Paris Revealed Read online

  The vespasiennes were replaced in the 1980s by large, lockable sanisettes that you initially had to pay for, and that quickly gained a reputation for being used by tramps to sleep in and prostitutes for their quickie customers.

  The result of demolishing all these traditional public places where men could relieve themselves for free without leaving the pavement was, predictably, the resurgence of the sly visit to a street corner. In desperation, the city’s sanisettes have been made free of charge, but queuing to use one is not a Parisian thing to do, and the complicated process of opening the cabin door is too much for some people (you often see tourists looking with glazed eyes at the long multilingual instructions).

  All of which explains why there is a new police brigade interested in what goes on when men pee in public. It is the Brigade des Incivilités de la Ville de Paris, and as well as punishing litterers and errant dog owners, its eighty-eight members (no pun intended) can impose fines of up to 450 euros for épanchement d’urine sur la voie publique (‘spreading urine on the public highway’—a wonderfully visual name for an offence), though the maximum fine is usually reserved for repeat offenders. According to a report published in the Courrier International, in 2008 some 56,000 square metres of Parisian pavement were soiled with urine every month. For those who have difficulties picturing 56,000 square metres, it is about equivalent to soaking the entire floor area of 500 two-bedroomed Parisian apartments in pee.

  This story has two rather obvious morals. First, while out walking in Paris, it is highly unwise to tread in anything wet unless you’re totally sure it’s water.

  And secondly, before the sanisettes, no one seems to have worried about where Parisian women were meant to pee.

  Miscellaneous obstacles

  Anyone who is planning to ‘flan’ around with their nose pointing up at the architecture should be warned—Paris’s pavements are strewn with metal booby traps, many of them planted by the authorities themselves.

  The most dangerous of these are the posts, painted dark brown or dark grey, that you often see lining the kerb. They look like elongated chess pawns, as if the city were playing a huge, and highly defensive, board game, and they can crop up at any moment, often in the middle of a wide pavement where you think you’re safe. The Parisians call them les bittes de trottoir, a name they love because it is both correct and obscene at the same time. A bitte is a mooring post, a kind of stubby bollard that you tie boats up to. It is also a very rude name for a penis, and a bitte de trottoir therefore sounds like a sidewalk gigolo.

  At first, from painful experience, I thought that the bittes were designed to trick pedestrians into cracking their kneecaps, thereby bringing in some welcome income for the city’s medical system. They were, I assumed, related to the dark-brown cannonballs that are sometimes welded to the edge of the pavement in very narrow streets, and that were obviously meant to trip people up and/or smash their toes.

  In fact, though, they are all to stop cars parking. Even though it’s forbidden and drivers could get a sizeable fine, such is the outlaw spirit of the average Parisian driver that he or she would still park on the pavements if the posts or cannonballs weren’t there.

  So these booby traps are actually meant to protect pedestrians. Just try to remember that next time you are doubled up in pain after ramming your groin into a metal post that appeared from nowhere as you were walking along a crowded street.

  Less dangerous than the bittes, but more decorous, are the endless numbers of metal skeletons lining the pavements—the remnants of bikes that have been locked to railings, lampposts and street signs and been cannibalized so badly that their owners can’t be bothered to unlock them. Their metal carcasses are a sorry symptom of the Parisian lifestyle—as mentioned in Chapter 1, most apartment buildings have nowhere where you can park a bike without neighbours complaining. Anyone who owns a valuable two-wheeler will therefore carry it upstairs and park it in their apartment or on their balcony. The less valuable ones have to survive on the streets, chained up all night outdoors, alone in a world of thieves, drunks and pranksters who will steal saddles, wheels and anything detachable—if they cant get the whole bike.

  Most Parisian apartment buildings forbid bicycles in their entrance halls. Bike owners live in constant fear of walking out one morning to find that their beloved two-wheeler has been attacked by predators.

  Canny owners paint their bikes ridiculous colours to ward off thieves in search of something resaleable, or use two or three locks to secure every moving part of the bike. But even these can fall victim to a bus or lorry that cuts a corner and squashes the bike against a traffic sign.

  The result is that the streets are enlivened by the sight of rusted frames with no wheels, no chain, and no handlebars, abandoned bike skeletons that have been picked clean, like the bones of a hanged criminal in medieval times.

  Sadly, these testaments to the strength of bike locks and the predatory nature of man have now become an endangered species. In March 2010, Paris passed a new rule decreeing that these épaves—the French word for shipwrecks—can be removed if there is sufficient evidence that they have really been abandoned, rather than just being left there by someone who wants to park their bike frame outdoors until they can afford wheels and handlebars.

  Parisian council officials are doubly happy with their new scheme. Not only will they be cleaning up their streets, they have also been able to expand the French language. The job of freeing the skeletons is being given to a small army of épavistes—a new word coined specially for this endeavour.

  Paris’s urban jungle

  Paris’s pavements are lined with trees, the majority of them the same species of silvery plane tree that Napoleon Bonaparte planted along his marching routes across France. The second-biggest group are lime trees, though not, unfortunately, the type you can make mojitos with—these are tilleuls, the species that produce France’s most insipid herbal tea.

  According to City Hall, there are approximately 484,000 trees in Paris, most of them in parks, gardens and the Bois de Vincennes and Bois de Boulogne. Around 96,500 of them line the pavements, a stock that is renewed with 2,400 new trees per year, grown at the city’s nursery out in Rungis, near the massive wholesale food market.

  This doesn’t mean that Paris is gradually being turned into a literal urban jungle (more’s the pity), because many of them are to replace the 1,500 trees a year that succumb to disease, old age or pollution and get the guillotine treatment.

  What’s more, every one of the trees lining the streets—the so-called arbres d’alignement—has a microchip embedded in its trunk, with a record of its age, the vaccinations it has been given, and general notes on its health. They may not look like it as you walk past, but these trees are really robots with an electronic brain. It’s all very Parisian—it looks natural and effortless but is in fact organized with scientific precision.

  Less easily monitored are Paris’s pigeons. Most Parisians hate them—almost as much as they hate the mad people who feed the ‘flying rats’, generally by emptying bags of breadcrumbs next to a bench and causing a fluttering, feathery riot.**** Parisians know that there is a season when it becomes perilous to linger for more than a second under any one of those 96,500 trees lining the streets and gardens. When the plane trees are in fruit in autumn, the pigeons gorge themselves and let fly huge jets of lime-green poop that spatter the pavement and turn parked cars into Jackson Pollock canvases.

  To combat the pigeon infestation—it is estimated that there are 80,000 or so pigeons in Paris, about one for every twenty-five people—the city is installing large pigeon coops in parks and gardens. The authorities have had to explain that they’re not trying to increase the population by making life even cushier—on the contrary, these are ‘contraceptive pigeon coops’. The first clutch of eggs is allowed to hatch, but when a female lays more eggs (and pigeons often lay six to eight clutches per year), these are given a good shake to make them infertile. The pigeons don’t realize t
his, however, and continue incubating the eggs rather than immediately laying a new batch.

  These pigeon coops also encourage the birds to poop in one place so that their droppings can be collected and disposed of, a new job so unpleasant that, rather than directly creating employment as it so often does, the city has outsourced the work to some unfortunate private company.

  A typical Parisian reaction to this scene would be ‘beurk’, or ‘yuk’. Parisians call pigeons ‘flying rats’, though at least rats don’t climb into trees and poop on your head. The city has recently introduced a pigeon contraceptive scheme, fortunately not involving condoms. For the unpleasant details, see this chapter.

  In the market for street entertainment

  Two or three times a year, the pavements outside my building spring a surprise on me. I heave open the heavy porte cochère to find the way completely blocked by a jam of people selling or browsing at a vide-grenier.

  Literally, this is an ‘attic-emptying’, though very few Parisians have attics. Many of them have caves (cellars) as well as wardrobes full of old clothes, shelves of books they’ll never read again and toys that the kids have outgrown. This, in theory, is what a neighbourhood’s vide-grenier should consist of, but of course Parisians are far too fond of bending rules to limit themselves to any theory, so in practice, the markets are a fascinating mix of private belongings and professional merchandise. They happen all year round (Parisians are naturally optimistic about the weather, and assume that Nature will obey their wishes), usually on a Sunday, and are always great places to pick up cheap pieces of Parisiana.

  I went along to the most recent vide-grenier in my neighbourhood to see what kind of things might tempt a visitor to the city.

  The first thing I noticed was the wide disparity between the stalls. Mine is a very mixed area, so the sellers ranged from families spreading out old sports shoes, PlayStation games and video-cassettes on a plastic sheet, to arty furniture sellers more suited to the Marais. There were also plenty of slightly roguish-looking brocanteurs (bric-à-brac dealers), postcard dealers (all French antique markets have at least one of those), stands selling a bizarre selection of old electrical parts, and one man in an Aéroports de Paris jacket selling suspiciously new-looking clothes.

  But this vide-grenier was much more than a slice of Parisian street sociology. It was also a treasure trove for anyone looking for something unconventional but typically French to take home.

  Here is a list, more or less at random, of objets parisiens that I saw:

  An old gendarme’s badge, a 1950s souvenir of the Sacré Coeur printed on a bit of varnished tree trunk, vintage black-and-white postcards of Parisian streets, alcohol jugs, trays and ashtrays (featuring Ricard and Pernod, of course, but also lesser-known brands such as Marie Brizard, Saint-Raphaël and Cusenier), complicated corkscrews (French engineers are constantly working on revolutionary ways of opening a bottle quickly to get at the contents), a 1960s Nescao tin with a picture of a hopelessly non-feminist French housewife, several old toy models of Citroën 2CVs, a book apparently claiming that the French single-handedly invented aviation, editions of Paris Match magazine from the ’40s and ’50s, with covers reporting on the death of Matisse, Princess Margaret’s failed engagement to Peter Townsend (bilingual headline: Sad Princesse) and a 1949 edition predicting that les mâles vont disparaître (‘men are going to disappear’—though they didn’t say when).

  My favourites, though, were the porcelain jug representing ex-President Mitterrand, which allowed me to ask, ‘How much do you want for Mitterrand’s head?’, and a little lead statue of Napoleon, which I haggled for and eventually bought for 5 euros, telling the French antique dealer in my English accent, ‘I’ll take Napoleon off your hands … again.’ For some reason, he didn’t seem to think it was funny.

  Say it with wordplay

  The French love puns, and the streets of Paris are a perfect playground for messing about with words (as in the case of ‘Sinners’ Street’ mentioned above). This is true on advertising billboards, of course, but there are also more permanent monuments to Parisians’ verbal foibles on display, and these are the names they choose for their hairdressing salons.

  Perhaps it is just the happy coincidence that the French know the English word ‘hair’, which lends itself to almost endless word games. They pronounce it the same way as ‘air’, and it’s also like the French suffix ‘-aire’ in commentaire, commissaire, etc.

  So whenever you smell a waft of warm shampoo as you walk past a Paris shopfront, or see a perfectly coiffed man or woman smoking in front of their shop door, it is a good idea to look up at the sign. More often than not, it will contain a painful pun.

  Here are just a few of the Parisian salons that you might stumble across while out ‘flanning’. They are all real names:

  Chambre à Hair—literally ‘hair chamber’, but sounds like the French for the inner tube of a tyre, which is a strange thing to want to look like.

  Gram’Hair—another strange one, sounds like grammaire, or grammar. Specializes in coiffing schoolteachers, perhaps.

  Besoin d’Hair—literally ‘need for hair’ but sounds like the French for ‘need some fresh air’.

  FM Hair—a clever, modernistic play on FM radio and hair, which sounds like éphémère, or ephemeral. Though come to think of it, that doesn’t say much for the durability of their haircuts.

  Post’Hair—sounds like the French pronunciation of ‘poster’, though surely it also sends out a disturbing subliminal message about baldness. What else is ‘post hair’? A wig specialist, perhaps.

  Hair du Temple—a pun on air du temps (spirit of the times) outside a salon in the rue du Temple, thus achieving a double-whammy play on words.

  Diminu’Tif—a purely French pun. Tifs is a slang word for hair. Diminutif means diminutive, or small, and diminuer is reduce, so the name could be interpreted as ‘reduce hair’, presumably an allusion to cutting hair rather than making it fall out.

  And finally, my two favourites:

  Challeng’Hair—literally, ‘hair challenge’ but it sounds like the French pronunciation of ‘challenger’, a word they know. Appropriately, it deals in baldness treatments.

  Volt’Hair—an electric-sounding play on the name of Paris’s wittiest writer, Voltaire. A literary hairdresser—what more could you want? OK, Voltaire wore a wig in later life, but when a hairdresser’s pun is in the offing, historical accuracy is neither hair nor there.

  * For more on this museum, see Chapter 5.

  ** For more on the ankle-spraying, see Chapter 3.

  *** ‘Health Prison’, which was not called that because the wardens served organic food and taught Pilates. It was the site of Paris’s last public guillotine, and two men were beheaded there (behind prison walls) in 1972. In fact, the prison is named after the street where it stands, which in turn owes its name to a seventeenth-century hospital.

  **** Feeding pigeons—or any wild creature (except one’s children)—is illegal in Paris, and carries the same fine as letting a dog poop on the pavement: 183 euros.

  Paris Plages. Every summer, Parisians rush down to the banks of the Seine in the hope that former president Jacques Chirac will keep his promise to swim across the river.

  3

  WATER

  Napoleon Bonaparte: Je voudrais faire quelque chose pour les Parisiens.

  His Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal: Eh bien, donnez-leur de l’eau.

  (I’d like to do something for the Parisians. - Then give them water.)

  A sinking feeling

  PARIS IS a city of eau. Its motto is decidedly damp—Fluctuat nec mergitur means something like ‘It might not be floating all that steadily, but it never sinks.’ This is not because Paris is comparing itself to Venice or Atlantis—Paris’s sandy river basin is not subsiding (at least, not according to estate agents). In fact, the motto refers to the very unseaworthy boat on the city’s coat of arms, a kind of wooden banana with a pair o
f underpants as a sail and no visible crew members, which is floating precariously on a rollercoaster of waves.

  This might seem a strange emblem for a city so far from the sea. The only waves you see on the Seine these days are when the river police are having a bit of fun with one of their speedboats. But until the nineteenth century, Paris was France’s busiest port, and the city council was actually founded by river merchants.

  These marchands de l’eau were so powerful in the early Middle Ages that they persuaded King Louis VII to give them a monopoly on all merchandise coming in and out of Paris. A royal charter signed in 1170 states that ‘No one may bring into, or take out of, Paris any merchandise unless he is a marchand de l’eau de Paris or in partnership with a marchand de l’eau de Paris.’ Anyone breaking this rule lost their whole cargo, half of which would go to the King, and half to the marchands.

  In 1246 the watermen went a stage further and formed themselves into the city’s first ruling body imposing their emblem—the banana-like ship—as Paris’s official seal. And their legacy was further recognized in 1853, when Baron Haussmann,* the Prefect of the Seine region, made Fluctuat nec mergitur the city’s motto.

  Haussmann was only putting into words the Parisians’ long and passionate relationship with water. It is almost as if they are former desert-dwellers, with a constant need to see water everywhere.