Dr Raheal Ahmad Siddiqui (TI)

Paris 2024 will be remembered for the summer Olympics where many events were held at exotic locations and many sportspersons achieved stardom. Hephaestus, who made weapons for the Greek gods at Olympus, made one extra javelin for Arshad Nadeem, who hurled it to create a new Olympic Games record. It also brought back memories of a trip my wife and I took a few summers ago when we visited some of these beautiful locations in Paris.

It was a secret trip. Ordinarily, I should not have written about it. But certain things happened apart from surprises that are usual for such trips and we crossed paths with some unforgettable characters in the streets of Brussels and Paris. Of course, the most amazing of those was Kenny, whom we met not in the street but at the reception desk of a hotel where we checked in in Paris. Meeting him was like experiencing Waterloo in Paris.

The plan was to board a train to Paris from Amsterdam; get off at Brussels and make a short day trip to Waterloo; and then continue the journey. We got off at Brussels Central Station as planned and discovered that Abbasi was not there to receive us. We explored the grand old building of the railway station and soon realised that the culprit was Victor Horta, the architect who designed the Central Station in 1910. The project was delayed by the outbreak of the two World Wars and completed in 1952, when the Central Station joined the North and South railway stations of Brussels. The city now had three railway stations. The realisation came after we made a few inquiries. We had missed Brussels’ South Station, which was closer to Waterloo, and therefore missed the rendezvous with Abbasi. To make matters worse, my mobile phone had gone out of order, causing us to lose contact with Abbasi.

We were rescued by a bespectacled young man dressed entirely in red. Hasan was tall and lean and spoke fluent English, which he said he had picked up at a school in Morocco. He was recruiting tourists for the Hop On-Hop Off Tourist Company, offering guided tours of the city in red buses.

When he learnt about our predicament and found out that we were from Pakistan, a ‘brotherly country,’ he immediately contacted Abbasi and guided him to where we were stranded. We said goodbye to Hasan and sped off to Waterloo, a place I had always wanted to see for two reasons: one historical and the other personal.

My favourite character in European history was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was barely five and a half feet tall but his towering personality dominated the 18th-Century Europe. After his forced abdication, Napoleon was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba, from where he escaped in March 1815, reached Paris, and reclaimed his title as emperor.

However, his second term lasted for only Hundred Days as “the unbeaten would fight the unbeatable.” On June 18, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army was routed, being crushed between the forces of the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian General Blücher. This time, he was imprisoned at St Helena, where slow arsenic poisoning shortened his life.

Abbasi drove us to the Waterloo Battlefield, where we ascended the Lion’s Mound and enjoyed an incredible panorama of the battlefield, now covered by lush green. At the top of this pyramid mound is an iron-cast lion representing Napoleonic victories. Its paw rests on the globe, which “announces the peace that Europe has won in the plains of Waterloo.”

Nearby was the Wellington Museum, housed in a small building where the Duke of Wellington stayed for two nights before the battle. The duke’s room and the desk where he wrote his battle orders are well preserved. I met my own Waterloo at a place far from this battlefield.

Years ago, I was sent to administer the Rahim Yar Khan district as its deputy commissioner. One fine afternoon, I received a call from the secretary to the chief minister, commanding me to release a hefty amount to a semi-government NGO against all financial propriety. As the situation became more challenging, the conversation grew stern.

“Note it down, mister; these are direct orders from the chief minister. Do you know who you are talking to?”

These words would send chills down the spine of some civil servants, yet I was made of sterner stuff. The bearded secretary to the chief minister had previously worked in the same organisation against a hefty salary. He was now trying to dole out an undue favour. As my polite defiance continued, he hurled the final threat: “This could be your Waterloo.”

“Sir, I have not been to Waterloo, but financial rules should be followed, even if you are in Waterloo.”

The line went silent. A day later, I received a fax message. It contained my transfer orders. I was now an officer on special duty. Like a good officer and a gentleman, I relinquished charge minutes and stepped out of my office in Rahim Yar Khan into the bureaucratic wilderness known as OSD. Ever since that day, I had wanted to visit Waterloo.

In Paris, we had a few disappointments. After walking for 20 minutes from Notre Dame Cathedral, we reached the Bastille, where traffic was flowing around a commemorative tower. The roundabout had replaced the dreaded jail. On July 14, 1789, a Parisian mob had stormed the Bastille, starting the French Revolution and leading to the abolition of the ancient regime’s divine right to rule.

In the open space in front of the café L’Arsenal Bastille, we found a solitary figure chiselling a sculpture out of a large tree trunk. With auburn flowing locks and a half-grey beard, Cucca appeared to be in his late thirties. He paused with a smile to pose for our camera.

“How long will it take to finish this sculpture?”

“I don’t know!”

“Where are you going to put it?”

Still smiling, he replied: “I don’t know!”

Cucca’s English was clearly far better than our French as he knew at least three English words – “I don’t know.”

The next day, my friend Moin Wani drove us to Versailles, the palace listed as a World Heritage Site. It was originally Louis XIII’s hunting pavilion. In 1682, it was extended by Louis XIV into the residence of the king and the royal court.

In 1789, after the storming of the Bastille, the Women’s March on Versailles on October 5 forced the king and his queen, Marie Antoinette, to move to Paris as prisoners. It was never to be a royal residence again. In 1837, it was converted into a museum. The palace has 2,300 rooms.

The palace is famous for two treaties that had profound significance in world affairs. In 1783, the Peace of Paris was signed, and the United Kingdom officially recognised the independence of the United States of America. In June 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the Hall of Mirrors, formally ending the World War I, though the seeds of the World War II were also effectively sown.

We were excited to see the best of French architecture. However, the excitement was short-lived. Like hundreds of other tourists, we approached the gate to buy entry tickets, only to be greeted by a yellow signboard: “Due to strike, the Palace and the Estate are closed. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Versailles did not disappoint us that day. Paris was inching closer to Lahore.

Leaving the château’ of Versailles out in the country, we moved towards Notre Dame and the Louvre Palais in the heart of Paris. The Notre-Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris) is a medieval Catholic cathedral representing the finest Gothic architecture, which flourished in 12th-Century Europe.

According to legend, Bishop Maurice de Sully had a vision of a glorious new cathedral for Paris and sketched it on the ground outside the original church. Construction started in 1163 and finished around 1240. The cathedral houses some of Catholicism’s most important relics, including the reputed Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross and one of the Holy Nails.

The cathedral has witnessed many historic moments. In 1455, Isabelle, the mother of Joan of Arc, unsuccessfully pleaded against her daughter’s conviction of heresy before a papal delegation. Mary, Queen of Scots, married Francis II of France in 1558, only to be beheaded 28 years later by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England.

In December 1804, the coronation of Napoleon and his wife Josephine took place inside the cathedral, for which Pope Pius VII specially travelled from Rome. However, it was Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame that brought the cathedral into the realm of literature and Hollywood, as the deformed Quasimodo, described as “a creation of the devil,” represented the good of humanity.

Afia and I joined the long queue of enthusiasts to enter the cathedral. The queue moved at a snail’s pace. We met a retired couple from Bordeaux who were visiting their son in Paris and, like us, were visiting the cathedral for the first time in their lives. They took our photo and invited us to visit them in Bordeaux, where they would treat us to the best French wine. Our tight schedule only allowed us to invite the charming couple to Pakistan in the coming winter.

There are no four-star hotels in Paris. You have to trust your own stars and destiny. As we walked into a hotel we had booked in advance, we met Kenny, the lone receptionist at the counter. It was an easy enough game to play with unsuspecting tourists – if you were Kenny, that is. He waited until some harassed-looking foreigner came along. He would then assume an expression as worried as the tourist’s, create a little problem, and finally, after causing a diversion, help resolve it. You were happy, and so was Kenny, and that was that.

Kenny, plump with an expressionless round face, after poking his computer for a while, announced that we had not been booked at his hotel and that we needed to check with our travel agent. All our desperate pleas that we had paid in advance for our stay fell on deaf ears. Afia joined me in cursing him – yes, in Urdu.

“Can we talk to your manager?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Bosses don’t work on Sundays.”

We confronted another Waterloo in Paris. Given no other options since bosses were not to be disturbed, we rebooked our room and paid extra as security – just in case we ran away while Kenny was off duty, though we suspected that he was trying to swindle us.

Minutes after we entered our room, the telephone buzzed. Kenny informed us that somebody from our embassy had sent a car to pick us up for dinner. An hour later, as we descended to the lobby, Kenny had a smile on his face. His computer had finally coughed up the information that absolved us. We would get back the extra money on Monday when his boss returned to the office. We were happy, and so was Kenny, and that was that.

We would have missed the most important thing about Paris had we not stayed at this hotel. It had an elevator for only two people. It was so slender that we had to squeeze into each other’s arms; all couples are advised to make full use of it. If you believe in the maxim that “Paris is for lovers,” then this elevator was just a ruse.

The writer is a retired civil servant with a keen interest in the preservation of heritage buildings and an animal rights activist. He may be reached at dr.raheal@gmail.com