Today I drove N to the airport in the morning, along with his enormous suitcase and guitar case that always cracks up the security people (plastered with stickers like "Tell your girlfriend I said THANKS").
On the way out I pointed out the new bidonville that has arisen just past Saint-Denis. It is a settlement right next to the A1, the main road from Paris to the airport, a slum worthy of Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro. A village built of cardboard and plywood, 
with makeshift smoky open fires and people washing in buckets. N could not believe his eyes. "How long has that been there?" he said. I couldn't say, but I noticed it several weeks ago.
I couldn't take a photo, but it looked less well-built than this one (right), only with no trees, under an autoroute bridge, and much colder. The people are cut off from the highway by a grill but otherwise are exposed to all the pollution of an eight-lane highway a few feet away. They are Romanian gypsies. I haven't seen anything about this in the media even though everyone coming in or out of Paris from the airport has to drive right by them.
Later today I went by the Place de la Concorde, where the Hotel de Crillon is across the street from the American embassy-- where you never see anyone go in or out, in spite of all the glass police booths that line the street. I didn't take a photo of them because you're not allowed to in front of any Paris embassy. On the same street as the U.S. embassy are the U.S. ambassador's residence, the British embassy and residence, the Japanese embassy, a very posh club called the Interallié, and the Elysée palace where the President of France lives. There are also some apartment buildings guarded by police; I believe these are high officials' privileges, the kind where you get 250 square meters for a couple of thousand euros. "Can't you see why everyone in France wants to be a fonctionnaire?" said D. "Respect, prestige, you can't get fired, you work in these gorgeous old buildings from the dix-huitième with fireplaces and moldings, what's not to like?"
"Well, the flip side of that," I said, "is that in France you get smart people in government. In the U.S. you get people like [name of relative here]."
The Crillon [warning: link has music] is one of the grandest hotels in Paris, a former private home. It has a famous restaurant called Les Ambassadeurs, where a woman I know was once proposed to on two successive nights by two different men. She said the maître d'hôtel kept an admirable sang-froid and merely asked if she would like champagne.
The hotel also has a roof apartment, with awnings over a big terrace, overlooking Place de la Concorde. I always try to crane my neck and see if anyone famous is looking out. The terrace sometimes features in glamorous ads, and rumor is that Madonna always stays there (and Michael Jackson before his downfall). The bus stop in front of the hotel has the highest proportion of fur coats and paparazzi in Paris. During the first Gulf War, fear of terrorism against the embassy emptied the hotel and at one point there were only four guests.
This war does not seem to have had the same effect. Paris is full of tourists and the weather is cooperating. It's not even very cold. I thought I saw J.K Rowling (author of Harry Potter) yesterday crossing avenue Montaigne in the "Golden Triangle." She is Scottish; I'm sure she would come to Paris during the sales.
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It's not really fair to France, which has a better social welfare system than most countries in the world, but the contrast between the Crillon and the bidonville on the A1 reminded me of two of the most famous lines in Chinese poetry, by the 9th-century Tang dynasty poet Du Fu. Du Fu lived in a time of war and starvation, he was passionately sympathetic to the poor, and to me he is one of the greatest poets of all time.
Inside the crimson gates, wine and meat rot;
outside in the street, the bones of those dead from the cold.
Those two lines were so strong and so critical of the authorities that they were officially suppressed, surviving only in rumor, and were found only by accident several hundred years later.
Thanks for the interesting blog entry! You do a nice job with your weblog.
By the way, if you click the speaker icon on the Crillon website you reference above, you can avoid the obnoxious music.
Posted by: William Smith | 16 January 2006 at 06:31