Canal Saint-Martin

This is not looking good. It’s not what I was expecting. Or it is not what they told me to expect. Some people at dinner mentioned that they were thinking of moving to the Tenth Arrondissement, and maybe they were talking themselves into an idea they really didn’t like or maybe not, but their enthusiasm for the recovering fortunes of the quartier was explosive and approaching ferocious. I hadn’t scouted around there in years, so I promised I’d go, and so I have and here I am walking along the Canal Saint-Martin. 

Sentences about living in the Tenth or intending to live there are always, invariably, and without exception finished off with “near the Canal,” like a tail not quite wagging the dog, but characterizing it: good dog, really good dog. The buildings along the Quais de Valmy and de Jemmapes on either side of the canal are typically handsome Parisian apartment houses, seven stories tall or so, tan stone, gray roofs, some wrought iron here and there, portly doors. The side streets are something else again, narrow, treeless, houses of no particular interest. Farther from the canal it’s just dreary. The Tenth has never been fancy.  

It was built as a working-class district. The canal was dug in the nineteenth century to avoid a long meander of the Seine and of course bridges were built over it. The bridges are particularly interesting because they open by swinging, coming to rest on the east side of the canal. It was from that side, in the nineteenth century, that the rowdier political element of the neighborhood went marauding on the west side of the canal where they could annoy les bourgeois in the better quartiers, then with the gendarmes in pursuit cross back over the bridges and swing them open to stop the cops. But colorful history is history, and a drab place that became really down at the heels will always remain down in the mouth even when it comes back or gets just slightly gentrified—though the French word embourgoisé has some advantages in this context. 

The walk along the canal, starting from where it emerges from under Boulevard Jules Ferry (a remarkably unpopular nineteenth-century politician who may have inspired some of the behavior of the louts of the Tenth) is not making me want to move here—or spend a lot of time, even though the prices are low, low meaning not horrifyingly high. Immigrant men who could be homeless and unemployed are the dominant bench-sitters along the quai on the west side of the canal. Radios and beer in hand, no loud voices, no panhandling, no harm, but too many of them up and down the quai. Some children on playground equipment—no harm there either, but fewer than the chômeurs. I’ve lived in neighborhoods like this, and I don’t any longer. It’s not what they led me to believe, the people at the dinner party, about the Tenth. Then a hundred metres or so up the street I get the catch of the day, three cherries in the slot machine windows, a keeper. 

There are three poivrots sprawled out across the sidewalk, quite neatly lined up, all things considered. Two have passed out and the third is obviously giving it serious thought. The French don’t get plastered. The French get peppered. So, a wino is a poivrot, more or less a peppered guy. Neither expression makes any sense, and if there are deep cultural signals that incline the French collective unconscious to invoke pepper and the American to channel plaster, I might as well just let it be. I have gotten plastered and je me suis poivré and I really can’t tell the difference. Plastered, I tend to fall asleep, and when I get peppered, j’ai la tendance à m’endormir. Passed out or tombé dans les pommes is simply a matter of where you happen to be at the moment or who is commenting on the inert body. 

I was the commentator and think I mumbled “Drunk as skunks,” aside from the rhyme a dumb phrase, but no matter and besides the rough French equivalent is “stuffed like a quince,” which also escapes me. Drunks passed out on sidewalks stopped getting my attention too long ago to remember, but these three have something going for them. Next to the one still conscious are two champagne bottles, one open and I’m guessing empty, the other sealed, provisions for the future, something to look forward to. This is class. This is new in my experience, but I wonder if it is in theirs. Perhaps they obliterate themselves day in and out exclusively on champagne, discussing at length the merits of a distinctly sweet demi-sec for breakfast, a sec at lunchtime, an extra-sec as an apéro until they finish the day with a really dry brut—or the other way around. Could it be (why not?) that the people I have heard talking about moving to the Tenth “near the canal” decided that a better class of drunk was a sign that things are looking up in the neighborhood? 

It could be, but I’ll have to make a note to ask. So, I thought, what else do we have here? The new restaurant on a triangular corner—terrific reviews and an absurd name—served me a good sandwich and a passable glass of wine for a price that would have been just a little high in dollars, but they were asking for euros. The courtyard in the old hospital across the canal is lovely, but with as many portable IVs attached to smoking patients as there are trees. The electrical supply store is not going to reel in les yuppies. And the boutique next door that shows no lights or signs of life and sells only plants that require no water seems too apt and arid a metaphor to be comfortable. 

Looking in the canal showed me no signs of life either, and when I asked a couple of people passing if there were fish in Saint-Martin and, if so, what kind and did anyone ever catch them, they looked as if they knew I was crazy—maybe a newly hatched (that is, still clean) poivrot—and accelerated. Maybe a solitary fisherman would add something, something picturesque, evocative of the old days, especially with a straw hat on my head and a pipe in my mouth. I looked around, but found nothing that could pass for a fishing pole and let me pretend to fish, let alone a hat and a pipe, so the experiment is still to be undertaken. But I doubt its outcome. 

I stopped and bought a bottle of champagne and, on my way back down the quai and heading for the Métro, left it by the three alcoolos. All were asleep. Just as well, I suppose, since I don’t know what I would have said. Probably nothing.  

©Joseph Lestrange