Lardenne went back to Toulouse without me. I’d treated myself to a day off. Claudine and I had gone out to get my suitcase from the hotel. Bonne-Nouvelle station was nearby. It was being renovated. A dozen workmen on scaffolding were busy tearing off the layers of posters covering the advertising hoardings. Further down, at the end of the platform, two other workmen were scraping the white ceramic tiles with metal spatulas. As it was torn away, the paper exposed ten-, twenty-year-old ads.
A punk couple with brightly coloured Mohican haircuts were kissing under a poster that pictured the town of Savignac and boasted the benefits of Calvé oil: rich, light, and a hundred per cent vegetable …
A young executive, with an attaché case in his hand and a Walkman on his head, was strolling past a poster that spelled out a mineral water jingle: Badadi badadoi …
Claudine stopped in front of another bit of the wall. She pointed to a tile still partly covered in shreds of yellowing paper that an Algerian workman was having trouble getting rid of. Only some of the text was legible but its meaning was not lost:
… prohibited in France … liable to be sentenc … court mart … Ger … Anyone carryi … Jews … maximum sentence of de … irresponsible eleme … support for the enemies of Germany.
… ilance … guilty and the population of the occupied territories.
Signed: the Militaerbefehlshaber Stülpnagel
Aubervilliers
January–February 1983