WE REACHED BONDY on our touring bikes just as the sun was turning the Canal de l’Ourcq into a ribbon of grey steel. That morning, we had set off from the Col du Donon, which lies nine hundred and eighty feet below the highest peak of the Vosges mountains in north-eastern France. For centuries, the col was used by Celtic tribes and Roman legions passing between Germany and Gaul. Its importance as a crossing-point is marked by the remains of a temple to Mercury and, on the southern ascent, by a memorial to the passeurs who helped French prisoners to escape from the Nazis. From there, we had spiralled down through the pine forests, over the Grendelbruch Pass, to the valley of the Rhine and the city of Strasbourg, then crossed the plains of northern France. By the time we reached Paris, we had covered five hundred and eighty-one kilometres at an average speed of 92 kph, according to my GPS unit, which, in the excitement of reaching Strasbourg railway station on time, I had forgotten to turn off.
A canalside bike path starts near the Gare de l’Est. It crosses the toy-town science park of La Villette, and passes under the baleful eyes of the neo-Gothic flour mills, the Grands Moulins de Pantin, which, until 2003, sucked in all the wheat of the Brie and the Beauce to feed the boulangeries of Paris. After Pantin, the piste cyclable wanders through a maze of half-demolished buildings, past the hulks of abandoned factories inexplicably ‘under video surveillance’, every window smashed and every surface covered by graffiti-artists as resourceful and determined as property developers. Then, rejoining the canal, it straightens out, and the speed picks up enough to change into the big chain-ring. Suddenly, approaching Bondy and the bridges that carry the Périphérique de l’Île-de-France, which marks the heliopause of the Paris system, we were pedalling alongside the Métro. A train was slowing down before veering into the Bobigny– Pablo Picasso station, and we could see the faces of passengers staring out at the open air.
At that time of evening, the north-eastern banlieue looked like a promotional film for home-buyers and investors. A Black African was walking along the tidy embankment with a friend who appeared to be Kurdish; a little girl was gleefully escaping from her parents on a tricycle. There was a startling absence of broken glass on the towpath; the only danger was a fast dog chasing the figures-of-eight of a fresh smell. After Bondy, where the canal swings north-east, in the cavernous gloom of yet another road bridge, three teenage boys were standing, looking tough and nervy, deep in some shared concern but obviously open to distractions. When they saw us coming, they moved to one side, and, with a shout of recognition, cheerfully saluted Margaret because she was wearing the red cap of a French cycling team, Brioches la Boulangère.
We left the canal at a pedestrian bridge and rode for two kilometres through the streets of Aulnay-sous-Bois. The Hôtel du Parc was a five-storey concrete dormitory with a view of a car park. The Senegalese man at the reception desk sent us down to the cellar to store our bikes; then he asked us where we had come from ‘like that’.
Every cyclist enjoys the chance to shrug off an epic expedition and to extol the miraculous efficiency of the bicycle, and so I told him, ‘This morning, we were on top of the Vosges mountains; we cycled down to Strasbourg and took the TGV to the Gare de l’Est.’
The man looked slightly puzzled, his question evidently unanswered. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I mean, how did you get here from the Gare de l’Est?’ ‘We cycled out along the canal.’ His eyebrows shot up, and he almost shouted, ‘You came all the way here from the Gare de l’Est – on your bikes?!’ – ‘Yes…’ – ‘Oh làlà! C’est fort, ça!’ (‘Blimey! That beats everything!’) Shaking his head, he handed us our room key, and said again, ‘Ah! C’est fort, ça!’
It was not the fact of having cycled seventeen kilometres that amazed him but the thought of actually traversing that solidified ocean of shunting yards, building sites, cemeteries, schools, hospitals, stadiums, advertising space and infrastructure that joins Paris to the banlieue. For some reason – personal challenge, GPS malfunction or an inappropriate foreign way of doing things? – we had spurned the merciful oblivion of the transport network to pursue our unimaginable course through the great abstraction.
Next morning, with the rain bucketing down, the expedition may well have appeared to verge on the eccentric. We cycled across the canal and the unfenced railway tracks to Clichy-sous-Bois. After exploring the area around the EDF site where the two boys had died, we headed back towards Paris. During one of the heavier downpours, we stopped under a bridge where a dead smiley face in blue paint announced the supremacy of ‘The Canal Brotherhood’ and the boys of ‘North Bondy’, all of whom had sensibly remained indoors. We left the canal near the Périphérique de l’Île-de-France and splashed along the main street of Drancy to the hideous apartment blocks of La Muette. It was here that Jews from the Vel’ d’Hiv had been incarcerated in 1942. The buildings had been completed after the war as though nothing had happened. The U-shaped block around the central courtyard survived the demolition of the towers in the 1970s and is now used as ‘social housing’. Most of the five hundred people who live there are waiting to be moved to less squalid accommodation. Some of them were standing under the concrete awnings as though they were ready to leave at any moment.
On a photograph taken that morning in Drancy, a complex expression on Margaret’s usually sunny face suggests that this would never be counted among our favourite springtime trips to Paris. Fortunately, the visit to the banlieue was just a prelude: we were returning to Paris on a mission. Three months before, a chance discovery in a Paris bookshop had turned up a tantalizing trace of something that had been lost for many centuries. It had been one of the most important sites in Paris, and was in some ways the foundation of all the city’s future glories.
The rain eased off as we reached the edge of the eighteenth arrondissement. Patches of eggshell-blue sky appeared above the Sacré-Cœur. It seemed as though the conjunction of personal adventure and historical discovery would occur. Foolishly, I uttered the ritual phrase, ‘Paris will never look the same again.’ Almost immediately, as though the demon twin of Saint Christopher who accompanies every traveller had been listening, we were lost. The eighteenth arrondissement, where I had lived as a teenager, did not look the same, and the elementary GPS unit showed only a dithering line of dots on a blank background. The streets that were crammed in between the railway lines in the 1930s surreptitiously change direction whilst appearing to run straight. On what turned out to be the tiny, disproportionately confusing Place Hébert, I unfolded the flapping map of Paris, and, after a few more ritual phrases, we set off again in the direction of the Porte de la Chapelle.
COMING FROM GRENOBLE, where the Alps rise up ‘at the end of every street’, Stendhal was ‘disgusted’ by his first sight of Paris in 1799: ‘The environs struck me as horribly ugly – there were no mountains!’ The capital of France was a geographical anti-climax, a city built on sand and puddles. One of its grandest quartiers was called ‘the Marsh’ (le Marais); its original name, Lutetia, was thought to be derived from a Gaulish word for ‘mud’ or ‘swamp’. Every thirty years or so, the Seine, suffering from senile amnesia, flooded half of Swampville in an attempt to get back to its old bed, which lies a kilometre and a half to the north of the Île de la Cité, along the line of the Grands Boulevards. The knobbly mounds of gypsum that rimmed the city were like a botched imitation of the Seven Hills of Rome. During the nineteenth century, some of them were even rounded off and flattened, as though town planners had taken Isaiah’s prophecy to heart: ‘Every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight’.
In 1899, the popular geographer Onésime Reclus found some ironic consolation in the fact that the Paris meridian exactly bisects the peak of Mount Bugarach, six hundred and sixty-four kilometres to the south. He declared Mount Bugarach to be a Parisian Pyrenee, ‘the Metropolitan Pic du Midi’: Paris had a mountain after all…But a mountain that was invisible even from the Eiffel Tower on a clear day was a part of the Parisian landscape only in the most abstract sense. Pending future upheavals of the Paris Basin, the capital would have to be content with its grandly named little lumps: Montmartre, Montparnasse, Montrouge, Montsouris and the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.
It was in January 2008, while browsing in a Latin Quarter bookshop, that I discovered what appeared to be a mountain in one of the most densely populated parts of Paris. It was such an unlikely discovery that I wanted to leave the shop at once, with the precious information stored away and preserved, at least for a few days, from the inevitable disappointment. Like every visitor to Paris, I had made ‘discoveries’ that were known already to millions of people – the mysterious little attic room on the south face of Notre-Dame overlooking the Seine, or the crenellated brick tower that hides in a shrubbery near the western foot of the Eiffel Tower (a chimney left over from the old hydraulic lifts). Then there were the discoveries that were purely archival – things that had vanished so completely that the imagination had no purchase on the present: the unmarked location of the guillotine that beheaded Marie-Antoinette, or the little-known Isle Merdeuse (‘Shitty Island’) that used to lie in the Seine in front of what is now the seat of the French parliament. And finally, there were all the discoveries that weren’t discoveries at all, because, despite plausible real equivalents, they existed only in a writer’s imagination: the seedy boarding house ‘in that vale of flaking plaster and streams of black mud’ behind the Panthéon where Balzac’s Le Père Goriot begins, or the curiosity shop on the Quai Voltaire where Raphaël de Valentin in La Peau de chagrin acquires the magical ass’s skin that makes his every wish come true.
This time, I felt sure that something real lay behind the excitement, and that, for once, instead of simply hoarding the memory of its treasures, I would be giving something back to Paris. The clue was an engraving made in 1685 by an anonymous artist. It shows the village of La Chapelle (now part of the eighteenth arrondissement) strung out along a ridge, its little houses silhouetted against a white sky under billowing, rococo clouds. A hedge-lined road climbs up through neatly furrowed fields to a small church tower that stands at the highest point: it was there that the road from Paris crossed the main street through the village before dropping down on the other side.
To anyone who has walked or cycled through France with a vision of the map’s lines and symbols superimposed on the landscape, the engraving is instantly recognizable as the picture of a col. Cols or mountain passes are a kind of international velocipedal currency: the difficulty of a ride – or a stage of the Tour de France – is measured by the number of cols it crosses, and even if the cols are only a few hundred metres above sea level, a rider who has crossed them is entitled to feel that mountains have been conquered. Often, they are marked by a chapel, a cross or a standing stone, and, if officially recognized as cols, by a special road sign. A col – also known as a pas (or a porte if it straddles a frontier) – is a gateway to another world. At cols, as at river confluences and tribal boundaries, human history and physical geography are in closest conjunction.
Ever since hearing of a cyclists’ organization called the Club des Cent Cols, I had been keeping a list of the cols we had crossed on our travels, accidentally or on purpose. The Donon was number 215 on the list, and the Grendelbruch Pass number 216. A cyclist who has crossed at least a hundred different cols, ‘for personal pleasure’ rather than in a spirit of competition, can submit a complete list, and, provided that all the cols appear in the club’s catalogue, the new member receives a colourful diploma stating that the holder has, ‘on a cycle propelled by muscular force alone, climbed at least 100 cols, including 5 over 2000 metres’.
As Stendhal might have guessed, Paris lies in the middle of a col desert. While the mountainous borderlands and the Massif Central have thousands of cols, there are barely ten between the Vosges mountains and the hills of Normandy, and only one within a day’s ride of Notre-Dame. This seems particularly sad since the introduction of the ‘Vélib’ self-service scheme in 2007. Every day, on lumpy grey bikes that might have materialized from a children’s cartoon, thousands of Parisians rediscover their city’s topography: the Avenue des Champs-Élysées is once again a hill, and ‘Montagne Sainte-Geneviève’ is no longer a misnomer. Yet there is no official recognition of the exploits of vélibistes, and nothing that allows pedalling Parisians to celebrate the eminence of their city.
The hypothetical pass at La Chapelle seemed to promise reparation. If the summit of the road that climbs up from the Seine to cross the northern ridge was a col, then the hills on either side of it – Montmartre and the Buttes-Chaumont – could legitimately be counted as mountains…
IN JANUARY, a preliminary investigation on foot produced some encouraging evidence. At the church of Saint-Denys-de-la-Chapelle, opposite the Hollywood Video shop and the Sex in the City club, the road slopes down on either side. The old Roman road from the south and the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis converged at what is now the Marx Dormoy Métro station. In the other direction, the road descends gently to the plain of Saint-Denis where the gigantic medieval fair of Lendit was held. Some historians believe that this convenient plateau above the marshes of Lutetia was the sacred ‘centre of Gaul’ where, according to Caesar, Druids came from as far away as the Mediterranean and Britannia to elect their supreme pontiff.
La Chapelle still has the bustle and turbulence of a major crossing point. The main street is a continual two-way procession of cars and trucks. With its jostling crowds and tatty shops, it has more of the big city about it than the delicate stage sets of central Paris. Across the road from the church, at the end of the Impasse du Curé, there is a view through iron railings of the Sacré-Cœur on its ant-hill of roofs and chimneys. Far below, trains from Picardy, Flanders and the Channel coast rattle through the deep cutting towards the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord.
In the whispering gloom of the church, a parish history in the form of a small brochure explained that this was the site where Saint Denis, who brought Christianity to Lutetia, was buried along with his severed head: a shrine was raised there in 475 by Saint Geneviève, the nun from Nanterre who had a genius for organizing military resistance and famine relief. Evidently, she knew that martyrs should be buried at places such as cols, through which travellers are forced to pass. Next door to the church, the Joan of Arc basilica marks the site where, in 1429, the Maid of Orleans spent the night before riding down to the gates of occupied Paris, and where she rested the following night after receiving a crossbow bolt in the leg. The parish history was offered as ‘a message of welcome and friendship’. We read it by the light of some votive candles. At the top of page two, we discovered that someone had been there before us:
The church was erected by the side of the great Gaulish road which, after crossing the Seine by the Île de la Cité, passes through a col between Montmartre and Ménilmontant, and proceeds to the town of Saint-Denis and beyond.
The thrill of finding the first piece of corroborative evidence overcame the mild disappointment of being beaten to the col. Three months later, this time with our bicycles, we made what we thought was the first conscious two-wheeled ascent of Paris’s only col. At the Porte de la Chapelle, we turned to face south, and set off up the slope with a thousand other road-users. To mark the historic moment, I looked over at the chapel as we reached the summit, but a furniture van was squeezing past, blotting out the view, and the narrow strip of asphalt between its tyres and the kerb was of more immediate interest. A lapse of concentration, and the expedition would have ended, without even the consolation of an official commemorative plaque: ‘Died crossing the Col de la Chapelle.’
Then began the real challenge: how to have the col ratified by the Club des Cent Cols. I knew this would not be easy. Every year, the club’s ‘Ethics, Reflection and Proposal Committee’ publishes a list of ‘Rejected Cols’. Ridiculous as it might appear to non-cyclists, some tourist offices try to attract cyclotouristes by exaggerating the hilliness of their region. Some of them even conjure up non-existent cols and invite cycling clubs and journalists to come and celebrate the erection of a sign. The Club des Cent Cols has no patience with this sort of trickery. Typical entries in the list are:
‘Col des Cantonniers’ (Var): Invented, without local evidence, for promotional purposes. Contravenes article 11.
‘Col des Cyclotouristes’ (Savoie): Indistinct topography. Fabricated by local cyclists. Contravenes article 11.
It turned out that there had been some discussion of the Parisian col after a member of the club, on a visit to the ‘archaeological crypt’ of Notre-Dame, had noticed the words ‘Col de la Chapelle’ painted on a papier-mâché relief map of ancient Paris. The experts on the committee had decided that there was insufficient evidence, and the case had been closed. The President answered my email as swiftly and efficiently as a racing cyclist swerving past a pothole:
This col has never been accepted. It is not shown on a map, nor is it named by a sign.
At least his message left a glimmer of hope: ‘This col…’ Its existence was not explicitly denied. Logically, then, the next step was to try to have the col inscribed on a map and printed on a road sign.
I wrote to the Institut Géographique National, electronically and then on paper, including the proper coordinates, and some further evidence from research in the library. It seemed that, back in the days when Prefects Rambuteau and Haussmann were replacing murky alleyways with gas-lit boulevards, an archaeologist called Théodore Vacquer, who resembled ‘a permanently curled hedgehog’, was snuffling through the debris, trying to piece together a mental image of Lutetia. He found the Roman forum under the Rue Soufflot, and the Roman arena by the Rue Monge. Vacquer was a digger, not a writer, but a study extracted by a geographer from his enormous nest of notes and sketches appeared after his death in 1912. There, for the first time, the existence of a ‘Pas de la Chapelle’ was revealed. Since then, a few geographers (but not cartographers), stalking into the increasingly uncluttered past of Paris, across Precambrian river beds and hills still wet with ancient seas, have written of the col that lay on the prehistoric ‘tin route’ from Britannia to the Mediterranean.
Weeks passed. Either an expedition to the lost col had set out from the IGN’s headquarters at Vincennes and never returned, or my letter had continued its journey to a recycling centre. In the meantime, I wrote to the mayor of the eighteenth arrondissement and to the civic authorities at the Hôtel de Ville.
A month later, a letter arrived from the IGN. It confirmed the ‘geographical and topographical’ existence of a Parisian col – ‘the lowest point between the Butte Montmartre and the Buttes Chaumont’. However, ‘until now’, the writer teasingly went on, the col has never appeared on an IGN map for two reasons: first, ‘the urban fabric is very dense in this area’ second, ‘its name is not currently used by the local inhabitants’. In other words, there were already too many place names on the map, and if an explorer arrived at La Chapelle, asking for the col, he would be met with blank stares (unless, of course, he happened to ask a geographer or the man who wrote the parish history).
I waited in vain for replies from the municipal officials, who might not have shared the cartographic scruples of the IGN. But by then, it no longer seemed to matter. A galvanized col sign embedded in the asphalt of La Chapelle would have been nothing but a quaint impediment, a photo opportunity for vélibistes, a slightly more durable form of graffiti – assuming that room could have been found for it among all the other sobering statements of urban fact: ‘PASSAGE INTERDIT’, ‘FIN DE ZONE TOURISTIQUE’, ‘VOUS N’AVEZ PAS LA PRIORITÉ’, etc.
Something had been obvious all along: the city, built by human beings, is indifferent to their desires. It shows them the solid form of their fictions, their tales of intimacy and glory, of love and everlasting pride, the legends and stories that only one person ever knew or that recruited generations to their make-believe. It educates even the most successful megalomaniacs in the smallness of their dreams. Paris shows its true face from the top of the Tour Montparnasse, where guards patrol the suicide fence. Most of that galactic scatter of illuminations reaching out to the horizons is darkness.
Every living city is a necropolis, a settling mountain of populations migrating downwards into the soil. Kings, queens and emperors are only its servants. They help it to erase even the possibility of memory. The sites of commemoration built by Napoleon III buried acres of history. A boulevard named after a battle obliterated the mementos of a million lives, and, at the end of his reign, the Archives Nationales went up in flames.
Five thousand miles from Paris, on an island in the South Atlantic, Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of what he might have done, ‘given only twenty years and a little spare time’. In the telescopic eyes of exile, Paris was an orb that he had held in his hand. If only time had served him, the old city would have vanished: ‘You would have looked for it in vain. Not even vestiges would have remained.’
On Saint Helena, Napoleon rummaged through his past: the docking of the riverboat under the towers of the Île de la Cité, the crowds that clogged the narrow streets, the École Militaire and the Palais-Royal. He remembered a day in the terrible year of 1792. The alarm bells were ringing, and there were rumours of a great upheaval. A ragged army was surging out of the faubourgs towards the Tuileries. He left his hotel in the Rue du Mail and headed for the quartier of slums and ruined mansions between the Louvre and the Carrousel. An ugly gang of ruffians was parading a pikestaff on which a head had been impaled. Noticing the young captain with his clean hands and laundered clothes, they challenged him to shout ‘Vive la nation!’ – ‘which, as you can imagine, I hastened to do’.
He went on to the Place du Carrousel, where he entered the house of a friend. The building had been turned into a kind of warehouse: it was packed with the belongings of aristocrats who had fled the country, taking whatever money was offered for their furniture, their trinkets and their family portraits. He made his way upstairs, through the debris of the world that was passing away, and looked out of a window: the rabble were storming the Tuileries Palace, butchering the Swiss Guards. From that window, as though from the balcony of a theatre, he witnessed the end of the French monarchy. Years later, on evenings when the Emperor prowled the streets of Paris in disguise, eavesdropping, inspecting the faces of Parisians for clues to the world he was creating, he looked for the house where so much history had been emblazoned on his mind. But his orders for the renovation of the quartier had been so swiftly carried out, and ‘so many great changes had taken place there that I was never able to find it again’.
THE COL DE LA CHAPELLE is still unrecorded on the map, and there is still no mountain in Paris. Unlike human beings, an accident of geography requires no commemoration, and perhaps, as the IGN’s letter suggested, it no longer exists. In the nineteenth century, the railways passed through the col, almost flattening it as they went. The cutting changed the landscape; white steam erupting from the locomotives formed new skies above La Chapelle, fashioning new routes for the imagination – a strand of pavement, a palace of chimneys, a procession of ghosts on a black canal. In 2010, only the volume of traffic testifies to the col’s importance. This brainstem of the future city, where travellers passed even before there was a settlement on the island in the Seine, is now the route that is taken by the Eurostar from London. Anyone curious to know the site should look for it on the left side of the Paris-bound train, shortly after the engine sheds marked ‘Gare du Landy’ (from the ‘Lendit’ fair at the fabled centre of Gaul). As the train reaches the summit, there is a faint sensation of the motors’ tug and release, but the col is easy to miss, since the carriages pass over it when the announcement has already been made – ‘Nous arriverons dans quelques instants àla Gare du Nord’ – and it is time to put away the book, gather up the luggage and prepare to meet the miraculous creation where even the quietest street is crowded with adventures.