Of bellards and bikes
This could be my last morning in Shayne's flat. Hannah arrives in Paris today - all our things from England are packed up and being held indefinitely by a removal company until we find an apartment for them to be moved into. I was out last night and didn't get in until after 4am, so I am sitting here at my desk, grateful for a brief burst of wifi, looking out at the little courtyard here and feeling, I admit it, a tiny bit sad to leave this weird place with all its wobbly floors and uncooperative appliances and Escheresque staircases. The bells from Notre Dame are ringing right now and I will miss the dissolute feeling of being a Latin Quarter inhabitant. Shayne has rented out the other room (there are only two rooms, so when they're both full Shayne himself sleeps in the kitchen...) which means it's been a bit crowded the last couple of days with Neil, a hugely tall computer-game programmer from Chicago.
The whole flat smells strongly of skunk, the drug not the mammal, because Shayne received a special package yesterday from a friend in California. Inside the envelope was a paperback book, the pages of which had been hollowed out - oh yes! - to create a literary recess in which several ounces of vacuum-packed home-grown weed were successfully concealed. He hasn't really left his desk since then. Not endearing behaviour when you're 19, and frankly embarrassing when you're 72 I would have thought.
I got home last night thanks to the magical system called Vélib', which is a network of free bicycles all over Paris. It's about €25 for a year. You grab a bike from one stand and stick it back in another somewhere else in the city. And they are everywhere. It is brilliant for getting home at the end of the evening; there is something incredibly liberating about cycling home through a dark empty city, getting lost, and generally having the whole of Paris to yourself. Apparently BoJo is introducing the idea into London next year.
Wherever I end up living I will probably not be able to walk to work anymore, so the bikes will be particularly helpful. Currently my walk takes me up over the Cité, across Les Halles, and all the way up rue de Montmartre. Les Halles is a strange desolate place these days, full of litter and clochards and one forlorn old merry-go-round. This is going to take me onto a linguistico-historical tangent actually, because clochard is a key Parisian word with an interesting and relevant etymology. It means a homeless person or tramp, and there are a lot of them in Paris. The word comes from cloche meaning ‘bell’, with -ard a usually pejorative suffix (as seen in ‘bastard’, for instance).
Why bell? Ah, gather round. Those of you who know anything about Les Halles will know that before it was made into a run-down shopping arcade in 1971, it used to be an enormous central market. If you read books by people who knew Paris then, it is the one thing everyone unanimously agrees on - how extraordinary it was and what a terrible decision it was to get rid of it. Les Halles was where everyone came for food. Elliott Paul has a whole beautiful section in his book about how you could stand on the western edge at 5:30 in the morning, as the sunlight was starting to appear, and look out over row upon row upon row of fresh strawberries stretching off into the distance, so red it hurt your eyes, and so many of them that the air was heavy and sweet - and so on. People are incredibly nostalgic about it. Zola set one of his novels there, Le Ventre (Les Halles was known as the stomach of Paris).
Anyway, what am talking about...oh yeah, so when all the food had run out and trading finished, which I believe was generally sometime in the early afternoon, they would ring a large central bell in the middle of Les Halles. This meant no more trading, and all the stallholders started packing up to go home. At the sound of the bell, the city's homeless and destitute would pour into the area to gather up what they could from the scraps left lying around. Hence they became known derisively as clochards, which is still what everyone calls them and I can never work out exactly how offensive the term is.
Les Halles actually had quite a pervasive effect on French vocabulary. Another word that comes immediately to mind is chandail, which means a kind of sweatshirt or jersey. To my lasting delight, it turns out to be an abbreviation of marchand d'ail or ‘garlic-seller’, because fruit-and-veg traders in Les Halles were known for wearing them. Both these words seem rather transparent once you know where they come from, but almost no one in France seems to have any clue about it, which gives me plenty of chance to impress people until they realise I can only understand one word in five of what they're saying.
I'm hungover and off work today. And I'm still living the single life until Hannah arrives at half-eight tonight. So I'm off for a tiny shot of coffee, a morning paper, and an infeasibly large pain au chocolat.
The whole flat smells strongly of skunk, the drug not the mammal, because Shayne received a special package yesterday from a friend in California. Inside the envelope was a paperback book, the pages of which had been hollowed out - oh yes! - to create a literary recess in which several ounces of vacuum-packed home-grown weed were successfully concealed. He hasn't really left his desk since then. Not endearing behaviour when you're 19, and frankly embarrassing when you're 72 I would have thought.
I got home last night thanks to the magical system called Vélib', which is a network of free bicycles all over Paris. It's about €25 for a year. You grab a bike from one stand and stick it back in another somewhere else in the city. And they are everywhere. It is brilliant for getting home at the end of the evening; there is something incredibly liberating about cycling home through a dark empty city, getting lost, and generally having the whole of Paris to yourself. Apparently BoJo is introducing the idea into London next year.
Wherever I end up living I will probably not be able to walk to work anymore, so the bikes will be particularly helpful. Currently my walk takes me up over the Cité, across Les Halles, and all the way up rue de Montmartre. Les Halles is a strange desolate place these days, full of litter and clochards and one forlorn old merry-go-round. This is going to take me onto a linguistico-historical tangent actually, because clochard is a key Parisian word with an interesting and relevant etymology. It means a homeless person or tramp, and there are a lot of them in Paris. The word comes from cloche meaning ‘bell’, with -ard a usually pejorative suffix (as seen in ‘bastard’, for instance).
Why bell? Ah, gather round. Those of you who know anything about Les Halles will know that before it was made into a run-down shopping arcade in 1971, it used to be an enormous central market. If you read books by people who knew Paris then, it is the one thing everyone unanimously agrees on - how extraordinary it was and what a terrible decision it was to get rid of it. Les Halles was where everyone came for food. Elliott Paul has a whole beautiful section in his book about how you could stand on the western edge at 5:30 in the morning, as the sunlight was starting to appear, and look out over row upon row upon row of fresh strawberries stretching off into the distance, so red it hurt your eyes, and so many of them that the air was heavy and sweet - and so on. People are incredibly nostalgic about it. Zola set one of his novels there, Le Ventre (Les Halles was known as the stomach of Paris).
Anyway, what am talking about...oh yeah, so when all the food had run out and trading finished, which I believe was generally sometime in the early afternoon, they would ring a large central bell in the middle of Les Halles. This meant no more trading, and all the stallholders started packing up to go home. At the sound of the bell, the city's homeless and destitute would pour into the area to gather up what they could from the scraps left lying around. Hence they became known derisively as clochards, which is still what everyone calls them and I can never work out exactly how offensive the term is.
Les Halles actually had quite a pervasive effect on French vocabulary. Another word that comes immediately to mind is chandail, which means a kind of sweatshirt or jersey. To my lasting delight, it turns out to be an abbreviation of marchand d'ail or ‘garlic-seller’, because fruit-and-veg traders in Les Halles were known for wearing them. Both these words seem rather transparent once you know where they come from, but almost no one in France seems to have any clue about it, which gives me plenty of chance to impress people until they realise I can only understand one word in five of what they're saying.
I'm hungover and off work today. And I'm still living the single life until Hannah arrives at half-eight tonight. So I'm off for a tiny shot of coffee, a morning paper, and an infeasibly large pain au chocolat.