Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (53 page)

La Chapelle still has the bustle and turbulence of a major crossing point. The main street is a continual two-way procession of cars and trucks. With its jostling crowds and tatty shops, it has more of the big city about it than the delicate stage sets of central Paris. Across the road from the church, at the end of the Impasse du Curé, there is a view through iron railings of the Sacré-Cœur on its ant-hill of roofs and chimneys. Far below, trains from Picardy, Flanders and the Channel coast rattle through the deep cutting towards the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord.

In the whispering gloom of the church, a parish history in the form of a small brochure explained that this was the site where Saint Denis, who brought Christianity to Lutetia, was buried along with his severed head: a shrine was raised there in 475 by Saint Geneviève, the nun from Nanterre who had a genius for organizing military resistance and famine relief. Evidently, she knew that martyrs should be buried at places such as cols, through which travellers are forced to pass. Next door to the church, the Joan of Arc basilica marks the site where, in 1429, the Maid of Orleans spent the night before riding down to the gates of occupied Paris, and where she rested the following night after receiving a crossbow bolt in the leg. The parish history was offered as ‘a message of welcome and friendship’. We read it by the light of some votive candles. At the top of page two, we discovered that someone had been there before us:

The thrill of finding the first piece of corroborative evidence overcame the mild disappointment of being beaten to the col. Three months later, this time with our bicycles, we made what we thought was the first conscious two-wheeled ascent of Paris’s only col. At the Porte de la Chapelle, we turned to face south, and set off up the slope with a thousand other road-users. To mark the historic moment, I looked over at the chapel as we reached the summit, but a furniture van was squeezing past, blotting out the view, and the narrow strip of asphalt between its tyres and the kerb was of more immediate interest. A lapse of concentration, and the expedition would have ended, without even the consolation of an official commemorative plaque: ‘Died crossing the Col de la Chapelle.’

Then began the real challenge: how to have the col ratified by the Club des Cent Cols. I knew this would not be easy. Every year, the club’s ‘Ethics, Reflection and Proposal Committee’ publishes a list of ‘Rejected Cols’. Ridiculous as it might appear to non-cyclists, some tourist offices try to attract
cyclotouristes
by exaggerating the hilliness of their region. Some of them even conjure up non-existent cols and invite cycling clubs and journalists to come and celebrate the erection of a sign. The Club des Cent Cols has no patience with this sort of trickery. Typical entries in the list are:

It turned out that there had been some discussion of the Parisian col after a member of the club, on a visit to the ‘archaeological crypt’ of Notre-Dame, had noticed the words ‘Col de la Chapelle’ painted on a papier-mâché relief map of ancient Paris. The experts on the committee had decided that there was insufficient evidence, and the case had been closed. The President answered my email as swiftly and efficiently as a racing cyclist swerving past a pothole:

At least his message left a glimmer of hope: ‘This col…’ Its existence was not explicitly denied. Logically, then, the next step was to try to have the col inscribed on a map and printed on a road sign.

I wrote to the Institut Géographique National, electronically and then on paper, including the proper coordinates, and some further evidence from research in the library. It seemed that, back in the days when Prefects Rambuteau and Haussmann were replacing murky alleyways with gas-lit boulevards, an archaeologist called Théodore Vacquer, who resembled ‘a permanently curled hedgehog’, was snuffling through the debris, trying to piece together a mental image of Lutetia. He found the Roman forum under the Rue Soufflot, and the Roman arena by the Rue Monge. Vacquer was a digger, not a writer, but a study extracted by a geographer from his enormous nest of notes and sketches appeared after his death in 1912. There, for the first time, the existence of a ‘Pas de la Chapelle’ was revealed. Since then, a few geographers (but not cartographers), stalking into the increasingly uncluttered past of Paris, across Precambrian river beds and hills still wet with ancient seas, have written of the col that lay on the prehistoric ‘tin route’ from Britannia to the Mediterranean.

Weeks passed. Either an expedition to the lost col had set out from the IGN’s headquarters at Vincennes and never returned, or my letter had continued its journey to a recycling centre. In the meantime, I wrote to the mayor of the eighteenth
arrondissement
and to the civic authorities at the Hôtel de Ville.

A month later, a letter arrived from the IGN. It confirmed the ‘geographical and topographical’ existence of a Parisian col–‘the lowest point between the Butte Montmartre and the Buttes Chaumont’. However, ‘until now’, the writer teasingly went on, the col has never appeared on an IGN map for two reasons: first, ‘the urban fabric is very dense in this area’ second, ‘its name is not currently used by the local inhabitants’. In other words, there were already too many place names on the map, and if an explorer arrived at La Chapelle, asking for the col, he would be met with blank stares (unless, of course, he happened to ask a geographer or the man who wrote the parish history).

I waited in vain for replies from the municipal officials, who might not have shared the cartographic scruples of the IGN. But by then, it no longer seemed to matter. A galvanized col sign embedded in the asphalt of La Chapelle would have been nothing but a quaint impediment, a photo opportunity for
vélibistes
, a slightly more durable form of graffiti–assuming that room could have been found for it among all the other sobering statements of urban fact: ‘
PASSAGE INTERDIT
’, ‘
FIN DE ZONE TOURISTIQUE
’, ‘
VOUS N
’
AVEZ PAS LA PRIORITÉ
’, etc.

Something had been obvious all along: the city, built by human beings, is indifferent to their desires. It shows them the solid form of their fictions, their tales of intimacy and glory, of love and everlasting pride, the legends and stories that only one person ever knew or that recruited generations to their make-believe. It educates even the most successful megalomaniacs in the smallness of their dreams. Paris shows its true face from the top of the Tour Montparnasse, where guards patrol the suicide fence. Most of that galactic scatter of illuminations reaching out to the horizons is darkness.

Every living city is a necropolis, a settling mountain of populations migrating downwards into the soil. Kings, queens and emperors are only its servants. They help it to erase even the possibility of memory. The sites of commemoration built by Napoleon III buried acres of history. A boulevard named after a battle obliterated the mementos of a million lives, and, at the end of his reign, the Archives Nationales went up in flames.

Five thousand miles from Paris, on an island in the South Atlantic, Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of what he might have done, ‘given only twenty years and a little spare time’. In the telescopic eyes of exile, Paris was an orb that he had held in his hand. If only time had served him, the old city would have vanished: ‘You would have looked for it in vain. Not even vestiges would have remained.’

On Saint Helena, Napoleon rummaged through his past: the docking of the riverboat under the towers of the Île de la Cité, the crowds that clogged the narrow streets, the École Militaire and the Palais-Royal. He remembered a day in the terrible year of 1792. The alarm bells were ringing, and there were rumours of a great upheaval. A ragged army was surging out of the
faubourgs
towards the Tuileries. He left his hotel in the Rue du Mail and headed for the
quartier
of slums and ruined mansions between the Louvre and the Carrousel. An ugly gang of ruffians was parading a pikestaff on which a head had been impaled. Noticing the young captain with his clean hands and laundered clothes, they challenged him to shout ‘
Vive la nation!
’–‘which, as you can imagine, I hastened to do’.

He went on to the Place du Carrousel, where he entered the house of a friend. The building had been turned into a kind of warehouse: it was packed with the belongings of aristocrats who had fled the country, taking whatever money was offered for their furniture, their trinkets and their family portraits. He made his way upstairs, through the debris of the world that was passing away, and looked out of a window: the rabble were storming the Tuileries Palace, butchering the Swiss Guards. From that window, as though from the balcony of a theatre, he witnessed the end of the French monarchy. Years later, on evenings when the Emperor prowled the streets of Paris in disguise, eavesdropping, inspecting the faces of Parisians for clues to the world he was creating, he looked for the house where so much history had been emblazoned on his mind. But his orders for the renovation of the
quartier
had been so swiftly carried out, and ‘so many great changes had taken place there that I was never able to find it again’.

T
HE
C
OL DE LA
C
HAPELLE
is still unrecorded on the map, and there is still no mountain in Paris. Unlike human beings, an accident of geography requires no commemoration, and perhaps, as the IGN’s letter suggested, it no longer exists. In the nineteenth century, the railways passed through the col, almost flattening it as they went. The cutting changed the landscape; white steam erupting from the locomotives formed new skies above La Chapelle, fashioning new routes for the imagination–a strand of pavement, a palace of chimneys, a procession of ghosts on a black canal. In 2010, only the volume of traffic testifies to the col’s importance. This brainstem of the future city, where travellers passed even before there was a settlement on the island in the Seine, is now the route that is taken by the Eurostar from London. Anyone curious to know the site should look for it on the left side of the Paris-bound train, shortly after the engine sheds marked ‘Gare du Landy’ (from the ‘Lendit’ fair at the fabled centre of Gaul). As the train reaches the summit, there is a faint sensation of the motors’ tug and release, but the col is easy to miss, since the carriages pass over it when the announcement has already been made–‘
Nous arriverons dans quelques instants ála Gare du Nord
’–and it is time to put away the book, gather up the luggage and prepare to meet the miraculous creation where even the quietest street is crowded with adventures.

c. 4500
BC
Neolithic settlements on the Seine (on the site of modern Bercy).

c. 2nd century
BC
The Celtic Parisii tribe settles on an island in the Seine.

52
BC
Defeat of the Parisii by Caesar’s second-in-command, Labienus.

1st century
AD
Development of the Gallo-Roman city of Lutetia on the left bank of the Seine: forum, aqueduct, baths (Cluny), theatres, amphitheatre (Arènes de Lutèce).

late 3rd century Saint Denis brings Christianity to Lutetia.