vingt-quatre = 24
quatre-vingts = 80
cent deux = 102
deux cents = 200
cent trois = 103
trois cents = 300 (etc., up to 109/900)
mille cent = 1,100
cent mille = 100,000
mille deux cents = 1,200
deux cent mille = 200,000 (etc., up to 1,900/900,000).
Though one would hope that if you suddenly caused the bidding to jump from, say, mille deux cents (1,200) euros to trois cent mille (300,000), the auctioneer would stop and ask for confirmation.
And if you win the bidding, you’ll hear the auctioneer call out, ‘Adjugé!’—sold. At which time you just have to hope that you got your numbers right …
* This bad signposting, I was later told, is due to the fact that the train station is in Meudon but the Arp museum is in neighbouring Clamart, and Meudon doesn’t see why it should put up signposts to someone else’s museums. Vive la bureaucratie française.
** Plenty of Parisian artists are obsessed with gazing at their own navel, but at least Arp put it to creative use.
*** The ‘temple’ quote is from the museum’s website. Funnily, on the page dedicated to the floor plan, the website also says that, ‘The location of artworks is updated every morning, before the Museum opens, based on information from the previous evening.’ It’s as if the crush in the museum is so great that, like glaciers scraping down a mountain valley, the crowds shove paintings along the corridors.
The ad said ‘furnished’, but it didn’t specify how furnished. Apartment-hunting in Paris requires the attention to detail of a micro-biologist.
12
APARTMENTS
On croit souvent qu’un appartement est bas de plafond, alors qu’il est tout simplement haut de plancher.
(You often think that an apartment has low ceilings, when in fact it just has high floors.)
PIERRE DAC, FRENCH COMEDIAN
One foot on the ground
WHAT SHOULD you do if you like Paris so much that you want to become a more frequent Parisian? Or even a permanent one? Lots of people decide to do so, and go native by buying a place here. These include French people, too. Many of them live in the deepest, darkest provinces but have a Parisian pied-à-terre, or ‘foot on the ground’—a rather painful image, as if they are stuck halfway while trying to disembark from a rowing boat. And for the unprepared, buying an apartment in Paris can feel a lot like that.
Even native Parisians often find buying property in their city a stressful, confusing process, because it is a relatively new experience for them as a sociological group. Until only ten or fifteen years ago, renting was so easy and cheap that buying wasn’t something that Parisians usually bothered about. Most middle-class couples were happy to pay the monthly rent, and spend what savings they had on a résidence secondaire—the weekend/holiday house on the coast, just outside Paris, or au pays in the region of France where one of their families came from. Then, once they’d dragged the kids through the education system, they simply stopped paying their Parisian rent (usually by passing the lease on to a family member) and retired to the résidence secondaire, which had long been paid for. It was a gloriously cosy system that, ever since the building craze under Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century, had divided Paris in two—the rich who owned the apartment buildings, and the less affluent, but often comfortably off, who rented.
Even twenty-five years ago, a typical Parisian estate agency was a narrow, dingy shopfront with a few handwritten cards in the window. The atmosphere inside was dusty and paper-swamped, like the office of a solicitor on the verge of retirement. Often they were just that—lots of properties were sold by notaires acting for families who’d inherited them and couldn’t decide which brother or sister was going to live there. Commissions on sales were huge—up to 10 per cent—so there was no need to achieve a high turnover. Four or five family-sized apartments a year could provide a very healthy second income for a solicitor. Apartments could moulder for weeks or months in a file on a notaire’s desk, waiting for one of his clients to mention that they might want to invest in property.
Buying to rent wasn’t attractive, either, because tenants’ rights had been set in stone by a post-war law aimed at repairing the trauma of the Occupation. From now on, it was announced on 1 September 1948, the French were going to occupy their rented homes at the same rent practically ad infinitum. The loi de 1948 fixed maximum rents, stipulated that rental agreements were completely open-ended, and that tenants could be evicted only if the landlord or landlady intended to live in the apartment or give it to his or her children—although it was impossible to budge any tenant over sixty-five or on a low income. And even when eviction was possible, the owner had to give six months’ notice and offer the tenants ‘equivalent’ housing elsewhere, the notion of equivalence being so vague that a tenant could hang on for years claiming that the new place wasn’t as conveniently located, didn’t have a bidet etc., etc. And the worst thing for landlords was that these ‘1948’ tenancies could be passed on from parent to child or sibling to sibling. Renting out was little more than charity work.
Given these conditions, many owners gave up and sold the apartments, either ‘occupés’ (and therefore much cheaper), or directly to the occupants, who had first refusal anyway. Meanwhile, almost no new apartments were coming on to the rental market—why build and rent out a place if you knew that it was going to be squatted at a government-capped rate?
It was therefore to try and reboot the rental market that, in 1986, the French government overturned the loi de ’48—without
