The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (4 page)

The process began at a street fair at the place Saint-Georges. The
place
had recently been renovated, and the volunteer association in the Ninth Arrondissement had decided to celebrate with food, drink, songs, speeches, and guided tours of the historic sites. At the center of the
place
is a defunct fountain with a large bust of Paul Gavarni, a nineteenth-century neighborhood painter and caricaturist. One side of the
place
is dominated by a mansion encrusted with multi-colored marbles and heavy with busts and statues; it is best known as the residence of the nineteenth-century Russian-born queen of kept women known as La Païva. On the other side is an 1873 mansion that houses a library of nineteenth-century French history for scholars, built by the French state for the politician and writer Adolphe Thiers. At the Théâtre Saint-Georges, on the corner, François Truffaut shot scenes for his 1980 film
The Last Metro
.

It was at this street fair that I met Didier Chagnas, a militant cheerleader for the neighborhood. Didier, well into his eighties, sports a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard. His sweater hugged his big belly; his pants were so long that they covered his shoes. His
plaid sport coat was much too big and looked as if he had found it at a church sale. (He probably had.)

Didier was holding forth to some twenty people in front of La Païva’s mansion. With its stone angels and lions and Gothic and Renaissance-style statues, the mansion is so showy that it was chosen as the setting for the American embassy in the 2006 film
The Da Vinci Code
. Didier said it was conceived as a fancy rental apartment building; later a more luxurious, permanent residence was built for La Païva on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. At one point Didier wandered off topic and started talking about the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, my street, which runs through the
place
. “I myself have lived in Number 15 since 1975,” he said.

“You have? I live in 18!” I said.

“Ah! You have a very beautiful staircase!” he exclaimed.

He took a deep breath and switched topics. Out came my building’s history. He called it one of the most beautiful bourgeois houses of the neighborhood. The building was financed by a businessman named Pierre Lemarié and was built in 1837. It had an unusual feature: entrances on two different streets so that horses and horse-drawn carriages could move in and out easily. Didier got so excited that he crossed the line of French politesse. “Could we all go into the courtyard with you?” he asked. “Come on, let’s go! Is that okay?”

I hesitated. My husband and I are the only foreigners and non-owners in the building (except for the young renters in the maids’ rooms on the sixth floor). That means we doubly do not belong. To lead a gaggle of curiosity-seeking French people into our courtyard could expose me to the wrath of our privacy-conscious neighbors. But this was a day to celebrate. In no time at all, we were parading toward my building.

When we arrived at the door, Didier stopped short. “First, we must appreciate the decorative wrought iron on the wooden door!” he said. So we did.

Then I punched in the door code and we filed into the entryway. Didier pointed out the friezes with hunting motifs and representations of the star-crossed twelfth-century lovers Héloïse and Abélard that are mounted above two of the inner doors. He said that so many buildings like mine were constructed at the time that friezes had to be mass-produced in plaster molds, sold by the meter, and painted to look like stone.

He took us deep into the courtyard and drew our attention to the original pavement of large square cobblestones and the one-car garages that were once stables for horses. Then he led us into a second, smaller courtyard where a nineteenth-century fountain stands.
Please, please,
I thought.
Please get us through this before one of the neighbors comes out and orders us to leave.
But Didier was just getting warmed up. He said that a famous portrait photographer, Nadar (whose real name was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), had his studio here at some point in the mid-nineteenth century. “He photographed just about every celebrity,” said Didier. Among his subjects, I discovered later, were Hector Berlioz, Sarah Bernhardt, Jacques Offenbach, George Sand, Guy de Maupassant, Édouard Manet, Gustave Doré, Gustave Courbet, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and Jules Verne.

Didier went on: “I don’t want to say something stupid, but I believe that Jules Verne lived here.” Jules Verne? I live in the same building as the man who wrote
Around the World in Eighty Days
? (I have never found evidence to confirm this, but what a delicious fantasy.)

Most remarkable, Didier said, are the unique staircase and skylight in the front entrance, which are oval, not round as are others of the Charles X building era. People in our group nodded solemnly, as if they knew everything about Charles X, the small-minded, ultra-conservative king of France from 1824 until 1830. His most important legacy was that he had an architectural style named after him. I had no choice but to open the inner door so that our group could carry out an inspection.

At this point, a thin, middle-aged man in our group took over. He didn’t introduce himself, but I soon learned who he was: Thierry Cazaux, an executive with the American investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald by day and the unofficial historian and passionate promoter of the neighborhood at lunchtime, on weekends, and by night. He explained that there had once been a plan to install an elevator inside the oval stairwell and he had been part of the cabal to stop it.

I later learned that Jean-Pierre Gauffier, the preservationist-crusader who owns the apartment above mine, was its leader. He waged an eight-year battle against the elevator. The pro-elevator lobby on the upper floors argued that Gauffier’s campaign was unfair, as he lived on a lower floor and had only two flights to climb.

In 2008, the French government designated elements of the building as “historical monuments” because of their authenticity and exceptional quality. That included not only the staircase, the stairwell’s black-and-white stone floor, and the skylight, but also the cobblestone-paved courtyard and the building’s three covered passageways. That means they cannot be tampered with and are protected by law.

Every once in a while, Jean-Pierre told me, the keyhole of his front door is packed tight with chewing gum—a silent guerrilla
operation from one of the pro-elevatorists, he assumes. He can usually dig it out with a hairpin, but sometimes he has to call a locksmith to get it unstuck.

By this time, I was so deep into the exercise that I was tempted to invite the group in for coffee. But in my upper-crust former neighborhood on the other side of town I would never, ever have brought strangers home. And I couldn’t remember if I had made the bed. So Didier, Thierry, and the group said their thank-yous and good-byes. One middle-aged man stayed behind. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses, a corduroy sport coat, jeans, and loafers, and he carried a small green backpack. With a sweet smile, he said his name was Michel Güet, that he was retired, and that he knew a thing or two about the history of the neighborhood.

“May I offer to show you around?” he asked, oh so politely.

I’m from the tough West Side of Buffalo and came to Paris via New York City, Chicago, Beirut, Tehran, and Baghdad. When a stranger offers to show me around, I normally ignore him and keep walking, fast. But it was broad daylight, and I was at the edge of my neighborhood fair with hundreds of people. I half-smiled and mumbled something like “Oh, yes, that would be nice.” Then I excused myself to get on with my day.

Fortunately for me, we would soon meet again.

IS FISH NECESSARY?

. . .

I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly. The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the browned butter. It was a morsel of perfection.

—J
ULIA
C
HILD
,
My Life in France

W
HEN LA POISSONNERIE BLEUE, AT NO. 5 RUE DES
Martyrs, went out of business, it was more than the closing of a shop. It was the end of a family business and the destruction of a web of neighborhood relationships with the fishmongers. Collective horror set in that the street was losing its soul, along with its sole. I shared in the general dismay.

La Poissonnerie Bleue had an awning the color of the sea when a sun-filled sky turns it the warmest of blues. It had been in business for more than a half century. Marc Briolay, the owner, had started working there in 1978, when he was still a teenager.
He and his wife, Évelyne, had raised their two children in the 950-square-foot rental apartment upstairs.

They built La Poissonnerie Bleue into a family-run operation. Their daughter, Justine, greeted customers out front. Their son, Thomas, scaled, gutted, and filleted in the back. Marc made change and worked the credit card machine. Évelyne kept the books. But now business was bad. Running a fish store is expensive, and Marc, I suspect, was more artisan than businessman. Revenues fell in 2011 and again in 2012.

Beneath the calm surface, a war waged over the shop’s broken ice machine—a longstanding dispute between Marc and his landlord over who would pay the 8,000 euros to repair it. Every fish shop needs large quantities of shaved ice. So Marc was forced to buy his own, an expense as extravagant as it was necessary.

That was not all. The walls, the ceiling, the refrigerator—they all needed work. Then there was the problem of the balcony. The Briolays claimed that a piece of it had once fallen on Thomas’s head. At some point, with these issues unresolved, the Briolays began withholding rent. When they owed the landlord 50,000 euros, he ordered them out.

In the United States, when a neighborhood merchant closes after so many years, there is often a ritual to mark the event. A fire sale, perhaps, or a going-away party. In France, there is a tendency to pretend it isn’t happening. So the announcement came in faint and barely legible writing on the “Suggestion of the Day” chalkboard that hung in front of the shop: “The fish store will close for good on October 31, 2012. Thank you. The Management.”

Because Marc refused to discuss the impending closure, Évelyne, who rarely ventured into the shop, came to do the talking.
“There are things I can’t pay for,” she confessed. “I have no shame in saying it.”

To any customer willing to listen, she said, “This is going to kill the bottom of the rue des Martyrs! This is a little village. Parents bring their kids here to teach them about food.”

Her greatest fear was that a shoe store would move in. The more she talked, the darker her predictions: “If there’s no fish shop, the neighborhood is dead!”

Everyone had an opinion about what could happen next, and all of the opinions were negative. Maybe the Carrefour supermarket next door would break down the walls and expand. Maybe yet another cheese shop or bakery would take over. No one had much hope that another fishmonger would move in.

“Where will we go for fish?” one customer lamented. “Picard?” Picard is a national all-frozen-food supermarket chain with an outlet around the corner. Its frozen red mullet is half the price of the fresh counterpart at La Poissonnerie Bleue, but Picard is viewed with disdain by traditional French cooks. The dirty little secret is that some Picard fish is
pas mal,
which in French doesn’t mean “not bad”; it actually means pretty good, only no one was admitting that in this crisis.

There was a smaller fresh-fish store several blocks up the street, but for residents of the lower rue des Martyrs, that was a world away. “Too far, too far,” said Yves Chataigner, who runs a cheese shop with his wife Annick, at No. 3 rue des Martyrs. “It might as well be New York.”

It wasn’t only that. The distant shop offered less choice, was owned by a chain, and employed fishmongers who didn’t bother to learn their clients’ names or fish preferences. (When I asked them for their reaction to the impending closure of their main
competition below, they replied with Gallic shrugs.) It was also up the hill, an incline that gets steeper as the street moves north, toward Montmartre.