As I admired the furniture, the owner, still talking on the phone, made a dismissive gesture as if to say, All yours if you want them, you don’t even have to buy the apartment.
Wondering if I would ever get a personal interview, I went into the next room. Half its width was taken up with a pair of kitchen units, one of which had a much-used electric ring on top, the other a stainless-steel sink. Next to these, on the same wall, was a shower cubicle, with a plastic curtain that looked brand new, and a beige plastic concertina door behind which there was a sort of toilet. I say sort of toilet because it had a bowl and a cistern, but was squat and slightly square, as if it would have preferred to be a sink. It was sitting on a white box that was plugged into the wall. I wondered whether it wasn’t some kind of built-in sex toy—the vibrating toilet seat. It all looked vaguely familiar, and I wondered if I hadn’t seen one in an old French film.
‘Bonjour!’ The owner came in behind me, apologizing for having been on the phone. He took my name, crossed me off a list and began to tell me, rather amicably, everything I already knew from the ad.
I interrupted him.
‘C’est un toilette, ça?’ I asked.
‘C’est un sani-broyeur,’ he said, and it all came flooding back—almost literally. When I first arrived in Paris, I spent a couple of weeks using one of these. Or rather, one week using it and another week waiting for a plumber to come and fix it. The sani-broyeur is a devilishly clever invention, and has allowed countless French apartment owners to stop using the shared loo on the staircase and install their own facilities, even when (and this is the key point) there is no regular-sized toilet downpipe within range. These machines can be plumbed in to a normal water outflow pipe, hence the broyeur (grinder) part of their name.
Instinctively I reached out and flushed, always a good thing to do when visiting an apartment. A toilet that doesn’t work is a good indicator that things might not be so well maintained elsewhere.
The sani-broyeur sucked away the water in the bowl, and then did its grinding.
‘You can get really silent ones now,’ the owner said, waving his telephone perilously close to the bowl.
I honestly didn’t want to know.
“Why are you selling?’ I asked. Again, a key question. If the owner looks cagey, there could be trouble afoot. A messy divorce or inheritance dispute between rowing siblings can sink a sale.
“We’re retiring to the campagne’, he said. ‘I’m selling everything.’ He looked too young to be opting out of work, but this was France and he was of the generation that had it good. If he’d worked since leaving school, he could get a full pension. Selling off his Paris property and moving to the résidence secondaire would allow him to grow old very comfortably.
Meanwhile, something else had just occurred to me. I went back and stood in the doorway to the other room. The apartment had seemed big for 18 square metres, and now it hit me.
‘Where’s the bed?’ I asked.
‘C’est un clic-clac,’ he said, meaning a fold-out bed.
Of course. And there was no wardrobe, either, or nook to hang a clothes rail. To be liveable, the room would need filling with furniture. The place wasn’t furnished as much as half-furnished.
The owner’s phone started ringing, and with a quick excusez-moi, he took the call and began to confirm that the place hadn’t been sold yet and oui, the caller could come and visit straight away.
I gestured as if to say I had to go. The owner smiled and nodded goodbye—he could tell I wasn’t interested, but he knew that someone else would be.
‘Non, non—un sani-broyeur,’ he was saying, ‘like all the studios on this floor. There’s never been a problem.’
I was already halfway to the stairs.
An apartment ‘under the roof’
My next visit was very different, mainly because the apartment was extremely tempting, and if I’d had the money (and the need for a pied-à-terre, of course) I’d have snapped it up.
It was in the 19th, above Belleville. Not exactly in the centre of town, but an area that is becoming trendier by the day, while keeping most of its traditional shops. The ad was for a grand studio in a courtyard, ‘under the roof (that’s where all apartments are, you hope, but top-floor places are often advertised using this evocative image of living amongst the roof beams), with a mezzanine, which can allow you to split a studio into two rooms.
I inquired when the owner would be holding viewings and she said, ‘All Saturday starting from nine.’
At nine on the dot I was there, but I wasn’t the first. In the courtyard—more of a lane than a mere courtyard—there was a middle-aged man taking photos with an iPhone. I went into the bâtiment de droite, nodding appreciatively at the note by the door apologizing to neighbours for wedging it open—a good atmosphere in the building, it seemed.
The stairs were bare wood but not in a neglected way, and the stairwell was graffiti-free (there is zero tolerance in any decent Parisian building). Just like my favourite restaurants, it wasn’t chic but it didn’t need to be.
Pushing open the door (which had a nicely solid lock), the first thing I saw was a woman of about sixty being interviewed by a small thirty-something man who was taking careful notes on his copy of the Particulier.
‘Et les charges, c’est par mois ou par
