Rue Rude

The chambre de service

 Today I had to go up to get something out of the attic. Well, I call it an attic, but it's very, very different from an American attic, the comfy kind at my mother's house where a warm wooden floor leads to a spacious room full of stored toys and mementoes. 

Most of the older buildings in our part of Paris have a floor of chambres de service or chambres de bonne. Do you see those little tiny windows at the top of these buildings? That's the servants' floor.

What I call our attic, or grenier, is just a storage room that used to be a servant's room. First, you have to go out the back door of the apartment, and up and up this Cinderella-worthy staircase (this is a view looking down). The old wooden stairs are worn down in the middle from a hundred years of trudging feet. The lights in the stairwell are on a minuteur and you have to keep turning them back on again every minute or so. A bit tricky when you're carrying something.

 
At the top, on what is called the sixth floor (American seventh floor-- but don't forget that ceilings are high in France: this is quite far off the ground), you get to a long corridor with many doors opening off it. This is what used to be, a hundred years ago, the servants' territory.

Each apartment in the building gets several chambres de service, or servants' rooms. In the old days, a small village of servants lived up here, in single rooms the size of a large closet. There were three sinks and two toilets for the whole floor, where there are about forty small chambres de service. The last time I was up here, the toilets looked like this:

I hadn't been up there in a long time and was pleasantly surprised to see a modern toilet in the other bathroom. But on the other hand, it means someone is using it, and doesn't have a bathroom in his or her room. 

For a while one rogue owner in our building was renting out two of the chambres de service, about 14 feet square, to a dozen Moldovans living in Paris illegally. But little did they know with whom they were reckoning!

Nowadays, the servants' floor is a bit lonely. It is still inhabited by one or two students whose rooms have been fixed up as mini-studios made out of two or three chambres de service put together, and obviously someone is using that bathroom, but the owners of the building don't really want anyone up there, so most of the chambres, like ours, are just storage rooms. Those long dark corridors that once echoed to so many voices are empty and quiet.

Lagniappe

Lagniappe is a French word, but it's not the French of France, but of Louisiana. It means a little extra added to what you give your client-- like the thirteenth donut. It's a nice custom but not one I've seen in France.

Today I had 40 minutes to kill and not enough time to go home, so I stopped into my favorite local pâtisserie, one I missed terribly when I was in the U.S. Over the years I have become friendly with the owner, who once invited me to visit her bakery in the basement, an invitation I keep meaning to take up. 

"An éclair au chocolat and a café, please," I said to the barman. I actually really wanted a café au lait (called grand crème in Paris); but no one in Paris drinks anything but an express after noon, and I have picked up the habit. 

"Balsssssa!" called the barman to the waiter. "Un éclair au chocolat pour la dame!" 

The owner, behind the pâtisserie counter, looked up, saw me, and waved. Then she put a macaron au chocolat on a plate and brought it over. "It's the last one," she explained. Lagniappe! Sometimes it's so nice to have lived here a long time....

Beautiful Paris

Even late at night out of the window of a moving car.... it's beautiful, no?

 

Le trou de la Sécu

A young woman I know, who is half French and a French citizen but grew up outside of France, has been trying for many months to get her French Social Security straightened out. (Sécurité sociale is the health-care system, not the retirement system as it is in the U.S.).

As a French citizen, she has had a Sécu number her whole life, and been reimbursed for health-care expenses with no problem. But now that she is back in France, she seems to fall between the cracks, and every time she goes to one office, they tell her she needs to go somewhere else with a different document.

"I went to my mutuelle," she said,  "and this time they told me my number was wrong. All the French numbers begin with one or two, and mine doesn't. They said that my number meant that I was a transexual."

More 'net

The Monet exhibit at the Grand Palais ends tonight at nine o'clock, and since Friday, the exhibit has been open 24/7 for the last viewers to get a glimpse of the paintings. Literally.

A friend invited me to the Monet exhibit on Friday morning. We had coupe-file (line-cutting) tickets called Sésame (for "Open Sesame!") and now I understood why back in November it didn't work simply to have tickets for a certain time. The people who did had to stand outside in the cold in a long, long line. With the carte Sésame we just walked in.

The Monet exhibit (I just accidentally typed Money, no doubt a Freudian slip) is a huge money-maker for the national museums. It brings together paintings that were made at the same time with the same theme, but which now reside in collections all over the world, from Melbourne to Moscow to Chicago. It was fascinating to see how the paintings developed and how Monet grew as a painter.

Unfortunately, you couldn't actually see the paintings until you were 10 inches in front of them.

Grammatical pizza

Politics in the galette

'Tis still the season of greeting cards in France. The French have the sensible custom of sending out Happy New Year (Bonne année) cards instead of Christmas cards, so you actually have time to write them. You can send them out until halfway through February. 

Another pleasant old custom which is certainly observed in my family is the galette, or king-cake as we call it in Louisiana. Inside the cake is a fève, or "bean" (in Louisiana, a plastic baby), and whoever finds it in his or her piece of cake is crowned king or queen-- the galette is always sold with a small gold cardboard crown! In France, the fève used to be a real bean, but is now made of porcelain, and bakeries vie with each other to find interesting fèves, as there are many fève-collectors. 

The "chessboard" series above is one that has caused a bit of shock this year. A friend of mine was surprised to find Marine Le Pen of the "France for the French" Front National in her galette.

 

Surveillance cameras everywhere: coming to Paris in 2011

Between now and the end of 2012, a thousand videosurveillance cameras are to be installed all over Paris. As in London, they aim both to catch criminals after the fact and to deter crime. Besides the 18th arrondissement (where the Goutte d'Or neighborhood, just downhill and east of Montmartre, is considered a dangerous neighborhood by many Parisians who have never set foot there), the arrondissements with the most cameras will be the rich ones: the seventh, the eighth, and the sixteenth. There will also be cameras in all the big tourist areas and policemen watching them will be able to switch live to cameras in the trains and metro. Big Brother quoi.

The French: most pessimistic people in the world?

According to a recent Gallup poll, the French are the most pessimistic in the world when it comes to looking at their country's future. 61% think 2011 will be a difficult year for the French economy; only three percent see prosperity coming. The percentage is quite a bit higher in Nigeria and Vietnam!

Back to Paris

It's always nice to come back to Paris, even if I feel grumpy about ending my holiday early. This is a photo of Paris CDG's Terminal One, the round one. The passages through the central space lead to the immigration controls and the baggage claim. Terminal One is so old it's being renovated and is worse off than ever during the travaux. 

We arrived home to dog mess all over the entryway to the apartment building, ground into the stairway carpet by the wheels on some unsuspecting person's suitcase or grocery cart. Dogs in Paris-- their owners don't clean up.

It's Monday and many of the local stores are closed. So I went to a supermarket to pick up our baguette-- bakeries drop off fresh baguettes in big brown bags for people to buy at the supermarket, and this is called a dépôt de pain. I ran into one of my neighbors and we exchanged cheerful Bonne années. It is safe to do that now that New Year's day has come!