Introduction

Before the Crossing

My love for its history began many miles from Paris, in a village along the Sarthe River in the Loire Valley where I spent my childhood. My family and I left the village for vacations, but most special of all were the trips to the French capital with my grandparents. When we reached the outskirts of the city—the boulevard périphérique, or ring road around it—I would gaze into the distance at its lights. Then into it we would plunge, and immediately be swept up in a whirl of hurrying pedestrians and swirling colors. I remember the bright neon signs—the green ones for the pharmacies and the red carrots for the tabacs, or tobacco shops. It was like Christmas, even in summer. Paris seemed to me a jungle, and being inside it both frightened and excited me.

At the age of fifteen I went to live in Paris, and took with me my love of its history. The city that had seemed so anonymous and impersonal, so beyond the scope of my comprehension, was now an open book. I knew almost no one; the names of the streets were my first companions. Most of all, it was through the subway system, the Métro as it is known, short for Métropolitain, that I discovered Paris. The Métro introduced me to and took me through this enormous, humming hive of activity. It was a country boy’s ticket to ride, and I took full advantage, crossing, recrossing, and crisscrossing the city. At each stop I asked questions. Why was it called Les Invalides? What was Châtelet, exactly? What République were they referring to, anyway? Who was Étienne Marcel? What did Maubert mean?

The Paris Métro map represents the city’s central nervous system; you can use it to trace its beginnings, when it was little more than a small island in the Seine. Each stop evokes some part of the past—not simply of Parisian history but of French history as a whole. From La Cité to La Défense—oldest to newest—the Métro serves as a moving time line, each station punctuating one of the twenty-one centuries of the city’s history. Riding it carried me from the past to the present. And sometimes it went ahead of me, transforming the city into France’s capital before I had quite caught up with it.

In short, I learned history by riding the subway. While I was doing that I was also becoming involved in theater and then film, both of which are in their own way forms of time travel. By entering into the world of La Fontaine, for example, or Fouquet, Mozart, and Sartre, what I did was relive history—or, perhaps better, reenact history.

As a kid I channeled my love for French history through toy soldiers on the field of battle. Not much has changed. History remains the engine that drives my life and my desires; it is an endlessly rewarding archaeological site to which I keep returning, again and again, unearthing more mysteries and paradoxes and posing more questions.

This book will seek to serve as a sort of timekeeper, a metronome, measuring history’s tempo, moving through time by means of Métro stops. The subway lines, like Ariadne’s thread, will guide you, just as they guided me, through tunnels echoing with the city’s hopes, fears, and dreams. Watch the closing doors, please. First stop, Lutèce.