Bloody frogs

My foot felt a lot better for having drained the blister. In the end, after fluffing about with the sharp bit on the clasp of my watchstrap I had simply jammed my fingernails into the flesh and ripped it apart. Messy but effective.

I walked to the nearby market. It’s not often that I’m up before all the market stalls are, but this was one time.


Two blocks and a square were given over to vegetables, fruit, African art, fish and miscellaneous hardware. As I walked in I passed a dozen chickens roasting, the first of many, whilst butchers’ shops, some Halal, raised their shutters.


Stalls sprang up piled with artichokes, aubergines, radishes, potatoes, carrots, spring onions, garlic, mint, parsley, onions, lettuces, cabbages – all great acres of colour, purples and greens and whites. Great walls of Italian parsley and hedges of mint rose half a metre on one stall. Vendors sang their sales pitches and bagged the purchases. At the end of the street a fish shop was putting the finishing touches to icy displays of huge, whole sardines, shrimp, tuna, cod, crab, lobster and shellfish. The pavement was soaked with fishy ice-melt; even at 9am it was sticky hot and close.


Walking back between rows of produce I spotted a hardware stall with what I’d come for – cadenas – padlocks. They were cheap rubbish and hugely overpriced but I got three at €3 and a table knick-knack for €1.50. I offered him €10 which he took easily. When I said merci, he replied that la plaisir est à moi.


I wandered away. There had been something about the twinkle in his eyes. Then I realised I’d paid the price for the larger padlocks behind. Mine should have been €2 each. Little wonder the pleasure had been all his.


I went to Notre Dame and felt like a traveller amongst tourists. A mass was in progress – in English – it being Sunday, but the masses streamed round, talking loudly.


Outside an American family gave way to a French couple on the seat to my left, while on my right Spanish gave way to English. Every race, creed and colour milled around, taking cheesy photos.


I took mine and headed to the Gare du Nord to ask about a night boat to the UK. I’d had enough of being alone in Paris.


Paris hadn’t had enough of me it seemed – a ticket to London was €285 one way, albeit on the Eurostar train, well over twice what I’d spent from Bucharest to Paris. I could take the train from Paris to Calais and then get a ferry, but the ticket queues were huge. I decided to go to Sacré Coeur instead. As you do..


I bought a baguette ancien (€1.80) to go with my huge Camembert rustique (€1.40) and exited the Metro at Anvers.


Almost immediately I entered the Montmartre that Impressionists love so. As it climbed, Sacré Coeur appeared at the end of the narrow street. Below the triple-domed church, steps trisect steep grass slopes.


Entering, I was pounced on by an African tout who held up a big hand for me to stop.

“I respect you, you respect me,” he said, trying to guilt me into stopping. Turns out I didn’t respect him.


On the grass, with my back to the church, I ate my lunch and did what I like most: people-watching. Amidst the increasing trudge of tourist feet, islands of calm lay. A couple canoodled, oblivious to the world. For an hour or more they lay with their noses touching, stroking each others’ arms and egos, whispering love.


An Italian man, his wife prone, rubbed her slightly enlarged belly, obviously happy.


A Sikh, with his entourage of five womenfolk sat two metres uphill from them, and said not a word.


“Ah, I got another beer in my backpack, everything is good,” this from a smiling American, opening a bottle of wine with four friends.


A warm wind blew, sparrows ate my Camembert crumbs and a girl in green spoke into a cellphone hands-free kit and smiled.


A bad rendition of La Vie en Rose came from below. A woman, 50+ and long since slim, was showboating. She wore a multi-coloured flowered headband, a purple chiffon skirt, a short pink top, horn-rimmed glasses and too much lipstick. Her bra, struggling desperately, failed to give her the support she so needed, as her breasts leapt this way and that, almost free of their material prison.


She sang, badly, and danced, worse. The Can-Can, Brasil, numerous tunes I knew but couldn’t name, she puffed out, dancing like a thing possessed. The Africans stopped hassling tourists and looked round, laughing. After a minute they resumed their work, making bracelets from multicoloured bits of string on the wrists of the gullible and friendly.


The woman danced backwards and forwards as people turned their heads. She tried to pull a few people into her world, with no success. As she headed towards me, bosoms flailing, I gave her a look that stopped her dead at five metres. She said something and a few people laughed.


She wound her way up and down the steps, her singing ebbing and flowing. A jazz trio played below, a tumbler did flick-flacks to applause and the Africans took a break. An hour later the woman thanked everyone, in Italian, and went home singing. As if a sign, the girl in green finished her call, the couple untwined and the Italians moved off. The Americans started their second bottle of wine and I packed up.



I had to go to the Arc de Triomphe to change trains. Besides, I wanted a beer on the Champs d’Elysées. But first I thought I’d go up to the top of the Arc, that is until I saw it wasn’t free. I wandered around taking photos when, at about 6pm, a policeman ushered me to the other side of a barrier. The centre, including the tomb of the unknown soldier, was being cleared. I was curious to know why. Now, my French is passable, but I hate talking French to the French, they speak it well and do disdain better.


“Do you speak English?” I asked him.


“Non,” he said, arms outstretched, sheep-dogging me behind the barrier.


Like a circus clown he raced around telling people to get out of the centre but, oblivious, allowed two or three in behind his back. He needed a plan or back-up. Luckily back-up arrived and the sector was slowly cleared.


A moustachioed old goat arrived and moved the velvet ropes and brass stands which surrounded the eternal flame. Soldiers in dress uniform, eight men, two women and three officers arrived. A drummer and a bugler came through the crowd.


What next? The President? As I gave birth to this thought a siren approached, raced around the Arc and screamed off.


Then the heavens opened. Black clouds had been gathering and an equally black guy over my shoulder had been making ‘ooh la la’ sounds as the thunder rolled by. The soldiers ducked out of the deluge to a series of titters from the crowd.


I waited, in my pole position, for something, but knew not what. I tapped a soldier’s shoulder and asked if he spoke English.


“Non, mais..” and he called another soldier over. His English was worse than my French but we established that it was a ceremony to honour the dead of 1914-18 and that it was held daily at 6.30pm. When we concluded his friend dug him in the ribs and said “I speak ze English” and laughed.


“Should the flame be out?” I asked, pointing at the eternal flame. It had been extinguished in the downpour and, after a lot of steam, had gone quiet.


“Is this a relighting ceremony?”


“Non, it nevair goes out.”


“But it’s out now.”


“Non, it is lit twenty-three hours a day.”


“Twenty-four?”


“Oui.”


It was as dead as Monty Python’s parrot and I wasn’t the only one who was pointing at it. Some minutes later it relit itself, the flame clearly visible and just as clearly showing it had been out before.


Ten minutes into the rain and it eased off. The sun even broke through. The soldiers marched out of sight around the corner and the old goat rubbed the head of a small child and invited him and his family through the barrier. About a dozen children flowed through the opening but when a rather too large kid tried, the old goat stopped him. The boy’s father had a small child, maybe two years old, in his arms and was already through.


“Français?” the goat asked.


“Non, Maroc,” said the man and, to a small murmur of disapproval from the crowd, was told that it was for French only, and forced back behind the gate.


“Like the last two wars?” I wanted to say, but the drummer drummed and the bugler bugled. I was fuming.


Afterwards I approached the goat.


“Do you speak English?” He didn’t even look at me, just saying 'non' without breaking stride. I was furious. I found another official.


“Vous parlez Anglais?” He made a face but tried, gave up and called a friend.


“Vous parlez Anglais?” I asked again.


“Oui, un peu.”


He asked if I was English. I admitted I was and he asked why I didn’t speak French. It rather defeated the point of asking him if he spoke English, I thought, but I persevered.


Without warning he told me about the second of September when the English Legion would be at the Arc.


“Why the second?” I ventured willing, for the moment, to follow this non-sequitur.


“Yes, yes, the second,” and he got his diary out to confirm.


“Is it an anniversary?”


“Yes they all come from London with the Ambassador.”


“Mais pourquoi le deuxième Septembre?”


“Oui, they come with the big hats, cyclists.”


So, English Legionnaires and the British Ambassador would be cycling from London to Paris in big hats? I steered the conversation back.


I asked him if all the children allowed through had to be French.


“Can you repeat?” he asked. I started again.


“No, in French.”


And so, with a bit of Anglo-Saxon swearing thrown in as my French basics escaped me, I did my best to say it was appalling behaviour of the old goat to discriminate against ‘l’Africaine.”


He shuffled nervously as he saw how angry I was.


“It’s for all the tourists,” he said, and shrugged.


“Merci,” I said; it took me two hours to calm down.


“Bloody frogs,” I said, and a lot worse. And as I cursed and drank a beer, I realised I was perversely happy. This was the France I had missed: the arrogant, English-hating, xenophobic “bloody frogs”. Now I could go home.



One footnote: the signs under the Arc are in French, German and Spanish. Did I miss something?