Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (50 page)

The sun rises behind him and then to his right: cars are entering the ‘Circle of Death’ in greater numbers, and there are the first signs of the turbulence that will lead to gridlock later in the day. On the straight section after Gentilly–Montrouge, Malakoff, Porte de la Plaine–the corrugation rattles out a measure of his speed, and he feels the acceleration before it happens.–10
10
.

Two tunnels separated by a heartbeat, then the ribbed carcass of the Parc des Princes dancing down like a space invader–too big to see him shooting underneath, through the long tunnel of the Bois de Boulogne, the echoes catching up and overtaking, before the little road ascending, the streetlamps’ blessing, and the traffic from another, more leisurely age, circling the leafy carousel of the Porte Dauphine.

11
04
–Porte Dauphine and back again, all the way around. This is a record that will last for years.

S
HE DID HEAR
the scream. She circled the Place de l’Étoile, then rode down the Champs-Élysées, stopped on the square with the courtyard of the Louvre and the Pyramid as her backdrop, and returned just in time to the Pomme de Pain, which the
motards
have virtually taken over. A moment in history…

He says just this: ‘11
04
.’

She places her hands on either side of his helmet. The face is a blur, a city hurtling backwards into a forgotten future.

1. Bondy

T
WO CENTURIES AGO
, for those who had the means to travel in what passed for comfort, Paris began and ended at 28, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Number 28 had once been part of a town house belonging to the Marquis de Boulainvilliers. In 1785, the property was sold to the King for six hundred thousand livres, and the garden was converted into the central terminus of the national coaching and posting service, the Messageries Royales, whose yards and booking offices had previously been scattered across the city. At seven or eight in the morning, and at five or six in the evening, the coaches known as
turgotines
, painted with the gold insignia of the Messageries, left for all corners of the kingdom; at various other times throughout the day, incoming coaches, ghostly with the dust of distant parts, tipped their benumbed occupants out into the miscellaneous crowd.

Whatever else they had on their minds–a lover left behind or ardently awaited, the luxuries of Paris or the looming monotony of the provinces–all but the most innocent or debonair of travellers who boarded the east-bound coach shared the same apprehension, especially if, having failed to book a seat on the morning service, they were forced to leave Paris when the lamps were lighting up the boulevards.

Like other passengers, they examined the carriage and the horses, assessed the resilience of the straps that held their luggage, and inspected the driver for signs of inebriation. They peered at the rectangle of sky above the rooftops and worried about the weather and the state of the roads. When the postilion called them to board, they noted the age, profession, size and smell of their fellow travellers, and prepared for delicate negotiations, the result of which would determine the congeniality of the next four or five days.

Along with all these vital considerations, travellers bound for the east had an additional cause for anxiety. After leaving Paris by the Porte Saint-Martin, their coach would follow the Canal de l’Ourcq across a level plain dotted with churches and attractive villas. Forty minutes into the journey, they would reach the little village of Bondy, which marked the edge of the smiling landscape of lanes and meadows between the Seine and the Marne where Parisians went for walks and picnics. Then, after the château and the staging post, they would enter a region of wooded hills which, like some ghastly cul-de-sac in the sunless heart of the city, had escaped the influence of civilization.

Although it took less than half an hour to cross it in a stagecoach, the Forest of Bondy was a large, dark blot in the mental geography of Parisians. It was one of those half-imagined places, like the Gorges d’Ollioules on the road from Toulon to Marseille, or the frontier passes of the high Pyrenees, that made city-dwellers feel safe in their crime-ridden metropolis. Barely two leagues from the glittering boulevards, the Forest of Bondy was believed to be swarming with brigands who thought nothing of leaving coach passengers dangling from improvised gibbets for the sake of a few coins and trinkets. Since 675, when King Childeric II and his wife Bilichilde had been murdered in the forest, so many travellers had perished at the hands of highwaymen that ‘
forêt de Bondy
’ had entered the language as a synonym for ‘den of thieves’. It was there that unspeakable things were done to the heroines of the Marquis de Sade, and scarcely a year went by without a Bondy Forest, thick with black and green paint, being trundled onto the stage of a boulevard theatre to provide an evocative backdrop for yet another hapless maiden dressed in white.

The horrors of the Forest of Bondy were no doubt exaggerated, but drivers and their passengers were always glad to see the other side of it, and it was only when the villages of Livry and Clichy had been left behind in their clearings that the passengers tucked into the provisions they had brought from Paris and began to sing the songs that would help to shorten the interminable journey.

Though partly mistaken in their object, their fears were not entirely unfounded. The Forest of Bondy had once formed part of the double belt of dense woodland that supplied Paris with timber and fuel, and offered it illusory protection from invaders. Beyond the wooded boundaries of the Île-de-France lay the windy plains of Champagne and Lorraine, and beyond them, the vast expanse that stretched all the way to Asia, whence came barbarians and the plague. In 1814, it was from the wooded heights of Livry and Clichy that the Cossacks saw Paris for the first time, and it was in the Château de Bondy that Tsar Alexander menacingly reminded the municipal delegation of Napoleon’s unprovoked attack on Moscow. More than half a century later, the Prussian army laid waste to the same woods and villages as it encircled the defenceless city.

Apart from the blacksmiths and innkeepers who plied their trade along the post road, the inhabitants had remained as obscure as savages in a remote colony. Parisians who knew every cobblestone of their
quartier
and who could detect the slightest variation in a neighbour’s routine had only the foggiest notion of human life beyond the boulevards. The people of the forest had first come to the attention of Parisians on the eve of the Revolution, when every town and village in the kingdom was invited to record its grievances. The villagers who lived by the Forest of Bondy turned out to have fears of their own. They were constantly in danger of starvation. The roads to local markets were unusable for half the year, the horses, hunting dogs, pigeons and rabbits of wealthy landowners destroyed their crops and they were cruelly burdened with taxes. The people of Aulnay-lès-Bondy complained that their property was not respected: ‘It seems only just that each individual should be free within his own enclosure and should not be troubled by incursions.’

Even in that quiet dawn of the industrial age, the villages of the forest were unloved satellites of the great city. They felt its gravitational pull but not its warmth. Paris had always been terrified of its
banlieue
. Exploiting its labour and resources, the city tried to keep it at a distance and even to abolish it altogether. In 1548, Henri II had ordered that the new houses in the
faubourgs
should be demolished at their owners’ expense. In 1672, when it was too late to stop the
faubourgs
from snaking into the countryside, all building beyond the outer perimeter was banned. It was feared that Paris would suffer the fate of ancient cities that had grown so huge that they could no longer be policed. But the wealth and needs of Paris drew ever larger armies of migrant labourers. They came on the roads, canals and railways that were centred on the capital like the spokes of a wheel. They repaired and serviced the city that treated them as serfs. When a ring of fortifications was placed around Paris in the 1840s, an anarchic zone of overpopulated suburbs quickly filled the belt between the fortifications and the old tax wall. To neutralize the threat to public order, the new suburbs were incorporated into the city in 1859. Yet still the city grew, and every year another group of farms, dairies, vineyards and allotments was engulfed by the tide.

Lying just beyond the limits of the metropolitan area, the villages of Clichy, Livry, Aulnay and Bondy preserved their rural appearance. The last known highwaymen were executed in 1824, by which time the business had become less profitable: railways drained the great east road of traffic, and most of the outsiders who passed through the villages belonged to a vanishing world. They followed much older routes in search of comforts that a modern city could not provide. They came on pilgrimages to the forest chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, where the Virgin Mary had descended from heaven in a flash of light and rescued three merchants from robbers on her birthday in 1212: the stream that ran nearby was found to possess miraculous healing powers. Even when highwaymen had become as scarce as wolves, it was easy to picture those villages as they had been a thousand years before. In fact, the region might have escaped the urban flood entirely were it not for an administrative decision that made the Forest of Bondy a place to be feared with good reason.

F
OR CENTURIES
, the city’s main abattoirs and refuse dump had occupied the site of the Montfaucon gibbet, where a massive medieval tower had stood, each of its gaping windows occupied by a crow-pecked corpse suspended from a chain. As it seethed out towards the Buttes Chaumont and the village of La Villette, the city had spread around its own waste, and the stench had become intolerable. In 1817, a decision had been taken to move the abattoirs to Aubervilliers and the festering mound of filth to the ill-famed Forest of Bondy. By 1849, long, heavy barges were sliding out of Paris every day along the Canal de l’Ourcq to dump the city’s excrement on Bondy.

Only when several years’ worth of waste had been floated out to the forest did the danger become apparent. Bondy was once again a spectre on the north-eastern horizon. It was as though administrative convenience had been the unwitting servant of an ancient curse. In 1883, a group of concerned citizens alerted the authorities to the new menace with a book titled
L’Infection de Paris
. Every year, as soon as the weather turned warm, ‘foul odours’ descended on the north-eastern quarters of Paris. The cover of the book showed the city divided into its twenty
arrondissement
s. A small black rectangle at the top right, labelled ‘Bondy’, was irradiating Paris with pestilential rays. The five
arrondissement
s facing Bondy–tenth, eleventh, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth–were black; the others were grey or white depending on their distance from the source of infection. Inside the book, the diagram appeared again, this time with a little table showing the annual death rate to be highest in the
arrondissement
s closest to Bondy, and a terse caption: ‘This map speaks for itself.’

The old Forêt de Bondy seemed pathetic by comparison. Modern-day Bondy was killing Parisians by the thousand. ‘Sewage men, knackers and other industrial workers are blockading Paris and growing rich at its expense.’ And who were these lethal parasites who lived in a blighted landscape of rust and demolition, where normal people retched as soon as they drew breath? Had anyone seen their identity papers? According to the book, the unregistered workers who made a living from the city’s waste were ‘a transient population of foreigners, mostly Germans and Luxembourgeois of dubious origin’…It was unclear whether the threat to Paris was believed to come from its own excrement or from the alien population that processed it.

In 1911, braving the stench, an ethnologist went out to see what was left of the old way of life. He travelled to the Forest of Bondy on the anniversary of the Virgin’s birth. There, between the villages of Clichy and Montfermeil, he found pilgrims still flocking to the little chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges. But the ancient traditions had been infected–or so it seemed to the ethnologist–by what he took to be the modern world. The simple piety of the medieval peasant was nowhere in evidence. The sickly smell of fried food hung over the wooden shacks that housed the pilgrims, and many of the faithful were clearly inspired by something other than religious fervour: ‘One may be quite certain that, for most of the thousands who visit the chapel, the water of the miraculous fountain is not their principal source of liquid refreshment.’ The chapel itself had recently been burgled, which seemed to prove that nothing was sacred any more.

Despite the growth of their enormous neighbour, change came slowly to the hills of the north-east. As the pestilential odours succumbed to modern technology, ever larger sections of the forest were carved into plots and sold to Parisian tradesmen looking for cheap retirement homes in the country. They brought with them their garden forks and pruning shears, and their proletarian ideals and organizations. As the old hierarchy of landlord and peasant dissolved, the villages became part of a ‘Red Belt’ of socialist and radical councils that seemed to present yet another threat to the security of Paris. But the rural past hung on, and even at the outbreak of the Second World War, the owner of one of those modest plots could still collect manure for his rose bushes from the cows that ambled along the main streets of Livry and Clichy.

It was only a matter of time before the area was engulfed by Greater Paris. Urbanization spread along the Canal de l’Ourcq, bringing its own trees and topsoil as a final insult to the forest. The neat little houses with their iron railings began to look as quaint and vulnerable as the cottages they had replaced. The first blocks of flats were built in 1960, then came the social housing projects with names that might have been chosen in desperation from a municipal catalogue: the Hamlet, the Village, Temple Wood, the Old Mill. Soon, the original terrain with its mounds and hollows was bulldozed into irrelevancy and was noticeable only to pedestrians with heavy shopping or arthritis. The pilgrims’ chapel was stuck on a patch of hard-wearing grass beside the four-lane Boulevard Gagarine, and the miraculous stream was led off through a culvert. Later, the sacred well became polluted and was stopped up. More tower blocks were erected on what were now the exposed and windy heights: ‘Les Cosmonautes’, ‘Allende’, ‘La Tour Victor Hugo’.

The immigrant workers, who had once come from Alsace and Germany, and then from Brittany and the south, now came from even further afield–Turkey and the Middle East, the Maghreb and Equatorial Africa, China and south-east Asia. Parisians who had moved to the suburb a generation before, and who had looked down their noses at the rustic locals, asked themselves, as they stood at the bus stop next to black, brown or yellow-skinned people dressed in brightly coloured prints and camel-skin jellabas, whether they still lived in a country called France.

It would be hard to say exactly when the region was severed from its rural past forever, and when the wilderness returned to the Bondy Forest in a different guise. The ridge of gypsum above Clichy and Montfermeil continued to produce plaster of Paris until 1965, and there were still some market gardens supplying the local grocers who held out against the supermarkets. On the other side of the canal, at Aulnay-sous-Bois, even when most of the population was commuting into Paris, there were fields of wheat, oats, barley, beetroot and potatoes. But the farmland was shrinking, and the rich smells of pigs and ploughed earth, which had reminded some of the newcomers of villages they had left behind, became ever fainter. The old world ended without anyone noticing. One day in the 1960s, when the Eiffel Tower could still be seen from the higher ground, the last farmer reached the end of his field, turned his tractor back towards ‘the Village’, and left his land to the developers.