Entre Les Murs

It's Not All Art, Wine and Romance

When we first looked at our apartment, we were a little concerned about the proximity of the football stadium, the Parc des Princes.  We asked a waitress in the café on the corner, what the crowds were like on game nights.  She gave us a don't-be-ridiculous look (only about a 5 on the French scale, but still fairly withering), and advised that this was the 16th, of course the police don't let anything get out of hand.  We were reassured that French fans bear little resemblance to the louts of Britain, and truly we've had little cause to conclude otherwise.  Often the increase in street noise is so slight we're not even aware when the game is over.  And the police presence is generally quite overwhelming.

But throughout Western Europe there are racist movements, stoked by populist politicians, and last week French football suffered the worst of human nature after the local team lost to Tel Aviv's.  An undercover policeman came to the rescue of a Jewish fan who was being set upon, and was attacked himself.  He fired his gun as they brought him down, killing one man and injuring another (details of the incident are not hard to find, and even made the Toronto Star and Sun.)

The incident took place near Port St. Cloud, about a quarter of a mile away.  That's far enough away from us that we didn't even hear the sirens, and were oblivious until Janet spotted the item in the on-line news.  It's still quite close to the stadium, but perhaps just distant enough to explain why the police, concentrated around the Parc itself, weren't there at the first whiff of trouble.  When I went by the spot on Sunday, the only evidence of what had happened was the pile of flowers and candles beside the bus depot.


We may have been oblivious to the hatred and death in the streets, but saw other cracks - certainly far, far less serious - in the facade of French civilization over the course of the weekend.  On Friday evening a teenager party erupted in the apartment directly below us.  I'm not shy about being the grumpy old man, but to do it properly demands a vocabulary and facility with the language that I don't yet have, so things went on for a while before I banged on the door and requested they keep it down (reasonably politely, but seeking to emulate some gallic indignation).  The young man (of course the parents had decamped) was something short of conciliatory but he did agree to turn down the music and things became much quieter; but what got me steamed was that it seems the rest of the neighbours had been consulted and agreed to the party. Nobody asked us.  Who cares what the foreigners think?

The following night, the same thing happened again, only this time from the apartment that shares a wall with ours in the next building.  They played the disco music we disdained in our own teenagerhood but which seems to have become classic in Europe (The Macarena, fercrissake).  In fact we'd lived through this a year ago (we might have suspected it was a birthday party if we hadn't actually had the fact made plain by lively choruses of "Bonne Anniversaire"), and at one in the morning on that ocassion I had managed to slip into the building and bang on their door (no emulation of indignation required).  But I don't have stamina as a curmudgeon and this time we opted for melatonin and ear plugs.

It was a long night, and the next morning there was one more Parisian delight: we were woken up by an organ grinder, merrily strolling down our block.  His instrument - or at least the volume - somehow called to my mind the tanks that rolled by on a weekend morning last spring, on their way to a Bastille Day parade.  But at that point in the weekend I may have been a little hyper-sensitive.

posted 26.11.06