Line
2 of the metro emerges from below ground just beyond station Anvers and runs on
an overhead track in an easterly direction as far as Jaurès before tunnelling
along towards Belleville and eventually, Nation. It is, they say, of all the
metro lines in Paris, the one which most graphically illustrates the short
distances in kilometres between the extremely rich (the elegant Porte Dauphine,
last station on the line in the west, frequently almost empty of voyageurs),
and the extremely poor in the north and east, (Pigalle, Barbès, Chapelle,
Belleville… heaving with tired people at every hour of the day and night).
In
fact because Paris is still so compact a city, it’s possible to take any number
of buses or metros and experience these shifts from wealth to poverty in a
matter of minutes. Or you can walk it – take the rue du Faubourg St Honoré in
an easterly direction and you won’t have to walk for long to see the haute
couture frontages give way to something all together more abordable côté prix.
Talking
of which, the word is out that the bo-bos of Paris, the probably leftish-leaning, middling affluent middle classes, are taking to
shopping for their basic groceries in low-price outlets like Ed and Franprix.
That may be so but there’s no sign that they’ve put themselves on an austerity
regime as regards their cultural sorties. Which is a gratifying thought given how
much there is to be gloomy about and what a wealth of outstanding culture this
city offers.
There
was ‘une votation’ this weekend on the question of the privatisation of the
post office. Une votation, (a word
apparently of Swiss origin, labelled vieux/régional in the Petit Robert
dictionary), is something short of an
state-sponsored referendum but weighty none the less: it’s estimated that
around 2 million people took part. The result has been an overwhelming consensus
against the privatisation of the post office (which will go ahead regardless of
course). The anger of the postal workforce must have its lively counterpart in
the UK. It’s an uncertain business consigning parcels to the mail at either end
of the line. Presumably some of what used to travel fast and efficiently from
here to there or from there to here, is now buried under mountains of
catalogues, brochures and other glossy garbage. Roy Mayall writing in LRB (24
September), tells us that delivering this stuff is one of the Royal Mail’s most profitable sidelines
and, as he puts it, ’my personal contribution to global warming: straight
through the letter box and into the bin.’
Indeed
there is plenty to get mad or depressed about but in between there are, as ever,
signs of people fighting back. They pull down the shanty-town at Calais but by
the end of the day following the demolition most of the kids they’d put into
foyers, some of them hundreds of miles distant, were back there once more,
hiding in the dunes, beginning to put other shelters up, beginning again
because the alternative is…well, there is no alternative as someone else once
famously said.
So
while you can’t deny that the mattresses lined up along one of the back streets
in the Goutte d’Or area are an eye-sore, you don’t necessarily want to see them
flung on the back of a city refuse lorry. Because you can’t help thinking that
if you had to make your bed on a Paris pavement every night, the first thing
you’d do would be get yourself something to lie on to keep the cold out of your
bones.
Anyway,
a bigger problem than the mattresses themselves is how to deal with the mounting
issue of human shit and pee in public spaces. That perhaps partly accounts for
the crop of fancy new toilets shooting up like grey mushrooms all over the
city. They will be accès gratuit (pee for free), when they finally open for
business and who knows what wonders they may perform when the doors slide shut
on you – un relooking éclair (instant make-over) perhaps? More prosaically, the
Mairie must have realised that if they can’t reduce the number of people living
on the street, they really are dans la merde, au sens propre comme au figuré.
one of the smart new public toilets in Paris
Let
me end however, by raising my eyes from the pavements and tell you the best
thing I’ve seen since I got back. It’s, by quite a long way, Dominique Blanc’s
interpretation of Marguerite Duras’ ‘la Douleur’, which has been playing at the
Theatre de l’Atelier. Wozzek at the Opera Bastille comes a good second. And the
most gratifying, levelling moment in that evening, in that glittering temple of
high art? When the people with standing-only tickets, who’d queued for an hour
and a half to get one, were given the go-ahead by the theatre manager to find
seats wherever they could in the stalls. So as the lights went down they
trooped en masse from their 5 euros space at the back right down to the front
to sit in seats sold to those roundabout them for 138 euros a pop.
Something
like starting out in a sleeping bag on the tarmac in Belleville and ending up in
a feather bed at the Porte Dauphine.
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