Illustration by Holly Whitnell.
I’ll always remember the 8th of September 2022 – for two reasons.
At the moment Queen Elizabeth’s death was announced to the world, I was waiting for a nine-piece nugget in a beach-side McDonalds in Playa de las Americas, Tenerife. There were plenty of British people in the restaurant and the atmosphere definitely changed as the news spread around the customers: conversations hushed, burgers were lowered despondently, and milkshakes were left to melt in 30 degree heat – out of sheer respect for the sovereign. I’m not embarrassed to say I was quite shocked myself (I didn’t even finish my chips) but after about 15 minutes, holiday life in Tenerife carried on as normal…
Which brings me to reason number two- later that evening, I had to tell my friends to hit the strip without me. The legal firm in Paris where I was due to start a vacation scheme the following week was – for the first time – requesting a convention de stage. I’ll always remember the 8th of September for the evening spent frantically liaising with the Oxford University internship programme from an Airbnb in the Cayman islands.
“Mais il faut, il faut absolument passer du temps en France cet été”
If you’re a second year French student, these words will sound hauntingly familiar. First spoken by my language tutor in HT22, they returned to me in most unwelcome fashion on one of those molten days between my narrative fiction prelim and Wadham College ball. Suddenly, in that intensely Oxford way, the real world was at stake again. I had zero plans to go to France and two empty weeks at the end of the long vac: it was looking like a solo trip. Ten weeks later, with the summer suddenly behind me, I left London by Eurostar on the 11th of September to spend 10 days in Paris – by myself.
Admittedly, my Paris trip does not technically count as full ‘solo travelling’, and I obviously spent time with other people. It’s only that, whenever I looked ahead to my trip during the long vac, I pictured myself reading Symbolist poetry, trying out my talents as a flâneur and practising in the kitchen for my impending self-catered living situation. These pictures were so cemented in my mind that in the end, other names on the itinerary didn’t really matter.
I felt like a solo traveller and, to that end, I made a note in a pocketbook whenever anything interesting happened. Drawn from that pocketbook, this article is a record of my time bordering on stream of consciousness. It only exists because I was travelling solo.
Day One
On day one, I wake up to a list of tasks I’d spelled out on a scrap piece of paper the night before: clothes, kettle, cereal, métro etc. I smash through every one of them, and as I nervously ride the underground to the office, I remember the words of my friend in Tenerife South Airport: “at the end of this job, you will wonder why you were ever worried at all”.
When I exit the station on the other side, I check Apple Maps (as if I don’t already know the route off by heart). Once the GPS has “led” my to the right street, I immediately spot the office-door but deliberately overshoot it. Once I “realise” my “mistake”, I turn around dramatically, somehow satisfied that I have fooled the Parisian passers-by into thinking I’m cool, unprepared, spontaneous and nonchalant. I still cannot really explain what was going on inside my head. I ring the doorbell.
Something that’s always struck me about Paris – at least since I’ve been aware of this sort of thing – is how everybody is beautiful in such a way that it doesn’t matter what they look like. I suppose it is their manner, maybe their gait or expression, but there will so often be something about them that simply announces: ‘I’m attractive’. This law office is no different, and as I sit down at my desk, it is as if my fellow trainees have all realised exactly what features they have at their disposal and presented them to their advantage.
I wrap up my thoughts on Parisian beauty, complete the day’s work and leave the office at 5 – relieved, frankly, to be out of there. The first day had me feeling on edge. I knew nobody at the office, I hadn’t spoken French all summer and nobody could really understand why a literature student (me) with zero experience in the law was working as a trainee. I still don’t really get it myself.
I read some of Zola’s Germinal in the evening (just to calm myself down) and write some reassuring notes at the end of the chapter. Ten days later, I would accidentally leave that book at Gare du Nord when waiting for my train home. If anybody found it, I hope they will be comforted by the half-nihilist, half-optimist message I left on one of the pages: ‘None of this actually matters. Relax. You can only gain from this’.
Day Two
At the office petit-déjeuner the next day, I’ve clearly left my attitude in the 19th century French Naturalist movement – sat in the middle of the conference table while the lawyers banter in French around me, I feel like I want to be invisible. It’s the senior partner who gets the biggest laugh:
One Englishman says to the other ‘When the Queen dies, we’ll get a day off work!’
“Not when the Queen dies” says the other Englishman, “IF the Queen dies’.
The table erupts into nepotistic laughter. I smile and exhale some air from my nostrils so nobody takes me for a nationalist. I later learned this clown was the former President of New College MCR. I sincerely hope any post-graduates at New College today are in a better position to count on entertainment from their common room leader. I have a shish taouk wrap for lunch and work quietly all afternoon. That evening, after a mild saga of indecisive panic, I resolve to cut my placement short by two days and leave on Friday, at the end of the week. I pack up my things because I’m changing accommodation the next day.
Day Three
At 6:45am I’m standing outside the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris (which Google tells me is the largest court in France by case-load!) on the edge of the city. On around 4 hours sleep, I feel foolish carrying my broken suitcase into the staggering foyer. Looking up in my manic sleep-deprived state, the interior of this building is making very little sense to me. It really starts stressing me out, and I actually have to stop myself from asking my supervisor why there are so many objects needlessly hanging from the ceiling!
We make it into the courtroom for the hearing. I stay silent for as long as I can but, tragically, I’d skipped breakfast that morning and there was nothing I could do. If Antoine Roquentin had been sitting in the benches, the rumbling stomach of the stagiaire two rows behind would certainly have initiated ‘the Nausea’.
That afternoon, I speak to the senior partner about Oxford and French literature. He tells me about his research there and, defending Christina Howell’s views on J-P Sartre, I begin to feel more like myself. As he leaves, he tells me he loves ‘lawyering’ but that he’d pay good money to do university all over again. A few minutes later, one of the trainees needs an English word to describe a collective of prominent legal authors without mentioning their names. I am pleased to be able to suggest ‘canon’, but bite my tongue before a tangent on the problematic nature of the term.
That evening, I take the metro to the 13th where my family friends live. This side of Paris is very different from the area where I’d been working: less money, more culture, more character. I find my way to their place and everybody is very happy to see other again. Sitting on the sofa with the familiar chaos of a francophone family, a home-cooked meal bubbling semi-supervised on the stove – the nightmare of the past three days begins to fade away. I speak French to their five-year old daughter who, to my relief, doesn’t use a single piece of legal vocabulary.
After a couple manic hours, everything is quiet as I sit down on the terrace with an old friend. We get on to talking about the course of his life, about the chance encounters that shaped it for the better – and just how easily they might not have. This is a kind of chaos, he says, that we accept in the Western world, especially because of the way we understand love. We insist that it be spontaneous, neither predestined nor arranged in any sense, but in the hands of the universe. We talk about the family he happens to have, how he’s taken a back seat in his own life while he does everything for his wife and children. He tells me I will learn this one day.
Day Four
The next day is a phenomenal day for French vocabulary. For anybody with plans to go to France and worrying about their slang, rest assured that ‘slay’, ‘problématique’ and ‘red flag’ are still a guaranteed laugh. For anybody just looking to make themselves chuckle, imagine the phrases ‘Saturday Night Live’, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and ‘How I Met Your Mother’ in a French accent. It still does it for me. I put my head down and push through the penultimate day.
On the evening of day four, worrying about how I should say my goodbyes, I promise myself I’ll head to the artisan boulangerie in the morning to buy breakfast for the team. I also promise myself that no matter what I will leave that office at 5 o’clock the next day and not a minute later. Once I’m out the door – I tell myself – I will never have to return. It’s true that some very good things had come out of my internship. My French had improved, I’d built some CV-able skills and made some contacts. But in all honesty, and for whatever reason, the week had been a massive struggle. I’m not sure whether it was the constant lack of sleep, the stress of Michaelmas looming, neglected reading lists or just sheer isolation but by that point – I was just sick of it.
I was sick of the awkward, broken business calls, French language keyboards and unfamiliar photocopier models. I was sick of the language barrier, laughing at jokes that weren’t funny and my ridiculous research into the European response to the omicron variant. Most of all, I was sick of feeling like a random, non-sensical addition to this law insurance office and the stubborn anxiety that had stopped me from talking normally to people. With all these thoughts running through my head, I fall asleep on the eve of the final day.
Day Five
The next morning (six hours sleep this time) I walk directly past the boulangerie on my way to the office – I never wanted to spend money on these people anyway. At 9am, I immediately start wrapping up my project. Leaving the building unannounced multiple times for coffee, I stop stressing about what other people think of me. Speaking to associates, I stop doubting my French and carry on speaking even when someone tries switching into English. Most importantly, I stop being so polite and striving to impress those select few members of the firm who, from the beginning, I’d correctly identified as arseholes.
We’re getting closer and closer to 4:30, when the final presentation is scheduled. Momentum builds, I ride the caffeine wave higher and higher, liberty is just around the corner when – disaster strikes. At 4:20 my supervisor is called into the senior partner’s office. He stays there for over an hour. During that time, my father arrives at Gare du Nord, entirely incapable of travelling further on his own. In despair, I’m at the point of leaving without saying goodbye when the trainee to my right looks out the window, into the Parisian rain.
‘Il pleure dans mon coeur’, he says, ‘comme il pleut sur la ville’. There’s silence, then laughter, before someone asks what he’s quoting. He doesn’t know but before he can finish looking up the poem I’ve told him the answer. Google confirms, he shakes my hand, and the conversation turns to French literature as everybody shares their favourite books. It was the best ten minutes of the week. As we reach the end, my supervisor calls me in to deliver the presentation.
Then I neck a coffee, pack my things, return my key, say my goodbyes and race to the station. Before you know it, I’m sitting with my father in a deafening bistro, shouting across the table while the TV shows the Queen’s vigil in Westminster. He listens closely while I tell him about my week. He pauses at the end, before telling me that the body has a survival mechanism, deep within it, activated only at the very edge of sanity. He can’t understand exactly why things had been so difficult, and I can’t explain it to him. But when some unknown anxiety pushes you to the brink, when there are too many choices and reasons to stress, the body and mind will literally wipe them out. Sitting there at the end of my tether, nothing could have been clearer.
‘Fuck it’, I learned to say, travelling solo in Paris. There are certain kinds of problems that are only as big as you make them. At times like these, act on impulse, stay out of your head and try to get some sleep. Happy Hilary!