They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  These days, the Left Bank is a poor echo of its glorious heyday. True, a handful of bookshops remain, nestled among the fashion boutiques – including a new Shakespeare and Company, named after the original Sylvia Beach enterprise. The cafés of the Lost Generation are still there. One can still check out Les Deux Magots or the Café de Flore, if forking out a mini-fortune for a continental breakfast is not an issue. But don’t expect to find a philosopher sitting next to you, if you do. Most likely, you will be nudging elbows with another tourist like yourself, trying to catch a glimmer of the elusive past through a glass darkly. The sixth arrondissement, home to St Germain-des-Prés, is the most expensive in the whole of Paris: at €9,790 per square metre,8 it fits the budget of bankers and film stars more than the ideas-rich and cash-poor intellectual of the avant-garde. There are a few corners left that retain a trace of authenticity: the Café Fleurus, a place where film deals are still made; the tranquil and birdsong-filled tearooms of the Grande Mosquée or Great Mosque of Paris, a favourite haunt of the actress Catherine Deneuve;9 or the lively rue Mouffetard near the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter, bustling with small restaurants and shops and a thriving street market. The student area around the Sorbonne, in fact, is the part of the Left Bank that has best retained its authenticity, alive with the vitality that comes from the presence of the young.

  If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AMERICAN WRITER (1899–1961)

  But where are the Paris avant-garde now? Many are in London, Dubrovnik or Istanbul. Although some of the artists and writers who stayed on in Paris do rent tiny chambres de bonne on the Left Bank – all that is now available to them at an affordable price – many others have found new haunts in which to cogitate, deliberate and procrastinate: mainly on the now trendy Right Bank of the Seine. Initially, there was the Jewish quarter of the Marais, and then – when the bankers and clothes boutiques followed them there – they fled further to the north of the city, to the picturesque and rustic banks, bridges and ateliers of the Canal St Martin. Take a stroll on a sunny evening along the bridges of the Canal, past the row of sugar-cube-coloured, pink-, yellow- and green-painted ateliers running along the cobbled bankside, and you might – if you are really lucky – eavesdrop on a conversation about Existentialism. And it might – you never know – even be in French.

  Myth Evaluation: False. The Left Bank is a haven of bankers, lawyers and established film stars.

  THE PARIS MÉTRO STINKS

  Métro c’est trop / The Métro’s too much

  TITLE OF A SINGLE BY FRENCH PUNK BAND TÉLÉPHONE, 1977

  Anybody who has visited Paris and taken the underground will have been at least once assailed, on descending the escalator into the bowels of the station, by the unique and pungent odour of the Paris Métro. A distinctive exhalation even today, it appears – if historical accounts are anything to go by – to have been overpowering in the past. The 1945 US Occupation Forces handbook attempting to dispel American GIs’ prejudices against the French, 112 Gripes about the French, refers to the common American complaint that ‘you ride on the subway and the smell almost knocks you out, Garlic, sweat – and perfume!’ The author of the leaflet goes on to explain that the odour of garlic arises from the fact that the French, ‘who are superb cooks, use more of it than we do’; that the stench of sweat is due to the French having to use ‘a very poor ersatz soap’; and that the perfume comes from the fact that ‘French women would rather smell of perfume than unwashedness which they dislike as much as you do.’*

  * The origins and causes of the myth of the unwashed French are examined separately in the chapter dealing with this subject, here.

  Fifty years later, although certain constituents of the old odour had changed, a peculiar smell nevertheless still lingered in the subterranean passages of the Métro. The British journalist John Lichfield observed in 1998:

  ‘The smell of the Métro – something between burnt air and rotting bananas – is a characteristic Parisian experience: as much a part of the city for visitors as the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Elysées. The magic formula is, or used to be, a delicate blend of scorched rubber, sweat and sewers. It also used to include the heavy scent of Gauloises and Gitanes, until cigarettes were banned from the Paris underground a decade ago.’10

  Nor have complaints about the emanations in the Métro been limited to foreigners. ‘I hate people. They stink in the Métro, and they stink on the pavements,’ wrote the modern French philosopher and writer Pierre Boudot; and the American-French author Julien Green noted in his journal in 1949 that his friend, the writer André Gide, ‘descends into hell in the Métro’.

  The Métro is an eminently Sartrean place where, in claustrophobic confrontation, each passenger becomes the prey of all the others.

  FRANÇOIS MAURIAC, FRENCH AUTHOR AND NOBEL PRIZE WINNER (1885–1970)

  These days, the Parisian Métro no longer reeks of garlic (as we have already seen, consumption of this pungent herb has declined sharply in France), nor of Gitanes (cigarettes were banned, as Lichfield notes, in the 1980s). Yet it is certainly true to say that the Métro still retains a distinctive parfum of its own. Every station offers a different olfactory cocktail. It might be top notes of sulphur, rotten eggs, dirty socks and urine, counterpointed by base notes of cleaning products containing fake lavender (Châtelet-Les Halles); or mouse droppings combined with scorched train brakes, permeated with a hint of cheap aftershave (Pigalle); or the damp odour of tourist sweat, tinged with fake Chanel 5 and Rive Gauche at the Champs Elysées, the underground car parks adjacent to the station being regularly sprayed with cheap scent to give a refined impression to those visitors too naïve to smell a rat.*

  * À propos of which: if you think you smell a rat on the Paris Métro, you probably can. There are estimated to be 6–8 million sewer rats in the city, and in 2011 there were 1,716 complaints related to the presence of rodents.

  And not only does the Métro’s unique bouquet vary from station to station, but it also differs according to the season and time of day: sour body odour in the summer; clammy raincoats and damp fog in the autumn; wheezy exhalations and coughs in the winter.

  But there is more to the undoubtedly peculiar scent of the Métro than mere bodily exhalations. Analysis by experts has found that the different underground aromas are in fact due to a complex mixture of chemical reactions, unique to each station. Take, for example, the distinctively pungent odour to be experienced in the central Parisian station of Madeleine – unfortunately nothing like the appetizing aroma associated with the eponymous cake of Proustian fame. Especially powerful at the notorious platform where Métro Line 14 stops at Madeleine station, this subterranean exhalation is caused by the slow release of hydrogen sulphide (the gas that famously smells of bad eggs, an essential component of the stink bomb) into the station tunnels. Its presence here – fortunately in quantities well below asphyxiation level – is said to be due to fluid from the water table above the station seeping down through organic matter, and infiltrating the station through walls and ceilings.*

  * This seepage not only releases a nasty niff, but also produces a wonderful array of rusty-brown ferrous stalactites on the Métro ceiling.

  The often unsavoury smell of the Paris Métro has long been a source of concern to the city’s transport authority. The RATP (or Régie autonome des transports parisiens, the French government agency that runs the Métro) devotes some €65 million a year to trying to combat the infamous underground odours, including enlisting the assistance of an army of trained perfume experts to try to find a cure for the Métro’s malaise. These consultants are members of an élite group of French master perfumers known as Les Nez (literally ‘Noses’), whose more traditional vocation is to concoct commercial fragrances for the massive French perfume and pharmaceuticals industry. In 1998, the authorities even tried to introduce a new, speci
ally designed perfume in the Métro cleaning products: named ‘Madeleine’ after the notoriously malodorous station of the same name, it was said to be composed of ‘lemon, orange and lavender, with an extra hint of floral bouquet and underlying woody notes, accompanied by vanilla and musk’. (This same scent was also introduced into the London Underground on an experimental basis in 2001, but was withdrawn after just one day when passengers complained of feeling sick.) The authorities have tried everything, all in vain: perfume pulverizers on the trains, scented cleaning products, sprays, even ‘micro-balls’ of perfume on the ground, invisible to the human eye, which are said to explode under passengers’ feet and prolong the diffusion of the scent.

  On the other hand, while it may be repugnant to foreigners in Paris, there is evidence that many Parisians take a tolerant, and even affectionate, view of the familiar and comforting scent of the Métro. In the process of researching the olfactory preferences of Métro users in the late 1990s and 2000s, the RATP made the surprising discovery that, while customers equated certain specific smells – particularly human body odour and excrement – with danger, they also had a distinct concept of a defined and unique ‘Métro’ scent, to which they were extremely attached. They felt very strongly that the Métro did and should continue to have an odour of its own, that it should ‘smell of itself’, retaining its unique imprint or griffe.11 Thus, despite the fact that Parisian commuters expressed revulsion for the Métro’s ranker odours, they apparently harboured feelings of nostalgia for the steamy, womb-like security of the carriages, their tang of disinfectant and bleach, and for the warm stench of scorched tyres and burnt-out train brakes at the end of the day.

  There’s no better place than the Métro for hating the human race.

  PHILIPPE JAENADA, FRENCH WRITER (b.1964)

  For the ingénue just arriving in the Métropolis from the provinces (a motif that has been endlessly rehearsed in French cinema and literature), the subterranean emanations of the underground represent part of the essence of life in Paris, along with the smell of tobacco in the streets in winter and the scent of bleach in the cafés in the early mornings. Thus the child heroine of Raymond Queneau’s cult 1959 novel Zazie dans le Métro (‘Zazie in the Métro’), newly arrived in Paris for a weekend with her uncle, has only one desire: to plumb its depths (she never does, because the Métro is characteristically on strike for the whole of her visit). With their down-and-outs, graffiti-scrawled trains and troubling palette of aromas, Métro stations – like the Vespasienne public urinals of old (see here) – remain louche places of both fascination and danger, where the humdrum life of the city teeters on the brink of something darker.

  And so to this day, despite the best efforts of the RATP to fumigate the Métro, it defiantly clings to its age-old smell. The nostrils of the traveller who gets off Line 14 at Madeleine are, as they have been for decades, still assailed by the stench of rotten eggs. Visitors to Paris who cannot abide the perfume that most characterizes the subterranean passages of the city would perhaps be well advised to take a taxi; alternatively, one can just adopt the Parisian point of view, and revel in the poetry of the city’s olfactory psychogeography. As Queneau said of his heroine Zazie, in an unpublished note to the original novel, in which he finally allowed his heroine to achieve her desire to enter the legendary labyrinth:

  ‘The mouth of the Métro smelled powerful… an odour of dust, of an iron-rich and dry dust, an odour which Zazie thought of as new and raw, and which she inhaled with enthusiasm.’12

  Myth Evaluation: True. The Parisian Métro still smells most peculiar, although garlic and Gitanes have now been replaced by unusual chemical odours. However, for complex socio-cultural reasons comprehensible only to Left Bank intellectuals and Deconstructionist philosophers, the unique and irrepressible odour of the Paris Métro is not noxious, but apparently – in anthropological terms – a nexus of urban experiences encompassing alienation, excitement, repulsion and danger.

  PARIS IS THE EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CANINE EXCRETA

  Q: How can you tell an American in Paris?

  A: He’s the one picking the poop up after his dog.

  POPULAR JOKE AMONG AMERICAN EXPATS IN PARIS

  This is one of the longest-running foreign beliefs about the streets of Paris. From Carrie Bradshaw’s hazardous and ill-fated excursion to the city of smoke, strange language and dog poop in the series Sex and the City (involving the inevitable skidding of her stilettoed heel in a pile of viscous dung) to the Merde series by Stephen Clarke, the evacuations of man’s best friend have become as much a part of the Parisian scene as the bistros or the cast-iron street lights. It seems, moreover, that even the French agree that the City of Light has a somewhat murkier aspect to its pavements. The French journalists Laure Watrin and Layla Demay, for example, make the following unflattering observations relating to the development of their children’s vocabulary in Paris as compared to New York:

  ‘Paris has not falsely assumed its status as the City of dog poop. If in New York, the first word of our children was ‘‘taxi’’, in Paris it was ‘‘dog mess’’. And when our Big Boy was seized with an urgent need without a toilet in sight, he said: ‘‘It’s no big deal, I’ll do it on the pavement.’’ Faced with our horror and categorical refusal, Big Boy replied: ‘‘But it’s not fair, the dogs have the right to do it, why not me?’’ That really is a dog’s life. Here, Rover has more rights than Junior.’13

  Oh God, murmured Durtal forlornly, What whirlwinds of ordure I see on the horizon!

  JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS, FRENCH SYMBOLIST WRITER (1848–1907): A PRESCIENT VISION OF PARIS FROM THE NOVEL LÀ-BAS (‘DOWN THERE’), 1891

  Unfortunately, a survey of the available evidence – including many years of walking (or rather, slipping on) the streets of France’s capital city – would tend to validate the myth. Paris’ canine population of some 300,000 dogs dump about 20 tonnes of dog dirt on the pavements every year, which amounts to a kilo of merde hitting the capital’s sidewalks every five seconds (enough, in total, to fill three Olympic swimming pools).14 In fact, it is rumoured that the Olympic dimensions of Paris’ dog-fouling problem is what lost it the chance to host the 2012 Olympiad. The Japanese, a people famed for their cleanliness, are said to have been particularly concerned about the health hazards raised by the prospect of athletes pounding slippery pavements. Possibly with good reason: every year, 650 Parisians are hospitalized from slipping on pavement dog deposits.15 And the problem is not limited to Paris, but extends to most of the major cities of France (and even to the Francophone enclave of Brussels in Belgium).

  The municipal authorities have done their utmost to try to reduce the amount of merde on the pavements of France’s major cities. When Jacques Chirac was Mayor of Paris, he introduced a fleet of bizarre and much-ridiculed motorbike poop-hoovers known officially as caninettes and in the vox pop as motocrottes: a strange breed of green tuk tuk equipped with an aspirator to zap up offending deposits, the cabin at the back serving as a repository not of passengers, but collected ordure. However, the motocrottes cost a fortune and only dealt with a tiny percentage of the problem, so they were abandoned in 2002 and are now just an eccentric footnote in Parisian municipal history. Since then, the authorities have sensibly focused not so much on cleaning up after the canine culprits as educating them – or rather, their recalcitrant owners – to clean up after themselves. Allowing one’s dog to foul the pavements in Paris, as in many other European capitals, is now punishable by a fine. A recent poster produced by the mairie of Paris, featuring a paradisal beach besmirched by canine defecation, seems to have prompted a certain amount of soul-searching and consequent poop-scooping by Parisian pet-owners. Yellow-jacketed ‘canine counsellors’ wander the city streets at the times and places known to be favoured by dog-owners for dumping excursions, ready to deliver a lecture on canine hygiene practices and armed with free collection bags. There is even a programme of street lectures and talks on pavement etiquette, including how to get one’s do
g to defecate in the gutter (a virtually impossible feat, as any dog-owner will testify). It is an uphill task. Accustomed to delegating most things (including waste disposal in all its forms) to the state, French dog owners are proving characteristically recalcitrant on the canine excreta issue. As one French writer has observed: ‘A French dog-owner won’t accept someone telling them to make their dog use the gutter. Endowed with civic spirit, Americans take care to clear up their dogs’ mess. The French would never stoop to do such a thing. They don’t have the same sense of civic duty.’16

  SHIT IN A SILK STOCKING (skip)

  The word merde first appeared in the twelfth-century satirical collection of tales, Le Roman de Renart. The French often refer to it euphemistically as le mot de Cambronne (‘the word of Cambronne’). This is a reference to General Pierre Cambronne (1770–1842) who, when called upon to surrender at the Battle of Waterloo by the British general Sir Charles Colville, is famously said to have responded with this single, forceful expletive. The incident was recounted by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables (1862).

  Cambronne’s supreme commander wasn’t averse to using the term, either. Napoleon is reputed to have once told the diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, whom he suspected of betrayal, ‘Tenez, vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie!’ (‘Why, you’re just shit in a silk stocking!’). As soon as the Emperor had made his exit, Talleyrand supposedly plucked up the courage to observe: ‘What a pity, sirs, that such a great man was so badly brought up!’

  In contemporary French, merde is most frequently used as a mild swear word rather than designating the bodily excrement of man or canine (the latter would more likely be described as crottes de chien). It is still used, however, by actors to wish each other luck on stage – the equivalent of the British phrase, ‘break a leg’. The origins of this usage seem to date from a time when the success of a play was gauged by the long line of carriage horses drawing up outside the theatre, depositing an impressive quantity of dung on the thoroughfare.