by Baxter, John
To keep up her strength, she was given horse blood—the horses themselves having long since been devoured.
A black market flourished, and crime with it, helped by the brownout that reduced all public lighting to half gloom. Paris was filled with refugees, deserters from the army, and prostitutes forced back onto the streets when, in a misguided attempt at social reform, brothels were made illegal in 1946 and their premises turned over to student housing.
For a lesson in how things can change, I take people to one of Paris’s most popular bistros, the Balzar, just off boulevard Saint-Michel. Today, it’s chic, popular, expensive, the ad hoc canteen for intellectuals from the nearby Sorbonne and Collège de France. In 1998, it was the site of a sit-in by some high-profile clients who feared changes in its style and menu after the Flo restaurant chain acquired it. All came to nothing when the Flo’s CEO, Jean-Paul Bucher, dropped by to reassure them no changes would be made; why would he alter a place he’d bought because he enjoyed eating there? The waiter returned to take orders, and in a very Parisian way, political action segued into lunch.
It was a different Balzar, and another Paris, when American writer Elliot Paul ate there in the late 1940s.
We dined together at the Balzar that evening. The wind had changed direction, slightly, and there was no rain but only a different kind of chill and a sulphur-colored mist around the hooded street lamps. The brown-out had not been lifted. No lights were showing in the windows of the stores on boulevard Saint-Michel. Traffic was sluggish and sparse in the dimness. Two young men, Siamese or Filipinos, sat on a bench opposite two ratty looking girls, not prostitutes but obviously tramps. The men were dour and scowling; the girls looked bored. One of the Filipinos, or whatever he was, took from his side coat pocket a small automatic and laid it on the table, looking sullenly at his girl the while. A waiter came into the scene with a tray of drinks, some coloured, sticky bottled appetizer. One of the Filipinos paid the waiter; the other put the gun back in his side coat pocket. As the waiter turned away, the two brown men looked at one another and suddenly smiled all over their flat round faces.
The Balzar survived and flourished, but you can still see signs of the old darkness. Farther up boulevard Saint-Michel, gashes of shell fragments mark the walls of the Ecole des Mines, the geological school and museum, and the city is sprinkled with plaques indicating that on this particular corner and in this gutter some resistant or maquisard died for his or her country.
Of the world of Manda, Leca, and Casque d’Or, the best reminder is Jacques Becker’s romantic film Casque d’Or, with young Simone Signoret as Amélie and Serge Reggiani as Manda. But Place de la Contrescape, at the top of rue Mouffetard, hasn’t changed substantially since Amélie, then a prostitute of nineteen, met twenty-two-year-old Manda. (As it happens, Hemingway—that man again—lived for a time only a few doors away, on rue Cardinal Lemoine.) The shooting and eventual knifing of Leca took place in les Halles, the old food and meat market, now a park to the north of rue de Rivoli. As for the Santé Prison, its walls of dark volcanic stone remain as grim as when Manda went to the guillotine.
The French stopped using the guillotine in 1977, but the Santé still retains a sinister glamour. For a while during the 1990s, its star prisoner was Ilich Ramirez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, who refused every request from the world press for an interview—except one. The editor of L’Amateur de Cigare, a magazine for cigar lovers, received a note, explaining, “I have just been moved, rather inopportunely, from La Santé prison. Please send all future issues of my subscription to my new residence, the isolation wing of Fresnes jail.” Feeling that their shared enthusiasm gave him an edge, the editor, Louis de Torres, asked for an interview, which Carlos gave, explaining that, though “in a somewhat precarious position as far as smoking is concerned,” he found consolation in reading about great cigars and recalled the summit of his smoking experiences—the opening of a box of Cuban Punch Number 13s on August 17, 1986, to celebrate the birth of his youngest daughter, Elba Rosa. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
Chapter 33
A Little Place in the Nineteenth
Frankly, being just plain American, I lack the sensitivities that influence a Parisian’s absolute preference for one quarter over another, based on social and real estate calculations that are opaque to mere étrangers. All of Paris seems great to me.
DIANE JOHNSON, Into a Paris Quartier
Occasionally, a visitor, gripped by the longing that accompanies the end of a stay in Paris, will ask wistfully, “How easy would it be to buy a place here?”
“A place?”
“Oh, nothing like this.” Usually they’ve rented a studio apartment in one of the low-numbered arrondissements, an easy walk from the Louvre and the smarter restaurants. “Just a pied à terre.”
They don’t need to be more specific. I know the dream. A winding wooden staircase, worn hollow by generations of feet. The door at the head of the stairs, opening onto a neat studio; an antique bed, draped in a faded, handmade quilt found in a country brocante; the tiny kitchen, with milk, butter, confiture, and a baguette, still warm, on the countertop, courtesy of an obliging concierge warned of your arrival; and, of course, your own little terrace, with a view over the zinc roofs of Paris. . .
“It can’t be that difficult, surely?” they continue. “The sixth is impossible, of course, but what about . . .” They wave in the general direction of Montmartre. “A little place—in the nineteenth, say, that just needed a bit of fixing up.”
This, I think, would be a good place to tell them about my friend Chloe.
Parisienne born and bred, Chloe writes for one of the big weeklies.
“You’ve moved,” I said last time we met.
“To the dix-neuvième. You and Marie-Do must come for dinner. When it’s fixed up.”
“Still working on it? But it must be, what, a year?”
“Eighteen months.” She sighed. “It’s a long story.”
The nineteenth arrondissement is an old area of working-class housing. Most of us, if we see it at all, do so from the freeway, heading out of town. But Chloe and her partner Hervé thought they had found a gem. The two-story row house was one of eight on a little allée running off a busy suburban shopping street, close—but not too close—to Paris’s outer beltway, the périphérique. It dated from the 1860s, as did the rough-cut stone blocks that paved the allée. A large basement ran under the house, and it had a tiny garden at the back.
“It looks . . . promising,” Chloe told the realtor. And cheap! Too cheap perhaps?
“The price is negotiable,” said the realtor, arousing their suspicions even more.
They understood the moment they arrived. Five cars filled every parking space.
“Clients of M. Barthelémy.” The realtor indicated the butcher across the street. Apparently his clients used it as a convenient parking lot.
It got worse as they neared the house. Steps from the street led down to a basement, the door of which was wide open. Just inside, a man in dirty underpants snored on a stained mattress. An argument raged in the gloom behind him. Over all hung a reek of decay and old piss.
A quiet street in the nineteenth arrondissement
“Unfortunately,” began the realtor, “you have . . .”
A girl in dirty jeans, grubby T-shirt, and bare feet came to the door, glared up at them. “If you’re not looking for a fuck,” she said, “fuck off,” and slammed the door.
“ . . . squatters,” he finished.
They bought the house anyway, and petitioned the authorities to install a lockable gate across the end of the allée.
“As you see,” said Hervé, presenting the sheaf of forms to Madame Bayard, the arrondissement’s officier d’habitation, “all residents of the allée are in agreement.”
“Yes,” she said. Her expression conveyed the wariness of someone who has learned from long experience that nothing in France happens eas
ily. “However, an objection has been lodged.”
It appeared Barthelémy the butcher wanted to hang onto his free parking lot.
“We have the right to park on our own property,” protested Chloe.
“Indeed. But he claims his business would suffer if there was a gate.”
“That’s his problem. It doesn’t give him the right to use our parking space!”
“Oh, I expect you would prevail if it went to court. But an appeal can drag on. You might like to negotiate.”
A few weeks later, for €10,000, M. Barthelémy agreed not to oppose the gate, and instead to send his customers down the block, where the Champion supermarket had just built a nice new parking lot.
“Now les squatters . . .” said Chloe when she and Madame Bayard next met.
“We prefer ‘occupants sans title.’ ”
“As you wish.” Chloe produced another dossier. “These list numerous complaints and arrests for drug dealing and prostitution. The people must be removed.”
“The mairie has no right to do that. It is a matter for the police.”
The commissaire de police could have been Madame Bayard’s twin. “To get rid of these people would require a court order. And I should warn you that these are not granted lightly. There is the question of rehousing. The authorities may feel these people are less trouble on your premises than on the street.”
“Can we eject them?”
“In theory, yes. But they could sue for damages if anyone is injured, or loses personal property, or is deprived of earnings.”
“From selling smack. And whoring?”
“I doubt they could make that stick,” the commissaire conceded. “But many businesses are conducted from home. They might claim to be, for instance, therapists—or financial consultants.”
Chloe tried and failed to imagine clients descending into that filthy cellar for emotional or fiscal counseling.
“So we’re helpless?”
“Not entirely. We can do nothing, officially. But you might like to write down this phone number.”
Chloe noted the number. The commissaire himself didn’t put his own pen to paper. Plausible deniability.
“You should have seen the guy he sent us to.” Chloe lifted her shoulders and hunched her head until her neck disappeared. Her whole pose conveyed “thug.” “We only ever knew him as Serge. His surname name ended in -vitch. All their surnames ended in -vitch.”
“All? How many were there?”
“Eight. Big blokes—and organized. Obviously ex-army, probably Special Forces, but not French. Speznatz? Stasi? Belarus? Romania? Anyway, the first thing we knew, a Portakabin appeared on the main street—those prefabricated offices they put on building sites?”
“Yes . . .”
Not seeing at all. Why were Paris stories never simple?
“The next day, midmorning, Serge and his boys just . . . materialized. All in black. They marched into the basement. Four of them swept up clothes, bedding, anything portable, and transferred it in the Portakabin. Only a couple of the squatters were in the house, but they bolted, barefoot. Four more of Serge’s boys stood by with new doors, steel-faced, with proper locks. It didn’t take more than ten minutes to hang them. At the end, I gave Serge five thousand in cash and he handed us the keys. In two days, the stuff in the Portakabin disappeared. Then the Portakabin. We never saw the squatters again.”
“And no retaliation?”
“Serge and his friends had a quiet word. That’s all it needed. If you’d have seen them, you’d understand.”
“But this is months ago. You still haven’t moved in?”
She sighed. “Ever heard of the Law of January 17, 1992? It controls the restoration of historic buildings. It seems . . .”
But I’d stopped listening.
Chloe’s story would demonstrate perfectly the drawbacks to buying an apartment. But Paris subsists on fantasy. Who was I to crush one, particularly as fragile as this. “I have spread my dreams under your feet,” wrote W. B. Yeats. “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” I’m not that cruel.
“A little place in the nineteenth? Why not? I’ll keep an eye open. You never know.”
Chapter 34
A Walk in Time
Last night I walked alone all over Paris, searching and searching for miles on end. Toward two in the morning, tumbling with fatigue down one of those empty lanes between the Luxembourg and the boulevard Saint-Germain, I suddenly heard the hollow tones of wooden-heeled footsteps approaching from far behind. I smiled to myself, slowed my pace, the feet came nearer, growing louder, swifter. When they were nearly upon me I shivered and was thrilled. Then the steps passed me—but I saw no one. The regular clack of the feet walking before me grew fainter, farther away, turned a corner and disappeared. But I hadn’t seen a soul. . .
NED ROREM, The Paris Diary
In most cities, it’s best to stay out of alleys. Not so in Paris, however. For one thing, allée in French doesn’t connote squalor and danger. An allée—or cour or impasse or pas—can be what’s called a “mews” in Britain: the courtyard behind a line of town houses where owners kept horses and carriages or, in earlier times, hunting falcons and hawks. It can even be the lane running alongside a park, lined with the sort of town houses that feature in Architectural Digest.
But, squalid or glamorous, all alleys have the same appeal to me. It’s like going backstage in a theater and seeing the machinery that maintains the illusion. Also, it’s surprising how often, while the front door of a historic building may be locked, even guarded, a door on the alley is ajar.
Everyone who visits Montparnasse walks along rue Campagne Première. Some are there to see where Jean-Paul Belmondo is shot down and expires in Jean-Luc Godard’s Au Bout de Souffle. Others pause at number 31—the admirers of architecture pay tribute to André Arfvidson’s tile-covered apartment block, a piece of secessionist Vienna transported to Paris. Others know Man Ray lived and worked here. But try cutting through the back alley picturesquely named Pas d’Enfer, the Passage of Hell, and see how Arfvidson, in those prerefrigeration days, built exterior chill cabinets into every apartment—small larders to store meat and milk, accessible only from inside, but with a few bricks missing to allow cooling air to circulate.
The Cour du Commerce, drawn in 1899
At the foot of rue de l’Odéon, on a narrow island of asphalt, in front of a cinema and a café, a statue marks the former home of Georges Danton, one of the men who made the French Revolution. He stands in heroic pose, right foot forward, arm outflung. At one knee crouches a rifleman, at the other a boy with a drum. Both look up adoringly. (He appears, to tell the truth, a bit silly. John Glassco made fun of the statue: “It’s the study of an angry child—a picture of outraged appeal, say to his mother over some injustice, like the theft of a toy by his elder sister. He’s even pointing to her in the distance.”)
Off to the right, you can just see the gates of the Abbey of the Cordeliers. The future revolutionaries, barred by the crown from renting a hall, borrowed one from the cordeliers—Franciscan monks who cinched their robes with cord. From 1791, they moved across the road, so I do the same, to the corner of a little one-block street called rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, because the old national theater, the Comédie Française, held its first performances there.
The Procope, where the plotters gathered in secret, is Paris’s oldest café. Here the plotters coined the revolution’s incendiary slogan: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
You can, if you like, take the tourist route down rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and admire the Procope’s now-elegant frontage, with its display of oysters and its high-priced menu. I prefer to go round behind and, through an ancient arch, enter the Cour du Commerce Saint-André.
Yes, it looks uninviting. Walking by on boulevard Saint-Germain, you wouldn’t give it a second glance. Even Danton on his plinth seems to turn up his nose. It hasn’t changed much since 1732, when the Cour du Commerce was nothing b
ut a ditch to channel storm water and worse as it rushed out of rue de l’Odéon. It still looks more like a gutter than a thoroughfare. A sidewalk clings to one edge. Ancient cobbles pave the rest, with gaps between to trap the careless high heel. Subsidence has dragged down the left-hand gutter. Buildings on that side, including the rear of the Procope, lean outward unpleasantly.
Why, then, am I drawn back to it? At least once a week, I stop walking and let people eddy around me as I stare up at the crooked roofs and attics or finger the scabbed paint and rust on a rail.
Fiction and films have taught us to see revolution in epic terms. Masses of people, usually with flaming torches, pour into plazas and besiege palaces that cover entire blocks. Speeches are made from balconies, statues toppled, treasuries looted, mansions burned. But true sedition is a secret business, plotted by a few desperate men and women in cellars at dead of night. Manifestos are composed by lamplight, behind locked doors. And printed in alleys like this.
That’s how it was in 1789. The most significant events took place in an area the size of London’s Soho or New York’s Greenwich Village; my neighborhood, in fact. The great assault on the Bastille prison in July 14—still France’s national holiday—fell flat when they found only seven prisoners inside. They burned it anyway, killed the governor, and paraded his head on a pole, but one can’t escape a sense of anticlimax. Hollywood did it better. Their Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities was a block square, and the crowd rivaled that of the Rose Bowl.