In 1994 I traveled from Malaysia to Paris on Aeroflot.
The Kuala Lumpur-Karachi-Dubai-Moscow-Paris flight time to Moscow totaled about 24 hours. None of them were comfortable in the flimsy chairs of the Soviet era jetliner.
Disembarking at Moscow, I discovered that my connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle was delayed until the next morning.
A Norwegian couple were in a similar predicament and I said, “It’s 10PM. What are we going to do all night?”
“Drink wine.” The husband pulled out two bottles of wine.
“I have two.”
“And my wife has two.”
We opened the bottles and sat on the floor surrounded by hundreds of stateless travelers trapped in the aeroport. Some looked as if they had been in limbo for weeks. After finishing the wine a refugee from Afghanistan sold us a bottle of vodka.
It was dawn.
In Moscow.
“Russia.
“Your flight is now.” The Norwegian pulled me to my feet.
“I don’t care.” I wanted to stay in the aeroport. “Life simple here.”
“You have to go.” His wife escorted me to the plane.
“Bon Voyage.” I saluted them at the door of the Airbus.
Stepping on board I rejoined civilization and I stumbled down the aisle to my seat. The faces of the other passengers gauged my drunkenness better than a breathalyzer. No one wanted me to sit next to them. I fell into an empty row and buckled up for take-off.
Several hours later a stewardess shook my shoulder me.
“We are in Charles de Gualle Aeroport in Paris.”
“Already?” I was the last passenger on the plane.
“We’ve been on the ground for 15 minutes.”
“Great.” I got to my feet and trudged out into the terminal. The time was 8:30. My friends were waiting in the city and it was Bastille Day or ‘le Quartoze’..
In July of 1789 Paris seethed with anger against Louis XVI and the ancien regime of the nobility.
The prison’s most infamous guest was the Marquis De Sade, who shouted from the ramparts on July 2, 1789, “They are killing the prisoners here!”
The unrepentant sodomist was transferred ‘naked as a worm’ to the insane asylum at Charenton, but the fire had been lit and the on July 14 hundreds of workers gathered in the neighboring Faubourg Saint-Antoine seeking to seize the gunpowder within the Bastille.
Mythically recounted in Dickens’ THE TALE OF TWO CITIES a tumbril loaded with casks of wine axle an axle on the Rue de la Roquette and wine flow down the gutters to be consumed by impoverished Parisians. The shadow of the dreaded upper-class Bastille prison loomed over the narrow street and someone shouted, “A la Bastille.”
The guards within the fortress defended the battlements against the mob, until the arrival of mutinous royal Bourbon troops armed with artillery. The commandant surrendered the prison, freeing its seven captives.
When Louis XVI was told the news in Versailles, the king asked an aristocrat, “Is it a revolt?”
His friend replied, “Non, mon Roi. It is a revolution.
Within three years after the Storming of the Bastille Citoyen Louis was sentenced to death and guillotined in Place de la Concrode before thousands of revolutionies.
I emerged from the terminal at noon and rom CDG Aeroport a taxi sped to Paris.
Atop Montmatre rose Sacre-Couer.
After the 1870 Commune the Catholic Church had erected the Temple of Repression to to remind Parisians that the Church ruled the Hearts and Minds of France.
The new Bastille.
My friend Tristam from the Musellmen Fumants was waiting at his apartment.
We watched the military parade on the Champs-Elysees.
That night we partied with friends.
I drank to Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternitie.
Hundreds sang Le Marseilles.
I cried each time.
It was good to be out of Moscow.
People drink too much there, then again so do I.