http://www.paris.org/Calendar/Salon/19f.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
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Shopping at Tati can be 'chic' if you go for upsidedown snobbery; but not the Metro. Definitely working-class and lower functionary.
Sometimes hot gushes of smelly air whoosh out of sidewalk grates, blown up by the rumbling passage of Metro trains. Nothing else smells like it.
Every once in a while Paris has a famous absolute traffic jam, or there is a demo, or there is an insurrection; at any rate you have to get over to the south 16th arrondissement and surface travel is out of the question. You take a deep breath and dive down the steps - into the ah, smelly, possibly dark, certainly slightly sinister, notorious! underground of Paris.
Usually, underground in the Metro, the lighting is dim, but adequate. Makes you look better, probably better than you do. It dosen't smell like the hot air whooshes on the sidewalk either. It is not very sinister. It dosen't look very notorious. But still, in the Metro...
Depending on the time of day you might have to stand up - ooh, those stops and starts on the 'fast' lines; watch you don't lose your Tati bag - or you can sit down; not much room, put your Tati bag on your lap - ah, not overhead, you can never tell can you?
Look around. It's underground out the window most of the time and the Dubonnet ads in the tunnels are long gone. So don't look out the window; look at the people - if you dare.
They are not looking at you. If they are with somebody, that's who they look at. Everybody who isn't watching for their stop, or writing homework or maybe a bit of poetry, is reading. Books, newspapers, magazines, menus, catalogues, and more books.
The RATP, the authority that runs Paris' Metro, tried TV for a while, but took it out. So people read. There's a lot to read in the Metro. You don't even have to bring your own stuff - which is handy because you never know when the Revolution might break out again and force you to use the Metro.
You can read the billboards in every station and stations come along every couple of minutes. If you are at Concorde, you can read the whole station. Each shiny white new tile has a letter on it. It could take years to read it and you spend minutes there at most.
The homeless sell newspapers in the Metro carriages, or they used to. On the way the Salon, I didn't see them, but maybe they were sold out. Or all at the Salon.
On the line 12 to the Porte de Versailles, to the Salon de Livre, the RATP in it's wisdom has installed in each of the 28 stations, five of La Fontaine's fables. The RATP, never an outfit for half-measures, has another literary program called '101 Metro poems', and they have also plastered a thousand city buses with poems (as well as ads), that have resulted from an program begun in 1993.
So think about it carefully: do you want to pay 30 francs to get into the Salon de Livre, or would you rather spend all day for the price of one ticket on line 12, checking out the literary situation of every station from Porte de la Chapelle to the Mairie d'Issy?
If you have one handy, carry something to eat and drink in a plastic Tati bag. All the clochards do.
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Updated 03/95 - text by Richard Erickson
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