Rue

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets

1.

C. and I live at the bottom of the hill of Belleville.

The street is no longer cobblestoned. There are bike lanes. The street lamps are different. Our front door is up from the second lamp on the right, just past the tattered awning, where the street’s curve begins. There is now a post office next to the lamp across the street, in front of the junk man’s carriage and horse. Next to it now are two ugly buildings, the smaller of which — a temporary annex used as an art space by the maternity and elementary schools in the catchment — is about to be torn down to reveal and extend the garden behind it. Ornamental crabapple trees grow in the garden, next to two 20-tonne granite blocks meant to look like meteorites. The blocks are symbolic stand-ins for two asteroids that in 2045 will be named Marie Moinon and Jean Moinon, after a couple who ran a nearby cafe-restaurant. In January 1944, while hosting a meeting at their cafe of the Paris branch of the Baker Street Irregulars — the Special Operations Executive (SOE) of the British WWII secret service — the Gestapo arrested Marie and Jean, and separately deported them to Germany, where they died 400 km from each other — Jean in a forced labour camp near Hamburg in December 1944, Marie in the gas-chambers in Ravensbrück on 5 March 1945, just a month before the camp was liberated by the Russians.

In 1946, the street around the corner from us was named after Jean. Ten years ago, just days before we moved in, Marie’s name was added.

2.

Homeless people sometimes sleep under the alcove of the other ugly building. I wrote about them here.

The cafe on the corner is for sale. Next to it is a fancy bistro. Next to that is a couscous restaurant, long shuttered. Next to that is our place, which, back when the postcard above was printed, was a butcher shop. There is still a meathook in our kitchen ceiling. According to some of the people in the building, the cellars downstairs held livestock. By 1927, however, the year Marie and Jean opened their restaurant, the butcher shop had been converted into a beer, wine, and coal shop run by the Moisset family, who also had the establishment a few doors down, where we watched last night’s World Cup final rugby match.

Biere des Aiglons, 33, rue Sambre-et-Meuse, 1927

Maison Moisset, 29, rue de Sambre et Meuse, 1927

Before all that the street was a creek. Or so C. thinks. Because of its curves. And because she believes the springs on the top of the hill of Belleville still feed underground streams first tapped by the Romans, using buried stone drains later torn out by the barbarians, or the Francks, or both. After that, around 800 years ago, monks channeled them again, and added an aqueduct wide enough for two men to stand in abreast. They used the aqueduct to bring drinking water to the Right Bank and feed fountains on the Left. Five centuries on, it too was abandoned, as were the connected matrix of hidden and exposed channels flowing down each flank of the hill.

C. is convinced the streams are still there, eating away at the quarried hill’s soft gypsum and sedimentary rock. She might be right. We’ve seen workers, month after month, pour concrete into the basements of buildings on the hillside streets of Rue de l’Equerre and Rue Pradier. G., who was with me when we fished out the man who jumped off the bridge into the artificial lake in the Buttes Chaumont, will attest to this, as he lives on Equerre and has witnessed the endless streams of concrete being poured into mixers and shoveled into sinkholes to shore up cellars and fight the inevitable disintegration and collapse.

But there is no proof of C.’s hidden stream in the archives.

3.

Claude Chastillon, Hôpital Saint Louis, 1608. The Montfaucon gallows are in the top left corner.

The first image I can find of our road is in the early 17th-century engraving above by the architect Claude Chastillon, where it traces a path from the top of the hill of Belleville in the top-right corner to the hospital in the foreground, which Chastillon co-designed with Claude Vellefaux. Henri IV laid its first stone in 1605.

Hôpital Saint Louis was a plague hospital, built on pasture land just outside the city’s walls, and just below the gibbet of Montfaucon, from which could swing 60 men simultaneously. This was for seven centuries the biggest gallows in the country. You can see it below and in the top-left corner of the Chastillon engraving above.

A much more famous building, Oscar Niemeyer’s Communist Party headquarters, now occupies the site.

(Question: why is there no street named after Chastillon? Avenue Claude Vellefaux, named after the other architect of the Hôpital Saint Louis, is just down the hill from us.)

Jean Fouquet, Montfaucon Gibbet, 1460

The hospital was meant to be temporary, only open during plagues, but it is still in use and much expanded, with a new building by Jakob+MacFarlane and specialized wards for burns, cancer, and skin, blood, contagious, and tropical diseases. Younger, spryer, we played road hockey in the hospital parking lot. I broke my friend Ray’s wrist there with a vicious crosscheck, for which I am not proud. And later, when we had a dog, we snuck him into the hospital’s back gardens almost daily, to chase chestnuts and roll in the grass. They collect honey in these gardens, as they did in the 17th century, and still use it in skin treatments.

C. is pleased with herself for having found a place to live so close to the hospital and its special wards. Not because she can walk there in five minutes to do her tai chi, but because, when the day comes — or rather, when the days come — we will not have far to go for whatever treatments are required, or to visit the deathbed of whoever goes first.

Always thinking ahead.

4.

In the late 18th century our road was called the Chemin de la Chopinette, because it led to the Barrière de la Chopinette, which you can see in this painting by J.-L.-G.-B. Palaiseau from 1860 — the year the barrier was torn down, and around the time our building, just across the street, and those around it, were constructed.

The Barriere de la Chopinette — and the six others like it — was part of a wall built around the city between 1784 and 1790. The barriers were the entry points — and where taxes were paid on all goods entering the city. Goods like wine, which is where the road’s name chopinette — “small pint” — came from, as many guinguettes — dance halls — were opened outside the city walls, to avoid the 20-franc duty paid on each hectolitre of wine brought into Paris. I wrote about this here.

There were already a few buildings along the road and the surrounding farmland had been cleared for more, but a 54-foot-long bush, right in front of where our building would soon be, was left standing. People hid inside the bush. They slept there, on hay bales, and turned tricks, and waited for drunken stragglers to stumble past. As did a woodworker named Bonheur on 22 October 1826, at around 8 pm. Bonheur had had a few, and as he weaved his way home — he lived on rue Chemin Vert — four men and a woman stepped out of the bush and relieved him of 20 francs and his necktie. Later that evening, the same gang jumped a drunk named Roussel, who, though hammered, successfully defended himself. Two of his assailants, a man named Chanet and a woman only identified as Chanet’s “concubine”, were arrested. At his trial, Chanet told the court that he preferred death. He then stepped out of the docket, stabbed himself four times with a concealed knife, and collapsed into the arms of the gendarmes.

The wounds were superficial. He and his concubine received life sentences.

5.

In 1885, two Masonic Lodges were headquartered in the same building down the street, in spaces now occupied by a secondhand computer store and a small business consultancy. That same year, our building sold for 176,000 francs, 36,000 francs higher than the asking price.

In 1893, five members of the Peschler family, living in our building and ranging in age from 15 to 19 years, were awarded French citizenship in accordance with article 9 of the French Civil Code, which stipulates that “any individual born in France to a foreigner may, within one year of coming of age, claim the status of French citizen; provided that, if he or she resides in France, he or she declares that his or her intention is to establish his or her domicile there; and that he or she establishes his or her domicile there within one year of the act of submission.” This “elective option” was a compromise solution. Napoleon that himself had argued, when he was First Consul, that, in line with the Constitution of 1799, the Civil Code should “automatically recognise the status of Frenchman for any individual born in France.

If individuals born in France to a foreign father were not considered to be French in their own right, then the sons of these foreigners who have settled in France in large numbers, where they have come as prisoners or as a result of wartime events, could not be subject to conscription and other public duties. The question should only be considered from the point of view of the interests of France… because these individuals have the French spirit, French habits; they have the attachment that everyone naturally has for the country in which they were born.

The Peschlers’ father was Italian. Our children are French, not because they were born on French soil, but because they attended French schools for 12 years, where they were taught French habits, fostered with French spirit, and “formed” into French citizens.

Jus soli, jus sanguinis. Droit du sol, droit du sang. “Just because a goat is born in a stable, doesn’t mean it is a horse.”— Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Thanks for reading. I’ll have more to say about blood and soil another time. The sun is out. The winds have stopped. It is time to go for a run along the Canal with my friend Hermon Mehari, who last night, just before the rugby, led a quintet at the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the Belleville Brulerie, France’s best coffee roaster.

Below is a chunk of the concert recorded on my iPhone. It’s a bit wobbly — excellent beer on tap, delicious natural wines, thank you, thank you, thank you — and it ends with the frightful face of superchef Hanzhou Piao, whom I’ve introduced to you many times, including here —

— and whose restaurant opens in the Marais this winter. The soloists are Hermon on trumpet and his fellow Kansas City sideman Peter Schlamb on vibraphone. The other members are Francesco Geminiani on saxophone (his visit to the Selmer saxophone workshop in Paris is also featured in the above Hexagon), Yoni Zelnik on double bass, and Guilhem Flouzat on drums.

Tonight, Hermon is playing with Peter (on piano), Francesco, Yoni and Gautier Garrigue on drums at a secret location on Faubourg de Temple. Tickets are almost sold out.

In between, we’re running 45 minutes up the Canal, turning around, and running back.

Communist Headquarters, Oscar Niemeyer, 1967-1981