Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  On the day the Paris Métro had opened, he had found himself in Venice, lying in a gondola on the Grand Canal, from which he waved to his mother as she stood in the window of the Hotel Danieli. He returned to his parents’ new apartment at 45, Rue de Courcelles, which, even after the opening of the É toile–Anvers segment in October 1902, was as far as one could be in central Paris from a Métro station. In August 1903, when eighty-four passengers were held up at Couronnes station by a smouldering train in the tunnel, and refused to leave until their fifteen centimes were refunded, and were asphyxiated and trampled to death, thus becoming the first consumer martyrs, he was preparing to join his mother at Évian and, daringly for him, to take the funicular to the Mer de Glace. In 1906, when both his father and his mother were dead, he moved to an apartment at 102, Boulevard Haussmann, which was noisy, dusty and new, but the only apartment on the market that his mother had seen. ‘I could not bring myself to move to a house that maman never knew.’ This placed him less than three hundred yards from the Saint-Lazare Métro station, which had opened only two years before.

  Without the hammering of his neighbours’ electricians, plumbers and carpet-fitters, he would have heard the excavations on the boulevard for lines A and B, which were managed by a separate company called Nord-Sud.

  The Nord-Sud was to the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris what Maple’s was to Au Bon Marché, or the Ritz to a shelter for the homeless. It used Thomson motors, fed by a pantograph that continually caressed an aerial wire. First-class carriages were bright yellow and red; second class were aquamarine and electric blue. In the connecting corridors of Saint-Lazare, a customer of the CMP passed into an enchanted world in which transportation was a pretext and every decorative detail a compliment to good taste: the mosaic lettering of the station’s name, the delicately lavatorial entrances of wrought-iron and ceramics. Saint-Lazare’s famous ticket-hall of multi-coloured columns and tiled, ventricular vaults bore a remarkable resemblance to the abbey of Fontevrault, and made it possible to imagine that Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lion-heart and the other sepulchral effigies had risen up and assumed the garb of modern Parisians, and were setting off for a monastic herb garden or a Saracen stronghold on the other side of Paris.

  In 1906, at the age of thirty-five, when his literary baggage was extremely light, he was already acquainted with the law of modern life according to which one’s immediate surroundings remain a mystery while distant places seen in guidebooks and paintings are as familiar as old friends whose material presence is no longer required to maintain the friendship. The Métropolitain, whose rumble was perceptible to the spiders on the ceiling, might as well have been a fantasy of H. G. Wells. This, combined with an inability to leave his apartment, explains why, when very few Parisians had never taken the Métro, and when more kilometres were travelled every day in Paris than on the entire rail network, Marcel Proust had yet to descend to the Métropolitain. He had never, as far as we know, even written the word; nor had any of his friends ever mentioned it. In August, he had tried to reach the Père-Lachaise cemetery in order to attend his uncle’s funeral, but had spent two hours wheezing in the Saint-Lazare railway station, galvanizing his asthmatic lungs with coffee before returning to his apartment. In September, imagining the marvels that might correspond to the exotic syllables ‘Perros-Guirec’ and ‘Ploërmel’, he had left for Brittany. The journey had ended at Versailles, where he took a room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. He was still there in December when he wrote to an old friend:

  I have been at Versailles for four months, but am I really at Versailles? I often wonder whether the place in which I am living–hermetically sealed and electrically lit–is somewhere other than Versailles, of which I have seen not a single dead leaf fluttering over a single solitary fountain.

  That year, he had planned a trip to Normandy. He had pored over guide books and gazetteers, and pestered his correspondents for information on rented accommodation. He had promised himself a quiet holiday somewhere near Trouville, if the ideal house could be found, with varied relaxations and occasional tours in a covered automobile.

  Nice and dry, not in the trees…electricity if possible, reasonably new, neither dusty (modern style is exactly what I need for easy breathing) nor damp. I need only my master bedroom, two servants’ rooms, a dining-room and a kitchen. A bathroom is not indispensable though very agreeable. Drawing-room pointless. As many WCs as possible.

  But Trouville had fallen through, leaving only the near-perfect memory of something that had never taken place.

  * THE MIRACULOUS TELEPHONE *

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER (1907), he surprised himself and his servants, who were accustomed to working in artificial light and sleeping in the daytime, by reaching the Channel resort of Cabourg. He chose Cabourg because he had spent some long and unforgotten holidays there with his mother, and because the Grand Hôtel was responsive to his needs. He wrote to a friend from his suite on the top floor: ‘I have just spent an entire year in bed.’ Then, after a brief calculation, he corrected himself: ‘This year, I have left my bed five times.’

  This was slightly inaccurate. In March, he had visited a friend in Paris who had been poisoned by oysters. In April, whilst enjoying a respite from the cacophonous installation of his neighbour’s toilet (‘she keeps having the seat changed–widening it, I expect’), he had gone to the balcony and taken the air. He had attended three soirées and visited a newspaper office to discuss an article. Including his departure for Cabourg, he had left his bed seven times in all.

  For longer trips across Paris, he had only to descend to the street, where, summoned by telephone, his chauffeur would be waiting. But there was always the possibility of getting lost at either end. Two years before–when his mother was alive, listening out for the creaking floorboard that announced the return of her son–he had left the taxi and stepped into the ‘ascenceur’ (which he always misspelled), and nearly committed a criminal offence against the General Secretary of the mortgage-lending bank, Crédit Foncier, who lived on the floor above:

  I absent-mindedly took the lift to the fourth floor. Then I tried to go back down, but it was impossible to reach the first floor. All I could do then was to take the lift back up to the fourth floor, from where I walked down, but to the wrong floor, where I tried to force the lock of M. Touchard’s door.

  Once, he took the ascenseur to the street, turned right towards the Byzantine dome of Saint-Augustin, then right and right again towards the cupola of the Printemps department store, and then, after completing a triangular itinerary of one kilometre, found himself so close to his starting point that, despite being unable to identify his own front door, he located it at the third attempt.

  The telephone made everything much simpler. Connections with Cabourg were not always reliable, because provincial exchanges often closed at nine o’clock in the evening. But in Paris, his friends could ask for the magic number–29205–and find themselves speaking to his concierge (who would send a messenger up the stairs), or even to Marcel himself, as if in person, provided that the telephone had been connected and that he had heard, from his bed or from the cabinet, the spinning-top sound that he preferred to the jangling bell. A telephone conversation was a little play for two or three voices. Sometimes, he transcribed the dialogue for the pleasure of his friends:

  Someone comes hurrying up from the concierge: you want to talk to me. I rush to the telephone. ‘Hello, hello?’ (Nobody there.) I call back…nothing. I ask for number 56565. They ring: it’s engaged.–I insist. They ring again: it’s engaged. Just then, there’s a call from you: ‘M. de Croisset would like to know whether this evening…’. I expect that, at that exact moment, you signalled to your secretary to indicate that some more agreeable invitation had caused you to change your mind. Whatever the case, silence ensues, and the person hangs up. I ring again; they give me a wrong number. And so it goes on.

  On that occasion, the unseen demoiselle, who placed distant souls in to
uch with one another, and whose utterances were always short and sibylline (because she was paid by the number of connections she made), finally delivered an unusually long burst of oracular wisdom: ‘In my opinion, M. de Croisset has disconnected his telephone so that he won’t be disturbed. Monsieur could telephone until two in the morning and would still be wasting his time.’

  THOUGH HE HAD yet to descend to the underworld in person, his words, transmitted by copper wires, had crossed subterranean Paris many times; his written messages had traversed all four hundred and fifty kilometres of the pneumatic tube network. The telephone was no less miraculous for having a scientific explanation. Had he been writing a novel, he would certainly have devoted long passages to it–the misunderstandings, the jocular friends who pretended to be somebody else, the total strangers whose voices suddenly entered his apartment. Without the distraction of a face, certain inflections and even aspects of a personality were instantly revealed. He himself had once been mistaken for a woman. Because of the telephone, his letters had become longer, more frequent and less trivial. ‘You only ever send me messages that could have been telephoned,’ he complained to a friend.

  The maid, too, was often forced to resort to pen and paper:

  Having been asked by Monsieur Proust to place a telephone call to Madame la Princesse which I was unable to do successfully because no one answered me I am taking the liberty of writing down this telephone message because Monsieur Proust was extremely anxious to learn whether the mouthful of soufflé had indisposed Madame la Princesse.

  Exasperated subscribers wrote to the newspapers, complaining about the inefficiency of the miracle. Unlike them, Marcel was always respectful of the mystery, and patient with wrong numbers and delays. He wrote an article on the subject for the Figaro:

  We fill the columns of the Figaro with our complaints, finding the magic transformations still not fast enough, because sometimes minutes pass before we see at our side, invisible but present, the friend to whom we wished to speak…. Weare like the character of a fairy-tale who, his wish having been granted by a wizard, sees his fiancée, lit by the vivid light of enchantment, leafing through the pages of a book, shedding a tear or gathering flowers, close enough to touch, yet in the place where she then finds herself, very far away.

  Every conversation with a disembodied voice seemed to him a foreshadowing of eternal separation. The lovely expression that had entered daily speech–‘It was nice to hear your voice’–filled him with poignant anxiety. Years before, his mother had chided him for his reluctance to use the telephone. He sometimes heard her voice, crackling but distinct, rising from his memory as though it came to him through the labyrinth of wires:

  The apologies you owe the telephone for your blasphemies in the past! The remorse you should feel for having despised, scorned and rejected such a benefactor! Oh, to hear the voice of my poor little wolf, and the poor little wolf hearing mine!

  * THE INDISPENSABLE CHEMIST *

  EVERY MODERN CONVENIENCE implied its ideal form–the electric switch that was always within reach, the automobile that never broke down, the telephone that never cut short a conversation. Yet when the invention malfunctioned, it could conjure up an unexpected variety of perfection that would never have existed if the convenience had worked as advertised.

  The Theatre in the Comfort of One’s Own Home!

  Opéra, Opéra-Comique, Variétés, Nouveautés, etc. Apply to THÉ TROPHONE, 23, Rue Louis-le-Grand. Tel. 101–03. For sixty francs a month, three people can hear performances daily.

  Trial audition on request.

  The théâtrophone had disappointed him at first. A live performance of Pelléas et Mélisande reached him like something precious that had been smashed and sullied by the post. The Pastoral Symphony was almost as inaudible as it had been to Beethoven. Die Meistersinger was full of interruptions, like an over-literal demonstration of Baudelaire’s dictum, in his essay on Wagner: ‘In music, as in the written word, there is always a gap that is completed by the listener’s imagination.’ Yet without that intermittency, the remote performance would have lost its power: his memory would not have been forced to rush about the orchestra pit, playing every instrument, until the musicians returned from nowhere.

  The mind, too, could be made to behave like a faulty contraption. Several chemists in his quartier stayed open into the night–the coloured jars gleaming in the gas light, a courteous magician presiding in a white coat–to dispense the precisely measured solace that only science could provide. Drugs helped him to sleep (Veronal, valerian, Trional and heroin, which he had once recommended to his mother), and to stay awake (caffeine, amyl nitrate and pure adrenalin). In certain states of drug-induced half-sleep, when the clatter of tramcars and the street-cries that had survived the advent of department stores reached his ears, muffled and distorted, the telephone operators in his brain started pushing plugs into sockets at random, rousing old memories, giving voice to the creaking floorboards and the ticking clock, initiating party-line conversations in which dozens of people spoke at once, repeating themselves endlessly or whispering things that could never quite be heard.

  Certain drugs were best avoided. Of cocaine, he said, contrasting its visible effects with those of a healthy diet and a recent haircut, that ‘time has special express trains bound for premature old age, while return trains run on a parallel line and are almost as fast’. But other drugs, dispensed by a chemist, could send him on circular journeys from one end of his life to the other, after which, when the doors and the furniture had resumed their habitual positions, he was surprised to find himself still in bed on the second floor of an apartment block in the ninth arrondissement of Paris.

  IN THE GLOOM of his soundproofed apartment, he had seen the years slip by. He sat in his nest of pillows and pullovers, writing long letters to friends and elaborate notes to the maid. In the time it had taken him to compose a few articles and reviews, the Métropolitain had become a world in its own right.

  By the time he started work on his ‘Parisian novel’ in 1908–fearing that he had left it too late–there were sixty kilometres of tunnels and ninety-six stations. The spread of the Métropolitain was such a normal part of life that newspapers no longer bothered to report the opening of a new line. The original Métro was already a quaint memory. Its sleepers of creosoted beech, which were blamed for breathing difficulties, had been replaced by solid oak. In 1909, the moving staircase at Père-Lachaise, which covered thirty centimetres a second, made the old kind of staircase seem intolerably uncooperative. Hundreds of other escalators followed. The climb out of the depths was now no more arduous than the descent. Lighting was improved, and it became possible to read in the underground. Travellers who were offended by the smell of their fellow passengers could place ten centimes in a slot, hold a handkerchief under a tap, pull the handle and collect a dash of sweet myrrh or ylang-ylang. There were weighing machines, inscribed ‘Know Your Weight–Know Yourself’, and a continually refreshed museum of cheerful pictures: a cow giving milk to a chocolatier, a cod offering its liver to a person with anaemia, a mongrel listening to a gramophone.

  Fears that Parisians would turn into a mindless herd obsessed with time had proved unfounded. Workers and businessmen in every part of Paris were delighted to be able to spend a few extra minutes in bed every morning. The Métro oiled their social activities and lent itself to their desires with unquestioning efficiency. At the music hall–which he sometimes attended in a box, sitting above the thickest layers of tobacco smoke–it was celebrated in songs: Landry’s ‘La Petite Dame du Métro’, Dranem’s ‘Le Trou de mon quai’. Less than ten years after the opening of Line 1, it was impossible to imagine Paris without the Métro. For tourists and returning natives, it was an inexhaustible source of what would one day be called ‘Proustian moments’.

  A patient chemist might have concocted the magic potion: old perspiration reactivated by new; a hint of stagnant water; various industrial lubricants and detergents; cheap scents fr
om a dispensing machine; a selection of hydrocarbons and carboxyls, and, dominating the other smells, pentanoic acid, from brakes and human warmth, which occurs naturally in valerian. It would have surprised him to learn that the infusions of valerian that sent him into the echoing realms of somnolence filled his apartment with an odour that had some of his visitors involuntarily rushing back to the Métropolitain.

  * THE CELESTIAL MACHINE *

  ANOTHER DECADE PASSED, and the great novel was finally nearing completion. The world described in Àla recherche du temps perdu was disappearing in the cratered fields of northern France, but the novel, with its gleaming inscrutability, the flawless circuitry of its sentences and its bewildering modes of efficiency, belonged to the new world as much as passenger aeroplanes and the Theory of Relativity.

  The author, meanwhile, inhabited a dimension where time moved as imperceptibly as an hour-hand. When he dined at the Ritz, he wore the same stiff white collar; his shoes came from Old England and his dinner jacket from Carnaval de Venise. The thin moustache, waxed by the man who had cut his father’s hair, was the kind of impeccable anachronism that inspired devotion in the waiters. The car waiting outside the hotel was the old Renault, which he had refused to allow the chauffeur to replace with a more modern machine. Apart from a few uniforms at the tables and talk about the lack of coal, the war had barely intruded on the Ritz.