PÉRIPHÉRIQUE

Gan, 1972–1977

IT WAS A SCENE that might have come from a comic book – some preposterous, graphic assemblage imposed on the city by a megalomaniac bande dessinée artist with a limitless budget and a nasty sense of humour.

The Finance Minister had just emerged from a meeting in the Louvre. He glanced along the avenue to the west-north-west; his jaw dropped, and he said to himself, ‘What the hell is that?!’

Something thin and vertical bisected his eye. Then a memory attached itself to the ghastly image, and he thought: ‘It was, yes, supposed to be big, but not that big…’ (Too tall for the artist to fit it onto one eyeball.)

Seen from behind, he was quite tall himself: buttress-shouldered, with light tracery around the neck, delicately cupola’d with baldness; early English rather than flamboyant. But that…(It seemed to come out of the top of his head.) No one could possibly miss it. He stood at one end of the sacred alignment where Parisians took their bearings: Louvre, Obelisk, Arc de Triomphe – civilization’s compass needle. The historic Grand Axis was a thin straight line at the centre of the globe: in one direction, the Great Pyramid of Giza; in the other, the island of Manhattan. And now, just up the road – that hulking great tower: La Tour GAN – so tall it would never look exactly perpendicular.

The bande dessinée artist might have drawn it in between one frame and the next.

Rising in the west, it reduced the Arc de Triomphe to the size of a mousehole. It redefined horizons and called the shots on perspective. In his mind’s eye, he saw a long, thin shadow fall across Paris, turning the city into a passive sundial. Even before the building was finished, the drawings were coming to life: the scratchy trees, a gratuitous bird, a woman with a pram, businessmen in shiny blue suits and vertically striped shirts, resembling the building they worked in – in effect, fittings.

Corporate aspirations were written all over its glassy facade. Anyone who saw those three enormous letters at the top of the tower might have mistaken them for the name of the city. Gath, Ashkelon, Athens, Babylon, Gan. Groupe des Assurances Nationales.

Faced with this towering obscenity, the Minister of Finance – already considering his options – cast his mind back to 1960 and the Rue Croulebarbe…Croulebarbe: it sounded like a name from a fairy tale. No. 33 Crumblebeard Street had set the pattern for the next twelve years. First, the project was a drawing on a display board in a refitted Second Empire drawing room. An innocuous address identified it as a normal part of the city. The architects talked of ‘integration’, as though the monster were to make its home in a convivial and accommodating neighbourhood of the sort depicted in children’s books: the chequered tablecloths of a restaurant, a cat snoozing under a concierge’s knitting, the casual intimacy of clothes hanging in the blanchisserie-pressing. Next, there was a hole in the ground with men and machines moving about inside it. And then, suddenly, it shot up like an elevator, the living-cubes materializing around it as it went, from one floor to the next, in a single day.

The friendly neighbourhood was gone for good. As for the monster, there were no words to describe it – or very few: a steel tube, a blank panel, then another steel tube followed by a window, in a row of eight panels and eleven windows, with minor variations, multiplied vertically by twenty-three.

It had more glass in it than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Standing outside 33, Rue Croulebarbe, you could see the setting sun in both directions. Now, after twelve years of urbanisme, it seemed a midget by comparison.

As Minister of Finance, he had been present at most of the meetings. There had been much talk, he recalled, about transparency: transparent government, transparent buildings. (He could see through the men who sat around the table.) Symbols and metaphors would be brought to life. Why? This was the talk.

He had serious reasons to doubt the transparency of glass. Twelve years after the scandal of Crumblebeard Street, a man couldn’t walk through Paris without seeing himself everywhere. The city had never been so opaque. Pairs of Parisians everywhere, and every paired pedestrian a self-hating Narcissus.

It was time to draw the line. And he was the man to draw it…Or his name was not Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

 

FIVE YEARS LATER, after becoming President of the French Republic, he drew the line at twenty-five metres, which was for the centre of the city, and for the periphery he set it at thirty-seven metres. This was thirteen and nineteen heights of Giscard respectively – excluding the Eiffel Tower, the Tour Montparnasse, three or four other towers and the rest of La Défense and the Front de Seine, which were already under way. Twenty-five and thirty-seven metres were the new vertical dimensions of the city, and it was a highly popular measure. Almost everyone could see the point of it.

The Black Prince, # 1

NORTHERN PARIS at night: the slag-grey hills of Belleville, Ménilmontant and Charonne, overgrown with aerials and chimneys. A lopsided building somewhere near the Porte des Lilas.

A window on the fourth floor, under the eaves: a young woman sleeps under a wind-blown sheet, dappled by the moonlight or the yellow streetlamp.

Sounds come through the open window. Something like the wail of a tom cat – Nyeeooowww!!! – draws a ribbon of sound around the outskirts of the city, marking its perimeter. She stirs on the bed, and moves her legs as if to release the tension. For a moment, she is out there with him on the motorbike.

There are no lights on in the building but it has patches of dirt or shade that almost look like human faces. A man walks past on the pavement below with no discernible features on his face. He turns a corner, slowly, as though he has a long way to go. His shoes are expensive but well worn. The artist shows him leaving a faint trail of white dust.

Quai de Béthune, 1971

WHEREVER GISCARD looked in Paris, he saw the works of his predecessor: Pompidou the banker, Pompidou the poetry-lover, Pompidou the President; some might have said the visionary. The chortling, two-faced peasant who kicked him out of the Ministry of Finance. – ‘Pom-pi-dou’, like the peeping of a car horn.

If he hadn’t died in 1974, after less than five years in office, who knows what he might have done?

Pompidou came from the land of the Arverni, where volcanic plugs jut out of the landscape like ancient, eroded skyscrapers, and the granite pastures are so bleak that an unsilenced engine is like the song of the skylark or the bleating of a calf. When he drove his car in Paris, he wanted buildings to disappear, which, in a sense, they did. He said, ‘It is up to the city to adapt itself to the automobile, not the other way around. We must renounce an outmoded aesthetic.’ His body had already adapted: he had a driver’s sagging hips and jittery legs.

In 1971, the architects who had won the competition to design the Centre Beaubourg came to see him at the Élysée. First, they saw the President of the French Republic in a suit; then he went away, changed into something more casual and came back smoking a Gauloise, saying, ‘I’m glad I’m not an architect. It must be the most difficult job in the world – all those building regulations!’

He did not pretend to be an expert, though he did have opinions. Asked about modern urban architecture, he said, ‘Without towers, it can’t exist.’ The reporter from Le Monde looked through the windows of the President’s office and saw the skyline changing as he spoke. ‘Like it or not,’ said Pompidou, ‘you can’t get away from towers.’ Then he added, as though in confidence, ‘And I know I shouldn’t say this, but the towers of Notre-Dame…they’re too short!’

His wife Claude was better on the details. It was she who decided that the largest ventilation components of the Centre Beaubourg (the roof-top cooling towers and the street-level air intakes) should be white instead of blue.

 

THE POMPIDOUS lived in what, to judge by the coffered entrance door with its lions’ heads and wreaths, was a beautiful old town-house on the Île Saint-Louis, at 24, Quai de Béthune. Three hundred years before, property speculators had developed the Quai de Béthune and renamed it Quai des Balcons for marketing purposes. Parisians who passed that way in their powdered wigs thought the exclusive water-front development an eyesore: balconies spoiled the classical simplicity of the facades and induced the wives of rich financiers to display themselves like prostitutes. In 1934, one of the balconied houses was bought by Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics millionairess. She tore it down and replaced it with a characterless mansion boasting a fashionable porthole window. All that remained of the original building was the entrance door. This was no. 24, where the Pompidous lived.

The Île Saint-Louis was so quiet in the evenings that one could almost believe that there were still toll-keepers on the bridges and chains to prevent anyone from reaching the island after dark. Next door, at no. 22, Baudelaire had lived as a young dandy with his hookah and his coffin-bed and the old paintings that he bought on credit from a curiosity shop on the island. Pompidou was an admirer of Baudelaire, and of poetry in general. ‘I remain convinced’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘that the face of a young girl and a soft, supple body are among the most moving things in the world, along with poetry.’ His anthology of French poetry included several poems from Les Fleurs du Mal.

‘The shivering dawn, in her pink and green dress,

Slowly advanced along the deserted Seine…’

‘Evenings on the balcony, veiled in pink mist!

How soft your breast seemed, and how kind your heart!’

It was some weeks after the judging of the architectural competition and the first excavations for the Beaubourg, which sent tremors to the most distant parts of Paris (but not to the Île Saint-Louis).

Pompidou and Baudelaire looked out of their respective windows, smoking cigarettes, blowing thought-bubbles of smoke towards the Left Bank. Only the Rue Poulletier and one hundred and thirty years separated them. The silvery wake of a river rat pushing through sewage could be seen under both windows.

Baudelaire gazed at the ‘watery suns and muddled skies’ above the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and thought of his mulatto girlfriend’s ‘lying eyes’. He saw the branch of the Seine where the water burbles under the Pont de Sully. He saw the grubby barges and laundry boats, and imagined himself in a city of canals where ‘vagabond vessels from the ends of the earth have come to satisfy your slightest desire’.

Next door, Pompidou imagined things that no one had ever imagined in that location: a forest of high-tensile steel and cross-bracing girders blotting out the view; a multi-lane overpass soaring through the rooftops, and space-age cars that seem to bulge and contract like tigers as they take the swerves. Where lovers strolled and beggars dreamed, he saw a limited-access freeway, just like the one that already runs along the Right Bank – the Voie Georges-Pompidou – and a thousand windscreened faces shooting out of an underpass, stunned by a sudden vision of beauty (golden domes, turrets, etc.) until a screech of brakes jerks them back to the present.

The Black Prince, # 2

POMPIDOU FLICKS his burning cigarette onto the street below. A faceless man walks along the quai. His black shoe extinguishes the butt as he passes. He wears a long coat, from which small amounts of what looks like builders’ rubble trickle out onto the pavement. He reaches the other side of the island and looks up towards the hunched suburbs and the Saturn Vs of the Sacré-Cœur. The clouds are red. Wailing sounds arc over the sky. Somewhere in the hills near the Porte des Lilas, the young woman sits up in bed.

She thinks of the time when she fell asleep on the saddle, resting her head on her lover’s back, leaning on the black leather. Through the bow of his shoulder, she could feel every bump and tremor, every syncopated rumble of the tarmac. His stillness never worried her. He said, ‘Danger comes from other people.’

They were already in their mid-twenties, which made it seem as though everything had gone very quickly. At high speed, the changes came slowly and easily – a slight bulge yielding, a readjustment of their twinned bodies. He always said, ‘When something changes, it has to be rediscovered.’

Seven hours from now, he would try to break the record, which stood at twelve minutes and a few seconds. He would see a Paris that no one had ever seen before, because everything looks different at speed. She slips back under the sheet and stretches out. She dreams of falling asleep on the bike, waking up in a favourite part of Paris: the leafy banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, the Place du Tertre, the Forum des Halles. A false dawn floods the room with yellow light.

Beaubourg, 250 BC – AD 1976

THAT NIGHT, Louis Chevalier had walked all the way from the heights of Belleville to the Île Saint-Louis, then back across the river to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. On a map devoid of other markers, his trail would have suggested a network of capillary paths that had grown up haphazardly, or constrained by ancient habits and accidents of geography. He had walked for five miles, through two thousand years of history. Now, he stood on a tiny hill of debris, staring at the ‘Plateau Beaubourg’.

He knew the area like the back of his hand. Or rather, he knew it as it had been before he was born. (Anything too recent made only a faint impression and met with a blank stare.) He had lectured at the Sorbonne on the history of Paris, to students barely out of the womb, beginning with the Gauls who periodically annihilated their settlement to prevent it from falling into the hands of their enemies. Invited to give his expert views on the city’s modern redevelopment, he had written one of his history books in a room at the Hôtel de Ville above the office where Baron Haussmann had planned the destruction of Paris. He had been a contemporary of Pompidou at the École Normale, and had sometimes lunched with the President and a few other normaliens at a little restaurant in the Rue Hautefeuille, where Baudelaire was born, but he had never dared voice his true opinions.

Now, Chevalier was writing a book called L’Assassinat de Paris. It was the fruit of long walks and readings that had left him up to his knees in the past. He would show the city succumbing to planners and financiers, and, if indignation left him room, he would reconstruct the Paris of his studious memory: ‘Left to itself, History would forget. But fortunately, there are novels – loaded with emotions, swarming with faces, and constructed with the sand and lime of language.’

He liked to feel the filth of the Beaubourg quartier permeate his body: its smut was an essential part of its history. The original village, built on a mound above the riverside swamp, had been named Beaubourg (Pretty Place) in a spirit of medieval sarcasm. Three of the nine streets in which Louis IX had allowed prostitutes to operate were in Beaubourg, which had once had the rudest street names in Paris: Rue Maubuée (Dirty Washing Street), Rue Pute-y-Muse (Streetwalker Street), Rue du Poil-au-Cul (Hairy Bottom Street), Rue Gratte-Cul (Arsescratcher Street), Rue Troussevache (Cowshagger Street), Rue Trousse-Nonnain (Nunfucker Street) and Rue Tire-Vit (Cocktugger Street), where Mary Queen of Scots was said to have asked her guide, ‘What street is this?’, to which the guide had euphemistically replied, ‘Rue Tire-Boudin, Your Highness.’ And ‘Tug-Sausage Street’ it remained until the 1800s, when it was renamed Rue Marie-Stuart.

Architectural pearls were forever being found in this squalid zone: curious lintels and casements, a Renaissance staircase in a sordid vennel, the embedded vestiges of turrets and gables, cellars belonging to houses of which no stone survived. Until 1950, hovels had squatted on the roof of the church of Saint-Merri, separated from one another by the flying buttresses.

The Plateau Beaubourg, where Chevalier stood, was now a ‘parking sauvage’. The rectangular patch of wasteground was used by motorists and by truck drivers serving the local shops. Painted transvestites and other creatures of the night hung around until they were replaced, just before dawn, by the muscular unemployed, looking for odd jobs at what remained of the markets.

In the days when buildings were thought to be incurable carriers of disease, the area had been designated Îlot insalubre n^o 1. It was the first of seventeen Unhygienic Precincts identified by government commissions in 1906 and 1919. In 1925, Le Corbusier had produced a plan – sponsored by a car company – that would deal with insalubrity once and for all. Much of the Right Bank would be flattened and the ‘tubercular’ buildings (and all the other buildings too) would be replaced by eighteen cruciform towers. East–west arteries would allow motorists to cross what had once been Paris in a matter of minutes. Le Corbusier’s secretary, who came in from the suburbs, would never be late for work again. The plan had been shelved, but the idea remained as a dream: Paul Delouvrier, ‘the Haussmann of the suburbs’, who had discovered Paris from the driving seat of his Studebaker convertible, decreed that Parisians should be able to travel about their city at 50–60 kph.

Several streets in Unhygienic Precinct No. 1 had been swept away in the 1930s as part of the programme of rationalization and sanitization, leaving the area of wasteground, which every night was carpeted afresh with broken glass, condoms and hypodermic needles.

 

THIS WAS THE SITE that Pompidou had chosen for a cultural centre and modern art museum. (‘It has to be modern art because we already have the Louvre,’ he explained.) Six hundred and eighty-one teams of architects had submitted designs of bewildering variety: a cube, a bent prong of glass and metal, a discombobulated rhombus, an inverted pyramid, a giant egg and something resembling a waste-paper basket. The winning design was compared to an oil refinery, which pleased the architects. It made radical use of steel, plastic and colour-coded utility tubes: green for plumbing, yellow for electricity, blue for ventilation, red for hot air. Specially designed seats, ashtrays and noticeboards were an integral part of the design, until they were stolen as souvenirs. Best of all, there was to be an escalator running up the outside in a perspex sheath.

Most of the local inhabitants were not opposed to the new building. ‘Who wants to live next to that?’ they would ask, pointing at the neighbouring slum from their own section of Unhygienic Precinct. They looked forward to the oil refinery. It would ‘regenerate’ the quartier. All the money went to the west of Paris, and it was high time that the east enjoyed some prosperity. There would be new shops and better drains, and the cafés would once again be full of cheerful customers heaping scorn on the municipal authorities, the President, technocrats, artists, builders, tourists and the young.

Louis Chevalier hated people for liking Paris in ignorance of what it once had been. To him, Paris was a composite place built up over the ages, a picture book of superimposed transparencies, overpopulated with the dead and haunted by the ghosts of the living. No sooner was a building demolished and replaced than his mind rebuilt it.

A light rain had begun to fall. His trouser legs felt heavy with the damp; his muscles turned to mud. He walked to the corner of the Rue de la Verrerie and stood in the doorway of Saint-Merri, where, in 1662, the sister of Blaise Pascal had waited for the very first omnibus. (The service was her brother’s idea.) Five buses went by, but all were full, and at last she had turned to walk home in a huff. He retraced her steps a short distance, then entered a side street near the Place Sainte-Opportune. On either side of the street, there were sounds of patient industry. A cobbler was sitting on his doorstep, tapping at a piece of leather. Market traders were passing with their baskets, handcarts, mules, tricycles and gas-fuelled trucks of a kind that was no longer manufactured.

At the end of the street was the ‘Grand Trou des Halles’ where the central markets, known as ‘the Stomach of Paris’, had been cut out. Tourists and Parisians were leaning on the barriers, gazing at the exposed strata and thinking about dinosaurs and Gauls.

In this ravaged zone, the crowd of inter-epochal Parisians was especially dense. By a wall that seemed to buckle with posters and stickers, gouged by knives and chisels, a man in a short blue coat had been crouching, two centuries before, clutching a door key, carving something on the stone. Restif de la Bretonne had already defaced every parapet on the Île Saint-Louis when he began to etch his way through the quartier Beaubourg. Years later, ‘to make the past live like the present’, he returned to read these messages to his future self and remembered his exact state of mind at the time: ‘10 jun. Reconciliatio: cubat mecum’ (‘Reconciliation: she slept with me’).

A historian claimed to have discovered some of Restif’s graffiti, but many of the stones had long since been chopped out and replaced, and the door key had never bitten very deeply. Now, there were transfixed hearts and genitals, cave paintings and cartoon faces, and skulls whose eyes grew wider and deeper as the rain and petrol-laden air ate into them. The letters of old slogans had blurred with age, and the ringed As of anarchists were as soft as ancient crosses carved on menhirs.

The Black Prince, # 3

THE RAIN IS a bad sign, but it will pass with the night. From Belleville, one hundred and thirty metres above sea level, Paris is becoming more distinct, like a coastline. It might almost be Nice or Constantinople. She looks out towards the centre, where tall cranes flash their red lights at aeroplanes, and waits for the dawn’s slow light to find the edge of the city.

This time, he will be alone – a chevalier or a prince leaving on a heroic expedition. But they will all be there to send him on his way, the riders who know each other only by their sound. They call him ‘Pascal’, but this is just a name they use to show familiarity. Soon, he will be known to the world by another name. A camera crew is already setting up at the Porte Maillot, and one of the riders is trying to explain to a reporter: ‘It’s like the new radar detectors: you know they exist, but you don’t know where they are.’

She is dressed in her leathers, and what might be a skirt of chainmail. She stands for another moment at the window, taking a last look at Paris, a helmet under her arm.

Beaubourg, 31 January 1977

HERE, THE POET had sat in a wine shop with a bottle of Burgundy and a saucer of walnuts, writing on the back of a letter – ‘New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of undressed stone,/Decrepit suburbs, everything becomes an allegory of something else,/And my cherished memories are heavier than rocks.’ Now, in the Paris that Louis Chevalier was forced to inhabit, the sign above the wine shop said ‘Pier Import – All the Orient at a Price You Can Afford’. He headed for the Rue de Rivoli, which still seemed new to him, past snickering neon signs that he could barely decipher: Drugstore, Snack, FNAC, Mic-Mac, Sex-Shop, Self, Le Petit Prince, Halles-Capone.

Near the corner of the Rue de l’Arbre-Sec, he gave directions to a young lieutenant who was looking for a hotel that no longer existed in a street that had changed its name.

Chronological anomalies were a normal part of life for Louis Chevalier. But since the redevelopment of the quartier had begun, even people who lived in the present had been noticing an inappropriate coincidence of historical periods. Families who came to see the work in progress were confronted with veteran prostitutes slouching on purpose-built stone staircases that led directly up from the street. Mothers averted their children’s heads and shot a glance at their husbands. Drunken clowns from circuses that had gone bankrupt after the war competed with graduates of the Marcel Marceau School of Mime. Beaubourg summoned up its ancient past, and over the whole Unhygienic Precinct – even when almost nothing remained of it except facades – and all through the corridors of the Châtelet-Les Halles RER-Métro station, there was the potent smell of the centuries: mould, sodden limestone, vomit, cabbage, corpse and cleaning fluid. A deodorizing unit had analysed its composition, but to no avail. Long after the renovation of the Îlot insalubre and the removal of Les Halles to Rungis, the authentic stench of the quartier Beaubourg hung on.

He made his way back to the Plateau Beaubourg, where he stood, a witness from another age, staring at a blazing wall of light. He had seen the building going up, tube by tube, until now, at last, it appeared to be permanently unfinished.

 

HIS CUPOLA gleaming in the spotlights, Giscard stooped as though entering a crypt. Baudouin I, Princess Grace, Presidents Mobutu and Senghor, and all the other personalities and heads of state had long since settled into their seats of chrome and leather when he arrived in the vast aquarial foyer with the wife of Pompidou. It was Claude Pompidou’s first outing since the death of her husband. The late President’s face hung over the foyer in the form of a hexagonal moon made of strips of metal. Even in his fragmented state, he appeared to be chortling like a peasant.

The guests, who numbered five thousand, had spent the last hour pushing one another towards the escalators and from one floor to the next, looking for the buffet. (Giscard had ordered that no food or drink should be served at the grand opening.) Then the escalators had been stopped, and ‘the Beaubourg’ had filled with sounds of exasperation and the clicking of heels on metal steps.

Outside, on the tarmac apron that had been the Plateau Beaubourg, a man stood among the onlookers, the world-class buskers and the qualified clowns. If L’Assassinat de Paris had carried illustrations, the artist would have shown him holding a thought-bubble in which Baudelaire’s poem, ‘Parisian Dream’, had been traced in a spidery hand:

A terrible sight, never seen by mortal eye…

Irregular vegetation had been banished.

An intoxicating monotony of metal, marble and water;

A Babel of stairs and arcades; a palace,

Infinite, with neither entrance nor exit.

A tamed ocean passed through a tunnel of jewels.

The colour black itself had an iridescent sheen.

No star, no vestige of the sun, even low in the sky:

All those wondrous things had their own source of light…

Inside, Giscard picked his way to the see-through podium. He had hoped that the project, starved of cash, would die a natural death. But then Pompidou’s protégé, ‘le Bulldozer’, Jacques Chirac – whose jutting jaw resembled the blade of a bulldozer – had put his weight behind the Centre Pompidou and pushed it through the committees.

The Centre had, however, proved useful in an unexpected way. On entering the private apartments at the Élysée for the first time as President, Giscard had found himself in the eerie but oddly irritating presence of a stainless-steel sphere. All around him was something like the insides of a transistor radio seen by a man who had shrunk to the size of a flea. This ‘environmental salon’ had been commissioned by Pompidou: polymorphic murals in over five thousand colours changed as one moved about the room, synaesthetically suggesting – and eventually causing – a severe headache. On Giscard’s orders, the ‘kinetic space’ had been removed to the Centre Pompidou where it belonged.

It was, therefore, with a mixture of relief and distaste that Giscard delivered his muddled and insulting speech of inauguration under the chortling, hexagonal moon:

Now, and for decades to come, a vast crowd will flow through this Centre. Long waves of humanity will batter the dyke of the museum’s canvasses, decipher the books, gape at the images, and listen to the slippery tonality and syncopation of the music.

As he spoke, he looked up into the vacuous circuitry of girders and tubes – green for plumbing, blue for ventilation…

There was, he could see it now, something entirely fitting about the Centre Pompidou. All that rubbish had to go somewhere, and where better than an architect-designed eyesore on a patch of wasteground? It had, moreover, united the Parisian bourgeoisie in loathing and fear of change. The very next day, eighteen thousand people came to see it, exceeding everyone’s expectations.

 

AFTER HIS LONG WALK through the centuries, the historian slept an agitated sleep on the rumpled debris of his bed. Like many Parisians, he would leave his shutters closed, even in the daytime. Only the maid would open them, when she came to wash away the grime. Baudelaire, who had moved from the Quai de Béthune to the other side of the island, had taken the extra precaution of having the lower panes of his window frosted ‘so I can see nothing but the sky’.

And then I woke up…eyes aflame.

The horrid slum, the stab of care, the brutal clock –

Midday! – It was raining shadows and the world was numb.

The Black Prince,# 4–5

(SEPTEMBER 1989)

SHE HAS STOPPED where the cobbles of the Place de l’Étoile meet the cobbles of the Avenue Foch, on the brow of what was once the Colline du Roule. The view down the avenue is a Joan Miró of bleary ochre light and pink splotches in which she sees his red light growing fainter. Few Parisians are about at that hour on a Sunday morning. The road surface glistens with the breath of the night but it will dry out in the breeze. Out beyond the old fortifications, conditions are very different. She catches the sound of the circular wind, and the wash of the traffic sweeping in from the south and the west.

They have come from all over Paris to see him off. A flotilla of halogen beams escorted ‘the Black Prince’ – a.k.a. ‘Pascal’ – to the great tidal river of the Champs-Élysées. Halfway up, they stopped at the Pomme de Pain for a chausson pomme and a coffee. It was there that they took the vow of silence a week before. They all have names that might have come from comic books or boutiques – Philou, Coyote, Karolus, Titi, Obelix, Pandore, Princesse.

She accompanies him as far as the Arc de Triomphe, then watches him embark on the gentle incline of the Avenue Foch. It is five minutes past seven. Just before the Porte Dauphine intersection, he slows down and stops at a light: someone crosses the road in front of him, cautiously, but without looking up.

From the other end of the avenue, she senses the acceleration as he descends the slip-road, past the rider with the stopwatch.

 

GISCARD FELT LIKE a tiny cathedral in a Sempé cartoon, dwarfed by ominous towers. He had saved the Gare d’Orsay and put a stop to the hundred-and-eighty-metre-tall Tour Apogée by the Place d’Italie. He had given the city a perimeter of frustrated skyscrapers truncated at thirty-seven metres. But there was nothing that he could have done to prevent the biggest architectural imposition of all.

From Porte de la Plaine, it had moved east to Place d’Italie. Advancing at a rate of twenty-three centimetres an hour for eighteen years, it had followed the outer line of the nineteenth-century fortifications, which the Director of Parks and Gardens had earmarked in the 1950s for a ‘Green Belt’ of promenades and playgrounds that would be ‘a reservoir of clean air’. The last section had been completed shortly before Pompidou’s death: from Porte d’Asnières to Porte Dauphine. It was now the most obvious feature of Paris on a map: a wobbly, amoebic circle, in which the monuments of the old city were featureless particles awaiting digestion in their vacuoles.

Before the Revolution, the tax-wall of the Fermiers-Généraux had raised howls of protest. Surrounded from within, the city had laid siege to itself, and an anonymous wit had penned the memorable line, ‘Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant’: Parisians were muttering about their immurement, bewailing the wall that walled them in. Now, the saying was literally true: Paris was surrounded by a continual murmur, a whispering wall of tyres and tarmac, a caterwauling of combustion engines.

The Boulevard Périphérique – shortened to ‘le Périph’ – made no difference whatsoever to traffic inside the city. The exogenous blood system pumped its corpuscles into a dead body clogged with inert cells. It was called ‘the Ring of Death’ and ‘the Circle of Hell’. It boasted one accident per kilometre per day, and it was thirty-five kilometres all the way round.

 

EVEN AT THAT HOUR, there is a surge and purpose about the traffic. It is essential to reach a safe speed – 190–200 kph – as quickly as possible. Drivers nearly always leave a gap of at least a metre, which is all he needs.

A red light is winking: at some future moment on a different time-scale, that vehicle will begin to change lanes. He allows the machine to relax into its natural velocity: 210, 220 kph…

The pillars of a tunnel, blazing orange, riffle past like a flick book cartoon. A walkway tilts 25 degrees and vanishes. – . – The next exit, Porte Maillot, is coming up already: the camera on the fuel tank sees the gigantic, maligned tower of the Palais des Congrès craning its neck. Other, inferior towers lean back to let him pass.

He knows the Périph like a lover’s body: the roughness and bumps between La Villette and Pantin; the surprising curve near the Porte des Lilas, where the road ahead will be invisible for maybe two seconds. He changes down, then back up into fifth.

A suspension bridge flexes its cables and flounces away. Cars – going where? – flash past in reverse. A tall partition blocks his view: a truck – it has no right to be in that lane – pulls out in front of him, suddenly grows taller, and all at once he is in the same time-zone as the truck. The deck of a bridge begins to rotate on its axis. A line of trees caught in a hurricane or some catastrophic stalling of the planet shoots overhead.

Perhaps, from where she is waiting, she will hear the scream of acceleration.

 

A WHITE PARTITION has been pulled across the room. Here, as Pompidou once complained, less than three hundred yards from the Champs-Élysées, the sounds of the city are muffled and distorted. In front of the partition is a model of the new national library. It consists of four towers, which are said to resemble open books, but without spines or pages.

No one who enters the office could fail to notice it. Ten million books, in their original, undigitized form, will fill the windows of the towers. In the present state of technology, the books will be destroyed by sunlight, but things move so quickly that – according to what will later be known as the Law of Accelerating Returns – by the time the towers are built, someone somewhere will have invented a special glass that will neutralize the effects of light without dimming its radiance.

Giscard’s successor is called ‘Mitterramsès’, and this is the ninth year of his reign. He is also known as ‘Tonton’ (‘Uncle’), and hence as ‘Tontonkhamoun’. He comes from Jarnac (sic), on the River Charente. Not since the days when the Parisii cowered behind their wooden stockade has the kingdom been so clearly marked off from the outer world. Nowadays, ‘Inside the Périphérique’ is another way of saying ‘Paris’.

Every few weeks, Mitterramsès has himself and his advisers taken through the inner city on a ritual itinerary. Sailing down the Seine, within the sacred perimeter, it is noticeable how these ‘Grands Projets’ – those he initiated himself and those he inherited from Giscard – go in pairs, on either side of the river, as though the delineated zone were a vast temple complex: Bibliothèque de France and Parc de Bercy, Opéra-Bastille and Institut du Monde Arabe, Musée d’Orsay and Pyramide.

‘When I was a student’, he tells the television reporters who interview him in front of the sloping panes of the Louvre Pyramid, ‘I was already rebuilding Paris’. Sandblasted, returfed, repopulated, its windows filled with monitors and cables, the heart of Paris has never looked so new. But the age of monuments is passing. A building is now an obstacle, a reinforced ego, a magnified piece of street furniture. A generation of towers is already marked for demolition, and, standing between the two reporters, Mitterramsès seems to age and shrivel. The Périphérique is no longer a limit; it is the principal avenue of a city that has yet to be identified – according to architects who have seen it from the air. Either that, or it is the centre of the vast new conurbation of Periphopolis.

Speed is eating away at the urban fabric, altering the shape and density of things. Skateboarders are plying routes of staggering complexity and length, instinctively rediscovering geological events and two thousand years of urban planning. Practitioners of parkour flip and spring about the city faster than cars, just as Quasimodo scrambled over the face of Notre-Dame.

‘The form of a city changes faster, alas, than a human heart!’

It was time to change the human heart…

 

A TRUCKER’S FACE pushed up against the glass, jawbone on the steering wheel, eyes boggling…Nyeeooowww!!! –

A city falls away to the right, and he descends towards a curved horizon. Concrete ceilings fly overhead like some futuristic dungeon complex. – . – A satellite estate blinded by sound barriers, then a shanty town that has slipped between the carriageways. To the north, behind the gantries that name the invisible suburbs, a colony of towers grows more distant. Contracted by speed, the Périph has a rhythm and integrity that its million daily users will never know.

The sun rises behind him and then to his right: cars are entering the ‘Circle of Death’ in greater numbers, and there are the first signs of the turbulence that will lead to gridlock later in the day. On the straight section after Gentilly – Montrouge, Malakoff, Porte de la Plaine – the corrugation rattles out a measure of his speed, and he feels the acceleration before it happens. – .

Two tunnels separated by a heartbeat, then the ribbed carcass of the Parc des Princes dancing down like a space invader – too big to see him shooting underneath, through the long tunnel of the Bois de Boulogne, the echoes catching up and overtaking, before the little road ascending, the streetlamps’ blessing, and the traffic from another, more leisurely age, circling the leafy carousel of the Porte Dauphine.

– Porte Dauphine and back again, all the way around. This is a record that will last for years.

 

SHE DID HEAR the scream. She circled the Place de l’Étoile, then rode down the Champs-Élysées, stopped on the square with the courtyard of the Louvre and the Pyramid as her backdrop, and returned just in time to the Pomme de Pain, which the motards have virtually taken over. A moment in history…

He says just this: ‘.’

She places her hands on either side of his helmet. The face is a blur, a city hurtling backwards into a forgotten future.