the end of the third or fourth day of the Air Show, I took the metro “home” and got off as usual at the St. Michel stop, near my cheap, no-star hotel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. 

Something was going on. 

The Boulevard St. Michel is always crowded but was even more crowded than normal and there seemed to be an extra-intense vibe in the air. I decided to investigate and wandered up the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Boulevard St. Germain, in the direction of all noise, and suddenly found myself in the middle of a riot. 

That’s right, a riot! 

Is this cool, or what?

That’s the thought that ran through my mind. So yes, I was kind of stupid. And/or naïve.

The riot had an ebb and flow. Thousands of angry students from the nearby Sorbonne – the big university in Paris – filled the street, throwing rocks at the riot police stationed in the intersection of St. Michel and St. Germain boulevards. I never did figure out what they were so angry about. They took out some of their anger on the cars unfortunate enough to be parked along St. Michel and were also ripping up and tossing around the large, heavy steel grates at the bottom of the trees that lined the street. Sometimes they threw the grates at one of the cars. Now keep in mind, this is one of the prime tourist spots in all of Paris and the streets are lined with up-scale shops and restaurants. It all seemed a bit surreal – and not at all frightening for some reason.

From time to time, the riot police would say enough is enough and rush toward the students, who moved back a bit – and then the cops stopped and fell back to their original position in the intersection. The students then crept closer and closer, hurling rocks and French curses; the cops would rush the students and … well, you get the picture. 

This happened a few more times. It all seemed rather organized and civil, exactly the way you’d expect the French to conduct a riot. Very sophisticated.

I worked my way to the front of the mob of students and was maybe 30 or 40 yards from the line of 100 or so cops decked out in full riot gear, including shields, clubs and tear gas canisters. They looked pretty tough, but come on … these were French riot police, how tough could they be? It’s not like they were New York, Chicago, or Moscow riot police. 

The cops made yet another rush toward the students, but by this point we all knew they weren’t going to do anything. It was all part of the game – and kind of amusing. Yeah, yeah, we’re really afraid of you.

Hey wait, they’re getting close, too close, they’re not stopping! What the hell?

I turned to run, but learned an important lesson about the physics of a riot: If you’re at the front of the crowd in a riot, closest to the police, and the cops rush you and everyone turns around to run … you’re suddenly at the back of the crowd, closest to the police.

Remember this in case you ever find yourself at the front of a riot.

The cops were on us in a flash and one whacked me on the ass with his club. 

It hurt! A lot. 

Hey, didn’t he know I was an American? I wasn’t about to stick around to tell him or show him my passport, or absorb another whack on the ass, so I frantically began pushing my way through the crowd and managed to make a right turn onto one of the small, windy and confusing streets of the Latin Quarter … and found myself in the midst of all the Greek and couscous restaurants. 

Whew, I’m safe. That was a close call.

Wrong again.

Several of the cops decided to turn down the street I was on. It was as if they were after me personally. Then, one of them went and tossed a tear gas cannister over my head. The tear gas presented me with an interesting dilemma: stay where I was and suffer the wrath of the police rushing toward me and maybe even get arrested, or run through the cloud of tear gas to what I hoped was safety and freedom. 

If they arrested me, would my American passport and press pass to the Paris Air Show get me out of jail? I decided not to find out. Running seemed the wiser choice and that’s exactly what I did, right through the huge cloud of tear gas. I was fast on my feet back then and after a few minutes of an all-out, terror-induced sprint down a couple of streets, I found myself in the clear, near the bridge across the Seine that leads to Notre Dame. I was prepared to take sanctuary in this massive church if the cops were still after me, but it seemed I had left them in the dust.

Or, in this case, a cloud of tear gas.

Ha! This tear gas isn’t so bad. I don’t feel a thing.

That’s right – I was wrong yet again – and quickly learned why they call it tear gas. My eyes were suddenly on fire. I began rubbing them frantically as the tears began to flow and I stood there, on one of the most heavily congested tourists areas in the world, crying like a baby, as an endless string of tourists wandered by, oblivious to the fact there was a riot going on a few streets away, wondering why this guy was standing there, out of breath and sweating, tears streaming down his cheek.

After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only five minutes, the fire in my eyes subsided, the tears stopped, and my vision began to clear. And there, to the right, in the middle of a little square and down a few steps was a bookshop. And not just any bookstore, it was …

That’s right, Shakespeare & Company.

What the hell, I might as well go in since I’m here.