Life in a Paris Suburb

WHEN we first reached Paris last spring, after three years in Washington, my wife and I were faced with the problem, disheartening enough all over the world since the war, of finding a place to live. The matter is made even more formidable in Paris for various reasons.

These include (1) a French law which says that unfurnished houses and flats must stay at rentals fixed not very much above those of the dear, dead days of 1914. Naturally tenants badly squeezed by the rising cost of living in every other field — the government refers to them, with straight-faced politeness, as “the economically feeble ones" hang on grimly to houses for which they may be paying as little as $57 a year. (I am taking the current exchange rate of 350 francs lo the dollar throughout this report.)

But (2) no such ceiling applies to furnished premises. So the French, never averse from picking up on the swings what may have been dropped on the roundabouts, have been letting their imaginations run riot in naming rentals for furnished places. And unfortunately (3) Paris, what with the Marshall Plan people and many another handsomely stalled U.S. government or international mission, is full of Americans eager to gratifv these fabulous demands with dollars and without argument.

(4) There has been little new housing put up in the past q mirier of a century; and finally (5) France is the squatter’s paradise. It is next to impossible to secure a court eviction order against anybody, unless you are able to promise alternative accommodation with which the potential evictee declares his complete satisfaction. And of course this is nearly always out of the question.

Often enough in those dreary weeks of house hunting, my wife would see a place which on first inspection not only seemed to have nothing wrong with it, but even appeared to be precisely what we sought. She might be aware, while going over it, that there were two or three unsavory-looking characters shuffling about in one of the top-floor rooms, but she look them to be caretakers. It was only when we started talking terms that the owner would say, with elaborate nonchalance, “And you would not, I feel sure, be greatly incommoded by the Lesmoines on the top floor. Their children cry but rarely, and they have been told to use the main staircase as little as possible.”Knowing that the Lesmoines might quite easily elect to stay on for good, we used at that point to lose interest.

Another large drawback was provided by the antics of the departing Germans. There was a lovely house at Marly-le-Roi. It had been inhabited at various times by Louis XIV, the actress Rachel — and the Wehrmaeht. From the outside it was a dream. Inside a nightmare. Whiter pipes had been wrenched from walls; bathtubs forced through floors; trucks driven into drawing rooms, and so on. We reckoned that repairs — taking many months—would about equal the asking price for the house.

Things began to look desperate.

The school holidays were drawing near. Soon four children would descend on us from England. So against our better judgment we closed with the owner of a hideous but huge edifice in a horsy suburb, twenty minutes by train to the west of Paris. The owner wanted to sell for $20,000, but we persuaded him to rent it for a year’s trial. (To begin with, I do not possess $20,000; secondly, the Bank of England would not let me take it to France if I did; lastly, we didn’t like this weirdly decorated sanctuary sufficiently to regard it as a permanent factor in our lives.)

The place what the French call a villa — was a frenzy of bad taste. Inside, it ran the gamut from imitation Versailles to genuine Bourse. Outside, it had mauve-painted erenelalions, imitation wooden beams made of cement, and a strange tower perched at one end. For the $1375 a year rental (plus a forfeit of $575 if we fail to renew next year) we get in addition to these dubious adornments a strongly built, eleven-room, three-story house, with bathroom, big kitchen, wine cellar, roomy basement laundry, two-acre garden (very well arranged, in contrast to the house), and a cement tennis court rather the worse for wear from an RAF bomb. There are also a detached lodge-keeper’s house of three rooms and a two-car garage.

The first tiling, obviously, was to obscure the mauve paint on the outside and the brown paint, which was the favored color for the interior. We called in a genial chap who came along with two assistants and a water boy. He shook his head a bit when we said we wanted the cement beams outside the tower painted a neutral color.

“That tower’s higher than I usually go,” he pointed out. “It means ladders— extra-long ones. Cost you more.” In the end he did a workmanlike job for $110, plus $15 for ladderage.

On investigation the property proved to contain a delightfully varied orchard. There were, in due season, apples, pears, peaches, plums, raspberries, wild strawberries, gooseberries, grapes, and excellent little walnuts. The couple who inhabited the lodge-keeper’s house, and who were allowed to cultivate a small kitchen garden below the battered tennis court, kept us up to scratch in the matter of garnering these rich harvests. No waste was tolerated. No windfalls stayed long on the ground.

The couple insisted, over my mild objections, on our making cider with our surplus apples. When I said that I did not propose to buy a cider press, they arranged for their cousin in the next suburb to crush our apples in his. Also to lend us one of his barrels. Then the problem of getting the barrel, now full and very heavy, back to us cropped up.

“I have it,” said Madame to my wife. “You have need of the plumber anyway. Get him in and leave the rest to me.”

The plumber, who owns a car, was duly called in to deal with a leaking faucet. Just as he was finishing, Madame started in on him with a mixture of blandishment and open bullying. Soon, with only a token grumble, he was off’ in his car to fetch our cider keg.

But in one respect we became known as “those improvident British.” My wife flatly refused to pick the lime keys off the enormous lime tree behind the house. “But filleul” (a straw-colored “infusion” made of lime keys and hot water, greatly esteemed by the French) “is rightly venerated as a sovereign cure for the congested liver,” protested Madame vainly. “Very well then, I shall myself garner these scandalously neglected keys.” She did, too.

The garden is taken care of by a scarecrow-thin and taciturn young man w ho does an excellent job for 20 cents an hour. He cleans floors inside the house as well. His sister, just as taciturn, helps with the housework, at 18 cents an hour. This gardener is, like Madame the Bodge-keeper, very much against waste. He uses the contents of our garbage can euphoniously called a poubelle in French — which lie laboriously totes down to the far end of our territory, to stimulate our compost heap. But he confesses himself baffled by empty sardine cans.

“Can’t find any use for these,” he mutters morosely.

The electricians were the biggest bane of those early weeks. Two young men would call, with every appearance of getting down to the many tasks urgently awaiting them — hooking up the new refrigerator, installing the electric water-heater, putting in a front-door bell, and so forth. But after an hour or so their stamina would always seem to run out abruptly.

Murmuring excuses, they would vanish, the job part done, to return no more that day or — very likely — the day after.

They paid nearly twenty visits all told before things were more or less in working order, and for days the trade name of “Tropicale” stamped upon our water-heater remained a silent mockery, since the bath water, obstinately unconnected with the heater, stayed glacial. One of the electricians finally produced the classic story of a dying grandmother and vanished permanently. Meanwhile a trench had been dug just outside the front door to receive a cable for the nonexistent front bell. And night after night, hurrying home in the dark, I would forgetfully fall into this hazard.

The electricians’ bill, including materials and a good deal of serialized work, totted up to $125.50.

In contrast to this, the five men who, in three hours of concentrated hard work, carried into and distributed about the place a whole houseful of our furniture from England showed remarkable efficiency as well as great strength. One of them would whip up two flights of stairs whistling cheerily, a full wardrobe trunk clutched lightly to his midriff.

The only thing that momentarily seduced them from their fanatic devotion to duty was the U.S.-style kitchen trash can, with the foot treadle for lifting the lid. This they had never seen the like of, and they delightedly set traps for one another with it, suddenly jerking up the lid to strike a guilelessly investigating colleague smartly on the nose.

The local upholsterer did a lovely job really good, painstaking craftsmanship— on some dining-room chairs which had been in storage since 1939. For this he charged just over $3 a chair, bringing the chairs back one at a time himself, riding his bicycle, with the chair balanced on the handle bars. If a thing can be carried on a bicycle, then it can be delivered to your house —that is the local tradesmen’s slogan. Anything that is beyond the powers of the vélo to negotiate has to be fetched by the purchaser.

As the long, hot summer suddenly changed into winter at the beginning of November we had our first bout, apprehensively enough, with our central-heating apparatus. We had laid in our season’s stock of coal and coke earlier, at a cost of $260. (Wood comes free from our “well-timbered” estate.)

But the implement designed t receive this fuel, lurking down near the wine cellar, is one of the most forbidding, Dali-esque confections that I have come across.

Its basic shape is oblong, but strange chains of various calibers wind their tortuous ways about its surface, through pulleys and around wheels. Weights and counterweights swing, unconvincingly enough, in this tangle; and on top there is a single demonic gauge, the hands of which are somehow cont rolled by the chain-and-weight section of the apparatus. However, it does — against all the odds — seem to keep the house warm.

A local youth comes in for an hour every morning to make up the fire. He receives 28 cents for his hour’s work,

We now have an electric washing machine (price $215), and glad of it we are. While we were dependent on the local laundries, we had a bad time. For one thing, the laundries could not agree to stagger their summer holidays. All closed down simultaneously right through the month of August. Then their prices are—by French standards — very high. Our weekly bill for two people used to average $3.40. And fellow suburbanites shook their heads at 12 cents for laundering a sheet.

But that was one of the lesser afflictions of a flaming August. Because of the phenomenal summer, the house played host to huge quantities of flies and — no doubt because of the Seine a few hundred yards away — to a plague of mosquitoes. There were no screens on any of the doors or windows.

So every night, as a woebegone act of faith, vve would go to bed daubed with one of those preparations which induce only added enthusiasm among the mosquitoes, and faint nausea on the part of the wearer. Several times a night we would have to switch on the light and go to work with Flit gun, swatter, and pillow. Dawn would find us haggardly surveying a stricken field.

(To be concluded)