The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (5 page)

“How will all the old grandmas get their fish?” asked Valérie Levin, the baker’s wife across the street.

Since this is France, where people hold the government responsible for just about anything that goes wrong, Valérie insisted that city hall should guarantee access to fresh fish. “The authorities have an obligation to put a fish store here, a civic obligation,” she said. She circulated a petition demanding a fishmonger. Two hundred people signed.

Not everyone was sad. Some thought La Poissonnerie Bleue was old-fashioned on a street beginning to turn hip. The presentation was predictable, not innovative. “The ‘look’ of the fish is not sexy,” said one customer. “There’s nothing to astonish me, to take my breath away.”

I asked Jacques Bravo, then the local mayor of the Ninth Arrondissement, if he could help the Briolays. Each of Paris’s twenty administrative units, or
arrondissements,
has its own mayor. Although these mini-mayors report to the head mayor of Paris, they have considerable authority over their own domains.

Bravo’s wife had rushed home a few days before to tell him that something terrible was happening to La Poissonnerie Bleue, that the entire street was talking about it. Bravo was resigned to the inevitable. The next Sunday morning, he turned up on the rue des Martyrs in a gray cashmere scarf and a pin-striped suit with a red rosette pinned to the left lapel designating him as an
officier
of the Legion of Honor. He shook a lot of hands before delivering the bad news. He had been presented just the day before with many delicate details about what had gone wrong. “I
love this family,” he said. “They’re very honorable. But it will be impossible to save them.” Nevertheless, he had solidarity with fish, if not with the fishmonger. He promised to try to find a replacement for Marc, maybe a young couple with a love of fish and a hunger for work. He cited the protection of the rue des Martyrs under the Paris Local Urbanism Plan law of 2006, which safeguards small independent artisanal businesses. “There will be a butcher here. There will be a baker here. There will be a cheesemonger here. And maybe, just maybe, there will be a fishmonger here. I’m a marathoner. And I can always speed up at the end.”

But he acknowledged that it was difficult to find fresh-fish sellers these days. Fish is a hard profession, with a high overhead. The trend in recent years is for fishmongers to set up stands in open-air markets that travel around to different neighborhoods.

In its final days, the atmosphere inside the fish store became tense. The full-time employee in charge of the smoked salmon counter was Joël Vicogne, who’d started working there when he was sixteen. He also happened to be the son of the landlord, who had once run the shop himself, in partnership with an uncle. Where did Joël’s loyalties lie? Was he a spy for his father? Plotting a takeover?

Joël, now well into middle age, had no intention of assuming the job of neighborhood fishmonger. “Fish is too tough,” he explained. “You have to be at the wholesale market at two, three in the morning. You have to be on your feet in rubber boots eight hours a day. You don’t get enough vacation.”

I wanted to toast the Briolays on their last day, so I arrived at the store on October 31 with plastic cups and two bottles of champagne. But Marc had thwarted my plan by shutting down three
days earlier. There had been no toasts, no tears, no good-byes. Just the clang of metal shutters closing the shop for the last time.

I took the news hard. No matter how busy the shop, how long the line stretched onto the sidewalk, there had always been time at La Poissonnerie Bleue to talk about fish. I learned there that an ugly-faced variety of ocean perch called
sébaste
is excellent stuffed with shallots or fennel and baked whole; that fresh cod works well with pesto; that red mullet is not too delicate to fillet and sauté. Justine, Marc’s daughter, had shared her secret recipe for linguine with shrimp, fish quenelles, and a sauce of butter, white wine, and shallots. Marc routinely threw a lemon and a bunch of fresh parsley into my bag and shaved two or three euros off the bill. I had felt like more than just a customer.

Soon after La Poissonnerie Bleue closed, a fancy chocolate and caramel shop opened a few blocks to the north. It was a very un–rue des Martyrs event, with an invitation-only opening day, a red carpet, potted trees at the entrance, and two press agents to answer questions.

Makoto Ishii, the young Japanese manager, dressed in designer black, offered the guests champagne and an endless supply of chocolates. He told me how much he and his wife had liked the rue des Martyrs the first time they had visited, more than a decade ago.

“We got off the Métro and began to walk up the street,” he said. “There in front of us in the distance was the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. It was love at first sight. We never left.”

They moved into an apartment on the street and later opened the chocolate shop next door.

Somehow, our conversation turned to fish and we agreed that the departure of the Briolay family represented the end of an era.

“There is a missing piece,” I said.

“The neighborhood needs fish,” replied Makoto. “Maybe I should take over the fish store.”

“What? I thought you were a chocolate expert,” I said. “You know fish?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know fish?”

“I’m Japanese.”

Of course.

Months later, the old fish shop was still shuttered. The sign for La Poissonnerie Bleue still hung outside, a painful reminder of what had been lost.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

. . .

Paris . . . is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers, to those capable of amusing themselves in its streets without regard to time when urgent business requires their presence elsewhere.

—J
ULIEN
G
REEN
,
Paris

I
HAD FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT MICHEL GüET, THE MAN
I encountered at the end of the impromptu group visit to my building. Then I bumped into him a few weeks later, outside an all-volunteer community center that ran a bistro at lunchtime. He was leading a group of retirees on a free tour of the neighborhood. He asked if someday soon I’d like to go on a walk with him on the rue des Martyrs.
Pourquoi pas?
Why not?

Michel was born in the neighborhood and is passionate about its past. We met on the front steps of the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Church—a fitting start, as he was baptized here.

I hadn’t expected a lesson quite like this one. He quickly assumed the air of a high school geology teacher, launching into
a lecture on the sedimentary rocks under our feet. They formed tens of millions of years ago, when this part of France was underwater, he said, and the walls and pillars of the church were built from this cheap and plentiful stone. To prove the point, he pointed to fossils and shells embedded in the pillars, like tiny jewels of nature.

“You see, here you have a perfect photograph of the bottom of the sea forty or fifty million years ago!” he said. “And to think that we bipeds are not even six million years old. It makes us humble inhabitants of our planet, no?”

I was eager to move forward a few million years. Michel obliged, sort of, and we walked to the back of the church to begin our uphill journey on the rue des Martyrs. He told me that in the Middle Ages, this area was part of a vast swamp. By the fourteenth century, the swamp had been drained and canals built. In the eighteenth century, the street was both residential and commercial, filled with dance halls, cabarets, and more than two dozen small inns, many of which doubled as brothels. Little survives now from that era. Most buildings date from a boom that accompanied prosperity in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The street became the physical spine of the neighborhood, the route between the financial world of the Grands Boulevards and the nightlife of Montmartre. It was built to be
populaire
—solid, unpretentious, working-class, poised between respectability and bohemia.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Napoleon III tasked his master city planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, with wiping out overcrowded, disease-ridden neighborhoods of Paris in the name of progress. Haussmann replaced twisting, narrow streets and alleyways that had existed for centu
ries with straight, wider streets and boulevards. The rue des Martyrs was mostly spared. Only a handful of its present structures, uniform five-story buildings with white stone facades and narrow wrought-iron balconies, are considered Haussmannian.

What remains is charming architectural chaos, a hodgepodge of styles and building materials. Some structures have five stories, others only three. Some have been topped with an extra floor or two, adding space but not elegance. Some windows have been enlarged, some not. Some doors and entrances have been replaced with banal metal, some maintained in their original wood with wrought-iron work. Look hard enough, and you can find creativity: brick, ceramic tile, flourishes of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. “We are in a mosaic of memory,” Michel said. “I can never pretend to know everything.”

Walking on the street with him is a journey into his own personal history. We stopped at the first corner on the right. As a schoolboy, Michel stood on this spot and watched as the supermarket–variety store at No. 7, across the street, went up in flames. “It looked like a giant barbecue,” he said. I told him I love this corner for another reason. The rue des Martyrs has no museums or private art galleries. But this corner has one of the most remarkable pieces of street art in Paris: two large advertising murals, one above the other on a wall at No. 10, painted more than a century ago. Long hidden from view, they were rediscovered by chance during construction work. Because they had been protected from sunlight and rain, they are nearly perfectly preserved.

A 1909 mural advertising Ripolin paint is on top. It shows three painters in white coats and straw hats, one in front of another, each holding a paintbrush and a small can of paint. The first is painting the wall; each of the others paints the coat
of the painter in front of him. A 1911 mural below advertises Bénédictine with the image of a bottle of the herbal liqueur sitting on a tray. For now, the murals are barely visible behind a protective translucent covering. Crude graffiti scars the Bénédictine ad. They have received official “historic monument” status, but the 150,000 euros or so it would take to restore and protect them is not there.

Michel pointed out the elementary school on the rue Hippolyte-Lebas. “You know who went to this school besides me?” he asked. “François Truffaut!” Truffaut had lived on the rue de Navarin just off the rue des Martyrs, and he set his semiautobiographical black-and-white debut feature film,
The 400 Blows
(1959), in the neighborhood he knew so intimately. Truffaut cast the fourteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud in the film as Antoine Doinel, an independent-minded teenager branded as a troublemaker by all the adults in his life. Antoine lives with his mother and stepfather in a cramped walk-up on the lower part of the rue des Martyrs. In one scene, his mother takes him home from school past the bakery on the corner with rue Manuel; in another, he and his best friend are seen walking inside the Cité Malesherbes, a private residential enclave whose iron gates open onto the rue des Martyrs. In early 2014, a plaque was erected at No. 33 rue de Navarin to celebrate the building where Truffaut spent his childhood and the neighborhood where he made the film, one of the first of the French New Wave.

“This building is interesting, with its second-floor balcony—we’re in the 1840s here,” Michel said as we passed No. 26. “And look at the ironwork on the door—it’s Abélard and Héloïse, and we’re in the Romantic period. Across the street”—No. 25—“we have neoclassicism with fake Corinthian columns. That building
with the bakery,” he noted, and I looked over at No. 26, “dates from 1895, and all those decorations on the facade are just to show off. The building just across the street”—we had now moved on to No. 23—“is a vision in sobriety.”