Alésia

Her luck could not have been worse. Bad enough that the sun had finally come out late in the afternoon and like everyone one else in the streets of this neighborhood she was a little overdressed for the weather; when the temperature drops to 19^oC (about 66^oF) on a summer day, Parisian necks immediately sprout scarves. Her hands were full of packages, and she was looking a little pooped in a long weighty dress. Worse still, she chose me of all people to ask her simple question: do you know the quartier? Not too well, but maybe I can help. Where’s the post office? I didn’t know, still don’t, and apologized. She smiled, thanked me, and started down the street. Poor thing.

Her luck changed after she walked no more than three metres away from me, just out of hearing, given the traffic buzz in Rue Alésia. The man she stopped began pointing, now holding his hands together as if defining a street, then curving one, his left, to emphasize a turn, then a definite drop of both to indicate the point of arrival—and I didn’t need to hear a word to know her question had been adequately answered. Off the hook.

There was no reason to worry. My guess is that ninety percent, probably more, of the people wandering around Alésia on this Saturday afternoon were locals, living no more than half a kilometre from where I was standing, a fifteen-minute walk. It’s not that the part of town is an immigrant enclave and unwelcoming to people from other quartiers or that it’s dangerous—little of Paris is—or that no one knows about the neighborhood. Alésia is moderately famous for its outlet stores, nothing like American outlet malls, but smallish individual shops selling what very well could be last year’s offerings from expensive designers, the genuine articles, reduced but not dirt cheap. Nothing in France, except the wine, is. But also nothing like the American outlet stores, no overwhelmed shops, no buses pulling up and pouring out determined buyers: there are no lines out the doors or at the cash registers, no frenzies, no drivers dueling for a parking space.

Perhaps that is because people come here to buy things they actually need, like bread, meat, a newspaper, frozen food, a haircut, lunch in a café, a comb, a bunch of flowers, a tank of gas. This is a shopping street in the old sense—a spontaneous bazaar that has developed over the years, changing with tastes and economics, selling what the locals will buy now—and probably amazing in the changes of detail to those who lived and shopped here forty or fifty years ago (though they are probably no longer around to be shocked, come to think of it), but faithful to the idea of a shopping street: Come and get it, we have it, entrée libre! It’s a useful place.

But it’s getting to be an old idea. The useful places have been vanishing bit by bit from the streets in most of central Paris. A walk around the Ninth Arrondissement the other day, a quartier where I used to stay years ago and knew well, did not turn up many of the ordinary places where you could buy enough to put together a kind of decent dinner on the way home. Even the cramped side streets have lost their charcuteries, their poissonneries, their caves, because what used to be modest apartment buildings and cheap hotels have become offices and much more expensive hotels. The shops don’t have to offer things you really need to end your day because the end of your day is more likely than not elsewhere. Fast breakfast, Asian carryout, an overpriced brasserie will do fine and a much better job paying the much higher rent.

You wonder where all the shops have gone. One of the nicest wine stores in town is in an underground parking garage—surely more cave-like than its cousins above ground and just as surely giving a new intensity to the meaning of Pouilly fumé. The others, the greengrocers, the bakers? Moved to the suburbs, closed up, gone fishing for all I know. But I do know that I miss them, which I also know is a waste of time, like missing les Halles. No one, not me, complains that there are guichets (or ATMs) and you don’t need to find a bureau de change. No one, not me (at least most of the time), complains that the pissoirs have been replaced by sit-down public toilets, useful for both sexes. No one, and certainly not me, complains about hoity-toity artisanal bakers replacing the mom-and-pops that made bread you didn’t want to eat or even think about.

Not so bad, and chasing the past doesn’t usually catch your prey. Besides, Rue Alésia is still here, busy, thriving, useful, and interesting to the eye. I should stop worrying about what was, and I do most of the time, but the signs in the real estate offices—they, too have multiplied, replacing something or other—gave me a scare. This part of the Fourteenth Arrondissement has had its downs over the years, but certainly is having its ups these days: an apartment of forty-five m² (maybe five hundred square feet) is going for—or at least asking for—half a million euros. What if they get it? What if the next apartment—and they’re doing conversions from rental to ownership up the street—goes for even more? So much for the discount stores, the cheap hotel that’s been in the family since 1925, the service stations with mechanics on duty, the small apartment building where you can actually rent for a reasonable price, and the boucherie chevaline that no longer sells horsemeat but maintains the great horse-head sign.

Some friends, you see, live in the Thirteenth, a part of Paris that has also had ups and downs, and during the downs suffered improvements. My friends live in a lovely, comfy building, and the old-timers have told them that the whole street used to look like their house. But across the street is an awful apartment house, not so old, and next door an equally awful office building, also not so old. The charming-old was easy pickings when the downs were really down, and the awful-not-so-old just waltzed in, wallet open and at the ready. Head shaking, vandal-murmurs, shouldn’t have happened.

But maybe there’s some hope here. The Battle of Alesia, not far from where Dijon is now, was where Caesar finally beat the Gauls under Vercingétorix in 52 BCE—after nearly losing his shirt, and his army, to him earlier in the year at Gergovia, which in a lyric and historic way gives its name, as Gergovie, to a street branching off Alésia. The Gauls, after all, were barbarians, and the Romans became Frenchman, though it took many years to perfect the brand. Maybe the barbarians will be stopped and have a final setback—and the rest will be… who knows?

And who knows who’s the barbarian? I don’t. Time to stop worrying. Alésia is here. So am I. So are all the people walking around now that the sun has come out. They’re not worried, and they can walk home in 15 minutes. Home’s a walk, five Métro stops, and another walk for me, today. Otherwise, 3000 miles. Maybe the Parisians with their scarves and smiles know better.

©Joseph Lestrange