Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  The bande dessinée artist might have drawn it in between one frame and the next.

  Rising in the west, it reduced the Arc de Triomphe to the size of a mousehole. It redefined horizons and called the shots on perspective. In his mind’s eye, he saw a long, thin shadow fall across Paris, turning the city into a passive sundial. Even before the building was finished, the drawings were coming to life: the scratchy trees, a gratuitous bird, a woman with a pram, businessmen in shiny blue suits and vertically striped shirts, resembling the building they worked in–in effect, fittings.

  Corporate aspirations were written all over its glassy facade. Anyone who saw those three enormous letters at the top of the tower might have mistaken them for the name of the city. Gath, Ashkelon, Athens, Babylon, Gan. Groupe des Assurances Nationales.

  Faced with this towering obscenity, the Minister of Finance–already considering his options–cast his mind back to 1960 and the Rue Croulebarbe…Croulebarbe: it sounded like a name from a fairy tale. No. 33 Crumblebeard Street had set the pattern for the next twelve years. First, the project was a drawing on a display board in a refitted Second Empire drawing room. An innocuous address identified it as a normal part of the city. The architects talked of ‘integration’, as though the monster were to make its home in a convivial and accommodating neighbourhood of the sort depicted in children’s books: the chequered tablecloths of a restaurant, a cat snoozing under a concierge’s knitting, the casual intimacy of clothes hanging in the blanchisserie-pressing. Next, there was a hole in the ground with men and machines moving about inside it. And then, suddenly, it shot up like an elevator, the living-cubes materializing around it as it went, from one floor to the next, in a single day.

  The friendly neighbourhood was gone for good. As for the monster, there were no words to describe it–or very few: a steel tube, a blank panel, then another steel tube followed by a window, in a row of eight panels and eleven windows, with minor variations, multiplied vertically by twenty-three.

  It had more glass in it than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Standing outside 33, Rue Croulebarbe, you could see the setting sun in both directions. Now, after twelve years of urbanisme, it seemed a midget by comparison.

  As Minister of Finance, he had been present at most of the meetings. There had been much talk, he recalled, about transparency: transparent government, transparent buildings. (He could see through the men who sat around the table.) Symbols and metaphors would be brought to life. Why? This was the talk.

  He had serious reasons to doubt the transparency of glass. Twelve years after the scandal of Crumblebeard Street, a man couldn’t walk through Paris without seeing himself everywhere. The city had never been so opaque. Pairs of Parisians everywhere, and every paired pedestrian a self-hating Narcissus.

  It was time to draw the line. And he was the man to draw it…Or his name was not Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

  FIVE YEARS LATER, after becoming President of the French Republic, he drew the line at twenty-five metres, which was for the centre of the city, and for the periphery he set it at thirty-seven metres. This was thirteen and nineteen heights of Giscard respectively–excluding the Eiffel Tower, the Tour Montparnasse, three or four other towers and the rest of La Défense and the Front de Seine, which were already under way. Twenty-five and thirty-seven metres were the new vertical dimensions of the city, and it was a highly popular measure. Almost everyone could see the point of it.

  The Black Prince, # 1

  NORTHERN PARIS at night: the slag-grey hills of Belleville, Ménilmontant and Charonne, overgrown with aerials and chimneys. A lopsided building somewhere near the Porte des Lilas.

  A window on the fourth floor, under the eaves: a young woman sleeps under a wind-blown sheet, dappled by the moonlight or the yellow streetlamp.

  Sounds come through the open window. Something like the wail of a tom cat–Nyeeooowww!!!–draws a ribbon of sound around the outskirts of the city, marking its perimeter. She stirs on the bed, and moves her legs as if to release the tension. For a moment, she is out there with him on the motorbike.

  There are no lights on in the building but it has patches of dirt or shade that almost look like human faces. A man walks past on the pavement below with no discernible features on his face. He turns a corner, slowly, as though he has a long way to go. His shoes are expensive but well worn. The artist shows him leaving a faint trail of white dust.

  Quai de Béthune, 1971

  WHEREVER GISCARD looked in Paris, he saw the works of his predecessor: Pompidou the banker, Pompidou the poetry-lover, Pompidou the President; some might have said the visionary. The chortling, two-faced peasant who kicked him out of the Ministry of Finance.–‘Pom-pi-dou’, like the peeping of a car horn.

  If he hadn’t died in 1974, after less than five years in office, who knows what he might have done?

  Pompidou came from the land of the Arverni, where volcanic plugs jut out of the landscape like ancient, eroded skyscrapers, and the granite pastures are so bleak that an unsilenced engine is like the song of the skylark or the bleating of a calf. When he drove his car in Paris, he wanted buildings to disappear, which, in a sense, they did. He said, ‘It is up to the city to adapt itself to the automobile, not the other way around. We must renounce an outmoded aesthetic.’ His body had already adapted: he had a driver’s sagging hips and jittery legs.

  In 1971, the architects who had won the competition to design the Centre Beaubourg came to see him at the É lysée. First, they saw the President of the French Republic in a suit; then he went away, changed into something more casual and came back smoking a Gauloise, saying, ‘I’m glad I’m not an architect. It must be the most difficult job in the world–all those building regulations!’

  He did not pretend to be an expert, though he did have opinions. Asked about modern urban architecture, he said, ‘Without towers, it can’t exist.’ The reporter from Le Monde looked through the windows of the President’s office and saw the skyline changing as he spoke. ‘Like it or not,’ said Pompidou, ‘you can’t get away from towers.’ Then he added, as though in confidence, ‘And I know I shouldn’t say this, but the towers of Notre-Dame…they’re too short!’

  His wife Claude was better on the details. It was she who decided that the largest ventilation components of the Centre Beaubourg (the roof-top cooling towers and the street-level air intakes) should be white instead of blue.

  THE POMPIDOUS lived in what, to judge by the coffered entrance door with its lions’ heads and wreaths, was a beautiful old town-house on the Île Saint-Louis, at 24, Quai de Béthune. Three hundred years before, property speculators had developed the Quai de Béthune and renamed it Quai des Balcons for marketing purposes. Parisians who passed that way in their powdered wigs thought the exclusive waterfront development an eyesore: balconies spoiled the classical simplicity of the facades and induced the wives of rich financiers to display themselves like prostitutes. In 1934, one of the balconied houses was bought by Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics millionairess. She tore it down and replaced it with a characterless mansion boasting a fashionable porthole window. All that remained of the original building was the entrance door. This was no. 24, where the Pompidous lived.

  The Île Saint-Louis was so quiet in the evenings that one could almost believe that there were still toll-keepers on the bridges and chains to prevent anyone from reaching the island after dark. Next door, at no. 22, Baudelaire had lived as a young dandy with his hookah and his coffin-bed and the old paintings that he bought on credit from a curiosity shop on the island. Pompidou was an admirer of Baudelaire, and of poetry in general. ‘I remain convinced’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘that the face of a young girl and a soft, supple body are among the most moving things in the world, along with poetry.’ His anthology of French poetry included several poems from Les Fleurs du Mal.

  ‘The shivering dawn, in her pink and green dress,

  Slowly advanced along the deserted Seine…’

  ‘Evenings on the balc
ony, veiled in pink mist!

  How soft your breast seemed, and how kind your heart!’

  It was some weeks after the judging of the architectural competition and the first excavations for the Beaubourg, which sent tremors to the most distant parts of Paris (but not to the Île Saint-Louis).

  Pompidou and Baudelaire looked out of their respective windows, smoking cigarettes, blowing thought-bubbles of smoke towards the Left Bank. Only the Rue Poulletier and one hundred and thirty years separated them. The silvery wake of a river rat pushing through sewage could be seen under both windows.

  Baudelaire gazed at the ‘watery suns and muddled skies’ above the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and thought of his mulatto girlfriend’s ‘lying eyes’. He saw the branch of the Seine where the water burbles under the Pont de Sully. He saw the grubby barges and laundry boats, and imagined himself in a city of canals where ‘vagabond vessels from the ends of the earth have come to satisfy your slightest desire’.

  Next door, Pompidou imagined things that no one had ever imagined in that location: a forest of high-tensile steel and cross-bracing girders blotting out the view; a multi-lane overpass soaring through the rooftops, and space-age cars that seem to bulge and contract like tigers as they take the swerves. Where lovers strolled and beggars dreamed, he saw a limited-access freeway, just like the one that already runs along the Right Bank–the Voie Georges-Pompidou–and a thousand windscreened faces shooting out of an underpass, stunned by a sudden vision of beauty (golden domes, turrets, etc.) until a screech of brakes jerks them back to the present.

  The Black Prince, # 2

  POMPIDOU FLICKS his burning cigarette onto the street below. A faceless man walks along the quai. His black shoe extinguishes the butt as he passes. He wears a long coat, from which small amounts of what looks like builders’ rubble trickle out onto the pavement. He reaches the other side of the island and looks up towards the hunched suburbs and the Saturn Vs of the Sacré-Cœur. The clouds are red. Wailing sounds arc over the sky. Somewhere in the hills near the Porte des Lilas, the young woman sits up in bed.

  She thinks of the time when she fell asleep on the saddle, resting her head on her lover’s back, leaning on the black leather. Through the bow of his shoulder, she could feel every bump and tremor, every syncopated rumble of the tarmac. His stillness never worried her. He said, ‘Danger comes from other people.’

  They were already in their mid-twenties, which made it seem as though everything had gone very quickly. At high speed, the changes came slowly and easily–a slight bulge yielding, a readjustment of their twinned bodies. He always said, ‘When something changes, it has to be rediscovered.’

  Seven hours from now, he would try to break the record, which stood at twelve minutes and a few seconds. He would see a Paris that no one had ever seen before, because everything looks different at speed. She slips back under the sheet and stretches out. She dreams of falling asleep on the bike, waking up in a favourite part of Paris: the leafy banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, the Place du Tertre, the Forum des Halles. A false dawn floods the room with yellow light.

  Beaubourg, 250 BC–AD 1976

  THAT NIGHT, Louis Chevalier had walked all the way from the heights of Belleville to the Île Saint-Louis, then back across the river to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. On a map devoid of other markers, his trail would have suggested a network of capillary paths that had grown up haphazardly, or constrained by ancient habits and accidents of geography. He had walked for five miles, through two thousand years of history. Now, he stood on a tiny hill of debris, staring at the ‘Plateau Beaubourg’.

  He knew the area like the back of his hand. Or rather, he knew it as it had been before he was born. (Anything too recent made only a faint impression and met with a blank stare.) He had lectured at the Sorbonne on the history of Paris, to students barely out of the womb, beginning with the Gauls who periodically annihilated their settlement to prevent it from falling into the hands of their enemies. Invited to give his expert views on the city’s modern redevelopment, he had written one of his history books in a room at the Hôtel de Ville above the office where Baron Haussmann had planned the destruction of Paris. He had been a contemporary of Pompidou at École Normale, and had sometimes lunched with the President and a few other normaliens at a little restaurant in the Rue Hautefeuille, where Baudelaire was born, but he had never dared voice his true opinions.

  Now, Chevalier was writing a book called L’Assassinat de Paris. It was the fruit of long walks and readings that had left him up to his knees in the past. He would show the city succumbing to planners and financiers, and, if indignation left him room, he would reconstruct the Paris of his studious memory: ‘Left to itself, History would forget. But fortunately, there are novels–loaded with emotions, swarming with faces, and constructed with the sand and lime of language.’

  He liked to feel the filth of the Beaubourg quartier permeate his body: its smut was an essential part of its history. The original village, built on a mound above the riverside swamp, had been named Beaubourg (Pretty Place) in a spirit of medieval sarcasm. Three of the nine streets in which Louis IX had allowed prostitutes to operate were in Beaubourg, which had once had the rudest street names in Paris: Rue Maubuée (Dirty Washing Street), Rue Pute-y-Muse (Streetwalker Street), Rue du Poil-au-Cul (Hairy Bottom Street), Rue Gratte-Cul (Arsescratcher Street), Rue Troussevache (Cowshagger Street), Rue Trousse-Nonnain (Nunfucker Street) and Rue Tire-Vit (Cocktugger Street), where Mary Queen of Scots was said to have asked her guide, ‘What street is this?’, to which the guide had euphemistically replied, ‘Rue Tire-Boudin, Your Highness.’ And ‘Tug-Sausage Street’ it remained until the 1800s, when it was renamed Rue Marie-Stuart.

  Architectural pearls were forever being found in this squalid zone: curious lintels and casements, a Renaissance staircase in a sordid vennel, the embedded vestiges of turrets and gables, cellars belonging to houses of which no stone survived. Until 1950, hovels had squatted on the roof of the church of Saint-Merri, separated from one another by the flying buttresses.

  The Plateau Beaubourg, where Chevalier stood, was now a ‘parking sauvage’. The rectangular patch of wasteground was used by motorists and by truck drivers serving the local shops. Painted transvestites and other creatures of the night hung around until they were replaced, the just before dawn, by the muscular unemployed, looking for odd jobs at what remained of the markets.

  In the days when buildings were thought to be incurable carriers of disease, the area had been designated Îlot insalubre no 1. It was the first of seventeen Unhygienic Precincts identified by government commissions in 1906 and 1919. In 1925, Le Corbusier had produced a plan–sponsored by a car company–that would deal with insalubrity once and for all. Much of the Right Bank would be flattened and the ‘tubercular’ buildings (and all the other buildings too) would be replaced by eighteen cruciform towers. East–west arteries would allow motorists to cross what had once been Paris in a matter of minutes. Le Corbusier’s secretary, who came in from the suburbs, would never be late for work again. The plan had been shelved, but the idea remained as a dream: Paul Delouvrier, ‘the Haussmann of the suburbs’, who had discovered Paris from the driving seat of his Studebaker convertible, decreed that Parisians should be able to travel about their city at 50–60 kph.

  Several streets in Unhygienic Precinct No. 1 had been swept away in the 1930s as part of the programme of rationalization and sanitization, leaving the area of wasteground, which every night was carpeted afresh with broken glass, condoms and hypodermic needles.

  THIS WAS THE SITE that Pompidou had chosen for a cultural centre and modern art museum. (‘It has to be modern art because we already have the Louvre,’ he explained.) Six hundred and eighty-one teams of architects had submitted designs of bewildering variety: a cube, a bent prong of glass and metal, a discombobulated rhombus, an inverted pyramid, a giant egg and something resembling a wastepaper basket. The winning design was compared to an oil refinery, which pleased the ar
chitects. It made radical use of steel, plastic and colour-coded utility tubes: green for plumbing, yellow for electricity, blue for ventilation, red for hot air. Specially designed seats, ashtrays and noticeboards were an integral part of the design, until they were stolen as souvenirs. Best of all, there was to be an escalator running up the outside in a perspex sheath.

  Most of the local inhabitants were not opposed to the new building. ‘Who wants to live next to that?’ they would ask, pointing at the neighbouring slum from their own section of Unhygienic Precinct. They looked forward to the oil refinery. It would ‘regenerate’ the quartier. All the money went to the west of Paris, and it was high time that the east enjoyed some prosperity. There would be new shops and better drains, and the cafés would once again be full of cheerful customers heaping scorn on the municipal authorities, the President, technocrats, artists, builders, tourists and the young.

  Louis Chevalier hated people for liking Paris in ignorance of what it once had been. To him, Paris was a composite place built up over the ages, a picture book of superimposed transparencies, overpopulated with the dead and haunted by the ghosts of the living. No sooner was a building demolished and replaced than his mind rebuilt it.

  A light rain had begun to fall. His trouser legs felt heavy with the damp; his muscles turned to mud. He walked to the corner of the Rue de la Verrerie and stood in the doorway of Saint-Merri, where, in 1662, the sister of Blaise Pascal had waited for the very first omnibus. (The service was her brother’s idea.) Five buses went by, but all were full, and at last she had turned to walk home in a huff. He retraced her steps a short distance, then entered a side street near the Place Sainte-Opportune. On either side of the street, there were sounds of patient industry. A cobbler was sitting on his doorstep, tapping at a piece of leather. Market traders were passing with their baskets, handcarts, mules, tricycles and gas-fuelled trucks of a kind that was no longer manufactured.