And finally, my two favourites:
Challeng’Hair—literally, ‘hair challenge’ but it sounds like the French pronunciation of ‘challenger’, a word they know. Appropriately, it deals in baldness treatments.
Volt’Hair—an electric-sounding play on the name of Paris’s wittiest writer, Voltaire. A literary hairdresser—what more could you want? OK, Voltaire wore a wig in later life, but when a hairdresser’s pun is in the offing, historical accuracy is neither hair nor there.
* For more on this museum, see Chapter 5.
** For more on the ankle-spraying, see Chapter 3.
*** ‘Health Prison’, which was not called that because the wardens served organic food and taught Pilates. It was the site of Paris’s last public guillotine, and two men were beheaded there (behind prison walls) in 1972. In fact, the prison is named after the street where it stands, which in turn owes its name to a seventeenth-century hospital.
**** Feeding pigeons—or any wild creature (except one’s children)—is illegal in Paris, and carries the same fine as letting a dog poop on the pavement: 183 euros.
Paris Plages. Every summer, Parisians rush down to the banks of the Seine in the hope that former president Jacques Chirac will keep his promise to swim across the river.
3
WATER
Napoleon Bonaparte: Je voudrais faire quelque chose pour les Parisiens.
His Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal: Eh bien, donnez-leur de l’eau.
(I’d like to do something for the Parisians. - Then give them water.)
A sinking feeling
PARIS IS a city of eau. Its motto is decidedly damp—Fluctuat nec mergitur means something like ‘It might not be floating all that steadily, but it never sinks.’ This is not because Paris is comparing itself to Venice or Atlantis—Paris’s sandy river basin is not subsiding (at least, not according to estate agents). In fact, the motto refers to the very unseaworthy boat on the city’s coat of arms, a kind of wooden banana with a pair of underpants as a sail and no visible crew members, which is floating precariously on a rollercoaster of waves.
This might seem a strange emblem for a city so far from the sea. The only waves you see on the Seine these days are when the river police are having a bit of fun with one of their speedboats. But until the nineteenth century, Paris was France’s busiest port, and the city council was actually founded by river merchants.
These marchands de l’eau were so powerful in the early Middle Ages that they persuaded King Louis VII to give them a monopoly on all merchandise coming in and out of Paris. A royal charter signed in 1170 states that ‘No one may bring into, or take out of, Paris any merchandise unless he is a marchand de l’eau de Paris or in partnership with a marchand de l’eau de Paris.’ Anyone breaking this rule lost their whole cargo, half of which would go to the King, and half to the marchands.
In 1246 the watermen went a stage further and formed themselves into the city’s first ruling body imposing their emblem—the banana-like ship—as Paris’s official seal. And their legacy was further recognized in 1853, when Baron Haussmann,* the Prefect of the Seine region, made Fluctuat nec mergitur the city’s motto.
Haussmann was only putting into words the Parisians’ long and passionate relationship with water. It is almost as if they are former desert-dwellers, with a constant need to see water everywhere.
And in fact, this is not far from the truth, because their addiction seems to be a subconscious hangover from their ancestors’ long battle to get clean drinking water. For most of its history, the city drew its water from the Seine, which lost its purity about 1,000 years ago. Long into the nineteenth century, there were pump houses beside the river, raising water to be distributed around the city via buckets or fountains. Some of the fountains were supplied by the springs in Montmartre and Belleville, the oldest of these being the Fontaine Maubuée, built in 1392 on a street corner that has since been demolished to make way for the Centre Pompidou. Which may be just as well, because the name Maubuée apparently came from mauvaise buée or ‘bad mist’, a reference to the inferior quality of the Belleville water.
Today, there are still dozens of these old fountains dotted around the city, some of them still working (and now providing good drinking water), like the gushing spout at the corner of the rue de Charonne and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine near Bastille, which must waste thousands of litres a day. No matter—the sight of running water is good for the Parisian soul.
The same goes for the Fontaines Wallace, the famous groups of green metal statuettes that provide a constant stream of drinking water, almost all of which goes undrunk. These were a gift to the city from a British philanthropist, Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of a marquess who inherited his father’s money and spent most of it on art (the Wallace Collection in London) and the rest on being kind to Parisians. During the Prussian siege of 1870–71, Wallace financed ambulances, and in 1872 he paid for the design and installation of the fountains that bear his name, even consenting to have them painted dark green so that they harmonized with the rest of the city’s street furniture.
At the time the Fontaines Wallace were built, the city was still relying on systems put in place by Napoleon. In 1799, the average Parisian had access to only a litre of water a day. As a military man, Napoleon envisaged an effective but crude solution—digging canals to bring water close to the city. However, many Parisians were still reliant on water carriers who would sell drinking supplies in the street, most of it a bacterial soup pumped out of the Seine, which was also the city’s main sewer. Predictably, disease was rife,
