by Baxter, John
In the Cour du Commerce, you sense what it was really like.
On the first building to the left, a tablet, placed almost unreadably high (out of embarrassment?), explains that on this site Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, helped by a German carpenter named Schmidt, perfected the instrument of execution that bears his name. Well, almost his name; an English jingle writer, finding no rhyme for “Gill-oh-tan,” made it “Gill-oh-teen.” Guillotin experimented on sheep; the sliding block with its angled blade is still called a mouton. He actually opposed the death penalty and hoped the device would be a first step in abolishing capital punishment. Instead, it encouraged fanatics like Robespierre to launch the Terror. Between sixteen thousand and forty thousand men, women, and children, from his former colleagues and friends to the royal family (and eventually Robespierre himself), fell to the machine that Guillotin promised in a burst of enthusiasm would “cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it!”
Turn and look at the opposite side of the street, at the largest shop in the Cour. As I write this, it’s unoccupied. It usually is. For a while it held an art gallery, then a restaurant. Between tenants, the floor-to-ceiling windows become a billboard for every concert and theatrical performance on the Left Bank. But if you find a clear spot in the glass, shade your eyes against the reflected light, and peer inside; you’ll see a wall of ancient stone, and the half-cylinder of a tower buried in it. This used to house the print shop of the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat.
The speeches of Danton and his friends arrived here so quickly the ink was still wet. His paper, L’Ami du Peuple, printed them, and they were carried to the banks of the Seine where bouquinistes sold them. Marat, plagued by a skin disease, seldom left home, but worked in a bath to relieve the itching. In July 1793, he agreed to see a twenty-five-year-old woman from Caen, Charlotte Corday, who claimed to have evidence of a conspiracy against the revolution. She stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife, then stood quietly waiting to be arrested. Four days after she killed Marat, Corday went to the guillotine. A year later, on March 24, 1794, Danton followed her, purged by his former friends for being, in their eyes, soft on aristos. About to be decapitated, he told the executioner, “Hold up my head afterward, where the crowd can see it. It’ll be a good effect, believe me.” A showman to the last.
Corday’s execution also went with a flourish. As her head tumbled into the basket, Legros, a carpenter assisting the executioner, grabbed it by the hair, held it up, and slapped its cheeks. Some thought they saw a blush. An Englishwoman in the crowd swore the face “exhibited this last impression of offended modesty.” It was probably just the light of the sunset striking through the trees of the Champs-Elysées, but Legros was dragged off to jail anyway. Corday, murderess or not, was no aristo but a woman of the people, and deserved to be treated with respect.
In 1892, an art student from San Francisco named Edward Cucuel rented an apartment on the Cour with his friend Bishop. His diary of their two years in Paris, illustrated with his sketches, preserves a taste of life in the Paris of Satie, Rousseau, and Apollinaire. Not that Bishop and Cucuel knew them. They were more concerned with finding the rent, hanging out with other students and models, and, from time to time, learning how to paint.
Rooms were rented unfurnished. They had to buy beds, a table and chair, even a stove, with a pipe that funneled fumes up the chimney or out the window but also provided the room with its only heat. There was no running water, and the whole building shared two squat-style toilets on the landings.
One generally couldn’t cook in a studio—but one didn’t need to.
Each day the street was visited by street-venders and hawkers of various comestibles, each with his or her quaint musical cry. “Voilà le bon fromage à la crème pour trois sous!” [Here’s good cream cheese for three sous] cries a keen-faced little woman, her three-wheeled cart loaded with cream cheeses; and she gives a soup-plate full of them, with cream poured generously over, and as she pockets the money says “Voilà! ce que c’est bon avec des confitures.” [There you are. It’s very good with preserves.] Other women in the Cour sold bread and rolls, hot coffee with milk, and, later in the day, soup and stew.
An American student cooking in his room, 1899
The Cour of 1892 was also a place of work.
It had iron-workers’ shops, where hot iron was beaten into artistic lamps, grills, and bed-frames; a tinsmith’s shop; a blanchisserie, where our shirts were made white and smooth by the pretty blanchisseuses singing all day over their work; a wine cellar, whose barrels were eternally blocking one end of the passage; an embossed picture-card factory, where two-score women, with little hammers and steel dies, beat pictures into cards; a furniture shop, where everything old and artistic was sold, the Hôtel du Passage, and a book binder’s shop.
The bookbinder survives in the boutique selling leather-bound notebooks, the bar at the end of the arcade nearest rue Saint-André des Arts still sells wine. And passing the shop selling travel souvenirs, I noticed that its stock included modern copies of antique tins from the belle époque, decorated with art nouveau images by Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec. After work, the laundresses returned to Montmartre. Some moonlighted as dancers at the Moulin Rouge, high-kicking in the can-can to show off the whiteness of their petticoats and knickers—those who wore any. And was it just coincidence that Vincente Minnelli shot some of the film Gigi in a side alley, the Cour de Rohan, where, behind a high green-metal gate, sometimes unlocked, a series of tree-shaded courtyards descends gently even deeper into Odéon? For more than two centuries, the Cour du Commerce has remained virtually unchanged, embedded in time. This is a place on which the past refuses to relax its grip. In a way that always escapes museums, it preserves the essence of Paris.
Chapter 35
Aussie in the Métro
Dans le métro, je prends toujours des premières; dans les secondes, je risquerais de rencontrer mes créanciers.
(On the metro, I always ride in first class. In second class, I would risk running into my creditors.)
BONI, MARQUIS DE CASTELLANE, in the days when the métro had first- and second-class carriages
Rapid transit isn’t noted for poetry—not in New York or London anyway, though people speak well of Moscow, where the underground stations are marble: not that this necessarily makes the trains run on time. For sheer noisomeness, it would be hard to beat New York’s subway. How insightful of Peter Carey to describe in His Illegal Self “the ceiling slimed with alien rust . . . the floor flecked and speckled with black gum . . . [where] cars swayed and screeched, thick teams of brutal cables showing in the windowed dark.” As for the winding, poorly sign-posted tunnels of London’s Underground, with their uneven floors, one always feels as if in a rabbit run with the ferrets not far behind. Not that there might be some truth in the 1972 film Death Line, that a group of Victorian railway workers, walled up alive somewhere under Russell Street, might have dwindled down to a single troglodyte cannibal, preying on wandering commuters, and muttering “Mind the doors!”
What, then, is different about the Paris métro? If you’ve ridden it, you would not ask.
There is, for instance, the perfume. A scented antiseptic spray is applied nightly—which also explains the glossy sheen of the floors. Then there’s the decor. Paris métro stations sometimes resemble women’s handbags, filled with colorful but often puzzling objects, many of dubious utility. (It was a popular game in the 1920s to go through a woman’s sac à main and analyze her character from its contents.) On any métro platform, expect to find walls covered in posters of billboard dimensions, often depicting ecstatic women wearing few, if any, clothes. Molded plastic seating in vivid pastels is standard. Likewise, vending machines for both candy and soft drinks. Some stations are decorated with mosaics, statues, or, in one case, a war memorial. Others exhibit displays in glass cases, promoting local industry or even the métro
system itself, praising its efficiency, cleanliness, reliabil
ity.
And where else are platforms as elaborately decorated? Pont Neuf, nearest to Le Monnaie, that is, the Mint, displays old coinage and an ancient hand press. At Tuileries, tiles on one platform reproduce impressionist paintings while, on another, passengers are confronted with an illustrated time line of the twentieth century, with images of Chaplin, de Gaulle, and Josephine Baker in mid-Charleston. At Concorde, each tile bears a single letter, as if for a giant game of Scrabble. They spell out the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the 1789 manifesto of the revolution. At Varenne, nearest to the Musée Rodin, full-size replicas of his Thinker and statue of Honoré de Balzac rule the platform. The Arts et Metiers stop, below the Museum of Technology, imitates a submarine in honor of Jules Verne and the Nautilus of his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Copper-colored metal cladding covers the walls. The seats are of stainless steel, and there are portholes. Next to Saint-Germain and the Sorbonne, manuscripts under glass and the names of French intellectuals projected on the ceiling or eternalized in tiles remind us of France’s greatest treasure, le patrimoine—the inheritance of the past. And on Richlieu-Drouot, an art deco memorial in black marble and gilt dating from 1931 commemorates railwaymen who died in World War I.
Louvre-Rivoli station is elaborately decorated with facsimile Egyptian statues and other antiquities. Les taggers caused a fuss here some years ago when they raided the station, gaudily spray-painting the tiled walls and lass cases. An initial uproar and accusations of vandalism gave way to a more thoughtful reaction from newspapers like the left-wing Libération. Wasn’t graffiti also art? And didn’t it deserve equal representation? The controversy continued for a few days, during which the métro authorities allowed the graffiti to remain, an object of interest to tout Paris, who crowded the platform to examine and discuss. Then, overnight, the spray-can art disappeared, and things returned to normal, until the next scandale.
One of Hector Guimard’s art nouveau entrances for the Paris métro
In many respects, the métro is a city in its own right. We passengers become pedestrians as we negotiate the often tortuous tunnels at transfer stations like Chatelet and Montparnasse Bienvenue, where so many lines intersect that a transfer involves traveling half a kilometer, either on foot or by moving walkway. The mass of working Parisians don’t regard the trip as dead time but an integral element of the day, to be enjoyed for what it can offer: a chance to read, to think, to doze, to flirt. “Métro Boulot Dodo,” they joke of their lives—Métro Job Sleep (which the poet Pierre Bearn expanded into “Métro boulot bistrots mégots dodo zéro”—Métro Job Café Cigarette Sleep Zero)—but the gibe is good-natured. To see a girl, a secretary or vendeuse, well-dressed and made up, immersed in a paperback of Kafka or Gide, is to be aware of that elegance of style and mind that has made Paris the envy of the world. In London, I’ve often watched women on the Underground doing their makeup on the way to work, brushing on mascara and redoing their lipstick, oblivious to the crowded carriage. In New York, many dress for the office but only from the ankles up, ruining the effect by wearing running shoes on the subway and carrying their good shoes in a bag. Parisiennes would never do either. On the métro, as anywhere outside their homes, they are on show and dress accordingly.
On a single ticket, you can ride the métro all day. (The system even has squatters, who slip in before it shuts for the night and bed down where trains are garaged at the end of the line.) You won’t starve. Aside from the vending machines, there are fruit sellers at La Motte Piquet–Grenelle and a snack bar at Pont Neuf. Nor do you lack entertainment. At Châtelet, musicians tune their accordions or clarinets as they wait for the next train, then ride it for a few stops, serenading the passengers with “La Vie en Rose” or “Padam Padam Padam.” Sometimes a beggar calls for attention with a formal “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” then gabbles his hard-luck story. His words, so often repeated he’s forgotten what they mean, are nevertheless polite. Like everyone on the métro, beggars behave in a way that is convenable—appropriate. All is comme il faut—as it should be.
Given the common presence of hectic design, it was disconcerting, descending into our local métro station, Odéon, early on a winter Sunday, to find it gutted for renovation. Seating and vending machines had disappeared. Walls had been stripped not only of advertising but of tiles as well, then recemented. With nothing to reflect light from the overhead fluorescents, the tunnel became a featureless cylinder of dingy gray, relieved in its uniformity only by a single hunk of machinery, a hydraulic jack two meters long and four meters tall, supporting part of the roof. With the chilly functionality of an armed guard, it looked to have been set there like a mute sentry, to remind us that Men Were At Work, and Attention Must Be Paid.
The next man onto the near-empty platform came down the steps carrying a bunch of roses wrapped in cellophane. Fumbling in his pocket, he laid the bouquet on the only accessible horizontal space—the top of the hydraulic brace. For an instant, one almost felt he had brought them for that purpose, placing them as on an altar, in a gesture of veneration and respect. Of course the moment passed. But such a gesture would not be out of character in Paris. On anniversaries and public holidays, and thanks to a thoughtfully provided metal ring attached to the wall, a posy of flowers appears on the marble plaques all over the city that mark where someone fell during the skirmishes of the occupation. Nor had Paris’s graffiti artists—les taggers—neglected our denuded station. The cement wall of the opposite platform was decorated (or defaced, according to taste) with a single flowingly sprayed rose.
Headed for Montmartre and lunch with a friend, I took the northern line 4, Porte d’Orléans–Porte de Clignancourt. In less than fifteen minutes, it carried me from the Left Bank, close to the city’s center, to its periphery, at the foot of the hill of Montmartre that Parisians call la butte—the bluff.
I climbed back out into the daylight at Barbès-Rochechouart, the closest the métro approaches Montmartre. Fifteen minute ago, I’d left discreet, bookish Odéon; I emerged in what might have been Rabat or Dakar or Kabul. Black, brown, and yellow faces swirled past. Even though it was Sunday, dozens of men stood silent on the opposite corner, sheltering under the overhead railway: day laborers waiting to be hired for a few hours of heavy lifting or digging, paid, of course, en noir—in cash, off the books.
Edmund White came here in May 1981 to stay with friends.
A food market was set up every few days under the elevated tracks of the métro at the Barbès-Rochechouart stop. Piles of melons, little mountains of saffron, cinnamon and coriander seeds, tin wells full of various grades of couscous grains—it was a strip of colourful Marrakesh set down in the grayest section of the city. Just below my friends’ windows bearded old men in lace caps were selling caftans on the street—and kids were selling drugs.
The market still exists, and the kids hanging out by the métro entrance may still sell you hash and kif, or at least know someone who could. To underline how little had changed, a patriarch in the hooded ankle-length robe called a thobe stood in front of Kentucky Fried Chicken, reflecting gravely on whether to take a tub of the regular or splurge on extra crispy.
This was a greedier Paris than my own backwater—a reef where sharks and barracuda prowled, snapping at the darting, brightly colored tourist fish. Rue de Steinkerque, barely a block long, was lined with souvenir shops selling “I ♥ Paris” T-shirts and postcards of Sacré-Coeur and the famous stone staircases, while on the street five men independently played three-card Monte, each with the same three black discs, like miniature beer mats, and three cardboard cartons, identically piled, easily toppled if the police took an interest. All used the same spiel and were watched by three apparently casual spectators, one of whom, as I passed, “won” ten euros by “spotting the lady.”
A few steps farther on, a man stepped in front of me, bent, and straightened up holding a gold ring. Acting surprised, he started to ask, “M’sieur, did you lose this?” As cons go, this was even moldier than thre
e-card Monte. I could have delivered the patter myself, since I’d heard it dozens of times—though seldom done as badly. “My religion forbids me from wearing such a ring. Also, I have no time to take it to the police or the office of Lost and Found. Why don’t you keep it and give me some money now . . . ?”
I wanted to say, “If you’re going to do this, at least don’t let me see the ring roll from your hand.” But who was I to tell him his business? He probably found plenty of clients among the walkers who, wearing the familiar beige windbreakers, sensible shoes, and expression of amiable wonder, wandered hand in hand, lost in the fantasy of Paris. That fantasy included dropping a few euros on three-card Monte or the ring swindle—no different than losing a few dollars in the slot machines in Las Vegas. The fun was in the game. And modern tourists, like their counterparts of the 1920s, enjoy glimpsing, however fleetingly, the larceny just below the surface of the places they visit. On bus tours of New York, drivers used to swing through the Bowery for a look at Skid Row. On the first such tour I took, a bum flung an empty bottle against the side of the bus. We all flinched as the driver explained that some locals resented being turned into tourist attractions. Some years later, I took the same tour—and jumped as an identical bottle shattered just below my window. There’s no business like show business.
Paris’s métro system long since took pity on the people who wilted at the multiple flights of steps leading to the pinnacle of Montmartre and installed a cable car. Its glass box lifted me comfortably to the esplanade just below the mushroom-like domes of Sacré-Coeur.
I stepped out onto a terrace which, in imagination at least, was no longer congested with men selling model Eiffel Towers and tourists snapping the view. For a moment, what Wordsworth wrote in 1802 about London in “Upon Westminster Bridge” applied no less to Paris.
