B004MMEIOG EBOK (16 page)
Authors: John Baxter
Enter, general of the armies of the night, at the head of your dreadful retinue.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
in his 1964 speech on the reburial in the Panthéon of resistance hero Jean Moulin
B
emelmans makes it seem amusing to have lived in Paris in those years after the war. Films like the 1951
An American in Paris
reinforced the impression that the sun always shone, art flourished, and even poverty was the pretext for a joke and a song.
That idea doesn’t survive long once you begin to know France. For every
American in Paris,
there’s a film like
Les Portes de la Nuit
—
The Gates of Night
—so drenched in a sense of betrayal, despair, and shame that almost nobody in France could bear to watch. It almost destroyed the career of Marcel Carné, who, until then, had been the hero of French cinema for having made
Les Enfants du Paradis
under the occupation. Its most durable survival is the song “Feuilles Mortes”—“Autumn Leaves”—one of those hymns to despair for which the French and the Germans have no equal.
Even all these years later, the occupation is a subject best avoided. As the French say, “One shouldn’t talk of rope in the house of the hanged.” From time to time, however, some visitor will ask, often with a certain embarrassment, “What was it like under the Nazis?” I’ve taken historians on discreet tours of places in the sixth
arrondissement
that have associations with that time, but always with a sense of embarrassment, as if they’d asked me to recommend a reliable brothel.
Not long ago, the American Library asked me to interview Leslie Caron for its
Evenings with an Author
series (she’d just published a memoir). It was ironic that she’d been plucked from obscurity at nineteen to star opposite Gene Kelly in
An American in Paris
, since she’d barely lived through the war. As she describes in her book, she almost starved to death.
We were down to animal fodder: salsify, rutabagas, Jerusalem artichoke. . . . Fruit was as rare and expensive as tobacco. Children had one glass of milk a day. We were each given an ever-shrinking ration of butter; it eventually amounted to an egg-cup-ful per person, per week. By the end of the war, bread was down to one slice a day per person—two-thirds flour, one-third wood shavings. Meat was also extremely scarce: about two hundred grams a week each. Cats and dogs disappeared—they were stolen and eaten. As a pharmacist, my father received cocoa butter to make suppositories, and it became the substitute for butter and oil in our cooking. Everything at our table had a faint cocoa flavour.
To keep up her strength, she was given horse blood—the horses themselves having long since been devoured.
A black market flourished, and crime with it, helped by the brownout that reduced all public lighting to half gloom. Paris was filled with refugees, deserters from the army, and prostitutes forced back onto the streets when, in a misguided attempt at social reform, brothels were made illegal in 1946 and their premises turned over to student housing.
For a lesson in how things can change, I take people to one of Paris’s most popular bistros, the Balzar, just off boulevard Saint-Michel. Today, it’s chic, popular, expensive, the ad hoc canteen for intellectuals from the nearby Sorbonne and Collège de France. In 1998, it was the site of a sit-in by some high-profile clients who feared changes in its style and menu after the Flo restaurant chain acquired it. All came to nothing when the Flo’s CEO, Jean-Paul Bucher, dropped by to reassure them no changes would be made; why would he alter a place he’d bought because he enjoyed eating there? The waiter returned to take orders, and in a very Parisian way, political action segued into lunch.
It was a different Balzar, and another Paris, when American writer Elliot Paul ate there in the late 1940s.
We dined together at the Balzar that evening. The wind had changed direction, slightly, and there was no rain but only a different kind of chill and a sulphur-colored mist around the hooded street lamps. The brown-out had not been lifted. No lights were showing in the windows of the stores on boulevard Saint-Michel. Traffic was sluggish and sparse in the dimness. Two young men, Siamese or Filipinos, sat on a bench opposite two ratty looking girls, not prostitutes but obviously tramps. The men were dour and scowling; the girls looked bored. One of the Filipinos, or whatever he was, took from his side coat pocket a small automatic and laid it on the table, looking sullenly at his girl the while. A waiter came into the scene with a tray of drinks, some coloured, sticky bottled appetizer. One of the Filipinos paid the waiter; the other put the gun back in his side coat pocket. As the waiter turned away, the two brown men looked at one another and suddenly smiled all over their flat round faces.
The Balzar survived and flourished, but you can still see signs of the old darkness. Farther up boulevard Saint-Michel, gashes of shell fragments mark the walls of the Ecole des Mines, the geological school and museum, and the city is sprinkled with plaques indicating that on this particular corner and in this gutter some
resistant
or
maquisard
died for his or her country.
Of the world of Manda, Leca, and Casque d’Or, the best reminder is Jacques Becker’s romantic film
Casque d’Or
, with young Simone Signoret as Amélie and Serge Reggiani as Manda. But Place de la Contrescape, at the top of rue Mouffetard, hasn’t changed substantially since Amélie, then a prostitute of nineteen, met twenty-two-year-old Manda. (As it happens, Hemingway—that man again—lived for a time only a few doors away, on rue Cardinal Lemoine.) The shooting and eventual knifing of Leca took place in les Halles, the old food and meat market, now a park to the north of rue de Rivoli. As for the Santé Prison, its walls of dark volcanic stone remain as grim as when Manda went to the guillotine.
The French stopped using the guillotine in 1977, but the Santé still retains a sinister glamour. For a while during the 1990s, its star prisoner was Ilich Ramirez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, who refused every request from the world press for an interview—except one. The editor of
L’Amateur de Cigare
, a magazine for cigar lovers, received a note, explaining, “I have just been moved, rather inopportunely, from La Santé prison. Please send all future issues of my subscription to my new residence, the isolation wing of Fresnes jail.” Feeling that their shared enthusiasm gave him an edge, the editor, Louis de Torres, asked for an interview, which Carlos gave, explaining that, though “in a somewhat precarious position as far as smoking is concerned,” he found consolation in reading about great cigars and recalled the summit of his smoking experiences—the opening of a box of Cuban Punch Number 13s on August 17, 1986, to celebrate the birth of his youngest daughter, Elba Rosa. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a
smoke
.”
Chapter 33
A Little Place in the Nineteenth
Frankly, being just plain American, I lack the sensitivities that influence a Parisian’s absolute preference for one quarter over another, based on social and real estate calculations that are opaque to mere
étrangers
. All of Paris seems great to me.
DIANE JOHNSON,
Into a Paris Quartier
O
ccasionally, a visitor, gripped by the longing that accompanies the end of a stay in Paris, will ask wistfully, “How easy would it be to buy a place here?”
“A place?”
“Oh, nothing like this.” Usually they’ve rented a studio apartment in one of the low-numbered
arrondissements,
an easy walk from the Louvre and the smarter restaurants. “Just a
pied à terre.
”
They don’t need to be more specific. I know the dream. A winding wooden staircase, worn hollow by generations of feet. The door at the head of the stairs, opening onto a neat studio; an antique bed, draped in a faded, handmade quilt found in a country
brocante
; the tiny kitchen, with milk, butter, confiture, and a baguette, still warm, on the countertop, courtesy of an obliging concierge warned of your arrival; and, of course, your own little terrace, with a view over the zinc roofs of Paris. . .
“It can’t be
that
difficult, surely?” they continue. “The sixth is impossible, of course, but what about . . .” They wave in the general direction of Montmartre. “A little place—in the nineteenth, say, that just needed a bit of fixing up.”
This
, I think,
would be a good place to tell them about my friend Chloe.
Parisienne
born and bred, Chloe writes for one of the big weeklies.
“You’ve moved,” I said last time we met.
“To the
dix-neuvième
. You and Marie-Do must come for dinner. When it’s fixed up.”
“Still working on it? But it must be, what, a year?”
“Eighteen months.” She sighed. “It’s a long story.”
The nineteenth
arrondissement
is an old area of working-class housing. Most of us, if we see it at all, do so from the freeway, heading out of town. But Chloe and her partner Hervé thought they had found a gem. The two-story row house was one of eight on a little
allée
running off a busy suburban shopping street, close—but not too close—to Paris’s outer beltway, the
périphérique
. It dated from the 1860s, as did the rough-cut stone blocks that paved the
allée
. A large basement ran under the house, and it had a tiny garden at the back.
“It looks . . . promising,” Chloe told the realtor. And cheap!
Too
cheap perhaps?
“The price is negotiable,” said the realtor, arousing their suspicions even more.
They understood the moment they arrived. Five cars filled every parking space.
“Clients of M. Barthelémy.” The realtor indicated the butcher across the street. Apparently his clients used it as a convenient parking lot.
It got worse as they neared the house. Steps from the street led down to a basement, the door of which was wide open. Just inside, a man in dirty underpants snored on a stained mattress. An argument raged in the gloom behind him. Over all hung a reek of decay and old piss.
A quiet street in the nineteenth
arrondissement
“Unfortunately,” began the realtor, “you have . . .”
A girl in dirty jeans, grubby T-shirt, and bare feet came to the door, glared up at them. “If you’re not looking for a fuck,” she said, “fuck off,” and slammed the door.
“ . . . squatters,” he finished.
They bought the house anyway, and petitioned the authorities to install a lockable gate across the end of the
allée
.
“As you see,” said Hervé, presenting the sheaf of forms to Madame Bayard, the
arrondissement
’s
officier d’habitation
, “all residents of the
allée
are in agreement.”
“Yes,” she said. Her expression conveyed the wariness of someone who has learned from long experience that nothing in France happens easily. “However, an objection has been lodged.”
It appeared Barthelémy the butcher wanted to hang onto his free parking lot.
“We have the right to park on our own property,” protested Chloe.
“Indeed. But he claims his business would suffer if there was a gate.”
“That’s his problem. It doesn’t give him the right to use our parking space!”
“Oh, I expect you would prevail if it went to court. But an appeal can drag on. You might like to negotiate.”
A few weeks later, for €10,000, M. Barthelémy agreed not to oppose the gate, and instead to send his customers down the block, where the Champion supermarket had just built a nice new parking lot.
“Now
les squatters
. . .” said Chloe when she and Madame Bayard next met.
“We prefer
‘occupants sans title
.’ ”
“As you wish.” Chloe produced another dossier. “These list numerous complaints and arrests for drug dealing and prostitution. The people must be removed.”
“The
mairie
has no right to do that. It is a matter for the police.”
The
commissaire de police
could have been Madame Bayard’s twin. “To get rid of these people would require a court order. And I should warn you that these are not granted lightly. There is the question of rehousing. The authorities may feel these people are less trouble on your premises than on the street.”
“Can we eject them?”
“In theory, yes. But they could sue for damages if anyone is injured, or loses personal property, or is deprived of earnings.”
“From selling smack. And whoring?”
“I doubt they could make that stick,” the
commissaire
conceded. “But many businesses are conducted from home. They might claim to be, for instance, therapists—or financial consultants.”
Chloe tried and failed to imagine clients descending into that filthy cellar for emotional or fiscal counseling.
“So we’re helpless?”
“Not entirely. We can do nothing, officially. But you might like to write down this phone number.”
Chloe noted the number. The
commissaire
himself didn’t put his own pen to paper. Plausible deniability.
“You should have seen the guy he sent us to.” Chloe lifted her shoulders and hunched her head until her neck disappeared. Her whole pose conveyed “thug.” “We only ever knew him as Serge. His surname name ended in
-vitch
. All their surnames ended in
-vitch
.”
“All? How many were there?”
“Eight. Big blokes—and
organized
. Obviously ex-army, probably Special Forces, but not French. Speznatz? Stasi? Belarus? Romania? Anyway, the first thing we knew, a Portakabin appeared on the main street—those prefabricated offices they put on building sites?”
“Yes . . .”
Not seeing at all. Why were Paris stories never simple?
“The next day, midmorning, Serge and his boys just . . . materialized. All in black. They marched into the basement. Four of them swept up clothes, bedding, anything portable, and transferred it in the Portakabin. Only a couple of the squatters were in the house, but they bolted, barefoot. Four more of Serge’s boys stood by with new doors, steel-faced, with proper locks. It didn’t take more than ten minutes to hang them. At the end, I gave Serge five thousand in cash and he handed us the keys. In two days, the stuff in the Portakabin disappeared. Then the Portakabin. We never saw the squatters again.”
“And no retaliation?”
“Serge and his friends had a quiet word. That’s all it needed. If you’d have seen them, you’d understand.”
“But this is months ago. You still haven’t moved in?”
She sighed. “Ever heard of the Law of January 17, 1992? It controls the restoration of historic buildings. It seems . . .”
But I’d stopped listening.
Chloe’s story would demonstrate perfectly the drawbacks to buying an apartment. But Paris subsists on fantasy. Who was I to crush one, particularly as fragile as this. “I have spread my dreams under your feet,” wrote W. B. Yeats. “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” I’m not that cruel.
“A little place in the nineteenth? Why not? I’ll keep an eye open. You never know.”
