Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  At the end of the street was the ‘Grand Trou des Halles’ where the central markets, known as ‘the Stomach of Paris’, had been cut out. Tourists and Parisians were leaning on the barriers, gazing at the exposed strata and thinking about dinosaurs and Gauls.

  In this ravaged zone, the crowd of inter-epochal Parisians was especially dense. By a wall that seemed to buckle with posters and stickers, gouged by knives and chisels, a man in a short blue coat had been crouching, two centuries before, clutching a door key, carving something on the stone. Restif de la Bretonne had already defaced every parapet on the Île Saint-Louis when he began to etch his way through the quartier Beaubourg. Years later, ‘to make the past live like the present’, he returned to read these messages to his future self and remembered his exact state of mind at the time: ‘10 jun. Reconciliatio: cubat mecum’ (‘Reconciliation: she slept with me’).

  A historian claimed to have discovered some of Restif’s graffiti, but many of the stones had long since been chopped out and replaced, and the door key had never bitten very deeply. Now, there were transfixed hearts and genitals, cave paintings and cartoon faces, and skulls whose eyes grew wider and deeper as the rain and petrol-laden air ate into them. The letters of old slogans had blurred with age, and the ringed As of anarchists were as soft as ancient crosses carved on menhirs.

  The Black Prince, # 3

  THE RAIN IS a bad sign, but it will pass with the night. From Belleville, one hundred and thirty metres above sea level, Paris is becoming more distinct, like a coastline. It might almost be Nice or Constantinople. She looks out towards the centre, where tall cranes flash their red lights at aeroplanes, and waits for the dawn’s slow light to find the edge of the city.

  This time, he will be alone–a chevalier or a prince leaving on a heroic expedition. But they will all be there to send him on his way, the riders who know each other only by their sound. They call him ‘Pascal’, but this is just a name they use to show familiarity. Soon, he will be known to the world by another name. A camera crew is already setting up at the Porte Maillot, and one of the riders is trying to explain to a reporter: ‘It’s like the new radar detectors: you know they exist, but you don’t know where they are.’

  She is dressed in her leathers, and what might be a skirt of chainmail. She stands for another moment at the window, taking a last look at Paris, a helmet under her arm.

  Beaubourg, 31 January 1977

  HERE, THE POET had sat in a wine shop with a bottle of Burgundy and a saucer of walnuts, writing on the back of a letter–‘New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of undressed stone, /Decrepit suburbs, everything becomes an allegory of something else,/And my cherished memories are heavier than rocks.’ Now, in the Paris that Louis Chevalier was forced to inhabit, the sign above the wine shop said ‘Pier Import–All the Orient at a Price You Can Afford’. He headed for the Rue de Rivoli, which still seemed new to him, past snickering neon signs that he could barely decipher: Drugstore, Snack, FNAC, Mic-Mac, Sex-Shop, Self, Le Petit Prince, Halles-Capone.

  Near the corner of the Rue de l’Arbre-Sec, he gave directions to a young lieutenant who was looking for a hotel that no longer existed in a street that had changed its name.

  Chronological anomalies were a normal part of life for Louis Chevalier. But since the redevelopment of the quartier had begun, even people who lived in the present had been noticing an inappropriate coincidence of historical periods. Families who came to see the work in progress were confronted with veteran prostitutes slouching on purpose-built stone staircases that led directly up from the street. Mothers averted their children’s heads and shot a glance at their husbands. Drunken clowns from circuses that had gone bankrupt after the war competed with graduates of the Marcel Marceau School of Mime. Beaubourg summoned up its ancient past, and over the whole Unhygienic Precinct–even when almost nothing remained of it except facades–and all through the corridors of the Châtelet-Les Halles RER-Métro station, there was the potent smell of the centuries: mould, sodden limestone, vomit, cabbage, corpse and cleaning fluid. A deodorizing unit had analysed its composition, but to no avail. Long after the renovation of the Îlot insalubre and the removal of Les Halles to Rungis, the authentic stench of the quartier Beaubourg hung on.

  He made his way back to the Plateau Beaubourg, where he stood, a witness from another age, staring at a blazing wall of light. He had seen the building going up, tube by tube, until now, at last, it appeared to be permanently unfinished.

  HIS CUPOLA gleaming in the spotlights, Giscard stooped as though entering a crypt. Baudouin I, Princess Grace, Presidents Mobutu and Senghor, and all the other personalities and heads of state had long since settled into their seats of chrome and leather when he arrived in the vast aquarial foyer with the wife of Pompidou. It was Claude Pompidou’s first outing since the death of her husband. The late President’s face hung over the foyer in the form of a hexagonal moon made of strips of metal. Even in his fragmented state, he appeared to be chortling like a peasant.

  The guests, who numbered five thousand, had spent the last hour pushing one another towards the escalators and from one floor to the next, looking for the buffet. (Giscard had ordered that no food or drink should be served at the grand opening.) Then the escalators had been stopped, and ‘the Beaubourg’ had filled with sounds of exasperation and the clicking of heels on metal steps.

  Outside, on the tarmac apron that had been the Plateau Beaubourg, a man stood among the onlookers, the world-class buskers and the qualified clowns. If L’Assassinat de Paris had carried illustrations, the artist would have shown him holding a thought-bubble in which Baudelaire’s poem, ‘Parisian Dream’, had been traced in a spidery hand:

  A terrible sight, never seen by mortal eye…

  Irregular vegetation had been banished.

  An intoxicating monotony of metal, marble and water;

  A Babel of stairs and arcades; a palace,

  Infinite, with neither entrance nor exit.

  A tamed ocean passed through a tunnel of jewels.

  The colour black itself had an iridescent sheen.

  No star, no vestige of the sun, even low in the sky:

  All those wondrous things had their own source of light…

  Inside, Giscard picked his way to the see-through podium. He had hoped that the project, starved of cash, would die a natural death. But then Pompidou’s protégé, ‘le Bulldozer’, Jacques Chirac–whose jutting jaw resembled the blade of a bulldozer–had put his weight behind the Centre Pompidou and pushed it through the committees.

  The Centre had, however, proved useful in an unexpected way. On entering the private apartments at the Élysée for the first time as President, Giscard had found himself in the eerie but oddly irritating presence of a stainless-steel sphere. All around him was something like the insides of a transistor radio seen by a man who had shrunk to the size of a flea. This ‘environmental salon’ had been commissioned by Pompidou: polymorphic murals in over five thousand colours changed as one moved about the room, synaesthetically suggesting–and eventually causing–a severe headache. On Giscard’s orders, the ‘kinetic space’ had been removed to the Centre Pompidou where it belonged.

  It was, therefore, with a mixture of relief and distaste that Giscard delivered his muddled and insulting speech of inauguration under the chortling, hexagonal moon:

  Now, and for decades to come, a vast crowd will flow through this Centre. Long waves of humanity will batter the dyke of the museum’s canvasses, decipher the books, gape at the images, and listen to the slippery tonality and syncopation of the music.

  As he spoke, he looked up into the vacuous circuitry of girders and tubes–green for plumbing, blue for ventilation…

  There was, he could see it now, something entirely fitting about the Centre Pompidou. All that rubbish had to go somewhere, and where better than an architect-designed eyesore on a patch of wasteground? It had, moreover, united the Parisian bourgeoisie in loathing and fear of change. The very next day, eightee
n thousand people came to see it, exceeding everyone’s expectations.

  AFTER HIS LONG WALK through the centuries, the historian slept an agitated sleep on the rumpled debris of his bed. Like many Parisians, he would leave his shutters closed, even in the daytime. Only the maid would open them, when she came to wash away the grime. Baudelaire, who had moved from the Quai de Béthune to the other side of the island, had taken the extra precaution of having the lower panes of his window frosted ‘so I can see nothing but the sky’.

  And then I woke up…eyes aflame.

  The horrid slum, the stab of care, the brutal clock–

  Midday!–It was raining shadows and the world was numb.

  The Black Prince, # 4–5(SEPTEMBER 1989)

  SHE HAS STOPPED where the cobbles of the Place de l’É toile meet the cobbles of the Avenue Foch, on the brow of what was once the Colline du Roule. The view down the avenue is a Joan Miró of bleary ochre light and pink splotches in which she sees his red light growing fainter. Few Parisians are about at that hour on a Sunday morning. The road surface glistens with the breath of the night but it will dry out in the breeze. Out beyond the old fortifications, conditions are very different. She catches the sound of the circular wind, and the wash of the traffic sweeping in from the south and the west.

  They have come from all over Paris to see him off. A flotilla of halogen beams escorted ‘the Black Prince’–a.k.a. ‘Pascal’–to the great tidal river of the Champs-É lysées. Halfway up, they stopped at the Pomme de Pain for a chausson pomme and a coffee. It was there that they took the vow of silence a week before. They all have names that might have come from comic books or boutiques–Philou, Coyote, Karolus, Titi, Obelix, Pandore, Princesse.

  She accompanies him as far as the Arc de Triomphe, then watches him embark on the gentle incline of the Avenue Foch. It is five minutes past seven. Just before the Porte Dauphine intersection, he slows down and stops at a light: someone crosses the road in front of him, cautiously, but without looking up.

  From the other end of the avenue, she senses the acceleration as he descends the slip-road, past the rider with the stopwatch.

  GISCARD FELT LIKE a tiny cathedral in a Sempé cartoon, dwarfed by ominous towers. He had saved the Gare d’Orsay and put a stop to the hundred-and-eighty-metre-tall Tour Apogée by the Place d’Italie. He had given the city a perimeter of frustrated skyscrapers truncated at thirty-seven metres. But there was nothing that he could have done to prevent the biggest architectural imposition of all.

  From Porte de la Plaine, it had moved east to Place d’Italie. Advancing at a rate of twenty-three centimetres an hour for eighteen years, it had followed the outer line of the nineteenth-century fortifications, which the Director of Parks and Gardens had earmarked in the 1950s for a ‘Green Belt’ of promenades and playgrounds that would be ‘a reservoir of clean air’. The last section had been completed shortly before Pompidou’s death: from Porte d’Asnières to Porte Dauphine. It was now the most obvious feature of Paris on a map: a wobbly, amoebic circle, in which the monuments of the old city were featureless particles awaiting digestion in their vacuoles.

  Before the Revolution, the tax-wall of the Fermiers-Généraux had raised howls of protest. Surrounded from within, the city had laid siege to itself, and an anonymous wit had penned the memorable line, ‘Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant’: Parisians were muttering about their immurement, bewailing the wall that walled them in. Now, the saying was literally true: Paris was surrounded by a continual murmur, a whispering wall of tyres and tarmac, a caterwauling of combustion engines.

  The Boulevard Périphérique–shortened to ‘le Périph’–made no difference whatsoever to traffic inside the city. The exogenous blood system pumped its corpuscles into a dead body clogged with inert cells. It was called ‘the Ring of Death’ and ‘the Circle of Hell’. It boasted one accident per kilometre per day, and it was thirty-five kilometres all the way round.

  EVENATTHATHOUR, there is a surge and purpose about the traffic. It is essential to reach a safe speed–190–200 kph–as quickly as possible. Drivers nearly always leave a gap of at least a metre, which is all he needs.

  A red light is winking: at some future moment on a different time-scale, that vehicle will begin to change lanes. He allows the machine to relax into its natural velocity: 210, 220 kph…

  The pillars of a tunnel, blazing orange, riffle past like a flick book cartoon. A walkway tilts 25 degrees and vanishes.–0 45.–The next exit, Porte Maillot, is coming up already: the camera on the fuel tank sees the gigantic, maligned tower of the Palais des Congrès craning its neck. Other, inferior towers lean back to let him pass.

  He knows the Périph like a lover’s body: the roughness and bumps between La Villette and Pantin; the surprising curve near the Porte des Lilas, where the road ahead will be invisible for maybe two seconds. He changes down, then back up into fifth.

  A suspension bridge flexes its cables and flounces away. Cars–going where?–flash past in reverse. A tall partition blocks his view: a truck–it has no right to be in that lane–pulls out in front of him, suddenly grows taller, and all at once he is in the same time-zone as the truck. The deck of a bridge begins to rotate on its axis. A line of trees caught in a hurricane or some catastrophic stalling of the planet shoots overhead.

  Perhaps, from where she is waiting, she will hear the scream of acceleration.

  A WHITE PARTITION has been pulled across the room. Here, as Pompidou once complained, less than three hundred yards from the Champs-É lysées, the sounds of the city are muffled and distorted. In front of the partition is a model of the new national library. It consists of four towers, which are said to resemble open books, but without spines or pages.

  No one who enters the office could fail to notice it. Ten million books, in their original, undigitized form, will fill the windows of the towers. In the present state of technology, the books will be destroyed by sunlight, but things move so quickly that–according to what will later be known as the Law of Accelerating Returns–by the time the towers are built, someone somewhere will have invented a special glass that will neutralize the effects of light without dimming its radiance.

  Giscard’s successor is called ‘Mitterramsès’, and this is the ninth year of his reign. He is also known as ‘Tonton’ (‘Uncle’), and hence as ‘Tontonkhamoun’. He comes from Jarnac (sic), on the River Charente. Not since the days when the Parisii cowered behind their wooden stockade has the kingdom been so clearly marked off from the outer world. Nowadays, ‘Inside the Périphérique’ is another way of saying ‘Paris’.

  Every few weeks, Mitterramsès has himself and his advisers taken through the inner city on a ritual itinerary. Sailing down the Seine, within the sacred perimeter, it is noticeable how these ‘Grands Projets’–those he initiated himself and those he inherited from Giscard–go in pairs, on either side of the river, as though the delineated zone were a vast temple complex: Bibliothèque de France and Parc de Bercy, Opéra-Bastille and Institut du Monde Arabe, Musée d’Orsay and Pyramide.

  ‘When I was a student’, he tells the television reporters who interview him in front of the sloping panes of the Louvre Pyramid, ‘I was already rebuilding Paris’. Sandblasted, returfed, repopulated, its windows filled with monitors and cables, the heart of Paris has never looked so new. But the age of monuments is passing. A building is now an obstacle, a reinforced ego, a magnified piece of street furniture. A generation of towers is already marked for demolition, and, standing between the two reporters, Mitterramsès seems to age and shrivel. The Périphérique is no longer a limit; it is the principal avenue of a city that has yet to be identified–according to architects who have seen it from the air. Either that, or it is the centre of the vast new conurbation of Periphopolis.

  Speed is eating away at the urban fabric, altering the shape and density of things. Skateboarders are plying routes of staggering complexity and length, instinctively rediscovering geological events and two thousand years of
urban planning. Practitioners of parkour flip and spring about the city faster than cars, just as Quasimodo scrambled over the face of Notre-Dame.

  ‘The form of a city changes faster, alas, than a human heart!’

  It was time to change the human heart…

  A TRUCKER’S FACE pushed up against the glass, jawbone on the steering wheel, eyes boggling…Nyeeooowww!!!–

  A city falls away to the right, and he descends towards a curved horizon. Concrete ceilings fly overhead like some futuristic dungeon complex.–7 46.–A satellite estate blinded by sound barriers, then a shanty town that has slipped between the carriageways. To the north, behind the gantries that name the invisible suburbs, a colony of towers grows more distant. Contracted by speed, the Périph has a rhythm and integrity that its million daily users will never know.

  The sun rises behind him and then to his right: cars are entering the ‘Circle of Death’ in greater numbers, and there are the first signs of the turbulence that will lead to gridlock later in the day. On the straight section after Gentilly–Montrouge, Malakoff, Porte de la Plaine–the corrugation rattles out a measure of his speed, and he feels the acceleration before it happens.–10 10.

  Two tunnels separated by a heartbeat, then the ribbed carcass of the Parc des Princes dancing down like a space invader–too big to see him shooting underneath, through the long tunnel of the Bois de Boulogne, the echoes catching up and overtaking, before the little road ascending, the streetlamps’ blessing, and the traffic from another, more leisurely age, circling the leafy carousel of the Porte Dauphine.