On fairly crowded trains, it is common for one place in the main seating areas of a carriage—the sets of eight seats—to be free. The problem is that there are two ways into these areas, so you might find yourself in direct competition with someone coming in from the other direction. The etiquette in these cases is to avoid eye contact and dash for the seat. If you get there first, it is only because you have won one of the many races for survival in Parisian everyday life. Of course, once you are seated, if you look up and see that the other person was old, pregnant, frail or beautiful, you can stand up again and make a great show of offering them your hard-won seat.
The managers of the Parisian métro have obviously decided that passengers don’t need to be warned to mind the gap when they get off a train. There can be a gap wide enough to fit half a baguette lengthways and they won’t tell you. For example, at Cité, if you get off the rear carriage of a Line 4 train heading south towards Porte d’Orléans, there’s a chasm between the métro door and the platform that could swallow up a slim Parisienne, but no warning. It really is necessary to keep your eyes on your feet when you get off a métro train, especially on to a curved station platform.
And when your métro journey is at an end and you want to leave the station, your troubles are not over. If you’re exiting a station that has glass doors that you have to push open (rather than turnstiles or guillotine-like rubber gates), it is vital to push exactly where it says Poussez, or, if there’s only a diagram, press right on the white hand on a green background. This pressure unlocks the door. Pushing anywhere else is pointless, and will have Parisians puffing down your neck within seconds, groaning at your stupidity.
After which, it only remains for me to say bon voyage …
* The 1900 Paris Olympics, the second modern Olympiad after the 1896 Athens Games, included the official sports of golf, ballooning, croquet, Basque pelota, polo, tug of war and cricket. The cricket gold was played for by only two teams—England and France—and the French team consisted almost entirely of British ex-pats. The match was played in Vincennes on 19 and 20 August, and won by England.
** Not personally—Bienvenüe had lost an arm during a security inspection on one of his railways.
*** Bénard later commissioned a dining room from Guimard, which is now on display at the Musée d’Orsay.
**** For the full story see my book 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.
***** Which it isn’t. The golden flame near the Pont de l’Alma is a life-size replica of the torch held by the Statue of Liberty that was presented to Paris by New York in 1989. The statue herself was of course given to America by France in 1886 to mark the centenary of the American Revolution. Yes, the French were ten years late, but it’s the thought that counts.
****** See also Chapter 1, ‘Parisians’, for a section on how not to annoy Parisians in other contexts.
Paris, a well-preserved historical city? Between the 1850s and 1870s, it was one huge building site as much of the medieval centre was demolished to make way for the boulevards.
5
HISTORY
La nostalgie, c’est le désir d’on ne sait quoi.
(Nostalgia is the desire for we know not what.)
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY,
AUTHOR OF LE PETIT PRINCE
MANY PEOPLE COME to Paris to feel nostalgic. Often, this nostalgie is related to something they haven’t experienced themselves—the glory days when everyone dressed like dandies or can-can dancers, the smoky café nights listening to Sartre explain how absurd everything is (except him, of course), the sound of jazz filtering up from basement bars, the sunlit summers when all you needed to fall in endless passionate love was a camp-bed in a Montmartre garret and a litre of cheap red wine.
Paris seems to be an ideal backdrop for reliving the perfect past. It still has the medieval Marais, the student-filled Sorbonne, the timeless waiters at the Café de Flore, the eternal banks of the Île de la Cité. It is so well-preserved that its nineteenth-century grands boulevards are almost banal.
Well, that is the cliché, anyway. In fact, Paris has suffered several waves of almost cataclysmic destruction. It’s a miracle that the famous monuments survive. Even the Eiffel Tower came very close to being toppled—and not by invading enemies. It may come as some surprise to learn that throughout history, Paris has devoted a great deal of its energy to destroying its own architectural gems.
Most of this energy was expended during infighting by political and religious factions, who made a habit of knocking down each other’s favourite buildings. But some of the most widespread damage was done coldly and calmly by the city’s planners simply building over the past. And as we will see, if the modernizers’ ardour hadn’t been cooled in the late-twentieth century, tourists might now be nipping into the Louvre during a motorway coffee-stop, and taking monster-truck mouches instead of bateaux …
A carnival of history
Although Paris’s past has been almost constantly violent, its history museum, the Musée Carnavalet, is a peaceful, intimate place, despite the fact that it is at the heart of the Marais, and its main entrance is just inches from the rue des Francs Bourgeois, a shopping superhighway for both Parisians and tourists.
The museum gets its name from its venue, the Hôtel Carnavalet. This is the former home of one of Paris’s most celebrated writers, the Marquise de Sévigné. She wasn’t an impoverished aristocrat who was forced to move into a motel—in its original sense, hôtel, or hôtel particulier, meant an urban mansion. And Carnavalet is just that, a sixteenth-century city château, which the Marquise rented from the 1670s until her death in 1696. While there, she wrote her famous letters to friends and family, describing Parisian
