Ligne 11: Châtelet–Mairie des Lilas
A cross between a bouncy castle and a roller coaster, it will shake, rattle and roll you up the hill from Châtelet to Belleville and beyond. There’s no need to go to Disneyland Paris—this old, neglected line will give you all the thrills of the funfair. Its carriages are narrow and the seats so close together that if you travel any distance, you will soon be on knee-rubbing terms with the people sitting opposite and next to you. When entering this line at Châtelet, it’s best to go underground at the place du Châtelet itself, because the Line 11 terminus is about a kilometre from other lines and you will spend so long wandering through tunnels that you won’t need to visit the catacombs.
FUN STATIONS
Arts et Métiers, for its curved copper-plated walls, created in 1994 by Belgian artist François Schuiten to celebrate the bicentenary of the nearby engineering school of the same name. It feels like waiting inside a water pipe.
Porte des Lilas, because it inspired the character in Serge Gainsbourg’s first hit, ‘Le Poinconneur des Lilas’ (the ticket-puncher), and because it is part of Paris’s cinema industry. If you see a movie scene filmed in a métro station, it will almost certainly be Porte des Lilas (even if the signs on the wall temporarily say something else). The station is regularly hired out to film producers, and has featured, for example, in Paris, Je t’aime and Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. (See also Line 3bis below.)
Ligne 12: Mairie d’Issy–Porte de la Chapelle
A long, cosy line, apparently built so that the middle classes won’t have to mix with anyone else. It winds in from the 15th, through the 7th and the posher office districts of the 8th and 9th, undergoes a quick culture shock at Pigalle, then heads for the chic part of the 18th behind Montmartre.
FUN STATIONS
Concorde, where excerpts from the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (France’s 1789 declaration of human rights) are written on the curving walls, one blue letter per white tile. The ironic problem with this noble intention is that there is no punctuation, making it very hard to read what one’s rights are.
Abbesses, which has one of the best examples of a Guimard Art Nouveau entrance. However, it was never meant to be there. It was moved from Hôtel de Ville station in 1974, even though the original managers of Line 12 had decided not to use any of Guimard’s designs.
Porte de Versailles—during the Salon de l’Agriculture, Paris’s immensely popular agricultural show held at the end of February, Parisians go there to see the cows, taste the sausages and watch the President perform. The rule is, if he’s good with farmers, he’s a good head of state. Sarkozy’s first visit ended in a televised slanging match with a farmer. Chirac used to spend whole days out here discussing milk yields and techniques for force-feeding geese, and people still love him for it.
Ligne 13: Châtillon–Montrouge–Gabriel Péri Asnières-Gennevilliers/Saint-Denis–Université
Brings in commuters from the northern steppes of the 17th arrondissement and the well-off but not-too-snooty southern suburbs, and dumps them all in west central Paris. Some of the trains on this line have been fitted with an electronic list of stations that makes each name flash as you pull into the station, while a happy female voice tells you where you are. There’s more standing room on these trains, which is good because the line has regular sardine moments between Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare. At its northern end, the 13 forks in two (at the aptly named station La Fourche) so spectacularly that if you are planning to visit the beautiful royal church of the Basilique de Saint-Denis, and stay on the wrong train, you will end up halfway to Brittany.
FUN STATIONS
Montparnasse-Bienvenüe (see Ligne 4 above).
Guy Môquet (pronounced ‘mockay’ and not ‘mocker’—moquette means carpet)—it’s not exactly fun, but the station is noteworthy for the display case of photos and documents in honour of Guy Môquet, who was shot by the Nazis when he was only seventeen, one of forty-eight prisoners executed in reprisal for the killing of a German officer in 1941. Môquet is famous for the patriotic letter he wrote on the eve of his death, which is regularly read out in schools. The tragic irony is that he was only in prison because he had been arrested by French policemen for distributing Communist leaflets in the métro, at Gare de l’Est.
Varenne, which is close to the Musée Rodin, and appropriately decorated with sculptures on the platforms. As well as Rodin’s famous Penseur (The Thinker), there is a cast of his wonderful sculpture of the writer Honoré de Balzac, who looks as though he regrets agreeing to be sculpted dressed only in his bathrobe.
Ligne 14: Saint-Lazare–Olympiades
The Parisians’ favourite, this new line rockets across the centre of Paris in what feels like milliseconds. Young execs don’t even have time to start a new game of phone Tetris between getting on at Saint-Lazare and shooting out into the squeaky-clean office district around the Bibliothèque Nationale. The stations are like glass tunnels, the trains are long and well ventilated and—best thing of all in Parisians’ eyes—there are no drivers. The line is automatic, so there’s no one to go on strike. The French like to say they’re in favour of workers’ rights, but if there was a referendum, everyone would vote to change the whole métro system over to driverless trains. Well, everyone except the transport workers, of course, who would go on strike in protest, therefore reinforcing the case for driverless trains.
FUN STATIONS
None, really. The trains are so frequent and fast that you never spend enough time in the stations to notice them. Oh, OK, Châtelet, because if you change from the old existing métro system on to Line 14, you have to go through what
