37
Bermondsey, London SE1. February 1978. 4 a.m. 8°C. From midnight, the ancient square fills with taciturn men unloading the contents of unmarked vans onto the paving slabs that give the market its name, the Stones. Hissing pressure lamps shed blue-white light on silver pitchers and crystal wineglasses. Other men squat furtively against the walls next to a few monogrammed knives and forks, frayed scraps of Elizabethan embroidery, a saucerless Georgian coffee cup: not so much stock as loot.
FOR A SMALL BUT DETERMINED GROUP OF PARISIANS, MAY DAY IS mainly interesting as the start of the season for the secondhand street markets known as brocantes.
Frustrated after having been penned inside during the winter months, sellers, both amateur and professional, load the contents of attics or garages into their vans and head for the streets and squares designated by local councils as sites for sales.
They’ve been doing so for centuries. Only the terminology changes. These days, a health-conscious society less accommodating of vermin shuns the term marché aux puces (flea market). They prefer vide-grenier (literally “attic emptier”), grand balai (big sweep-out), or marché pour tous (market for everyone), but most use the all-purpose term brocante. In the trade, sellers identify themselves with the old term for rag picking, chineur.
Serious chineurs avoid any event using the words antiquaire or antique. Antiquaires, rating themselves above mere brocanteurs, hope to attract the carriage trade. Some erect tentlike canvas pavilions and fit them out like shops. Brewing some coffee, they seat themselves at a Louis XVI desk of dubious provenance, and open Le Monde. Despite this impression of indifference, they are as alert as any spider to the punter who strays close to their web. In an instant they’re at their side, inviting them to “just feel that embroidery, all original, I assure you. And try this chair. What princes, even kings, have sat here? American Express? Naturellement, monsieur. And of course we can ship it to South Dakota.”
The first temperate weekend of the year sang the same siren song to me as to the chineurs of Paris. Of the five or six serious brocantes (those with two hundred sellers or more) scattered across the city, the most promising was in the fourteenth arrondissement. The farthest south of Paris districts, jammed between Montparnasse and the Périphérique, it combines nineteenth-century workers’ housing with light industry and the characterless high-rise blocks of rent-controlled apartments known as HLMs: habitation à loyer modéré.
Paris brocante, or junk market.
Hemard, Joseph. Brocante. In Le Grand Clapier de Paris, editions de la Tournelle, 1946.
When I arrived, about a hundred trestle tables had colonized a small square and a few side streets. Sellers, bundled up against a wind that still carried an edge of winter, sat behind them, hands shoved in pockets, wearing the expression of slightly pained boredom that comes with the territory.
Unlike antiquaires, chineurs don’t encourage you to buy. If anything, they imply that you are an unwelcome interruption to their day. If you hold up an object and inquire, “Combien?” they will stare at it as if they’ve never seen it before, then shrug and mumble an amount, often turning their back as they do so, a classic gesture of “take it or leave it” that has one reaching guiltily for one’s wallet.
I was shuffling through a pile of the 1930s picture magazine Vu, hoping to find one with a cover by Man Ray, when someone called my name from the opposite side of the alley.
“Might have known you’d be here,” said Harry Callaghan, holding out a meaty paw enclosed in a fingerless mitten knitted from gray wool.
Harry was that rarity, an Anglo chineur. From his accent I’d guess East Coast USA, but it was so overlaid with the residue of places he’d lived and worked that the original was lost forever. He was probably tall, but years of browsing, hands in pockets, through junk markets and squatting to rummage in cardboard boxes half-hidden under competitors’ stalls had given him a permanent slouch.
His white beard blended with a mop of gray hair, neither trimmed since the Reagan administration, if then. Both exploded like stuffing from a gutted mattress, topped by a large felt hat he kept permanently jammed just above his ears.
“I never thought I’d see you go retail,” I said, glancing at his table.
For Harry to set up shop, even one so temporary as this brocante stall, was as unexpected as finding a peacock roosting on your back fence. I knew him only as what’s called a “runner” or “scout.” Finding a salable item, these freelancers agree on a price with the dealer and sell it on immediately.
He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah . . . well . . . you know . . . Stuff was piling up, and the old lady . . .”
I looked around. “Clytie not here?”
Harry’s consort was about twenty years younger than him, and certainly prettier. Allowing for the feral expression that comes with the brocante life, she could have passed for Leslie Caron’s younger sister. Having been christened Clytemnestra made her a street fighter since kindergarten. Each time we met, I remembered the advice of one Virginian about a Southern lady of his acquaintance. “Lay a hand on her,” he warned, “and you’ll draw back a bloody stump.”
“No,” Harry said. “Sunday. Lunch with the marraine. Marie-Dominique with you?”
I shook my head. “Same thing.” Sunday lunch with mother, godmother, grandmother, or favorite aunt was a ritual hardwired into French female DNA.
“So . . . what are you working on?” he asked.
I told him. Somewhere inside that jungle of hair, eyes lit up.
“Ah. I might have something for you.”
Rummaging under his table, he dragged out a cardboard carton and made room for it on the table.
“Got this in a house sale the other day. Haven’t had a chance to go through it.”
Something as heavy as a brick thudded onto his table. Roughly cubic, cut from pale gray stone, it measured about twelve centimeters on each side. I recognized a cobblestone, identical with the millions paving French streets.
“Guaranteed to have been used in ’68,” he said. “Imagine getting one of those up the back of your head.”
I hefted it. Some stones weighed three or four kilos. This one belonged to the smaller variety and tipped the scales at about a kilo. Still more than enough to give someone a nasty headache. Some unlucky members of the police and militia at whom they were flung in May 1968 suffered shattered limbs and fractured skulls.
May ’68 made the paving stone a signature object, as emblematic as Marianne’s Phrygian cap in 1789. The first students to dig up the stones were surprised to find they weren’t cemented, just bedded loose in an inch of sand to allow a little play when traffic passed over. The sand provided just that edge of fantasy that stimulated creativity. Overnight, a new graffito appeared on the walls of Paris: “Sous le pavé, la plage” (under the paving, there’s a beach).
Harry hefted the stone. “What do you reckon it’s worth?”
“Why should it be worth anything?” I said. “You can pick them up anyplace they’re mending the roads.”
“Yeah, that’s you. What about someone in . . .” He gave a wave that encompassed everything from the next arrondissement to outer Mongolia.
“No idea.” I looked at the carton. “Anything else in there?”
He rummaged deeper, unearthing yellowing copies of Le Figaro and Le Soir with photographs of baton charges and burning cars. There were faded manifestos forecasting the demise of democracy in general and General de Gaulle in particular, preceded by that of the police, the universities, the Ministry of Culture, the church, the press, and God, that had been run off on office duplicators normally used for school circulars and lunch menus. But all revolutions are by their nature amateur, made up as the principals go along.
Australia had never experienced a revolution. Everything came easily to “the lucky country,” as we complacently called it. But I could remember the racing of the blood that came with reading of internal strife in other cultures.
1789 . . . 1871 . . . 1968 . . . Revolutions were like the seasons. Always another one along in a minute, with each upheaval igniting the same passions. The issues changed, but not the rhetoric, nor the wardrobe. The crowds harangued by Danton in his red surcoat shared the elation of those listening to Louise Michel, the “Red Virgin” of the Commune, and that of the students in May 1968 who gathered in the Théâtre de l’Odéon to cheer a carrot-topped rabble-rouser named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, aka “Danny the Red.”
“Ah, here’s something.”
From the carton, Harry took a tattered, rolled poster. A stark and bloodstained face glared at me, surrounded by a message in block capitals: “Bourgeois. Vous n’Avez Rien Compris” (Middle class, you have understood nothing). As if the students understood any better.
Despite its yellowing paper and frayed edges, the poster conserved an unignorable energy. More professional design and printing would have maximized the effect but dulled the edge of its indignation.
“How much?”
He overcharged me, but in the best traditions of the brocante I didn’t haggle.
Meanwhile, the market for memorabilia of les événements remains healthy. Even for cobblestones. Recently an entrepreneur bought up a few hundred of them, cleaned them off, numbered them sequentially, and sold them as art objects. For €150, you could even have one gold-plated. As for the poster, restored and framed, it hangs in the front hall of our apartment. People tell me it’s worth a lot more than I paid.
Revolution has not only its seasons but a price as well.