Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  The BHV has just about anything that can reasonably be classified as hardware and countless items that stretch the point—for instance, in the automotive section, just opposite snow chains and some 200 shades of touch-up paint, you’ll find the complete library of Michelin guides and maps. The BHV never stocks just one of anything. On my most recent visit I noted more than a dozen styles of gardening gloves; 25 or so versions of the distinctive Parisian mailbox, with racks underneath for newspapers and magazines; perhaps 50 different flashlights, both functional and designer models.

  Hinges, locks, knobs and handles fill long aisles, floor to ceiling, with styles that number in the thousands and range from medieval black iron to Louis XIV to Starship Enterprise. In the BHV’s basement you’ll find country weather vanes from any French province you wish to restage back home, shoe trees in the wood of your choice, or a bicycle lock that exactly balances your imperatives for security and esthetics. If you can’t find a portable cement mixer anywhere else, you can pick one up in Paris.

  The BHV eschews the usual French word for hardware, quincaillerie, preferring bricolage—loosely, do-it-yourself. At last count the store stocked more than 350,000 items in its départment de bricolage. That figure is even more remarkable when you consider that many home-decorating items (unusual carved moldings, ceiling medallions, paints, and a compelling selection of wallpapers and coverings) aren’t included. They’re on the fourth floor, with the largest cache of designer toilet seats ever uncovered.

  Store statistics confirm what has long seemed evident: on all but one of eight floors—the ground level, where cosmetics and perfumes are sold—male shoppers outnumber the ladies at the BHV. Men predominate even in a third-floor kitchenware department that is about twice the size of Bloomingdales’. (The selection of steak knives is bewildering.)

  The fact that the BHV is a power bazaar might have something to do with its imperial origins. The store was incorporated in 1854 as Bazar Napoléon by a former street merchant, Xavier Ruel, who had been rewarded for saving the life of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoléon III. Ruel chose rue de Rivoli for his Second Empire building (still in use) because he correctly reckoned that it would become Paris’ busiest thoroughfare.

  More visitors probably stroll past the BHV each day than by both the main locations of the Galeries Lafayette and Printemps department stores. But more might not recognize the black-domed building as a department store. The BHV—Napoleon’s name was not dropped until 1884, almost ten years into the Third Republic—gives short shrift to “visual merchandising” (a.k.a. window dressing). In fact, some days the iron gates over display windows remain shut, and several window spaces have been rented to street vendors selling schlock. Before venturing inside to search for my aérateur I thought the place was a warehouse.

  Down the street from Le Printemps is the glass-domed Galeries Lafayette, another megalith of consumption on the Parisian grand magasin scene.

  In the toy department, I was sure that I had found the perfect gifts for my step-nieces: Barbies dressed like “Apache dancers,” in tight, front-slitted black skirts, red and white striped shirts, and black berets. They were packaged in screaming pink telephone booth-like boxes with French sayings, such as “Bonjour, ça va?” and “Je t’aime,” scattered about the surface like confetti. And best of all, these dolls spoke French! “Elle parle!” the box shouted in large blue letters.

  I took one of the dolls out of its box and pushed the button on its back. In a voice that trilled like Edith Piaf singing, the doll said, “Je t’aime. Je t’aime.” I hit the button again. This time, in a dense, nasal patois, the doll seemed to say, “Voulez-vous rester avec moi?” Nah, I must have misunderstood it. I put the doll back in the box before I heard too much and took it and its twin to the cashier.

  —Claudia J. Martin, “Service by Committee”

  Every Parisian I’ve asked says he (or she) shops there, but I’ve seen the BHV mentioned in few guides to the city. Apparently the management hasn’t noticed the slight. There’s a Tourist Welcome Center on the ground floor to help you find things, and bilingual agents at the sixth-floor customer-service department can arrange shipping when you toss baggage allowance to the wind and buy too much. Announcements in English are made over the public-address system, and most salesclerks speak enough of the language to tell you to stand right there, they’ll be back with someone fluent.

  Once I eavesdropped as two BHV cashiers read to each other from mimeographed sheets, practicing the English equivalents of la plume de ma tante est sur la table. When one of the grandmotherly cashiers spotted me, I feared I had embarrassed her. But she hoisted her shoulders, smiled proudly and glued together the words: “Hello. Do you speak English, too?” I often tell the story when Anglophones proffer that old (and essentially untrue) cliché that Parisians could if they would, but they won’t.

  The best way to approach hardware shopping at the BHV is to allow plenty of time; try to get the lay of the land while you’re still on the stairs leading down to the basement (be prepared for aisles that extend to the vanishing point—I still get lost), then start prospecting. Help is always around if you need it, but finding things yourself is more rewarding—and you’re almost guaranteed to stumble upon items you need but didn’t know existed. My prize find is a set of long steel keys with handles on one end and threaded points on the other. It took me a while to puzzle out their purpose, but a dollar’s investment means I’ll never again have to use a hammer and nail to make starter holes for wood screws. Less constructive but more envied is the Fermé le mardi (Closed Tuesday) sign I bought for my kitchen.

  Join the huddles around live demonstrations of the newest widgets, and for hands-on entertainment drop by the plumbing section where dozens of novel faucets and showerheads are connected to the Paris water system, ready for testing. When you find something you want to buy, ask a salesperson to write up your order and take the sales slip to a cashier, who will stamp it paid (the BHV takes all charge cards). Then go searching for the salesperson again, to claim your purchase. It’s a time-consuming routine, but its charm grows on you. For a break from nuts and bolts, head upstairs to the sixth-floor salon de thé. Now, really—name one shopping-mall hardware outlet with a decent salon de thé.

  The late Coleman Lollar once boasted that one-third of the hardware in his house hailed from the BHV.

  Whoever goes in search of anything, must come to this, either to say that he has found it, or that it is not to be found, or that he is yet upon the quest.

  —Montaigne

  MORT ROSENBLUM

  The Source

  Visit a distant and little-known part of Paris.

  PAUL LAMARCHE, KEEPER OF THE SEINE, SCAMPERED OVER THE last traces of a vast Gallo-Roman temple to show me the river’s source. He was into his 90s, quick, sturdy, with an elfin twinkle in his eye. Those old guys in Armenia last long on yogurt, but Lamarche thrives on the magical waters of the Seine.

  “Look at this,” Lamarche said, bending over a tiny stream trickling down a groove in the rock. He dislodged a stone and seized a waterbug, like a minuscule shrimp. “Any kind of pollution kills these things,” he explained. “You won’t find any cleaner water.” He cupped his hands in the furry green moss and thrust his face into the cool liquid. I did the same. Water never tasted better.

  The old man fell silent to let me ponder the past. Instead, my mind flashed ahead to the immediate future. I could imagine splashing water into guests’ whisky aboard La Vieille [the author’s boat and river home] and mentioning casually that I had scooped it from the Seine. A sadist’s dream.

  We were on the Langres Plateau in the Côte d’Or, up to our ankles in red poppies and talking over the bussing hum of cicadas. Wild roses and columbines fringed the rocks, and rich, fragrant grass hid little yellow buds. Lamarche first saw this enchanted source when he was six. “We hiked down from Chanceaux to say bonjour to the goddess,” he said, nodding toward a Rubenesque statue in a fake grotto built by the city
of Paris to honor Sequana.

  The plaque says she was put there by Napoleon III, but Paul knows the statue was replaced in 1928. Once water spouted from her left arm, as though she were personally filling the river, but in dry years the pressure was not strong enough. Now water burbles ignobly from somewhere near her feet. In any case, her cave is not the actual source.

  “The river really starts here,” Lamarche said, pointing to a rusty grate by a few chunks of marble column, all that remains of the biggest temple in ancient Gaul. “And there and there.” Water oozed from two other breaks in the rock at the base of a low cliff, in a clump of trees. “Then it goes underground and loops around to the grotto.”

  He was enjoying himself, poking holes in the first few fibs the Seine’s curators sought to perpetrate on the public. The river was his life, and Sequana his beloved ancestor. After checking out the world in the military, Lamarche came home to Saint-Germain-Source-Seine, the village nearby. In 1953, he settled into the old caretaker’s farmhouse just below the grotto and opened the Café Sequana. His wife, Monique, made omelettes and strong coffee. At the source, Lamarche planted two willows, under which picnickers can dangle their toes in cool water, and shaped the small park. With money left over, he built the first bridge over the Seine, a funny little miniature of the vaulted spans farther down.

  These days, mostly, he and Monique tend their fields. The grotto is left open to the public and needs only a casual eye. But when anyone stops to ask, the old man seizes a fat iron key and shows off the real thing.

  Lamarche took me to the gate and worked at the rusted padlock. For several minutes, he jiggled the key and muttered darkly. Finally, he worked it loose. My friend Jeannette, meantime, simply walked past the locked gate; the fence had long since collapsed. Inside, Lamarche showed us a heavy slice of column that looters had tried to roll into a pickup. He had run them off. “They’ve taken everything,” he said, shaking his head at nonspecific sacrilege over the last two millennia.

  The park belongs to Paris. After all these years, the source of the Seine, deep in the belly of Burgundy, is still a colony of the French capital. Napoleon III claimed it last century when such symbolism was pregnant with political import. Now, only a curiosity, the symbol still fits. When the river gets bigger, it is pushed around with Paris in mind. Downstream from Paris, it runs thick with urban waste.

  Although Lamarche plants the flowers, trims the trees, and cleans up after slobs, what he likes best is talking to visitors. He wants people to get Sequana’s story straight. Which is not so easy to do. The Dictionnaire Etymologique des Noms de Rivières et de Montagnes en France offers eleven lines on the name Seine. This, via a string of variants used over the centuries, evolved into Seine. Squan, apparently, was a Gallic word meaning twisting, or tranquil, or both. The Romans added a few vowels. Later, French settled on a single syllable.

  An eighteen-inch-high statue of the goddess has survived in a museum at Dijon. She is in flowing Greco-Roman robes, standing in a boat with a bow shaped like the head of swan; in the swan’s mouth is a small round object, a pomegranate or a tennis ball. For myth spinners, it is a promising start.

  Archeologists, in fact, have put together a detailed account of the daily goings-on at the temple to Sequana. Reading it, I half-suspected that some clumsy printer had substituted pages from a modern guide to Lourdes. The Gauls’ first temple was made of wood and clay earth, but Romans later hauled in enough slabs of marble and hewn stone for a vast religious complex. The waters trickled among high columns and past inner recesses reserved for holy business. Downstream, they widened into a pool where the masses took the cure.

  Gauls, Romans, and foreign tourists covered great distances, hobbling on foot or in fancy carriages. Priests received offerings in temple alcoves. Pilgrims sealed vows by pitching coins or jewelry into the water. Artisans fashioned replicas of limbs in need of curing, and they charged an arm and a leg. In bronze, wood, or soft rock, they depicted familiar-looking maladies—tumors, poxes, and deformities—which the Seine was enlisted to heal. Souvenir stands sold kitschy statuettes; had transport been better, they might have come from Taiwan.

  The temple thrived as a sacred health spa and also as a vacation getaway from a bustling Gallo-Roman settlement downstream started by a tribe of Gauls, fishermen, and water traders known as the Parisii. Par, in Celtic, means boat. By then, the Parisii’s capital on an island in the Seine, now the Ile de la Cité, was rolling in resource. The settlement, as well as the region near Sequana’s temple and the river that linked them, were at the crux of a new world taking shape.

  About six centuries before Christ, and the Romans, the Greeks had found a more direct route to Britain than sailing by Gibraltar and up rough open seas. They needed English tin and copper to make bronze, buying it with Mediterranean wine. Greek traders followed the Rhône to the Saône until they ran out of river. Crews humped their cargo overland to the headwaters of the Seine. From there, it was only water to the Thames. The Greeks enriched not only the entrepôt region of Vix, not far from the source, but also Gallic villages clustered along the river.

  Germans, meantime, carted their heavy metals from Spain, in exchange for honey, amber, and furs. That required crossing the Seine. Wagoners settled on the Parisii’s village, where flat rocks on either bank flanked an island made of silt. For much of the year, horses could ford the river; it was twice as wide then as it is now and a whole lot shallower. When the water was high, Gauls ferried the wagons across, for a price.

  Paris was born on what is now Ile de la Cité, a small island in the Seine. On its coat of arms, the city’s symbol is a boat shaped like an island.

  —JO’R, LH, and SO’R

  The island was perfectly placed. Forests hemmed in the river basin, and bandits cruised the few rutted roads. Anyone with a choice preferred the Seine—peaceful, dependable, and free of muggers. And road convoys had to get over the river. Seven thousand strong, behind a stockade, the Parisii ran a bustling market and a mint that stamped gold coins. Politics were shaped by the watermen, the nautes, who ruled the wavelets until A.D. 52.

  But after Rome conquered the British isles, Caesar realized he had to fuel his legionnaires there with home-grown olive oil. Like all other roads, he decided, the Seine would lead to Rome. His armies seized everything along the old Greek route. On their island redoubt, the Gauls fought back.

  Caesar reported humbly: “Labienus exhorted his soldiers to remember their past bravery, their happiest combats, and to conduct themselves as if Caesar, who so often had led them to victory, were there in person.” Romans routed the right flank, but the Parisii’s general, Camulogenus, held the center. “All were encircled and massacred,” Caesar wrote, adding that horsemen cut down those who fled. We have no Gallic version, but the battle was likely the origin of Parisian driving habits.

  Having burned their town rather than leave it to Caesar, the Gauls started fresh on the island. On the river’s left bank, a gleaming Roman city offered the usual colonial amenities: temples, baths, a theater, aqueducts, and stone streets, along with a port. Stone pillars and wooden planks made up the first Petit Pont. Gauls ran their own port on the island. The whole place was called Lutetia, a name that lingers today on a fancy hotel façade and a hundred other places.

  The Romans built a temple to Jupiter atop a shrine to a Gallic god; Notre-Dame, on the same spot, now blots out both deities. By then, the Gauls had joined the invaders they could not beat. The nautes offered a statue to honor the Roman god and continued their lucrative river traffic.

  Late in the 3rd century, France was rearranged by the muscular Teutonic tourism that got to be a habit. Franks swept southwest from the Rhine estuary. They eventually settled most of the country, hence the name France. But Burgundians from the central Rhine, tall Wagnerian blondes with a power problem, made straight for the Seine. In A.D. 276, they trashed Lutetia, burning the Roman sector. Failing to dislodge the Gauls from their island, they moved up-stream and razed Sequana’
s temple.

  A Seine biographer, Anthony Glyn, reckons the Germanic invaders smashed the temple because they did not like female deities. In fact, centuries later, a monk named Seigne (pronounced “Seine”) was sainted and recruited as patron of the river, which explains those impressive church towers at Saint-Seine-L’Abbaye, a few miles toward Dijon on the other side of the hill from the source. But he didn’t take; Sequana has eclipsed Saint Seigne, whatever his role.

  The Roman Empire was crumbling fast. In Lutetia, Gallo-Romans had shaped a new culture. Freed of Mediterranean keepers, they took the old name, Paris. And they looked mostly down-stream, toward England and northern Europe, where trade was brisk. Wine from Burgundy and Champagne floated down the Seine. But not much came from beyond, overland from the Saône. Gradually, Sequana’s shrine lost its pre-Michelin stars and slipped into the mists.

  I started my river journey on foot. This line might have carried some power in a Richard Burton diary, with chilling detail of treacherous porters and mosquitos the size of turkey buzzards, but walking down the Seine is not what you’d call hardship. In fact, I didn’t go very far before I hopped back into an open car and followed the farmer’s roads and narrow strips of blacktop to the first proper bridge across the river. A very short bridge.

  My original idea had been a single journey, from first trickle to final rollers, in some form of conveyance. Paul Theroux suggested a kayak, the way he’d do it. Another old pro urged something more French, like a rubber Zodiac. Had I talked to Mark Spitz, I probably would have considered the butterfly stroke. But the Seine, often submissive, needs a minimum of conquering. To live her secret life, you’ve got to take it slowly, in various ways at different times. My exploring would take me among old books, into rusting engine compartments, and, as far as I could go, into the thoughts of river people. More than a journey, this was a quest. I was after the soul of the Seine. Scrapping all plans, I simply set out.