Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  Visible in the streets of the Latin Quarter, as Julia first knew it, was the Paris that had existed for hundreds of years but would do so for very little longer. In that Paris, most of the ordinary working people still lived within an embracing culture of poverty. One-woman laundries full of steam occupied basement rooms; cobblers, tapping nails into soles, sat in triangular shelters inserted into any odd corner where one old building protruded further than its neighbour. In other corners, hot-chestnut sellers, as in Bertie’s time, did a steady trade among the chilled and hungry. Meanwhile, those who had slipped from the world of work into destitution, through ill luck, folly or too heavy an attachment to the eternal coup de rouge, slept undisturbed on Metro gratings through which came the dragon’s breath of the tunnels. Others bivouacked under bridges on the quays where, as yet, no politician had had the bad idea of constructing motorways.

  It was still the world in which the Hédevins worked long hours in menial jobs in the restaurant trade, and nursed the dream of one day retiring back to the Lozère. Their small son Paul had been taken there for safety, to grandparents, in 1940, abruptly exchanging the freedom of the streets for that of the hills, rocks and trees that had cradled his ancestors. He had been returned to Paris after the War as a cheerful but almost illiterate eleven-year-old. In the Lozère people had had priorities other than school attendance, and on the farm a boy was always useful. Although he was to settle and marry in Paris, and make his way in turn in the restaurant and hotel business, his identity and values continued all his life to draw upon the peasant roots from which he had come. In the maze of the city he had his own pathways, his own routines.

  But then many born Parisians too continued, throughout the twentieth century, to treat their particular quarter as a known village set in wilder country which they seldom penetrated. Typical in this way was the journalist and novelist Henri Calet. He was born in 1904 in the Montparnasse hospital that received unmarried mothers, grew up to travel the world but always returned to his natal landscape. His most enduring book, Le Tout sur le Tout (‘All About Everything’), takes Montparnasse, just up the hill from the Latin Quarter, as his sacred ground of memory, at once the microcosm of the globe and the sum total of his inheritance.

  The Rue de la Huchette, Elliot Paul’s adopted sacred ground, was in the 1950s still lined with small businesses sellings things in small quantities: grocers, ironmongers, drapers, seedsmen, all characteristic of provincial France, as it had been when the American had lived there twenty-five years before. Milk was ladled from churns into customers’ own cans, yoghurt was sold in earthenware pots which were to be returned. A tiny theatre, newly started in an old warehouse, was the only sign of changes to come. Night after night, two plays by Ionesco were applauded by an audience that had filtered over from a kilometre to the west. Since the end of the War, St Germain des Prés had become the epicentre of fashionably Bohemian Paris.

  Fifty years later the very same plays, La Leçon and La Cantatrice Chauve, are still part of the repertoire at the Théâtre de la Huchette: they are a cherished tradition there. But all around in the street, and in the adjoining alleys of St Séverin, towards St Julien le Pauvre, the scene is transformed. The modest shops have become North African restaurants, take-away counters and Italian pizza bars. You could say that Huchette has, in the very long perspective, regained its old identity, for in the twelfth century it was the street where the mutton-roasters plied their trade. But the present-day loud music, the necklaces of lights, and the grazing hordes of American, German and Dutch tourists that now fill the narrow street are redolent of nothing but the blurring of national cultures and the loss of habitat for ordinary Parisians.

  * * *

  In the 1950s a few remaining old-fashioned restaurants still advertised plats à emporter, usually stewed meat and vegetables, handed out in covered metal bowls on which a deposit was taken. Otherwise, frankfurter sausages with fried potatoes, wrapped in paper, were the only take-away food on sale. These were not eaten in the street, but were carried off to be consumed in shabby rooms. In the Rue Maître Albert, and in the Rues des Anglais, des Rats and de Bièvre, tenants still settled for years in homes whose only water supply was an ornate, verdigris-encrusted tap several flights below. There, in their own kingdom of interconnected courtyards, grubby children in traditional blue or black pinafores played happily in permanent puddles. In such pockets, the bugs that George Orwell had recorded in cheap lodgings twenty-five years before were still a fact of life.

  Elsewhere, bugs and non-existent plumbing had been more or less remedied after the War without pulling down the buildings. But on the grounds of insalubrité, that sonorous word of official French condemnation, there was still extant the long-term plan, carried over from the nineteenth century, to demolish the entire Maubert district. Traditionally, the designation ‘insalubrious’ was based on the local death rate from tuberculosis, and hence on the by then obsolete notion that tuberculosis was caught from buildings rather than from people. In addition, for many years after the War the tuberculosis figures themselves were out of date: the most recent ones available derived from the early 1930s.

  However, this did not prevent them from being used for the Grand Plan that was drawn up in 1950 and ratified a full eight years later. Marked for extinction, along with Maubert, were great swathes of traditional working-class habitat in the north of Paris, in the 15th arrondissement behind Montparnasse and in the 13th behind the Gare d’Austerlitz. Fortunately for the Latin Quarter, the engines of destruction first turned their attention to these larger schemes. Many of the unfortunate working-class citizens in the designated areas were removed to tower blocks a long way out of town, which in a few years more became the breeding ground for newer social evils than insalubriousness.

  In the 1950s Julia knew nothing of the guerrilla warfare then continuing between preservers of old Paris and would-be developers. The high houses of Maubert and the Montagne Sainte Geneviève, palpably so much older than anything surviving in London, seemed to her eternal, as if the irregular buildings were natural rock formations in a mountainous landscape. In those days, entry codes were unknown. Concierges might keep intermittent watch from behind net curtains, but the great courtyard doors for bygone coaches and carts opened readily. You could walk in, as if into a public space, in any daylight hour, and explore further doorways, climb flights of worn stone stairs, admire half-obliterated carvings and the lettering of defunct trades, peer from old windows onto still more hidden inner yards and rooftop views. If you proceeded quietly but purposefully, Julia discovered, looking as if you knew where you were going, no one was likely to question you.

  The Rue des Carmes itself, always a cut above neighbouring Maubert, had not entirely escaped twentieth-century attentions. At its foot, the last of the Rue des Noyers including Alfred de Musset’s birthplace had finally been pulled down, in spite of protestations, in 1930. ‘This is progress,’ wrote a local antiquarian at the time, ‘ignoble progress, and the so-called exigencies of public health, the mania for straight lines, and the urban planners who, on the pretext of renovating a city, smother its soul and its memories.’2 In place of the house and others adjoining was erected the headquarters of a Technical School of Building, in uncompromising Bauhaus brick. Just one stone-fronted house of the same style as the de Mussets’ remained, and remains to this day, along with the surviving trace of the Rue des Noyers in the form of a lowered piece of pavement at the foot of the Rue Jean de Beauvais. A similar drop outside two ancient shops on the opposite side of the Boulevard St Germain indicates the original level of the Place Maubert.

  The upper reaches of the Rue des Carmes lost its old houses on one side to road-widening in the 1920s, but the section below the Rue des Ecoles, which had already undergone some late-nineteenth-century straightening, remained untouched in the 1950s. The Hôtel des Carmes, and another lodging house alongside, hung over the Rue Basse des Carmes and the remains of Napoleon’s covered market, where chickens, old clothes an
d bicycles were still bought and sold. Not till after the Left Bank riots of 1968 would the market site be rebuilt again with another four-square, cloister-shaped building. This is the concrete blockhouse of a new district police station, a classic example of the architecture of paranoia.

  Opposite the Hôtel des Carmes, when Julia took up her abode there, was the house of a Dominican order, almost the last relic of the religious foundations that had once crowded the immediate district. Rebuilt in the 1860s in heavy Gothic-revival style, set back from the street around the remnant of a much older cloister, it was a sunless place of dwindling, ageing occupants, but added an old-world respectability to that section of the Carmes.3

  Like most small hotels then that provided long-term accommodation, the Hôtel des Carmes had no proper lobby or desk. You walked straight in from the street, along a corridor, past an alcove where unwatched keys hung on pegs and there was a bell just in case you should want to summon someone, and then to the spiral staircase that went up six floors to the top of the house. The rest of the ground floor, one-time stabling or storehouse for the monks of the Carmes cloister, was occupied by the family that managed the hotel. Underneath, in the deep cellars, was a jazz club. It had been established there shortly after the War, and in 1948 the film maker Jacques Becker used it as a setting for his Rendez-vous de Juillet. This confirmed and spread the fashion for jazz-cellars, and by the 1950s St Germain des Prés (now conflated in many people’s minds with the Latin Quarter) was celebrated for these seductive, smoky holes.

  The hotel was still very much as it had been when it had sheltered thirty-eight people from many different countries in 1926. But the numbers had increased, and in thirty years the ethnic base had shifted. Now Arab music wailed in some corners, and among the layered smells of damp washing, bought fried potatoes and methylated spirit stoves were those of couscous and spice. Once away from the staircase, down which a faint light penetrated through grimy panes of glass high above, the labyrinthine corridors were completely dark. They burrowed round corners, through big old rooms that had been partitioned into smaller ones, and no two floors were the same. Coming and going between the street and her own eyrie, Julia never learnt the layout of most of the floors in between. Turning the heavy old key to push open the door of her room was like emerging from a forest climb onto a sunlit upland at the top.

  She had a window high above the street, looking over the Dominicans. She had a round table, discarded from some more elegant setting, and two chairs. She had a sagging bed with a bolster, twill sheets and an old feather quilt, a wardrobe with a mirror and some curtained shelves. Behind a screen was a basin with taps that produced cold water and, sometimes in the mornings, warm water too, tinted brown. Underneath the basin was a doll-sized enamel bidet on a stand, with a jug to fill it. The hotel had no bathrooms, and if any of the rooms on the lower floors had shower cabins Julia neither knew nor cared. The lavatories, one to each floor, were by the stairwell, the site to which all Parisian plumbing had naturally gravitated with the invention of the soil pipe, since that had to go down somewhere. Each convenience consisted of a hole in the floor with two ridged surfaces for the squatter’s feet. This, as one of Julia’s new acquaintances said, was ‘more hygienic’ than the pedestal sort, since ‘ainsi tu ne mets pas ton derrière sur n’importe quoi.’

  Of course she got to know new people all the time, superficially. In the hotel itself were a band of rather noisy French male students who greeted her cheerfully – ‘Bonjour la petite anglaise!’ – often followed by some unintelligible joke or query she felt it best to ignore. She was wary of their slang and their deliberately coarse shouts as they bounded up and down the stairs, but half wanted to know them better: they seemed so vital and sure of themselves. In the room opposite hers there were two Brazilian girls who exchanged the odd friendly word with her: one of them was pregnant, and one night came up the stairs sobbing steadily. Later, there were cries, and running feet, but by that time Julia was almost asleep.

  There were other students, Arab these, who led their own life in a sort of kasbah at the back of the first floor, and an older Moroccan who always greeted Julia politely on the stairs, once carried a heavy bag up for her, and once invited her into his room for a glass of mint tea. She sat nervously on the edge of the bed, alert for the moment when he would make a lunge at her. Her rapidly accumulating experience of life led her to expect this would happen, but he just spoke nostalgically of his wife and children in Rabat, and of the sadness of separation. She avoided him, rather, after that. Her own neediness had little to offer to his.

  Her days were, in any case, increasingly populated by young and not so young men. She was pretty, and though her air of concealed desperation must have put some off, it undoubtedly drew others to her. In those days (or so it seemed to Julia) it was the general rule that a man would, of course, try to go to bed with a girl, and it was equally accepted that she would do her best to resist him. The two conventions struck her as rather irrational and extreme, and led to exhausting wrangles, but she went along with them. She struggled, giggling, kissing, demurring, on quiet evening quays by the river – and, once, on the green banks of the Marne where, in an expedition redolent of working-class Paris life before the War, a not so young man had taken her on his motorbike for a Sunday picnic. One evening, a distinguished-looking man rather older than her own father took her to a brothel behind St Séverin. It would, he said, be interesting for her to visit such a place. She was sufficiently aware to guess that he had something more in mind, but she said, poker-faced, How kind it was of him – Yes, it had been very interesting, and now she must go home.

  She had met this gentleman, most respectably, in the home of one of the Pierre-Solange contingent. From some sense of honour, or simple embarrassment, she never told the Pierre-Solanges of this further experience with him.

  She felt herself to be buoyant, managing well. She had escaped from many things.

  Then one night she had a terrible dream.

  She was in the hotel, but could not for some reason reach her own room. She was in one of the lower corridors, in the dark, and could not go back: possibly the stairs were not there any longer, or perhaps some hostile presence was behind her. She could only grope her way forward. But, as she did so, she became aware that in the room at the end of the corridor lay something dreadful, something on which she did not want to open the door. It was a body. It lay on the floor and must, she began to realise, have been there for a long time. Decomposing. No one had found it till now. She knew whose the body was. Horror seized her.

  She woke with a cry. The quilt was twisted round her. She lay there unmoving in the dark. She wanted to go to the hole by the top of the stairs, but was too frightened to get out of bed. Who knew what was lurking behind any of these doors? Or what she might find when she came back …

  At last the short summer night began to bleach into day at the edges of the shutters. She crept out of bed and opened them, breathed the morning air. Far below in the street someone was brushing water about with a twig broom. On the edge of the wall by the dormer window, scored into the old plaster, was an elaborate pierced heart with initials: she had never looked hard at it before. How long had it been there – months? Many years? The walls were lumpy, their paint faded, marked here and there with old nails and stains.

  All at once she knew that beneath the present layer of paint and plaster lay other hearts, other messages, crude drawings and sentimental ciphers, the grimy prints of other hands. Innumerable people, she realised, had been happy and unhappy here before, making love or submitting to another’s needs, wrangling about money, celebrating survival, clinging to one another or plotting escape, being homesick for distant places. They too had looked from this window, whose frame from an unimaginably distant tree was now petrified silver with time. Perhaps people had even died in this room, long before it was a hotel, of consumption or cholera or –? Or abortion. Or despair. Babies may have been born here too, children grown here year by
year. Underneath the present layer on the walls might lie their pencilled heights and names, messages of hope for a future now all past.

  Exhausted by the night, overwhelmed with intimations of a life ahead she could hardly compass, let alone plan, she huddled on her clothes and went out to look for a cup of coffee. But the richness of the vertiginously populated past had reached out and touched her. Although she did not yet know it, it was to shape her own future.

  * * *

  The Pierre-Solanges, as they admitted to her long after, were rather worried about Julia. What was their old friend Tommee thinking of, to leave his little girl kicking around Paris on her own? But they were busy people and did not want to stir up trouble – and perhaps in England, famed for modernity, these things were viewed differently. They contented themselves with inviting her sometimes to lunch, when she ate ravenously and they complimented her on her increasing fluency in French, or to the occasional early evening party at which their sophisticated middle-aged friends found her crude but fetching.