A Chance Encounter in Rainy Paris

Stephen’s elderly (and crude) companion laments the muddy conditions in Paris…

Standing outside a café the other day, I got talking to an old chap who lives in my quartier here in the north of Paris. He has an apartment in one of the huge tower blocks that were built in the 1980s, apparently during a period when the city council forgot that architects existed. Brutalism is trendy now, but these buildings never will be. They have all the grace of a rotting potato.

The old chap told me that for this reason, his building has been en travaux (having work done) for the past decade or so. Substandard materials are being replaced and ‘attractive’ cladding added, with workers gazing in through his windows from each new outbreak of scaffolding. The old chap lives on the 28th floor and could enjoy a wonderful view of Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower – if only his apartment were on the side that faces the tourists’ dream. But he looks out towards the périphérique, a clutch of railway lines and a horizon of suburban sprawl.

MUDDY UNDERFOOT

When he told me all this, he wasn’t really complaining. Something else was bothering him. Something more seasonal. “My whole street has turned into the Somme,” he said.

I wondered for a moment whether trench warfare had broken out. Or had he seen the ghosts of Henry V’s archers on their way to Agincourt? He explained that the pavement and road had been dug up as part of a plan to plant shrubs and create a cycle lane. Most of Paris is undergoing this metamorphosis at the moment, but rain had turned the old chap’s morning stroll to the Sunday market into a trek across a battlefield.

He showed me his shoes, ordinary leather slip-ons, that were crusted with mud. Unlike the Somme’s clays, though, this was light in colour, presumably because of the sand that Paris uses as a foundation for its paving stones.

Not to be outdone, I lifted a foot to show my expensive blue training shoe spattered with white. The previous day I had been to the Orangerie in the Tuileries, to remind myself of its excellent permanent collection of early 20th-century Parisian art (Modigliani, Utrillo, Soutine et al). And after rain, the pathways in the Tuileries always turn into a sort of mixing bowl for cement. No wonder Louis XIV moved out to Versailles. The old chap nodded. “Every November, when they give us our flu vaccinations,” he said, “they should also distribute rubber boots. It’s the only way to walk around Paris in the winter and early spring.” I didn’t like to play the ecology card and suggest that one pair of boots per lifetime would be enough. We Parisians only get muddy feet if we walk in parks after rain or across building sites.

A TRIP TO MARKET

“Still, mud can come in useful,” the old chap said. He pointed to his shopping bags that were overflowing with seasonal vegetables – leeks, celery, a bunch of small fresh beetroot, a tray of mushrooms. Our local market sells exotic imports like avocados and pineapples, but all winter it is jammed with seasonal produce, a lot of it grown in the countryside around Paris.

In these days of disappearing seasons, our market, like the mud, is always a reminder of where we are in the calendar. “Do you go to the mushroom stall?” the old chap asked me. “No, the queue is always too long, and he sells out so fast,” I confessed. He laughed. “Yes, I always get there before nine. And I always make the same joke. I tell him, you’re lucky, your queue gets longer every week.” This was an obscene pun. As well as a line, queue in French means a male member. I laughed politely. In French, puns like that are not seasonal, they’re perennial. That poor mushroom seller must know exactly where he is every Sunday morning.

Stephen Clarke’s latest book, Charles Frederick Worth, the Englishman who invented Parisian Haute Couture, is about the 19th-century Brit behind the fashion industry.

From France Today Magazine

Lead photo credit : Photo: Shutterstock