Paris bulletin 3 2015

Since I left here in early April spring has sprung and the blackbirds are now rushing about feeding their babies in the bushes on the roof garden to the left of my kitchen window. I’m sure ‘rush’ is the right verb to use: buds to blossom, babies to fledglings, warmth to heat (the meteo predicts temperatures of 32 degrees down south today). But what hit me hardest on my return three days ago was a different kind of rush: the brutal, don’t-look-you-in-the-eye kind, and the noise and dirt that both bring with them. I am dismayed.  Has it got worse in the month I’ve been away? Is it because I’ve come from the peace of the countryside - not entirely litter-free it has to be said, but pristine compared to what stirs round my feet here when I go out?

There is a new poster on the billboards: ‘350 tonnes de mégots (cigarette butts) ramassées chaque année dans les rues de Paris’. It’s true that smokers treat the pavements like a giant ashtray but they aren’t the only culprits. I watched a group of young people waiting for a bus out at the Bois yesterday. They were passing a large bottle of Coca-Cola between them. When the bus came they tossed the empty bottle on the ground and got on. I said nothing to them and neither did anyone else. What should one do in such a situation?

The encampment of tents under the overhead metro line, mentioned in a previous bulletin, has got bigger. The numbers of men selling shoes and belts and ear phones and fresh, but wilting, coriander and mint, and ‘Marlborough, Marlborough, Marlborough’ cigarettes has spread like a rash down the street from the crossroads. Yesterday on my way back from the shops I saw a man sweep the litter carefully through the railings surrounding the metro-line encampment. The wind caught it and lifted it across to add to the heap against the railings on the far side of the street.

The city fathers would probably be outraged at this image of Paris as hardly better than a litter-strewn bidonville. After all they spend huge amounts every year clearing camps like the one on the boulevard, sending people back across the border to where they’ve come from (or anywhere as long as they’re ‘not here’), encouraging everyone to use the bins and the public toilets, and deploying a fleet of trucks to clear up the stuff we throw out.

Fortunately the Paris I am describing is not the image most tourists will take away from their stay, although they probably will remember the queues outside the main ‘attractions’ (Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Invalides, Musée d’Orsay...) and the press of people in front of the iconic statues and paintings. But would be dishonest not to talk about what it’s like to live in one of the most impoverished, densely populated arrondissements. That’s why this is not a ‘where to buy the best baguette/croissant/olive oil... in Paris’ kind of blog. There are plenty like that on the web, most of them written by visiting Americans for whom Paris seems to figure largely as a shopping destination.

Thinking that I needed to retrouver mon équilibre, I decided to take the 43 bus across to Bagatelle yesterday afternoon. The bus takes you from the Gare du Nord via the Porte Maillot to Neuilly, ‘ville fleurie’ on the outskirts of the city. One metro-bus ticket, price approximately £1 at current exchange rates, gets you all the way. Public transport remains one of Paris’s great success stories, and is set to get even better with the new tramways.

The swathes of spring bulbs are long gone but the flowering shrubs are at their peak and the famous allée des pivoines (peonies) will be at its best in a fortnight I’d say. It’s worth a visit just to see that incredible border, every clump a different variety. Entry is free until early June.

 

My attachment to Bagatelle goes back to my earliest times in Paris, with my guide and mentor Madeleine Mezeix, English teacher at the time at the lycée Condorcet. Strange to think that had she been alive now she might have taught my grandson who was a student there until last year. Madeleine lived in a rented flat on the rue de Castellane, very close to the Printemps department store. While I was living here in the winter of my nineteenth year, I went every Tuesday evening to work on my French in that sixth-floor flat, with its gently sloping floors, its art-deco sofas and chairs. The evening started with a meal – always the same: endives au jambon, followed by pommes au four. Afterwards I laboured over a prose translation under the dim light of the reading lamp on her desk.

Autres temps, autres moeurs, you could say.

Spring is here but nothing nice is growing in the English political garden, or the French one for that matter. Parisians have been out on the streets once more while I was away, marching against ‘la loi sur le renseignement’, the French equivalent of what the newly unshackled Theresa May is going to introduce in the UK: the aptly-named Snooper’s Charter, which will bring about a massive increase in the state’s surveillance of our private lives.

On the suggestion of a dear friend I am re-reading Orwell’s 1984. It never felt more real, more relevant, than it does now.