Cicilie among the Parisians

A friend of mine said that he’d like to leave a comment on my blog suggesting that my fieldwork could have benefited by some knowledge of what happens in the city before lunchtime. As I have in fact been out there many times before 12 o’clock, I have informed him that such a comment is totally ill-informed. Today I’ll even prove that I was out before dawn on a Saturday. (Since it’s in the middle of winter – and winter indeed, since emergency measures are put into action with Plan Grand Froid niveau 2 and alerte orange (in this country not concerning terror dangers, but exceptional snowfall) in half of France – dawn comes not too early).

What did I find out? As I crossed the city between 8 and 9 o’clock in the morning, I had the chance to take a look at a few peculiarities of French society that I only had knowledge of from films and other secondary sources. For instance, there are people living and carrying out their daily life all over the city, even in the most touristy streets of the Latin Quarter (I know already that people live in the most touristy quarters of the Jewish area, which I’ve done myself). All along the way I saw locals joining their tiny Parisians dogs for a morning stroll, and there were even a man walking his unleashed brown and black lapdogs across Boulevard Saint Michel, where I really didn’t think there were any flats. (I’ve already become so accustomed to the clothes of the dogs that I have lost track of how usual dogcoates actually are, but I’m not sure if I can claim that a majority are wearing them despite the fact that we live under Plan Grand Froid niveau 2). Parents are bringing their children and even toddlers to primary and nursery school at dawn on a Saturday. And yes, there are really baskets with fresh croissants and pain au chocolat at the counter of most/all bistros (as I have seen on so many French films from all times). And many people do in fact have their breakfast in the local café perhaps at the corner. From the bus, I could see customers at the café tables engage in lively conversation long before 9 o’clock. And again, it happens all over the city, and I don’t know how early in the day they started this sociability.

This mix of habitable and commercial areas, of housing and public facilities, seem are more thorough in this city than other cities I know. It’s also something which separates Paris proper from some of its deprived banlieues, and which separates the 19th century cities from the modern style Le Corbusier suburbs… I don’t know too much about this yet, but it’s for sure something I’ll return to.

As I was one hour wrong about when the lecture I was going to this morning started, I had the chance to have a second breakfast – croissant beurre and café allongé – and see the bistro morning life from the inside. I found a very typical looking one run by two Chinese (one of them could have been an actor in a film by Wong Kar-Wai) just nearby the EHESS where the lecture would take place. (A lecture, by the way, on the social sciences and the crisis in the banlieues, which I will return to as well).

In the bistro, most people stand along the counter. Some, like the two young, green dressed street cleaners are following the lottery draw on a TV screen. (I’ve noticed that it’s common for the street cleaners and the postmen to drop by at a bistro and have a coffee by the bar on their morning round). Except from the white and native speaking street cleaners, there are two middle-aged men speaking Arab and two women and a man, all in their twenties, speaking Rumanian, I think (it sounds like a mix between a Slavic and a Latin language), and several French speakers. It’s so cold that people keep their overcoats and even woollen hats on, and none stay for long.

At half past nine, the bistro has quieted down. La grisaille du jour has settled, and it has become too unbearably cold to sit here.

At 10 o’clock, life has regained the daytime mode I know well: shops are opening and people – tourists and locals – are strolling along the streets. But a homeless man, just in his sleeping bag, outside a nearby school has not yet woken up. He’s obviously neither benefited from Plan Grand Froid (emergency housing for the homeless), nor from the tents distributed by "Doctors of the world" (with a little not saying, pertinently though sadly “each tent is a roof lacking”).