The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (20 page)

There are three independent bookstores on the rue des Martyrs and five more on adjoining streets. L’Atelier 9, at No. 59, most closely resembles an independent neighborhood bookstore in the United States. It has large front windows organized by themes that change regularly. The brightly lighted interior has cozy spaces for lingering. The employees enjoy talking to customers and recommending their favorite books; “
coups de cœur,
” they are called. Still, there is only one armchair, reserved for visiting authors, not idle readers. And no latte bar.

My first bookstore contact on the rue des Martyrs was Guy
Bertin, who sells used and discounted books at No. 21, close to where Circul’Livre appears each month. He has been in business for thirty years but claims to be struggling, despite rent stabilization that keeps his costs low.

His store, Le Bouquinaire, is an oddball shop with unpredictable hours. A small sign just inside is aimed at potential pickpockets: “To avoid confusion, thank you for leaving your purses, backpacks, and heavy coats at the entrance.” Shelves in the window near the counter hold Bertin’s personal collection of miniatures: dozens of Playmobil men, Smurfs, and other tiny figures in molded plastic. Sidewalk display cases entice customers with one-euro used paperbacks and splashy new photography books:
Paris of Dreams
,
Paris Disappeared
,
Paris Unknown
.

Bertin does not believe in idle chitchat. He smokes a lot. His clothes hang on his thin body. Although he is bald on top, his hair grows thin and gray down his neck. For the longest time, I felt like an intruder in his shop, where he greeted me with the requisite polite
bonjour
more out of necessity than warmth.

“He’s a survivor,” said my friend Katia Kermoal, who lived on the street for years. As the founder of
Le Daily Neuvième
, an online newspaper for the Ninth Arrondissement, Katia knows just about everyone on the rue des Martyrs.

We stopped in one day, and she asked Bertin how he was doing.

“Terrible,” he replied. “I’m ready to quit. It’s the Chinese.” He spit out his words. “They come all the time and want to buy my lease. They want me out.”

“Well, let’s keep you in business a little while longer,” I said cheerily.

I said I’d give him some English-language books to boost his
foreign-language inventory. I told him a tale of woe about the British edition of my last book, about how the British publisher went bankrupt without paying my advance. The warehouse was stuck with three thousand copies and said that unless I bought the entire stock, the books would be destroyed. I bought them, for about twenty-five cents each. Even with shipping to France, each cost less than a dollar. Did he want a few copies? For free?

I thought the story would soften him up, or at least show him that all of us were suffering from the revolution in publishing. He said nothing as his thin lips curled down. Intellectual seduction was getting me nowhere.

The next day I dawdled outside, flipping through books on the display tables. I picked up a hardcover first edition:
Le temps des amours
by Marcel Pagnol. It cost one euro.

Then I ventured in bearing gifts: a copy of my book
La Seduction
in French and four copies of the cheap British edition. I asked Bertin if I could sign the English-language copies. “Maybe you could make some money here,” I said.

“A book for sale is not a book sold,” he replied.

But he relented. “You can sign one copy. That way the buyer will feel special. To be correct, here’s your payment.” He gave me five euros.

“No, I’ll take the payment in books.”

“My books are too expensive for you, Madame.”

But when I tried to pay him a euro for the Pagnol, he refused to accept it. “It’s yours,” he said.

For free? A small victory!

“I treasure first editions,” I said. “This is fabulous!”

He told me to curb my enthusiasm. He explained that while in the United States hardcover books cost more than paperbacks, in
France the “hardcover” usually means a cheap book club edition printed on mediocre paper with a rough binding. “The Pagnol is worthless,” he said.

Once I came by with six books I knew he could sell, including a new novel by Marc Lambron, a member of the Académie Française; a heavy tome on the relationship between Paris and New York by Marc Fumaroli, also a member of the Académie Française; a memoir by Eva Gabrielsson, the woman who had been the longtime partner of the late Stieg Larsson, the author of the Millennium trilogy; and a political analysis of Lebanon and its lessons for the Middle East.

He started to hand me six one-euro coins, saying, “I don’t want to be in your debt.”

“They’re not for sale,” I said. “Next time I choose a book, you can give it to me.”

“It will be too expensive for you.”

One day, I brought Bertin the catalog of a new Matisse exhibition still in its original plastic wrapper (retail price: thirty-five euros); a catalog from an exhibition at the Maison de la Culture du Japon à Paris; and the glossy coffee table book produced for the 2012 season of the Spoleto performing arts festival in Italy.

He apologized that he hadn’t found new books on the neighborhood for me.

Then he remembered: a 1965 book club edition of
Connaissance du vieux Paris
(Knowledge of Old Paris) by Jacques Hillairet, an eminent historian of the monuments, buildings, and streets of Paris. The book cost thirty-five euros.

“There has to be something in it for you,” he said.

I searched the index, and on page 436 I found a delicious factoid: in 1787 there were fifty-eight structures on the rue des Mar
tyrs, twenty-five of them cabarets. Bertin told me to take the book home. Wait—the bookseller was giving me a book?

Not so fast.

“Keep it,” he said. “For a few weeks.”

Thierry Cazaux, the neighborhood historian, doesn’t think much of Bertin as a true bookstore owner. He refers to him as a
soldeur,
a vendor of discount books. “He should not be called
libraire,
” said Thierry; he explained that while the term refers to a person who sells books, being one “requires vast knowledge and expertise. A
libraire
offers advice about literature.”

I couldn’t disagree more. For me, Bertin is a
libraire
and more. He’s a
libraire
who knows how to stay in business. I told him so one day. “I’m not a
libraire,
” he said in protest.

“Sure you are,” I replied. “Okay, you have all these popular cheap books outside, but your back room—it is filled with old treasures: about cinema, art, theater, history, music, architecture.”

“Madame,” he said, “that is the most wonderful compliment you could ever pay me.”

LIBRAIRIE VENDREDI, NEAR THE TOP
of the rue des Martyrs, is a classic Paris bookstore run by what Thierry would call a true
libraire.
Its front window is filled with books of philosophy and poetry so obscure that I almost expected to see a sign saying, “Non-intellectuals Not Welcome.”

When I was a college freshman, my English professor told me I would never be more than a B student. I majored in history. I avoided the required fifteen hours of philosophy by substituting foreign languages, convinced I would never master Plato, Aris
totle, and the others. The experience left scars. I would never call myself an intellectual. So for the first three years I lived in the neighborhood, I stayed away from Librairie Vendredi.

A bookstore has been in this building for more than one hundred years, giving Librairie Vendredi the feeling of another era. It is a sliver of a shop, so small I knew that if I ever went in, I would have to talk with the two women who run it. They would ask if I wanted help; “Just browsing” doesn’t seem like a proper response in a place of such erudition.

The shop’s one concession to modernity is an outdoor display of bargain books. Anyone can stop and flip through the selections without feeling inadequate. Most are either unusual or obscure—a catalog from a sale of Gustave Doré prints from 1990, a dog-eared copy of a minor Molière play.

But one day I saw a book of essays by the British novelist Zadie Smith. In English. For two euros. It was my ticket in! I entered the shop, money in hand, to meet owner Gilberte de Poncheville and her associate of fifteen years, Hélène Murat.

Librairie Vendredi is no more than 215 square feet, so narrow there is hardly space for an island piled high with books selected as favorites of the day. Shelves rise at least ten feet from floor to ceiling; ladders against the wall make the high books accessible. Hidden away in the back is a counter used as a desk.

Gilberte was unsmiling and unassuming; her glasses and dangling earrings gave her a fusty look. She wore jeans and a cashmere cardigan over a buttoned-up blouse. I don’t think Gilberte knew about Zadie Smith, which made me feel better about being there.

I asked her about herself.

“I don’t have much to say,” she told me in a weary voice. “I do
my work. I’m not amusing. I’m not a worldly person—nothing like that, you know.”

Hmm,
I thought,
maybe she’s as intimidated by me as I am by her books.

“Maybe she prefers books to humans,” whispered Marie, my research assistant.

Because the shop opens at noon, I thought Gilberte and Hélène might be semiretired. Not so. They need mornings to read their books so they can properly advise their customers.

One day Gilberte showed me a recent copy of the London
Sunday Times Magazine,
with an article describing the rue des Martyrs as one of the world’s great shopping streets. It included sweet little illustrations in color; Librairie Vendredi was featured in one of them. I asked Gilberte if I could borrow the magazine to make a copy. I was surprised when she said yes. When I returned with the magazine and a framed copy of the article for her, Gilberte did something I hadn’t expected. She smiled.

Then she began talking. As a child, she had wanted to be a florist or a bookseller. Eventually, bookselling won out. Gilberte and her husband bought Librairie Vendredi in 1978 from a Romanian refugee who was retiring. The shop, which had opened around 1910, still had its coal-burning stove—and shelves of books black with coal dust.

Today Gilberte has ten thousand titles, about 40 percent of them new books. She arranges books alphabetically by author according to subject, but she does not label the shelves. You just have to know that the small section on the right is psychology and the big wall on the left is poetry. Because Gilberte is a poetry fanatic, that is her largest collection. “Classic, modern, it’s all mixed together,” she said.

Gilberte and Hélène don’t spend much of their time on accounting, so they don’t know whether they turn a profit. They don’t use a computer. I’ll say that again: they do not to use a computer to keep track of their stock. Nor do they have a card catalog. They keep all (or at least most) of the books in their heads. “We’re the computers!” said Gilberte.

She scorns what she calls the “uniformization” of books: the same titles in all the bookstore windows. “The books are whatever we like. We are completely out of the best-seller circuit,” she said. “The important thing is to be a reader and to stay close to my books and to find books that you don’t find everywhere.” Gilberte is the very definition of an intellectual—even though she denies it.

Journalists pride themselves on storytelling, and I am telling Gilberte’s story despite her reticence. “I hate books of anecdotes,” she said. “You can’t say very much with anecdotes. Too many anecdotes—it means the author lacks inspiration. There is no writing. There is no style. There is no poetry.”

She also dislikes practical books. “You won’t find a cookbook here, or a travel book, or a diet book, or any book on well-being with a title like
Discover Your Inner Clown
. These sell really well in France. But they’re not for us.”

She does have a small section of children’s books, mainly for clients who come into the shop with their children. It is an odd assortment on oddball topics, including a children’s book by Marguerite Duras, most famous for
The Lover,
about her affair with a Chinese merchant in Indochina when she was about fifteen.

The shop has a reputation for “being rather alternative” in its philosophy section, where it has books on “situationism.” I thought of the 1957 musical
Funny Face
; Audrey Hepburn tells
Fred Astaire she wants nothing more than to go to Paris and attend lectures on “empathicalism.” I wondered if there was a correlation between the two. I was too embarrassed to ask, so I just said, “Why do you have books on situationism?”

“Why? Because of our taste, because we are like that,” said Gilberte. “We can say that about all of our books. We have lots of books about the theater and movies because we like the theater and movies. And we’re rather on the left here—we make no secret of it—so we have connections with thinkers who are slightly subversive.”