Texts for Translation 2011:
  Mark Ovenden

Chic Beneath the Streets

A light-hearted editorial piece about the Paris Metro, first published in “Five Dials”, HamishHamilton’s online-exclusive literary review.

Written by Mark Ovenden, a London-born journalist now living in Paris, France, author of “Transit maps of the World”, “Paris Underground: the maps, stations and design of the Metro”, and the forthcoming: “Railway Maps of the World”.

There is not much Parisian life that cannot be found underground.

The Paris Metro is a microcosm of the city beneath which it runs. One might miss the majesty and grandeur of the Eiffel Tower glimpsed between buildings, or perhaps the autumn leaves crunching underfoot along the quays of the Seine, but below the Haussmann boulevards lie thorough-fares resplendent with just as much diversity as those on the surface. Metro passengers buy and drink coffee down there; passageways are filled with the mouth-watering aroma of freshly baking croissants; passers-by are passing an eye over...each other; the homeless are sheltering from the elements; chatterboxes are gossiping on their mobile phones; the stressed are thump- ing away at portable computer keyboards or fingering their hand-held devices; and the restless are playing Suduko. You might even find the odd person reading a book - perish the thought!

Parisians and tourists alike seem perfectly unfazed to shop, drink wine, hold parties, get lost, take drugs, fall in love, get married, have babies . . . all encased by the classic white ceramic bevelled-edge tiles entombed inside the warm, brightly lit tunnels, in the cold damp earth of the Ile de France (or as the locals prefer to call it as it sounds far grandiose, the ‘Region Parisienne’). Almost as an aside it also an efficient method of public transportation!

Since 19 July 1900, the day the first parts of this now labyrinthine transit system opened, people have passed beneath the unsymmetrical, organic-looking, moulded wrought-iron casts of young art nouveau architect Hector Guimard. They’ve hopped down (what still seem like surprisingly few) steps to those early platforms (in places a mere 3 metres below the streets), and entered a subterranean world within a world. With 16 lines, and 212km of route, it is the world’s eighth longest subway system, and almost four million journeys are made on the Paris Metro each day to the 300 stations – 380 if you count all the interchanges (some people do: there are frequent competitions by a dedicated bunch to pass through as many as possible in a given 24hour period). Only the New York Subway has more stations than Paris.

The Metro is such an intrinsic part of the ‘quotidien’ (daily life) in the French capital that the words of a long-forgotten poem have become an idiom of the language; ‘Metro-Boulot-Dodo’ (subway-work-sleep) was first coined by poet Pierre Béarn (in his 1951 Couleurs d’usine about the rhythmic monotony of everyday life - the full quote was: ‘Métro, boulot, bistro, mégots, dodo, zéro’).

Paris would even have had the first underground railway in the world if some of the fanciful plans of the 1840s were enacted; yet London, Budapest, Glasgow and Boston got there before the French Government stopped interfering with the will of the Parisians to construct a system that suited their needs rather than those of the competing mainline railway companies.

Having seen just how gloomy some of neighbouring London’s ‘Underground’ stations looked at the end of the nineteenth century, the French had the huge benefit of hindsight and chose a bright, almost hospital-clean appearance of white ceramic to line the platform walls. The tiles were specially chosen to bounce round as much light as possible from those crude early electric bulbs, and they’ve stood the test of time.

Though more people are now transported below ground each year in Tokyo, Moscow, Seoul, New York and Mexico City . . . Paris comes next in the number of passenger journeys made, so it is no surprise the full cornucopia of life is played out right below our feet. Having moved to Paris from London expressly to write about the design of the Paris Metro for a new book, I marvelled at the sheer diversity of the spaces and the people teeming, idling, kissing, peeing and begging in them. After five years being an Englishman in Paris, here are a dozen observations that travellers both new and frequent might find interesting, though they could easily have been taken from a grumpy old git’s guide to foreigner folk:

1. The stations are much closer together than they are in almost any other city (the idea was that one would not have to walk any further than 500 metres in any direction to find a Metro entrance – only the older stations of Buenos Aires Subte and Madrid Metro are more closely spaced than those in Paris), so if your destination is say five stops away, this would equate to an average of only two or three stops in Washington DC or Moscow – it may be more pleasant, and possibly quicker, to walk.

2. When traversing Paris by Metro, time a journey by counting the number of stations on the map. A good rule of thumb seems to be about two minutes per station, plus two for each inter- change.

3. Though smoking has been banned for passengers since 1992, both the homeless who lollop around on the platforms, and incredibly even some train drivers, seem to believe they have a constitutional right to ignore the health and safety implications of chucking lit cigarettes on to the oily track in the driest part of the city. Word of advice here: never tackle anyone breaking the rules – unless you want to risk a vociferous rebuttal and possible physical attack. The only smoker I’ve ever tried a polite word in poor French with was a well-dressed middle-aged female passenger. I was hysterically shouted at for several minutes in words that even the teenager stood next to me seemed quite shocked to hear emanating from such a well-dressed mouth.

4. The trains of lines 1, 4, 6, 11 and 14 run on rubber tyres rather than steel wheels – a technology developed by the French to cut down the vibrations beside historic buildings, and successfully exported to cities like Montreal, Santiago, Mexico City and Taipei. Oddly, the aroma of hot rubber belching up through the grates at street level is a strangely welcoming whiff on returning to Paris.

5. Buskers, though slightly annoying to people whose ears are already stuffed with their own brand of tinny tootling, are generally the quintessential Parisian accordionists playing traditional French music. They have even been known to crack a wry smile on the dourest Parisian visage.

6. Most train doors (at least on the older rolling stock) are opened manually by a cute little handle – and so passengers can jump out even before the train has come to a complete halt. It’s telling to observe the tourists from other parts of the world, more used to all doors opening automatically at each station. Tip: don’t stand too close to the platform edge in case some mad hurried commuter sweeps you off your feet, or an overhanging strap gets caught by the handle. I witnessed a nasty incident

at last year’s Gay Pride when a tipsy tranny’s clutchbag was whipped from her shoulder and dragged halfway down the platform at Bastille – though she had the presence of style to scream something like ‘fashion’s moving so fast these days’ as she ran for the battered baggage...in 6 inch heels.

7. Though tickets are not needed to get out of the system, never jettison a billet before sortie-ing as gangs of stern roving inspectors can wait cunningly hidden at strategic enclaves before the exits. No valid ticket; one hefty fine. At €1.60 (cheaper with a carnet of ten and better value with a day pass – or using the electronic smartcard Navigo), it’s so cheap to ride the Metro it really is not worth risking injury and fine by jumping the barriers. Those who have dutifully paid often take great joy in watching the myriads who squirm mightily before the burly contrôleurs with their pathetic fake excuses about why they haven’t got a valid ticket. On the one occasion I jumped over I was caught six minutes later leaving Gare du Nord. However, I had been in and out of stations all morning trying to find a working photo-booth to send a mugshot in for my Navigo. The ridiculous story and comedy French somehow convinced the contrôleur I was not worth processing and let me off.

8. The Navigo pass itself is idiosyncratically French: not only is a photo obligatory (it’s burnt on to the card) but a weekly only runs from Sunday to Saturday or a monthly from the 1st of the month. It cannot be started on any other day and it cannot be topped up for a journey over the zone(s) it is covered for. A full valid ticket for the entire journey has to be bought from the starting station, even if that station is already covered by the zones you’ve paid for on your card. The RATP have promised to upgrade the system for several years because it’s highly frustrating for all users. However, at €56 a month (for zones 1 & 2) it’s considerably better value for money than many other large systems offer.

9. The trains are generally extremely frequent and usually reliable – it’s an odd sight to see more than three minutes’ wait on the electronic indicators (which co- incidentally are normally very accurate in predicting when the next train will arrive). But if they are flashing something obscure like 13 minutes it usually means the unit is merely recalculating the exact E.T.A. and it will drop down to 3 or 4 minutes as soon as it stops flashing. If that doesn't happen there may be a more serious issue afoot: like a strike! There’s no need to run for a Paris Metro train, another one will almost certainly be along in a minute.

10. Unlike many other major subway systems (and most of the British overland train network) mobile phones and 3G work pretty seamlessly underground in Paris – both in the trains and in the vast rabbit warren of cross passageways. An impressive feat, which has so far led to very few overly loud and pointless conversations about being ‘dans le train’ and precisely zero terrorist attacks (the reason the London tunnels have not been equipped with them, for example). On the down side, that does mean ‘going into a tunnel’ is not a valid excuse for cutting a caller off in Paris!

11. There are several ‘ghost stations’ (long closed but still visible from a passing train). Easiest to spot are: Saint Martin (between République and Strasbourg Saint Denis on both lines 8 and 9); Champs de Mars (between La Motte Picquet Grenelle and Ecole Militaire on line 8); Arsenal (between Quai de la Rapée and Bastille on line 5) and Croix Rouge (between Sèvres Babylone and Mabillon on line 10). Impossible to see (unless you’re lucky enough to get on one of the special occasional ADEMAS society overnight services, using beautiful refurbished old 1920s Sprague Thompson rolling stock) are Haxo (on a now long closed shuttle that ran between Porte de Lilas and Pre St Gervais – the station was only built at platform level and has no stairs or access to the surface – very eerie) and Molitor (on an unused spur off the Auteuil loop of line 10 – also platforms only, with just an emergency stairwell to the surface). The old train society ADEMAS occasionally have a special event down here – they celebrated last New Year’s Eve with a full sit-down meal on the dusty old platforms where no fare-paying passenger had ever trod.

12. Must-see stations include the 1967 rebuild of Louvre–Rivoli station. Here a somewhat tired relic of the first 1900 line was badly in need of renovation. Given its proximity to the world’s biggest museum (the line actually runs along one wall of the

Louvre basement), the station was lavishly refurbished with marble and (reproduction) museum exhibits. There’s a piece of the retaining wall of the original 1700s Bastille prison jutting out on to one of the line 5 platforms; though poorly marked and barely recognized by the passers by, this is probably one of the oldest visible foundations on the Metro. The last standing full art nouveau entrance is at Porte Dauphine and is now a national historic monument.

So the Metro has much more to offer than merely its utilitarian original purpose.

While the Paris stations might be recognizable as symbols of the city . . . the Metro map has never reached the same iconic status as, say, its London or New

York counterparts: The RATP insisted for many years on avoiding copying the diagrammatic style, first popularized by Harry Beck’s map of the Tube in 1933 and much emulated elsewhere. A totally geographical map of the city remains outside each station, but passengers have benefitted since 2000 from a 45-degree-based diagram on pocket maps and inside the trains.

Assignations, liaisons dangereuses and sheer bold-as-brass pick-ups are common in crowded trains where the rules of up-top are abandoned in favour of an intimacy that the invasion of close personal space, never tolerated on the surface, inevitably brings. There’s at least two urban myths (one enshrined in song) of women who became pregnant on the Metro - and gave birth to the infants 9 months later...also on the Metro! My favourite story is of a friend who was beckoned into the driver’s cab on the way to work. After the train was emptied at its terminal, Nation, the driver took it – and my (by-then, semi-clad) mate – round the loop, so to speak.

But the Metro holds all sorts of possible outcomes - getting safely from one destination to another often being the least important. One ‘dernier metro’ a distinctly scary-looking security guard got on at Arts & Metiers and sat opposite me on one of the fold-down seats. The train was virtually empty but after a few risky furtive glances the handsome fellow strode brazenly over and sat right next to me. Was he about to get angry, or something far more salacious? To my pleasant surprise a large manly hand grabbed my thigh! After an exciting few station stops of leg frottage then waiting for doors to open and close, it was time for me to get off and the hunk of blokeyness decided to follow. Half an hour later, when walking the brute out of my building, and back towards the Metro, he warns me rather brusquely that if I see him on the train in future I’m not to let on to him... in case he’s with his girlfriend. I’m sincerely hoping the good lady is not a regular reader of Five Dials. ◊

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