Jack Kerouac visited Paris 40 years ago. He drank wine, sat in cafes, made notes, talked with barkeeps and coffee-drinking table-sharers, keeping his sharp eye on the locals. He never wrote a cliche, never wasted words, always kept his ear out for the language that would sound bebop cool and descriptive.
French was his first language, a colloquial French-Canadian version called joual. His parents were from Quebec, and he didn’t start speaking English until he entered public school at age six in Lowell, Massachusetts. Not a native speaker, and yet Kerouac’s On the Road jump-started the careers (or fantasies of careers) for many writers of English.
Ti Jean (“Little John,” the joual nickname his mother always called him) spoke and understood French when he visited Paris, so I read his 37-page essay “Big Trip to Europe” again. I quote him in italics below from the collection Lonesome Traveler, where “Big Trip” and seven other articles were published in 1960.
What endless human types passed my cafe table: old French ladies, Malay girls, schoolboys, blond boys going to college, tall young brunettes headed for the law classes, hippy pimply secretaries, bereted goggled clerks . . .
In this essay, Jack Kerouac doesn’t come off as the drunk, pill-popping wastrel sometimes described by Ann Chambers in her biography of him. In “Big Trip to Europe,” Jack is funny, self-deprecating, observant, and kind.
. . . bereted scarved carriers of milk bottles, dikes in long blue laboratory coats, frowning older students striding in trench coasts lik in Boston, seedy little cops (in blue caps) fishing through their pockets, cute pony-tailed blondes in high heels with zip notebooks, goggled bicyclists with motors attached to the rear of their cycles . . .
I imagine Jack ordering food and drinks in his joual French, and the conversations starting up with the waiters and bartenders. “Where you from?” And Jack says, “The USA, but my folks were from Quebec.” “But what kind of French is that you’re talking?” “That’s what my folks talk in Quebec.”
 . . . bespectacled Homburgs walking around reading Le Parisien and breathing mist, bushyheaded mulattoes with long cigarettes in their mouths, old ladies carrying milk cans and shopping bags . . .
Jack loved hearing people speaking French so far from home. He wanted his parents to be with him, to hear people greet each other and kid each other and ask about going to mass. Jack may have been King of the Beats, but he had a Catholic soul and toured many Parisian cathedrals.
. . . rummy W. C. Fieldses spitting in the gutter and with hands-a-pockets going to their shops for another day, a young Chinese-looking French girl of twelve with separated teeth almost in tears (frowning, and with a bruise on her shin, schoolbooks in hand) . . .
I don’t take notes compulsively as Jack did, but I watch. A young woman brings out endless silver buckets of blooms to the front sidewalk of the flower shop on Montorgueil. And there’s the man setting out trays on top of the crushed ice for the fish in the poissonerie (“fish shop”). And the woman who guides rolling stands of scarves, tea towels, sequined T-shirts, and multi-colored berets onto the covered walkways along the Rue du Rivoli. Endless tasks, some sleep, then all over again.
. . . porkpie executive running and catching his bus sensationally and vanishing with it, mustachioed longhaired Italian youths coming in the bar for their morning shot of wine, huge bumbling bankers of the Bourse in expensive suits fishing for newspaper pennies in their palms (bumping into women at the bus stop) . . .
Skinny dads walking with their little kids to the ecole maternelle (“nursery school”) that’s near my apartment. Nanny women of color pushing strollers with little white-skinned babies, whispering in front of the Virgin Mary at the St. Eustace cathedral. A sandbox wet from last night’s rain in the Luxemburg gardens, where one little kid is building a castle, molding the sand with buckets.
. . . serious thinkers with pipes and packages, a lovely red-head with dark glasses trotting pip pip on her heels to the bus, and a waitress slopping mop water in the gutter.
As I walk around Paris watching Americans fumble with euros, Parisians pout their way through a metro ride, Germans keep their voices low, I hear Jack Kerouac in my head, penciling book pages; I see Ti Jean nodding to the literary beat of the Parisian heart: a chocolate-pastry-scented, mightily scarved, smarted shoed, black-army heart.
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