Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (48 page)

He knew the area like the back of his hand. Or rather, he knew it as it had been before he was born. (Anything too recent made only a faint impression and met with a blank stare.) He had lectured at the Sorbonne on the history of Paris, to students barely out of the womb, beginning with the Gauls who periodically annihilated their settlement to prevent it from falling into the hands of their enemies. Invited to give his expert views on the city’s modern redevelopment, he had written one of his history books in a room at the Hôtel de Ville above the office where Baron Haussmann had planned the destruction of Paris. He had been a contemporary of Pompidou at École Normale, and had sometimes lunched with the President and a few other
normaliens
at a little restaurant in the Rue Hautefeuille, where Baudelaire was born, but he had never dared voice his true opinions.

Now, Chevalier was writing a book called
L’Assassinat de Paris
. It was the fruit of long walks and readings that had left him up to his knees in the past. He would show the city succumbing to planners and financiers, and, if indignation left him room, he would reconstruct the Paris of his studious memory: ‘Left to itself, History would forget. But fortunately, there are novels–loaded with emotions, swarming with faces, and constructed with the sand and lime of language.’

He liked to feel the filth of the Beaubourg
quartier
permeate his body: its smut was an essential part of its history. The original village, built on a mound above the riverside swamp, had been named Beaubourg (Pretty Place) in a spirit of medieval sarcasm. Three of the nine streets in which Louis IX had allowed prostitutes to operate were in Beaubourg, which had once had the rudest street names in Paris: Rue Maubuée (Dirty Washing Street), Rue Pute-y-Muse (Streetwalker Street), Rue du Poil-au-Cul (Hairy Bottom Street), Rue Gratte-Cul (Arsescratcher Street), Rue Troussevache (Cowshagger Street), Rue Trousse-Nonnain (Nunfucker Street) and Rue Tire-Vit (Cocktugger Street), where Mary Queen of Scots was said to have asked her guide, ‘What street is this?’, to which the guide had euphemistically replied, ‘Rue Tire-Boudin, Your Highness.’ And ‘Tug-Sausage Street’ it remained until the 1800s, when it was renamed Rue Marie-Stuart.

Architectural pearls were forever being found in this squalid zone: curious lintels and casements, a Renaissance staircase in a sordid vennel, the embedded vestiges of turrets and gables, cellars belonging to houses of which no stone survived. Until 1950, hovels had squatted on the roof of the church of Saint-Merri, separated from one another by the flying buttresses.

The Plateau Beaubourg, where Chevalier stood, was now a ‘
parking sauvage
’. The rectangular patch of wasteground was used by motorists and by truck drivers serving the local shops. Painted transvestites and other creatures of the night hung around until they were replaced, the just before dawn, by the muscular unemployed, looking for odd jobs at what remained of the markets.

In the days when buildings were thought to be incurable carriers of disease, the area had been designated
Îlot insalubre n
^o
1
. It was the first of seventeen Unhygienic Precincts identified by government commissions in 1906 and 1919. In 1925, Le Corbusier had produced a plan–sponsored by a car company–that would deal with insalubrity once and for all. Much of the Right Bank would be flattened and the ‘tubercular’ buildings (and all the other buildings too) would be replaced by eighteen cruciform towers. East–west arteries would allow motorists to cross what had once been Paris in a matter of minutes. Le Corbusier’s secretary, who came in from the suburbs, would never be late for work again. The plan had been shelved, but the idea remained as a dream: Paul Delouvrier, ‘the Haussmann of the suburbs’, who had discovered Paris from the driving seat of his Studebaker convertible, decreed that Parisians should be able to travel about their city at 50–60 kph.

Several streets in Unhygienic Precinct No. 1 had been swept away in the 1930s as part of the programme of rationalization and sanitization, leaving the area of wasteground, which every night was carpeted afresh with broken glass, condoms and hypodermic needles.

T
HIS WAS THE SITE
that Pompidou had chosen for a cultural centre and modern art museum. (‘It has to be modern art because we already have the Louvre,’ he explained.) Six hundred and eighty-one teams of architects had submitted designs of bewildering variety: a cube, a bent prong of glass and metal, a discombobulated rhombus, an inverted pyramid, a giant egg and something resembling a wastepaper basket. The winning design was compared to an oil refinery, which pleased the architects. It made radical use of steel, plastic and colour-coded utility tubes: green for plumbing, yellow for electricity, blue for ventilation, red for hot air. Specially designed seats, ashtrays and noticeboards were an integral part of the design, until they were stolen as souvenirs. Best of all, there was to be an escalator running up the outside in a perspex sheath.

Most of the local inhabitants were not opposed to the new building. ‘Who wants to live next to
that
?’ they would ask, pointing at the neighbouring slum from their own section of Unhygienic Precinct. They looked forward to the oil refinery. It would ‘regenerate’ the
quartier
. All the money went to the west of Paris, and it was high time that the east enjoyed some prosperity. There would be new shops and better drains, and the cafés would once again be full of cheerful customers heaping scorn on the municipal authorities, the President, technocrats, artists, builders, tourists and the young.

Louis Chevalier hated people for liking Paris in ignorance of what it once had been. To him, Paris was a composite place built up over the ages, a picture book of superimposed transparencies, overpopulated with the dead and haunted by the ghosts of the living. No sooner was a building demolished and replaced than his mind rebuilt it.

A light rain had begun to fall. His trouser legs felt heavy with the damp; his muscles turned to mud. He walked to the corner of the Rue de la Verrerie and stood in the doorway of Saint-Merri, where, in 1662, the sister of Blaise Pascal had waited for the very first omnibus. (The service was her brother’s idea.) Five buses went by, but all were full, and at last she had turned to walk home in a huff. He retraced her steps a short distance, then entered a side street near the Place Sainte-Opportune. On either side of the street, there were sounds of patient industry. A cobbler was sitting on his doorstep, tapping at a piece of leather. Market traders were passing with their baskets, handcarts, mules, tricycles and gas-fuelled trucks of a kind that was no longer manufactured.

At the end of the street was the ‘Grand Trou des Halles’ where the central markets, known as ‘the Stomach of Paris’, had been cut out. Tourists and Parisians were leaning on the barriers, gazing at the exposed strata and thinking about dinosaurs and Gauls.

In this ravaged zone, the crowd of inter-epochal Parisians was especially dense. By a wall that seemed to buckle with posters and stickers, gouged by knives and chisels, a man in a short blue coat had been crouching, two centuries before, clutching a door key, carving something on the stone. Restif de la Bretonne had already defaced every parapet on the Île Saint-Louis when he began to etch his way through the
quartier
Beaubourg. Years later, ‘to make the past live like the present’, he returned to read these messages to his future self and remembered his exact state of mind at the time: ‘
10 jun. Reconciliatio: cubat mecum
’ (‘Reconciliation: she slept with me’).

A historian claimed to have discovered some of Restif’s graffiti, but many of the stones had long since been chopped out and replaced, and the door key had never bitten very deeply. Now, there were transfixed hearts and genitals, cave paintings and cartoon faces, and skulls whose eyes grew wider and deeper as the rain and petrol-laden air ate into them. The letters of old slogans had blurred with age, and the ringed
A
s of anarchists were as soft as ancient crosses carved on menhirs.

The Black Prince,
#
3

T
HE RAIN IS
a bad sign, but it will pass with the night. From Belleville, one hundred and thirty metres above sea level, Paris is becoming more distinct, like a coastline. It might almost be Nice or Constantinople. She looks out towards the centre, where tall cranes flash their red lights at aeroplanes, and waits for the dawn’s slow light to find the edge of the city.

This time, he will be alone–a
chevalier
or a prince leaving on a heroic expedition. But they will all be there to send him on his way, the riders who know each other only by their sound. They call him ‘Pascal’, but this is just a name they use to show familiarity. Soon, he will be known to the world by another name. A camera crew is already setting up at the Porte Maillot, and one of the riders is trying to explain to a reporter: ‘It’s like the new radar detectors: you know they exist, but you don’t know where they are.’

She is dressed in her leathers, and what might be a skirt of chainmail. She stands for another moment at the window, taking a last look at Paris, a helmet under her arm.

Beaubourg, 31 January 1977

H
ERE
,
THE POET
had sat in a wine shop with a bottle of Burgundy and a saucer of walnuts, writing on the back of a letter–‘
New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of undressed stone
, /
Decrepit suburbs, everything becomes an allegory of something else
,/
And my cherished memories are heavier than rocks.
’ Now, in the Paris that Louis Chevalier was forced to inhabit, the sign above the wine shop said ‘Pier Import–All the Orient at a Price You Can Afford’. He headed for the Rue de Rivoli, which still seemed new to him, past snickering neon signs that he could barely decipher: Drugstore, Snack, FNAC, Mic-Mac, Sex-Shop, Self, Le Petit Prince, Halles-Capone.

Near the corner of the Rue de l’Arbre-Sec, he gave directions to a young lieutenant who was looking for a hotel that no longer existed in a street that had changed its name.

Chronological anomalies were a normal part of life for Louis Chevalier. But since the redevelopment of the
quartier
had begun, even people who lived in the present had been noticing an inappropriate coincidence of historical periods. Families who came to see the work in progress were confronted with veteran prostitutes slouching on purpose-built stone staircases that led directly up from the street. Mothers averted their children’s heads and shot a glance at their husbands. Drunken clowns from circuses that had gone bankrupt after the war competed with graduates of the Marcel Marceau School of Mime. Beaubourg summoned up its ancient past, and over the whole Unhygienic Precinct–even when almost nothing remained of it except facades–and all through the corridors of the Châtelet-Les Halles RER-Métro station, there was the potent smell of the centuries: mould, sodden limestone, vomit, cabbage, corpse and cleaning fluid. A deodorizing unit had analysed its composition, but to no avail. Long after the renovation of the
Îlot insalubre
and the removal of Les Halles to Rungis, the authentic stench of the
quartier
Beaubourg hung on.

He made his way back to the Plateau Beaubourg, where he stood, a witness from another age, staring at a blazing wall of light. He had seen the building going up, tube by tube, until now, at last, it appeared to be permanently unfinished.

H
IS CUPOLA
gleaming in the spotlights, Giscard stooped as though entering a crypt. Baudouin I, Princess Grace, Presidents Mobutu and Senghor, and all the other personalities and heads of state had long since settled into their seats of chrome and leather when he arrived in the vast aquarial foyer with the wife of Pompidou. It was Claude Pompidou’s first outing since the death of her husband. The late President’s face hung over the foyer in the form of a hexagonal moon made of strips of metal. Even in his fragmented state, he appeared to be chortling like a peasant.

The guests, who numbered five thousand, had spent the last hour pushing one another towards the escalators and from one floor to the next, looking for the buffet. (Giscard had ordered that no food or drink should be served at the grand opening.) Then the escalators had been stopped, and ‘the Beaubourg’ had filled with sounds of exasperation and the clicking of heels on metal steps.

Outside, on the tarmac apron that had been the Plateau Beaubourg, a man stood among the onlookers, the world-class buskers and the qualified clowns. If
L’Assassinat de Paris
had carried illustrations, the artist would have shown him holding a thought-bubble in which Baudelaire’s poem, ‘Parisian Dream’, had been traced in a spidery hand: