Paris For The Living
When not lurching around the web looking for sites interested in European life and poli-sci, I publish at Continental Riffs on Substack. Volte-Face, quoted below because I felt like it, is one of my novels. As soon as French bureaucrats hand over my working papers, the printing presses will start up. There’s more on that at Riffs. In the meantime, an ever so slightly caustic piece on one of the many pleasures of living in this old town.
What were the teenagers’ names ? Knowles couldn’t remember. Yet to finish high school, they were touring Europe with their parents and tired of ‘the old stuff,’ they pressed Knowles for something, anything off the beaten path. The party of three drifted toward the Caire. Tour Jean sans Peur was close by but they’d seen all the elegant rockpiles they could stand, no matter how medieval they claimed to be, and what did that mean anyway ? After Réamur Saint Denis changes from bistrôts to discount houses with Deshis hauling crates piled with clothes up the street on dollies one outlet to another, cycle messengers racing past on short cuts, hookers soliciting anybody who gave them so much as a glance. Le Caire isn’t for tourists. There’s nothing to see there.Volte-Face Paris, chapter 8
The marchés are a good place to start if what you want is the living Paris. Les Halles was the Belly but it’s gone now. Still, there are markets all over town, descendants of the great open air bazaar at the foot of the hill of what is now Quartier Latin. Every quartier has one if not two, some filling a plaza, others stretching down the length of a boulevard. Fruits and vegetables and everything else are only part of it. It’s commerce, true, but it’s the personal exchanges, the bargains, the shouts of the vendors, the offers to taste, the engagement with strangers and finally the loss of time that make marchés an adventure. You go but you never know how long you’ll be.
So let’s get lost, shall we ?
Opened in 1615, Enfants Rouges on rue Bretagne (Right Bank, 3ème arrondissement) is the oldest of Paris marchés. Enfants is named after the gang of anarcho-children who terrorized shopowners and their bourgeois clientele in the late 19 thcentury. No, that isn’t true. I made it up. I have to to tell the truth all the time ? Why ? Name me someone else who does. Substack pages that prattle on about how community gardens are going to lead to a Love Revolution get thousands of followers at the drop of a hat, and here I drag my tail along the pencilled page writing about artists and writers and another Paris, so why shouldn’t I lie every so often, just to make sure you’re still with me. Are you ? The couscous at this stall is excellent, every pearl absolutely moist but not damp. (There you go, a food revue. My forté.)
Enfants Rouges was named after a 17 th century institution for orphans, all of whom wore red hats while roaming the streets of the Marais doing, according to some versions, good works (in between pranks). The grand hôtels of the Marais were built in the 1500s, and then, over the course of the late 16 thto mid-17 thcentury, abandoned as the noble families picked up their skirts and moved to Versailles to be close to you know who and his ill-fated successors. The Marais is quite possibly at its absolute apogee now, home to numerous billionaire’s cultural foundations, 427 handbag stores for the ladies and 300 with socks for the gents. Anyway go to La Marché des Enfants Rouges on Rue de Bretagne — actual artists may be spotted at Le Progrès on the corner — and rub elbows with some of the locals at the counter. They too have protected status with UNESCO but you can say almost anything to them, they’re not diplomats. Living in contemporary Paris has made stoics of them all.
Enfants Rouges : Tuesday-Saturday 8h-20h30, Sunday 8h30–17h. Every day except Monday. (Hours if not stated for individual markets are early morning to early afternoon.)
(What do I mean by saying living in Paris turns you into either a jaded hedonist or a stoic ? Paris has been invaded countless times; next year’s Olympics are only the latest instance. The joggers who run right at you on the sidewalk, fitted out with the latest equipment to track their every precious heartbeat, carrying the latest portable in case there’s an emergency at work, are latterday Vandals. They have all their vaccines and can travel anywhere they like. What’s driving them ? Their current mania is the 15 minute city. The vielle souche Parisian, here for generations, knows his quartier one building at a time, looks across the counter at these strangers and goes about his life. What does this ancient specimen think of the new arrivals ?)
Marché Place Monge
Located not far from where quartiers Sorbonne, Jardin des Plantes and Croulebarbe intersect (three entirely different Parises), Marché Place Monge on the Left Bank (5 thArrondissement) is a large market crammed onto a small square plaza, so, ducking your head to pass under the awnings, that moveable feast comes at you from all directions : large rounds of cheese next to neatly arranged goat crottes, quick Middle Eastern meals for students, rugs from Iran, olives in three shades and more. If among all these pungent smells you catch a whiff of horse coming from somewhere, it’s true, the Mounted Infantry is housed on one side of the plaza. Suggestion: fresh bread with ham and cheese and whatever you like before you head over to the Arenes, the small Roman amphitheater a heartbeat away, another place rarely visited by out of towners. Open: Wednesday, Friday, Sunday.
Marché couvert Saint-Quentin
Raining ? Always raining in Paris. It’s a state of mind. Eskimos have 63 varieties of snow and we have rain, drizzle, chili-mili as the Basques call it, downpours, come and go, rain while the sun is shining, all day soaks with the rain clouds just out of reach overhead. If you don’t love Paris in the miserable, damp, ruining your shoes December rain, you don’t love Paris.
There are three covered markets, permanent structures, on the Right Bank: Saint-Quentin on the corner of Magenta and Chabrol, five minutes from Gare de l’Est, in a building just anonymous enough for the uninitiated to pass by without noticing. Inside it’s another world. Fruit stands, cheese mongers, fish, butchers and prepared meals and restaurants, one of which may possess the expertise to master the dreaded Parisian Pizza syndrome.
Its younger, smaller cousin, Marché couvert Saint-Martin is a few blocks away at rues Bouchardon and Chateau d’Eau.
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 8h-20h, Sunday 8h-13h30, closed Monday.
Marché biologique Brancusi
Mysteriously named after the Romanian sculptor whose studio was reasonably near by but who lived happily before some foods were and others weren’t, the city’s largest organic market is just a few steps from the Montparnasse cemetery, so if you’re hungry after paying respects to the illustrious dead, a visit to this market, which features reasonable prices for those “naturally” inclined, is in order. N.b., the neighborhoods here, Montparnasse and Plaisance are strictly forbidden to tourists, who may find themselves forced to get an entire sentence out in French to order a meal. The zone has the feel of a part imaginary, part suspended in time Paris, before the hordes arrived. There’s even a bar where the clientele get up to sing but I’m not telling you where it is.
Back to the Right Bank
We cross the river for our last two marchés, unjustly leaving Belleville (Wednesday, Friday) and Place des Fêtes (Saturday) for those with sturdy legs on the hills. The Sunday market on Boulevard Richard Lenoir must be visited. It starts early, in the dark and cold, and that atmosphere makes me think of what Les Halles must have been like before the great market was dismantled and moved out of Paris in the ’70s. Too damn messy, too noisy, too 24/7 working class… It wasn’t what the fellows running things wanted for their Paris. It’s an underground shopping mall now, with canned music, ceaseless public service announcements and a clunky beige canopy overhead designed at great expense by an English architect. You can go ahead and bomb it and start over, it’s okay with me…
Knowles turned toward Oberkampf. At Lenoir the trucks were already pulling in. It was Sunday morning and the market was setting up. Knowles searched for an open café, anywhere with something warm to drink. His fingers were frozen. The workers were unloading crates of vegetables and hauling others with trout and mulets, merlan and calamar, dourade from the Basque coast with their sad, searching eyes and a whole tribe of squid who’d been caught in the nets and were still scuttling away even now they were neatly laid on ice. Knowles had sobered enough to make conversation with the men and women arranging the stalls, pausing to blow clouds of warm air on their hands. A long drive in the dark to get there and then the coldest hour came, the one before dawn. Bastille was still asleep, head under the covers after Saturday night. Knowles strolled straight across the throroughfare.Place d’Aligre Volte Face Paris
The market at Place d’Aligre has a reputation. I can tell you about the place but maybe better to take a step back. The neighborhood nearby, San Antoine, was one of the most rebellious in the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, and after that during the much maligned Commune. Aligre shares that temperament, with numerous radical, civic organizations still active.
The atmosphere is intoxicating, a bit messy or a lot, convivial. You’ll find everything you need in the gustatory realm here, and if the street sellers don’t have it, the shops behind them do. The fall season of wild mushrooms were piled high last weekend, the Boy Scouts had a small band on the corner playing wildly out of tune, and while the covered market was fastidious and busy as ever, I couldn’t help straying over to the acres of books in messy piles on a long table, if only to test my resistance to buying an old Les Plus Belles Villes de France that weighed half a ton. The 70s color was terribly nostalgic and made me want to. But the best bar in town, the Baron Rouge, was close by, and after managing to slip inside, I faced the dilemma. What to do in a bar when one no longer drinks ? The selection of wines is deep, prices très raisonnable, plates of meat and cheese formidable. Grab a table if you can. Atmosphere ? The Baron has lagueule d’atmosphere.
Pour plus des infos ou, si vous voulez, des reseignements, sur les marchés :
Aligre’s covered Marché Beauvau is open every day except Monday. The open air market happens every Sunday. The Baron Rouge is eternal but closes at 10 p.m.
· https://www.paris.fr/lieux/marches-alimentaires/tous-les-horaires
Before you cut out…here’s a Wily Ronis in color from one side of 1960 or the other, photo taken at Les Halles, the old market, seen from behind Saint-Eustache. The whole world of food and flowers was spread out at your feet.
Photos above by Riffs, except the Ronis, the Marché Brancusi and the first two from Place d’Aligré, for which I couldn’t find attribution…
Originally published at https://continentalriffs.substack.com.
