On some mornings, you have to be able to long-jump a couple of metres to get from the middle of the street to the kerb with totally dry feet. And if you’re half asleep and forget to leap, your shoes will be turned into shipwrecks.
Every morning, people on their way to work will complain about one or other of these watery obstacles. But if the streets were suddenly dry, they would complain even more, and then begin to worry that something in the city had gone profoundly wrong. They may be obsessed with the prospect of a flood, but they’re even more scared of being deprived of their beloved eau.
* For more on the Baron and his impact on Paris, see Chapter 5.
** Looking at the four caryatids—for example on the fontaine outside the Chez Clement restaurant in the place Saint-André des Arts—I personally can’t tell the difference between them. It is almost as if Wallace’s designers hoped to convince Parisians that goodness was exactly the same as sobriety. Idealistic, to say the least.
*** Grève also means strike—it was on this sandbank that unemployed Parisian workers used to gather, or faire grève. Though they used to be hoping for an offer of loading or unloading work to come along—it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the word took on its modern meaning of the French workers’ favourite negotiating tool.
**** For a full account of these riverside dance sessions, see my novel Dial M for Merde.
****** Neptune was also the name given to the seaborne operations during D-Day. Coincidence, or a symptom of how seriously Paris is taking the danger of flooding?
Bastille’s original métro station, by Hector Guimard. Today his designs are seen as architectural gems, but in his lifetime, fickle Parisians thought his Art Nouveau style outdated, and many of his métro entrances were demolished.
4
THE MÉTRO
On ne perd rien à être poli, sauf sa place dans le métro.
(You lose nothing by being polite, except your seat in the métro.)
TRISTAN BERNARD, FRENCH WRITER
PARIS IS proud of its underground rail system, and so it should be. Travelling beneath some big cities can be a slow, hot experience, like being stuck in a hammam with a crowd of grumpy strangers. But outside of rush hours and strike days, the Paris métro can whisk you from almost anywhere to anywhere in the city in under forty-five relatively painless minutes.
And it’s getting even better, with old trains gradually (and on some lines very gradually) being upgraded and refitted, which is why I personally always choose the métro over the bus. If you don’t have time to watch as a bus driver hoots at badly parked trucks, inches through roadworks, or terrifies cyclists, it’s far better to travel underground.
I should stress that this chapter deals only with the métro itself, and not the RER (réseau express régional), the métro-like system that crosses Paris and stretches out into the suburbs. Parisians are inherently snobbish, and regard this system as a kind of slave ship transporting unfortunate chained-up workers away from their suburban homes and into the clutches of their cruel masters, with the cruelty even being doubled because in the evenings they’re transported back again in the same horrific conditions. It is actually quicker to travel between some parts of Paris on the RER, but no true Parisian ever takes the option, presumably for fear of being mistaken for a suburbanite.
The light at the end of the métro tunnel
What few Parisians know is that their métro very nearly didn’t get off the ground at all—or rather that it almost stayed overground.
In the mid-1800s, every major city in the Western world was trying to work out how to transport its residents and incoming commuters around the increasingly jammed streets. Paris was actually ahead of the game, because as early as 1852 it inaugurated an overground urban railway that skirted the edges of the city—hence its name, the Petite Ceinture, or little belt. At first, it carried only animals being sent to the city’s abattoirs and freight, but gradually it was adapted to take passengers, and came into its own during the 1870–71 Prussian siege, when French soldiers were able to dash to defend different parts of the city on steam trains—one of the first examples of mechanized warfare.
The Petite Ceinture was taken out of service in the 1930s, but much of it is still visible. The raised gardens near Bastille, the Coulée Verte, run along a converted section of the old network. The Parc Montsouris in the south and the Buttes-Chaumont in the north are both crossed by stretches of unused railway, and the Flèche d’Or music venue in the 20th is in an old Petite Ceinture station.
Meanwhile, back in the nineteenth century, arguments about a bigger urban rail network raged on. London had opened its first city railway in 1863, connecting up its major train stations. New York, Berlin and Vienna followed, and even Budapest was jumping on the bandwagon. Paris was being left behind, and for a very Parisian reason.
From 1856, when discussions about a large urban railway network for the city began, to 1890, every proposal hit the buffers. Some of the ideas put forward by Paris’s engineers were too insane to be taken seriously. One was a sort of funfair ride, with trains floating along on underground rivers. Another engineer called Arsène-Olivier de Landreville envisaged gigantic viaducts carrying steam trains above the Paris rooftops, thereby avoiding pollution from the smoke.
There was also a strong lobby for a straightforward overground train system, an extension of existing rail networks beyond the mainline termini and into the heart of the city, but none of the regional railway companies could decide which one of them would build and run the system, and continually opposed each other’s projects.
Amongst the most futuristic ideas was a plan to get rid of steam trains altogether and use the largely untested technology of electricity. This daring project was put forward by Paris’s Director of Works, Edmond
