Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (23 page)

She still went to Italy every year, but her true place was in Paris, and at the house in Médan, which became a site of pilgrimage. Every year, on the first Sunday in October, the leading lights of the literary world arrived at the station and walked up to the house to pay homage to the Master. Two years after his death, in 1904, hundreds of people attended the commemoration. It was a shame that the children had been unable to witness their father’s glory. Little Jacques was suffering from tuberculosis and was being treated at the clinic in Normandy that Alexandrine had investigated herself. She reminded Jacques’s mother that he was to eat as much as he could and that he should be given plenty of milk and eggs between meals. A few days later, when all the disciples had gone home, she wrote to her again:

* THE MAGNIFICENT MÉTROPOLITAIN *

I
N THE STIFLING HEAT
of the early afternoon of Thursday, 19 July 1900, a hundred people of all ages, shapes and sizes were standing in front of the little kiosk that had recently appeared on the pavement of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. Some, acutely aware of their place in history, were looking at their watches. Others were there simply because they happened to be passing and had joined the crowd on principle or because they wanted to find out why so many people were all waiting to use the same toilet.

At exactly one o’clock, the glazed doors swung open and a heady smell of pine forest escaped into the Paris air. The crowd passed under the glass umbrella and clattered down the wooden steps to an illuminated newsstand where banknotes could be changed, and a counter where a pretty face was waiting with a ticket and a smile. They were delighted to find the underworld pleasantly cool. Someone exclaimed, ‘I could spend my holidays down here!’, and everyone agreed.

They bought their tickets–rectangles of pink or cream card, with a background design that might have been a cathedral or a power station–then they hurried down another flight of steps, and a blast of Arctic air had them clutching at their throats. Despite the cold, the stench of creosote was overpowering. As their pupils dilated, they were able to distinguish, by the aquarium light of the electric lamps, an asphalt pavement stretching away into the darkness. On either side of the pavement were two cement-lined trenches and, at the bottom of each trench, an elevated bar of shiny metal. Men in black sweaters with red piping and the letter ‘M’ embroidered on the collar emerged from the gloom, announcing that anyone who touched the shiny rail would die in an instant. Impressed, the crowd drew back, and three wooden crates the colour of ceramic bricks, scintillant in the electric light, positioned themselves in front of the passengers.

Second-class passengers shared the front carriage with the Westinghouse motors; then came first class with red leather seats; then first and second class together. Everything looked neat and clean. On the outside, the varnished coat-of-arms of Paris in blue and red adorned the painted panels. At the front of the train, two men standing behind glass windows looked like animated statues in a museum: one had his hand on the regulator, the other held the brake. Another train would come along in five minutes, but the crowd was in no mood to wait and surged into the carriages. The women admired the fluted wood furniture and the polished wooden decking. The men quickly occupied the seats in order to have the pleasure of giving them up to ladies.

In the front carriage, one of the employees tried to make himself heard above the hubbub. ‘
One hundred and twenty-five horsepower–times two, equals two hundred and fifty horsepower! Direct current of six hundred volts! Three-phase current of five thousand volts! Supplied by the factory on the Quai de la Rapée!
’ The train began to move, and, as it entered the tunnel, the passengers saw huge blue sparks leaping through the darkness like ghostly dolphins escorting a ship.

‘The cold is relative to the heat above ground,’ said the employee. ‘Mademoiselle has nothing to fear for her chest!’ A dozen pairs of eyes fastened themselves on the object of concern. ‘We shall shortly be pursuing the audacious curve that will place us on the line of the Champs-É lysées!’ With that, the employee opened a door and vanished into the next carriage.

It was hard to tell how fast the train was moving until a dimly lit cavern appeared and disappeared in a flash. One of the passengers began to read from a folded piece of paper as though he were reciting a prayer: ‘PORTE MAILLOT–OBLIGADO–É TOILE–ALMA–MARBEUF. The first station should be Obligado…’ Two minutes later, another illuminated cavern passed the windows, and the train seemed to be gathering speed. A young man claimed to have caught sight of a word on a tiny plaque, too short to be ‘Obligado’, but possibly ‘Alma’ or ‘É toile’. ‘It’s too soon for Obligado,’ someone said, ‘we won’t be there for a while.’

A multi-coloured blur clattered past in the opposite direction. The train slowed down and stopped in a glittering nave full of people rushing about. A voice outside shouted the name of the station and the girl in the low-cut dress screamed, ‘
Champs-É lysées!
’ ‘Eight minutes from Porte Maillot,’ said her neighbour. ‘That’s no time at all!’ said the young woman. ‘It’s so
fast
!’ The man on the other side of her leaned over and said, mysteriously, ‘Nothing in life is ever fast enough, Mademoiselle.’

Twenty people boarded the carriage, which was already full, but no one alighted, and the temperature rose to a comfortable level. The employee reappeared. ‘We’re missing out all the stations!’ said the man with the paper. ‘Eighteen stations,’ said the employee. ‘Eight already open. Ten to open before the first of September. Next stop: PALAIS-ROYAL!’

Now that they could visualize the route–down the Champs-

É lysées, across the Place de la Concorde and along the Tuileries Gardens–it seemed all the more miraculous. At Palais-Royal, the passengers on the platform had to wait for the next train. Then came Louvre–which was hard to imagine–Châtelet and Hôtel-de-Ville, where they stopped for half a minute. A darkened station that must have been Saint-Paul flicked past, then the wheels gave a horrible screech, daylight flooded the carriage and, blinking as though at some amazing novelty, they saw the snail-like traffic on the Place de la Bastille.

A respectable-looking woman began to shake with helpless laughter as the train gave a jolt and plunged back into the tunnel. GARE DE LYON–REUILLY–NATION–PORTE DE VINCENNES. ‘
Tout le monde descend!
’

The crowd spilled out, their faces radiant with satisfaction. They placed their tickets, marked ‘
Àla sortie jeter dans la Boîte
’, in a wooden collection box, while the empty train slid away behind a large rotunda. They climbed the steps, passed under the glass umbrella, and found themselves in a suburban landscape of dirty little houses and dusty grey trees blasted by a scorching wind. They stopped on the edge of the street, looked at one another, and said, in a single voice, ‘
Let’s go back to the Métropolitain!
’

By the time they had bought their tickets from the smiling face behind the counter, the train had completed the return loop and was standing at the other platform, waiting to take them back to the other side of Paris in twenty-seven minutes. Everyone agreed that, from now on, they would take the Métropolitain whenever they could.

* THE ADMIRABLE CONVENIENCE *

M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
, former man-about-town, writer of occasional elegant articles in the newspapers and collector of rare aesthetic sensations, often sat for a long time in the iris-scented room like a sphinx, with the door (in case someone rang) and the window left open, despite the smell of laundry and the pollen of the chestnut trees on the boulevard, remembering the views from other
cabinets
–the ruined tower of Roussainville-le-Pin, the glistening white walls of the trellised pavilion on the Champs-É lysées, the skylight in his mother’s toilet, which, seen in the mirror, might have been a cloud-reflecting pool. The days of perilous journeys from kitchen to
cabinet
, with all the risks of tripping up and spilling, were long past. In well-appointed apartments, the water was already waiting in the bowl: a smart tug on a nickel-plated bronze and ivory handle emptied it in a flash and filled it with two fresh litres of water from a reservoir mounted on the wall.

It was the only room in the apartment in which the outside world was audible. Anywhere else, the noise would have been a distraction, but here, it plunged him into a pleasant state of half-conscious meditation. The parping of automobiles was a simple melody for which his mind automatically supplied the words: ‘
Get up! Go to the country! Take a picnic!
’ Petrol fumes gusting up from the street suggested the shade of willows and a brook singing duets with the softly puttering Panhard-Levassor.

The room was arranged, like his table at the Ritz, for special, daily occasions. He ate once every twenty-four hours, the same meal whenever possible: one roast chicken wing, two
œufs á la crème
, three croissants (always from the same
boulangerie
), a plate of fried potatoes, some grapes, a cup of coffee and a bottle of beer, followed, nine or ten hours later, by an almost empty glass of Vichy water. He rarely visited the
cabinet
for anything else. When the convoluted journey was over, the rest was taken care of by English engineering. (These days, nearly all the household gods spoke English: Maple & Co. on the Place de l’Opéra and Liberty on the Boulevard des Capucines for modern-style furniture, the Société Française du Vacuum Cleaner–‘
nettoyage par le vide
’–for the fitted carpets, Remington for the typewriter, the Aeolian Company for the pianola.)

On the day the Paris Métro had opened, he had found himself in Venice, lying in a gondola on the Grand Canal, from which he waved to his mother as she stood in the window of the Hotel Danieli. He returned to his parents’ new apartment at 45, Rue de Courcelles, which, even after the opening of the É toile–Anvers segment in October 1902, was as far as one could be in central Paris from a Métro station. In August 1903, when eighty-four passengers were held up at Couronnes station by a smouldering train in the tunnel, and refused to leave until their fifteen centimes were refunded, and were asphyxiated and trampled to death, thus becoming the first consumer martyrs, he was preparing to join his mother at Évian and, daringly for him, to take the funicular to the Mer de Glace. In 1906, when both his father and his mother were dead, he moved to an apartment at 102, Boulevard Haussmann, which was noisy, dusty and new, but the only apartment on the market that his mother had seen. ‘I could not bring myself to move to a house that
maman
never knew.’ This placed him less than three hundred yards from the Saint-Lazare Métro station, which had opened only two years before.

Without the hammering of his neighbours’ electricians, plumbers and carpet-fitters, he would have heard the excavations on the boulevard for lines A and B, which were managed by a separate company called Nord-Sud.

The Nord-Sud was to the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris what Maple’s was to Au Bon Marché, or the Ritz to a shelter for the homeless. It used Thomson motors, fed by a pantograph that continually caressed an aerial wire. First-class carriages were bright yellow and red; second class were aquamarine and electric blue. In the connecting corridors of Saint-Lazare, a customer of the CMP passed into an enchanted world in which transportation was a pretext and every decorative detail a compliment to good taste: the mosaic lettering of the station’s name, the delicately lavatorial entrances of wrought-iron and ceramics. Saint-Lazare’s famous ticket-hall of multi-coloured columns and tiled, ventricular vaults bore a remarkable resemblance to the abbey of Fontevrault, and made it possible to imagine that Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lion-heart and the other sepulchral effigies had risen up and assumed the garb of modern Parisians, and were setting off for a monastic herb garden or a Saracen stronghold on the other side of Paris.

In 1906, at the age of thirty-five, when his literary baggage was extremely light, he was already acquainted with the law of modern life according to which one’s immediate surroundings remain a mystery while distant places seen in guidebooks and paintings are as familiar as old friends whose material presence is no longer required to maintain the friendship. The Métropolitain, whose rumble was perceptible to the spiders on the ceiling, might as well have been a fantasy of H. G. Wells. This, combined with an inability to leave his apartment, explains why, when very few Parisians had never taken the Métro, and when more kilometres were travelled every day in Paris than on the entire rail network, Marcel Proust had yet to descend to the Métropolitain. He had never, as far as we know, even written the word; nor had any of his friends ever mentioned it. In August, he had tried to reach the Père-Lachaise cemetery in order to attend his uncle’s funeral, but had spent two hours wheezing in the Saint-Lazare railway station, galvanizing his asthmatic lungs with coffee before returning to his apartment. In September, imagining the marvels that might correspond to the exotic syllables ‘Perros-Guirec’ and ‘Ploërmel’, he had left for Brittany. The journey had ended at Versailles, where he took a room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. He was still there in December when he wrote to an old friend:

That year, he had planned a trip to Normandy. He had pored over guide books and gazetteers, and pestered his correspondents for information on rented accommodation. He had promised himself a quiet holiday somewhere near Trouville, if the ideal house could be found, with varied relaxations and occasional tours in a covered automobile.