At first, from painful experience, I thought that the bittes were designed to trick pedestrians into cracking their kneecaps, thereby bringing in some welcome income for the city’s medical system. They were, I assumed, related to the dark-brown cannonballs that are sometimes welded to the edge of the pavement in very narrow streets, and that were obviously meant to trip people up and/or smash their toes.
In fact, though, they are all to stop cars parking. Even though it’s forbidden and drivers could get a sizeable fine, such is the outlaw spirit of the average Parisian driver that he or she would still park on the pavements if the posts or cannonballs weren’t there.
So these booby traps are actually meant to protect pedestrians. Just try to remember that next time you are doubled up in pain after ramming your groin into a metal post that appeared from nowhere as you were walking along a crowded street.
Less dangerous than the bittes, but more decorous, are the endless numbers of metal skeletons lining the pavements—the remnants of bikes that have been locked to railings, lampposts and street signs and been cannibalized so badly that their owners can’t be bothered to unlock them. Their metal carcasses are a sorry symptom of the Parisian lifestyle—as mentioned in Chapter 1, most apartment buildings have nowhere where you can park a bike without neighbours complaining. Anyone who owns a valuable two-wheeler will therefore carry it upstairs and park it in their apartment or on their balcony. The less valuable ones have to survive on the streets, chained up all night outdoors, alone in a world of thieves, drunks and pranksters who will steal saddles, wheels and anything detachable—if they cant get the whole bike.
Most Parisian apartment buildings forbid bicycles in their entrance halls. Bike owners live in constant fear of walking out one morning to find that their beloved two-wheeler has been attacked by predators.
Canny owners paint their bikes ridiculous colours to ward off thieves in search of something resaleable, or use two or three locks to secure every moving part of the bike. But even these can fall victim to a bus or lorry that cuts a corner and squashes the bike against a traffic sign.
The result is that the streets are enlivened by the sight of rusted frames with no wheels, no chain, and no handlebars, abandoned bike skeletons that have been picked clean, like the bones of a hanged criminal in medieval times.
Sadly, these testaments to the strength of bike locks and the predatory nature of man have now become an endangered species. In March 2010, Paris passed a new rule decreeing that these épaves—the French word for shipwrecks—can be removed if there is sufficient evidence that they have really been abandoned, rather than just being left there by someone who wants to park their bike frame outdoors until they can afford wheels and handlebars.
Parisian council officials are doubly happy with their new scheme. Not only will they be cleaning up their streets, they have also been able to expand the French language. The job of freeing the skeletons is being given to a small army of épavistes—a new word coined specially for this endeavour.
Paris’s urban jungle
Paris’s pavements are lined with trees, the majority of them the same species of silvery plane tree that Napoleon Bonaparte planted along his marching routes across France. The second-biggest group are lime trees, though not, unfortunately, the type you can make mojitos with—these are tilleuls, the species that produce France’s most insipid herbal tea.
According to City Hall, there are approximately 484,000 trees in Paris, most of them in parks, gardens and the Bois de Vincennes and Bois de Boulogne. Around 96,500 of them line the pavements, a stock that is renewed with 2,400 new trees per year, grown at the city’s nursery out in Rungis, near the massive wholesale food market.
This doesn’t mean that Paris is gradually being turned into a literal urban jungle (more’s the pity), because many of them are to replace the 1,500 trees a year that succumb to disease, old age or pollution and get the guillotine treatment.
What’s more, every one of the trees lining the streets—the so-called arbres d’alignement—has a microchip embedded in its trunk, with a record of its age, the vaccinations it has been given, and general notes on its health. They may not look like it as you walk past, but these trees are really robots with an electronic brain. It’s all very Parisian—it looks natural and effortless but is in fact organized with scientific precision.
Less easily monitored are Paris’s pigeons. Most Parisians hate them—almost as much as they hate the mad people who feed the ‘flying rats’, generally by emptying bags of breadcrumbs next to a bench and causing a fluttering, feathery riot.**** Parisians know that there is a season when it becomes perilous to linger for more than a second under any one of those 96,500 trees lining the streets and gardens. When the plane trees are in fruit in autumn, the pigeons gorge themselves and let fly huge jets of lime-green poop that spatter the pavement and turn parked cars into Jackson Pollock canvases.
To combat the pigeon infestation—it is estimated that there are 80,000 or so pigeons in Paris, about one for every twenty-five people—the city is installing large pigeon coops in parks and gardens. The authorities have had to explain that they’re not trying to increase the population by making life even cushier—on the contrary, these are ‘contraceptive pigeon coops’. The
