The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (14 page)

“Wasn’t that fun?” he asked.

I politely agreed with him. But now it was my turn.

“Did you know Gabriela played soccer in both the United States and France?” I asked, pumping myself up with motherly pride. “She played striker.” That meant she was responsible for striking the most goals. “She was a champion.”

Mahmoud thought he had heard me wrong. And Gabriela thought I was making too much of her youthful soccer career. But she played along. She took out her iPhone and found an action shot of herself at about seventeen, in her blue-and-white team uniform, her arms and long ponytail in flight, just as she was about to kick the ball. It was as if Mahmoud were seeing a pig fly. He burst into the Berber dialect of the Kabylie region of Algeria, where he was born, and shouted to his colleagues to come see an amazing feat.

After that, I had new standing at the café—as Gabriela’s mother. But my excursion to Kardec’s door with Mahmoud hadn’t gained me any new knowledge about the café’s ghosts.

SO BACK TO THE GHOST
I began with, Thomas Jefferson. He arrived in Paris in August 1784, joining fellow Americans Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to negotiate trade treaties with
Europe. Nine months later, he succeeded Franklin as America’s minister to France. His job was to represent the young republic at the tumultuous, dysfunctional court of Louis XVI.

Jefferson’s move to France came at a difficult time in his personal life. His wife, Martha, had died several years earlier; and soon after he arrived in Paris, he lost his two-year-old daughter, Lucy, to whooping cough. Jefferson spoke mediocre French and was in poor health. But he adapted to the pleasures of Parisian life. Eventually he fell in love here, and so we have another ghost. Maria Cosway, exotic, golden-haired, beautiful, was an accomplished portrait and landscape painter, a harpist, a singer, a composer, and a deeply religious Catholic. She was also married—to Richard Cosway, a successful artist who attracted both mistresses and hangers-on.

Jefferson was entranced upon meeting Maria in the summer of 1786 (he was forty-three, she twenty-six). For several weeks, they spent just about every day together. Jefferson took her to the theater, to musical performances, and to gardens outside Paris. One evening, they went to a nightspot called the Jardin Ruggieri, on the rue Saint-Lazare, close to the base of the rue des Martyrs and just a short walk from what is now Le Dream Café.

The Jardin Ruggieri had originally been a vast private home and garden. After it fell into disrepair, the Ruggieri family—Italian fireworks experts who immigrated to France—transformed it, in 1766, into Paris’s first amusement park. Here you could watch fabulous fireworks, enjoy pantomimes, stroll in the gardens, and dance under the stars. There was nothing subtle about the fireworks displays. The night Jefferson took Cosway, the program included “The Forges of Vulcan beneath Mount Etna” and “The Combat of Mars.”

Cosway’s husband ended the relationship by taking Maria to
London. But Jefferson could, for the time being, console himself with intellectual companionship. He had becom
e friends with an interesting Frenchman with an estate on the rue des Martyrs.

The friend, with the unwieldy name of Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, was a jurist, and one of the most important personalities of the reign of Louis XVI. Named minister of state in 1787, he proposed the establishment of a national assembly of notables, a new constitution, and a law creating administrative divisions by communes.

I have never found an explanation for why Malesherbes bought a country villa on undeveloped land so far from the calm elegance befitting his social status. It may have been his passion for botany and his determination to grow rare plants in his garden. For whatever reason, he was by far the most important resident then living on the rue des Martyrs.

Jefferson, more than two decades younger than Malesherbes, shared his passion for gardening, and the two became good friends. I can picture them strolling through the garden nursery, discussing seedlings and soil composition. Jefferson called Malesherbes “the most curious man in France” about trees, so they may have spent long hours debating the peculiarities of roots, barks, cross-pollination, insects, leaf blight, and fungal diseases.

Jefferson gave Malesherbes American pecans and cranberries he’d brought to France. (“The pecan is one of the trees of America that is the most interesting to transplant in Europe because its fruit is excellent and with a taste very different from other nuts,” Jefferson wrote his French friend in 1786.) He also brought Malesherbes what he called a “prodigious quantity” of shrubs and trees. One of Jefferson’s favorite trees was the Virginia juniper, whose seeds Malesherbes planted in his nursery.

The two had more in common than gardening. Malesherbes was a passionate supporter of American independence, religious tolerance, and freedom of the press. (He helped the philosophers Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau publish their writings, which had been banned in France.) He had a remarkable library, to which Jefferson contributed a copy of
Notes on the State of Virginia,
the book that laid out his views on religious freedom. Jefferson referred to Malesherbes as “the good and enlightened minister” who was “unquestionably the first character in the kingdom for integrity, patriotism, knowledge, and experience in business.”

Malesherbes survived the first phase of the Revolution and in 1792 became the personal lawyer of King Louis XVI. For that service, Malesherbes was arrested at the end of 1793, at home on the rue des Martyrs. He refused to defend himself. On April 22, 1794, he was forced to watch as his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughters were guillotined; he then followed them to the scaffold. The French state seized their properties and possessions (which were later returned to surviving family members). The house was torn down, and the site was eventually rebuilt as the Cité Malesherbes, the private gated street that it is today.

Despite the death of his friend, Jefferson strongly believed the French Revolution had ushered in an era of freedom that needed to be preserved. The deaths and destruction, while unfortunate, were necessary sacrifices to the higher cause of liberty. “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated,” he wrote.

I wonder if they ever spoke before Malesherbes was beheaded, if they parted as friends, or if Jefferson felt betrayed by Malesherbes’s unswerving loyalty to the king and asked for his seeds back.

THE KNIFE SHARPENER

. . .

As to knife sharpening, I am no expert.

—J
ULIA
C
HILD,
LETTER ON MAY 5, 1952,
TO HER FRIEND
A
VIS
D
E
V
OTO

O
NE DAY, A LIVING GHOST CAME TO THE RUE DES MARTYRS.
It announced its presence with a bell. The sound, which got louder, pulled me into the past. The bell from Holy Angels Elementary School, perhaps? But no, a school bell ringer would not be moving around.

I followed the sound until I saw the bell ringer. He was a
rémouleur,
a person who sharpens knives on a grinding machine. This particular grinder was Roger Henri, and he pushed a two-wheeled cart with a narrow wooden seat. The cart had two wooden pedals and two grinding stones connected to a wheel. Pedaling turned the wheel, which turned the stones, which sharpened the knives.

In that moment I was back on the far West Side of Buffalo, where I had grown up in an immigrant neighborhood—or, more
accurately, a Sicilian one. Ethnic Italian groups tended to cluster, so the Siciliani, the Abruzzesi, the Calabresi, the Campagnesi, and the Campobassani had their own areas. The far West Side, near the Peace Bridge over the Niagara River to Canada, belonged to Sicily.

When I was a kid, a knife sharpener walked through the neighborhood and announced his presence with a hand-held bell. Women circled round with their knives and scissors, many of them grateful for a few minutes out of the house.

Henri, the Paris knife sharpener, had a mustache and glasses and wore a long jacket with enormous pockets. He was a trout fisherman, which I perhaps could have guessed from the fishermen and trout decorating his suspenders. His big belly and a pudgy chin made him look older than his sixty-five years. He dispensed cream-colored cards in flowery script with the name and description of his business: “Maison Roger. All types of sharpening of tools, knives and scissors. House calls.”

With work to do, Henri didn’t much care for chitchatting. But when I asked if I had time to run home and get my knives, he perked up and followed behind me with his cart. I brought him seven big kitchen knives and two pairs of scissors from my apartment. He couldn’t escape my questions now.

Henri had learned his trade from his mother. For fifty years he had been trolling the streets of Paris with a cart custom-made by a locksmith. He left it in the courtyards of buildings where he knew the concierges; when it was time to change neighborhoods, he transported the cart in a small truck. He did business in just about every part of Paris, and worked every day except Sunday. “Sunday belongs to the Lord,” he said.

I asked why he had stuck with the business. “I’m independent,” he said. “I have no one behind me giving me orders.”

I asked whether all the pedaling tired him out, and he said, “Noooooo,” as if it were a ridiculous question. “I pedal even when I’m not grinding. Heh. I’m pedaling now while I’m talking to you.”

It is rare to see a knife sharpener in Paris. Chimney sweeps and chestnut sellers still roam the streets with pushcarts from time to time. But most itinerant workers—rag pickers, glaziers, china repairers—are long gone.

This special moment of freelance craftsmanship needed to be shared. So I told everyone who passed that we had a knife sharpener in our midst. Now, if I were in New York City and asked people to move closer to a man holding knives, they might think I was a lunatic and call the police. And if I were in my old Paris neighborhood off the rue du Bac, people would give me a disdainful stare that said, “You are vulgar, foreign, and do not belong.”

But this is the rue des Martyrs, where people are more relaxed. Plus, I am respectable-looking, it was the first sunny day of spring, and just about everyone was in a good mood. Furthermore, Ilda Da Costa, the concierge in my building, who knows everyone in the neighborhood, was just as interested as I. She stood by my side and gave me credibility.

“This is like old times,” said an old man. “It’s like when I was five years old and someone would cry out in the streets, ‘Sharpener! Knife sharpener!’ And we’d come down with our knives. It’s fantastic! We ought to make a film.”

A woman said, “This is so rare! Hardly anyone does this any
more!” Her knives needed sharpening, but she lived in a fifth-floor walk-up and had arthritis. I volunteered to get them for her, but she glared at me as if I were crazy, or maybe a potential thief, and said thanks, but no thanks. I gave her my phone number in case she changed her mind.

Another man stopped and said he was an artist. He gave me postcards of two of his paintings, scenes from Montmartre. By this time Henri had finished sharpening and was eager to leave. I told him I had lots more knives. I ran upstairs and found a dozen antique knives with bone handles and carbon blades. The blades were stained black.

Hah! That would keep him busy.

Henri chided me for having exposed the knives to humidity, the enemy of sharpness. “Never, ever expose carbon blades to dampness!” he said.

While Henri worked, Pierino Anselmo, the Italian-born glazier whose shop is two doors down from my building, came by. He was so excited by the sight of the knife sharpener that he launched into a personal story in rapid-fire Italian. He said he came from a long line of glaziers. His family immigrated to France to find work after World War II. Two of his great-great-grandfathers, his grandfathers, his parents, and several of his uncles had been itinerant glaziers. He had opened his shop more than fifty years ago, when he was in his early twenties. But from the age of fourteen until then, he had been a street artisan, like the knife sharpener. He walked with a heavy wooden contraption filled with glass plates strapped to his back, shouting,
“Vi-trier! Vi-trier!”
“Gla-zier! Gla-zier!”