Paris bulletin 6 2008

Our local post office is round the corner, just near line 2 of the metro where the track rears out of the tunnels and takes you high above the Paris streets for several stops. On my trips round there, at least once a week, I pass a woman standing in a doorway. She’s there almost every time I go, a bottle blond of about fifty, well-dressed with a fat, pale face that matches her hair. Without fail as I pass she puts the same question to me – ‘S’il vous plaît, est-ce que vous pouvez me donner une cigarette?’ I find myself wondering how many she gets given every day. Does she smoke them? I never see her smoking.

If you take the line 2 going west from us and get off at metro Blanche you are in the heart of Paris’s ‘red light’ district, Pigalle, Montmartre. When I go to my yoga class in the morning the streets are empty but get yourself back there as the sun goes down and the lights come on and it’s a very different scene, with the sex shops winking and the tourists piling out of their coaches for an evening of bare breasts, the can-can and a glass of house wine that costs as much as a good bottle of Burgundy from le père Doudine, our wine shop on the rue Myrha.

Paris is coming alive again after a time of cold and wet. The Luxembourg Garden is open later now so I can walk through it and come back home from Arabic with the scent of hyacinths in my nostrils. I said hi to old Verlaine on my way through tonight. Poor chap, he’s still looking stonily downwards from his plinth, waiting I imagine for the forget-me-nots and tulips to cheer him up.

 

 

                                     Paul Verlaine surrounded by flowers

This evening on my way through to the metro at Rennes I was treated, as was the rest of la rue Madame, to an impromptu jazz concert: three musicians strolling along and the music bouncing off the walls of this narrow residential street. That part of Paris must have more apartments lived in by aged ladies than almost anywhere else in Paris (I should know – I lived in that quartier for a year when I was twenty-one). So there was more than one curtain twitching and some windows flung wide open. Three floors up at the top of the street a black guy appeared at the window with a trumpet of his own and before we knew it music was raining down on us as well as soaring upwards.

'Ben dis donc’, says the wee mémère with her shopping trolley, ‘C’est pas mal ça. On se croirait à la Nouvelle Orléans!’

That’s Paris in the spring.