Characters in Search of an Author

They were on a ventilation grille in the street, probably taking advantage of the hot updrafts from passing métro trains below or some sort of radiated warmth from underground cables. The sun was shining and the street was full of people, all talking and laughing. Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to the full set of underwear that somebody had left to dry outside of the Bains Douches. Pants, socks and vest, worn and discoloured with use, were stretched out and gently steaming, right in the middle of the footpath. I wondered who they belonged to as I carefully stepped around them. Whose dignified Sunday ritual was this? A visit to the public baths and a small bit of laundry probably equated to a grasp at retaining a sense of being human to someone, a soul adrift somewhere, on the streets or in a bedsit, but still a part of this city. Paris still has quite a few public baths and this one, in the warren of streets between the Jardin de Plantes and the Rue Mouffetard, was clearly busy. It is easy to take something as basic as private washing facilities for granted, but for so many the practice of cleansing oneself was clearly not straightforward or something that could be easily accomplished in the home. What brought them to this place? What were their stories?

You don't need to absorb yourself in Parisian life for very long to see the characters of the city emerging all around you. A short time spent on the terrace of a street café, walking in the park or even gazing out across the zinc rooftops from your apartment window reveals little aspects of the lives of others to you, things that make you wonder. I hadn't been here long when I noticed the elderly gentlemen across the courtyard opening his windows and with great effort lifting his leg up onto the bottom of the frame. Was he going to jump? I was a little concerned. Thankfully it turned out that all he wanted to do was cut his toenails. Laboriously he applied the clippers, and with each audible snip a tiny remnant of nail floated down onto the cobbles below. A small pile must have built up, just in front of the big blue gate through which mopeds, bikes, cars and people passed without thinking throughout the day and night. It must have built up and been blown away into the ether by the breeze, the old man's very personal contribution to the detritus on the city streets. Why did he choose to cut his toenails this way, such an odd and clearly difficult thing to do? What was so wrong with his clippings that he could not bear to have them in his flat? What was so right with them that he wanted to share them with the world? All questions that will never be answered, but an eccentricity observed, noted and pondered nonetheless.

In search of something typically and classically French to read, I stumbled upon the short stories of Guy de Maupassant. He was an acute observer of people and one to whom the characters of Paris and beyond were a subject of fascination. He drew me in by mentioning places that I know – a tortured individual in one story wandered from the Madeleine to the Faubourg Poissonierie and I recognised those streets, imagining the places where he might have stopped and taken shelter as the rain fell, the poor man being too scared of an imagined spectre to return home. I kept on reading because the characters were so well drawn that I could see parallels with the individuals who have crossed my path in the Paris and France that I have come to know. Quite often, though, Maupassant writes about unpleasant people who do unpleasant things. He does not shy away from the seedier side of life, which lends his work a sense of honesty and realism. The stories are peppered with bored, rich wives who use their idle hours to take lovers or make unreasonable demands on their long-suffering husbands, but also with maids and farm girls who unfortunately find themselves “in the family way” and circus performers living brutal lives amongst the sawdust. He writes about lonely people who are unhappy, about people on long train journeys, about prostitutes, street urchins and soldiers. It is just a short step from these people, created with a few lines of prose all those years ago, to the people living out their lives in Paris today. If you look around you it is obvious that their descendants are still out there, living out their own stories in this more modern world. The problems and peccadilloes that Maupassant wrote about are still there, too.

I walk around this city and see a million characters, perhaps in search of an author but more likely just content to tell their own stories by living them everyday. I reckon that Maupassant probably took a room in Paris and walked out every day, seeing the same people, starting to become familiar with certain faces, with particular ways of being, and wove stories around the framework of city life that was existing all around him. A cast for his tales was always there before his eyes. He just had to answer the questions that every observer of city life asks, similar questions undoubtedly to the ones that I ask everyday. Who is the blind lady with the dog who plants herself outside churches or in busy thoroughfares, singing along loudly to Edith Piaf songs, hoping that somebody will give her a few coins? Why does that cyclist ride down my street in the evening, attempting to clear the traffic ahead of him by bleating like a goat? Does the “poete publique” with his portable typewriter, sitting outside the Pompidou Centre, ever write anything that gets published? Does anyone ever commission any work from him at all? From the weather beaten accordionist on the quayside to the kids who hang around outside Notre Dame breakdancing on a Friday night, from the security guards struggling to keep warm outside the Hotel de Ville to the owner of those pants left out to dry on the street, I can't help but think about who they are and why they do what they do. What paths led them to this amazing place, to be here and just be living out their lives? Of course I shall never know, not really, but I shall spend many an hour trying to guess.