Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  For those of us who continue to live in Paris, it’s at times painful to observe how the city continues journalistically to be painted more in memories and dreams than in truth. The story of the expat American writer in the Paris garret is one of the great cliches of the century. And one that just won’t go away. It’s hard to forget that afternoon in the late 80s when I got my 90-second on-camera chance at stardom: for a 4-minute segment on American Writers in Paris, CNN completely rearranged my apartment to fit the decor of a pre-determined thesis statement. And in the great young tradition of sound-bite editing, I went on record as affirming exactly what I’d been trying to dispel: the cliches no longer applied.

  The fact is that most people who write about this city don’t live here and write for others who also don’t live here, many of whose only travel need is to imagine Paris. One guidebook editor once explained to me that 25 percent of the Paris guides sold in the United States are purchased by people who’ll never make the trip. Nonetheless, some five million do actually arrive each year, and the terms in which they visit Paris and return periodically are the ones I’d like to help freshen-up. First, we have to get beyond the Marais and St. Germain-de-Prés and wander out into the outer districts and banlieu proche in search of what remains of a Paris populaire, the Paris that President Jacques Chirac as former mayor sacrificed to the delight of private developers. Moving to Montreuil at first was painful in that somehow an American in Paris who is not within eyeshot of the Seine tends to wonder what he or she is doing here. But the move from the bourgeois rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement to the banlieu rouge was a pertinent step into being part of Parisian life as opposed to remaining just an admiring spectator.

  Bringing you to Montreuil helps reveal much about the Paris that travelers and visitors don’t see and rarely come to know. And telling its story becomes a vehicle for slashing back much of this sappy, albeit pleasurable, fairy tale and enhancing perhaps a new urban serendipity.

  Montreuil, industrial and delivery-truck studded, is not particularly pretty, it has no outstanding monuments, and brags of nothing exactly quaint. Once upon a time it was France’s leading manufacturer of bonbons and porcelain-headed dolls. Today, the town makes knock-off prêt-a-porter, and is loaded with noisy print shops and binderies. The sharp steel sculpture in honor of the Resistance movement which towers over the Place Duclos at the Croix-de-Chavaux, although admirable for its message, is reminiscent of the hideous eastern bloc aesthetics of the fifties and sixties. No, it’s not beauty that drives Montreuil. In fact, in the late winter when the municipal Christmas lights are belatedly swinging in the breeze over the shabby rue de Paris beyond the Porte de Montreuil, I think more of East Orange, New Jersey than Paris, France.

  But don’t be mistaken; Montreuil is not East Orange.

  Montreuil-sous-Bois today, when mentioned in the guidebooks, is noted for its bustling Marché aux puces, where great piles of used dress shirts and slacks, neckties and lacey blouses at ten francs an item await being picked over. This can be seen as a metaphor. Montreuil is also known for its colorful patchwork of multicultural residents, a fact the town advertises as an asset with its plastered slogan Vive la difference! More Malians, for example, live in Montreuil than anywhere else in the world, except, of course, Mali. The Malians of Montreuil, mostly from the Kaye/Yelimane region of Mali, subsidize many of the local development projects back home with the active support of Mayor Brard, who is a local hero in this sub-Saharan nation. Sixty-three languages are spoken by the kids in the town’s public schools—languages that most anglo-saxons haven’t even heard of, like Bambara or Pull or Mori or Kabile. Along the rue de Paris, one finds felafels, pilpil, nems, gyros, crepes, roasted sheep heads, spicy olives... Around the Robespierre Métro station, stunning, coalblack women in brightly patterned batiks walk past with multiple babies bundled on their backs. My ten-year-old son’s best friend, Mamadou, lives a few hundred meters away from us in a family cluster that includes his polygamous father and a dozen siblings and half siblings. Mamadou calls my son his “frère” and me “papa.” On the Moslim fête de la mouton, Mamadou’s father slaughters a healthy sheep with a sharp knife in front of the house and divvies up the meat for friends and neighbors. On the tiny rue Bara over 1000 African workers live in a packed residence filled with laborers, students, tailors, barbers, and merchants of bananas, wild yams, grilled corn, and imported cassettes from Abidjan, Dakar, and Douala. Meters away a cello maker carves wood for his instruments, labor unionists distribute flyers announcing a strike in protest to factory closings, the National Conservatory of Music and Dance is conducting ballet classes, platters of couscous are being served for lunch, an exhibition on Albatros, the Russian school of cinema in Montreuil in the twenties is opening, and the Portuguese owner of the Italian restaurant Jardin de Florence is prepping his bacalhau. This is Montreuil on any day.

  Montreuil also has one of the highest per capita rates of artists per square meter anywhere in France. The availability of affordable work space, the community of like-minded people, and the progressive cultural politics of the town, make Montreuil a logical choice to make art. What’s remarkable about Montreuil is the cultural life that lies within the dailiness of its residents and the political biases of its traditionally communist city government. Montreuil is a mainstay in the cluster of towns circling Paris to the north, east, and south popularly called the Banlieus Rouges, the Red Suburbs, a score of municipalities that have continually voted-in communist city governments—towns like Bagnolet, St. Denis, Malakoff, Montrouge, Creteil, and La Courneuve, which sponsors the exciting Fête de la Humanite each September with the communist daily newspaper, l’Humanité. The word alone, communist, even years after the fall of the eastern bloc, shocks most Americans. And in the eighties some of us joked with the absurdity that Montreuil would hang on longer than extremist Albania. Who would have guessed that that presupposed absurdity would become a prophesy?

  For those who read French, there are seven major daily newspapers in Paris to choose from. On the left there is L’Humanité, the Communist dinosaur; on the far right, Le Quotidien de Paris; moving towards the middle, one can enjoy Le Monde, which tends to be intellectual; the lighter afternoon paper France Soir; Info Matin, whose articles might prove easier to read for the French-impaired visitor; Libération, which has good coverage for art lovers; and Le Figaro, which dates back to 1866 and often rails against the government from a conservative viewpoint.

  —JO’R, LH, and SO’R

  By communism in France, we only mean a more egalitarian distribution of local taxes and services. Culture, for one, is seen as a necessity for enriching the daily life of a community and its citizens—not a luxury or a privilege that comes last on the priority list. Culture is the core of a civilized and intelligent society. In Montreuil, the Office of Cultural Affairs employs 22 full-time people and spends over five million francs each year on the performing and plastic arts, cinema, literature, and music. Several years ago I had the bright idea of inviting the Culture Director for the town, Jean-Michel Morel, and the former Cultural Attache of the U.S. Embassy in Paris for a local lunch to brainstorm on some potential projects. I nearly choked on my steak frites when the American diplomat asked Morel in complete seriousness if “he had a budget.” Morel squinted at me with cynicism and disbelief. He answered, “Why? Don’t you?” The reply was “no.” And the lunch meeting died on the spot. The fact is the town of Montreuil spends more on culture than most large American cities and nearly as much as the entire National Endowment for the Arts budget for literature! Montreuil and other French towns don’t believe in being reliant on large corporate gifts from Mobil or Philip Morris to get a dance company to perform or a painter’s works on the walls of a gallery. Culture isn’t a PR stunt.

  The town subsidizes and administers an art et essai cinema which takes its name from one of the founding fathers of the French film industry, Georges Melies, France’s equivalent of Thomas Edison, the “Magician of Montreuil,
” who set up his ground-breaking studios in town over a hundred years ago. Ticket prices are kept low for all those who live and work here, and all the public schools integrate the modern moviehouse into their curricula. In fact, Montreuil-sous-Bois is credited as the birthplace of Western cinema, having housed the studios of the Freres Lumiere, Leon Gaumont, and the Pathe brothers. Over 1200 silent films were made in the Croix-de-Chavaux area between 1896 and 1929! The town’s commitment to this tradition is clear, and Morel, who writes for the cinema himself and edits an imprint at the prestigious literary publishing house Le Seuil, has done much to help young cineastes. Not only are numerous contemporary films shot in Montreuil, production and animation houses, including those affiliated with Disney, are known for their Montreuil design and illustration studios. In the last few years, some of France’s most important high tech software and entertainment publishers, like UbiSoft, have helped affirm Montreuil’s future, and the town’s emerging Institute of High Technology inaugurated in the fall of 1996 the opening of one of France’s most robust fiber optic Internet cable networks.

  Since the mid-’90s, however, economic pressures have forced the city government to take somewhat more capitalistic measures in attracting less cultural and more corporate residents. The high demand for loft space and townhouses (pavillons) has driven the once-controlled real estate prices way up, although they still remain much lower than those in either central Paris or the chic western suburbs.

  As you enter the town from Paris’s McDonald’s-studded Porte de Montreuil, a large mural commemorating the centennial of cinema greets you on a massive wall that is part of the architecturallyimpressive national headquarters for the CGT, the largest and most provocative of the French trade unions. Initially attached to the Communist Party, the CGT no longer wears this ticket, but is still wholly known for its left-wing orientation.

  Just a few hundred meters down the rue de Paris, on a small side street to the right there is a progressive jazz club called L’instant Chaviré, the only club of its kind in the Département Seine Saint Denis, known as the 93rd which corresponds to its postal code and is embossed on all the license plates in the state. Here on any given night you can hear anyone from the American transplant jazz innovator Steve Lacy to a battery of Camerounais percussionists or a hot Cuban or antillais salsa combo. On the walls of this converted garage are the paintings and photographs of local artists, and around the small tables the young and not-so-young Montreuillois culture-set talk loudly about art and life while downing quantities of reasonably-priced red wine. Although a private initiative, l’Instant Chaviré has been substantially supported by the town since its opening, mostly because the mayor’s office recognizes that such public places contribute to the overall quality of daily social and cultural life of its citizens. A refreshing outlook for government.

  Theater people have come to Montreuil too. A well-known clown called Hoppman left Paris in 1994 for a space near the Croixde-Chavaux. The popular singer Enzo Enzo calls Montreuil home. As does the film star Marie Rivière and the Olympic track stars Michel Jazy and Serge Hélan. The French-American painter Daniel Kohn lives and works in Montreuil, and the megastar African jazzman Manu Dibango not only lives in town but donates gigs to Montreuil all the time. The American drummer, Kenny (Klook) Clarke, one of the founders of Bee-bop who played with Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker, lived in Montreuil in the sixties. And the poetic and tragic singer, sailor and actor Jacques Brel lived in Montreuil for much of the sixties and seventies.

  Behind their renovated rue de Paris townhouse, stuck in between an Algerian bakery and a Cambodian vegetable shop in which incense is always burning as an offering to Buddha, Colorado-born painter Ralph Petty and his wife Lisa Davidson, who translates French articles for travel and art publishers, settled into Montreuil around ten years ago and built a stunning studio out back. As Lisa, who left Seattle nearly two decades ago, brags, “We’re cultural refugees.” Now their kids, like ours, are native Montreuillois, polyglot, deeply exposed to people from around the world, and are a wholly new kind of American in the world. A typical roll call in the local primary school Jules Ferry includes first names like Bandiougou, Karim, Haïtem, Souphien, Kianouch, Thibaud, Hamed, Mhemet, Nasrine, Djadje.... Back in New Jersey in the sixties we all were Jeff, Mike, Steve, David, Jennifer, Lisa, Mary, Judy, Lori, Barb.

  On the eastern edge of the mythic French capital, just beyond the famous and forever congested périphérique, another reality thrives: Montreuil-sous-Bois. There isn’t much forest anymore, or peaches for that matter—the town was once famous for its indigenous fruit trees. “The Montparnasse of the fin-de-siècle” might still seem a bit over the top, but then again, so are prices of drinks at La Coupole in Paris’s irreplaceable Montparnasse.

  David Applefield, an American writer and publisher from Boston, has lived in Paris and Montreuil since the early 1980s. Author of the guidebooks, Paris Inside Out and The Unofficial Guide to Paris, and the novels, Once Removed and On a Flying Fish, he edits the international literary journal, Frank (www.ReadFrank.com), and the weekly Paris newsletter, My Mercredi, on www.paris-anglo.com. Applefield is also host of the Paris radio program, “Frankly Speaking,” which can be heard on www.RadioinEnglish.com

  Ce qu’il ya de plus étranger en France, pour les Français, c’est la France. What is most foreign in France, for the French, is France.

  —Honoré de Balzac

  TISH CARNES BROWN

  The Frog and the Periscope

  A case of time travel.

  THE FROG SIGN CREAKED AS IT SWUNG ABOVE OUR HEADS. WE opened the door directly under it and crossed the courtyard. Although it wasn’t necessary, my husband knocked on the door of Roger’s just as he did the night he discovered it. After a few seconds, the door squeaked as it was opened by a woman looking very formidable in a severe black dress. I smiled. No wonder he thought she was the madame of a brothel all those years ago.

  “Oui?” Although she had aged, her voice still had the sultry Simon Signoret quality to it.

  “Bon soir, madame. Est-ce que possible,” Dave hesitated, searching for the French words hiding in the back of his memory, “pour moi et ma femme manger ce soir?”

  “Oui, monsieur,” and she stepped aside so we could enter her restaurant.

  Tables and diners lined each side of the long, narrow room. The din of conversation and a variety of mouth-watering aromas surrounded us. Madame led us half way down the aisle and seated us at our table.

  So this was the famous Roger’s I’d heard so much about. We were on our honeymoon and we’d come to Paris not only to see the celebrated historic sights of that beautiful city but to go in search of a piece of Dave’s past, hoping it too still existed. I desperately wanted this restaurant he’d frequented to be the same for him. So far so good, but knowing how things change, I vowed to eat my cuisses de grenouille with crossed fingers.

  It wasn’t long before a robust, middle-aged man, with a cigarette dangling precariously from his mouth, approached us. I recognized Madame’s husband and the proprietor, Roger, immediately from Dave’s description of him. His soiled white t-shirt overhung a long, white apron. He tossed a hunk of bread onto the bare wood table and extracted a couple of bottles of wine from under his arm. After upturning our glasses, he first poured some red and then some white into each one: Roger’s celebrated “rosé” apéritif. And true to form, he took the ashtray, dumped the contents on the floor and wiped it out with the bottom of his t-shirt.

  Dave ventured some more rusty French. “Bon soir, monsieur. J’ai mange ici beaucoup ans passé. Est-ce que possible le même t-shirt?” he laughed and pointed at Roger’s shirt.

  “Mais oui! Un très vieux t-shirt,” and he made a face while holding his nose. “Vous êtes américain ou anglais?”

  One evening I found myself making a speech about Australia to a group of French journalists. I apologised for my appalling French, stumbled through my short speech, felt relieved when they laughed at the joke
at the end, wiped the sweat from my brow, and sat down, relieved it was over. At which point a charming French woman came over, said she’d enjoyed it and was pleased I had not done what so many English language speakers do in similar situations, apologise that their French is lousy and, therefore, make their speeches in English. “Oh no,” she said, “you went on to prove it!”

  —Tony Wheeler, “Life in Paris”

  “Américain. J’ai travaille à Paris pour l’Armée des États-Unis en cinquante et un. Mes amis et moi mange ici tout les Mercredi soirs. J’ai apporte ma chérie,” he pointed to me, “ici manger vôtre grenouille—le meilleur à tout Paris!” My chéri’s French was now rolling off his tongue and my heart swelled with pride.