Dixième delights

Tim Heald

Ifirst went to Paris with my father in the 1950s. My black and white box Brownie picture shows him standing in the Champs-Elysées staring ferociously at a map held between extended arms. He’s lost. It makes me wonder how we won the war. A decade or so earlier he’d been awarded an MC and an immediate DSO fighting through Europe and here he is, a newly retired colonel, adrift in tweed a mile or so from where our BEA flight touched down at Le Bourget.

I don’t know what he’d have thought if he were still alive and realised that his son had, half a century later, gone back to Paris by train through the Chunnel thanks to a special offer on the internet from Britain’s largest supermarket chain. It was a Christmas present to my wife: Eurostar and a couple of nights at the Grand Hotel for £119 a head.

Part of the attraction of this trip was the 10th arrondissement. The 10th is as unfashionable as the Tesco offer was naff. In the past, whenever I’ve arrived at the Gare du Nord I’ve headed straight for the Métro or the taxi rank and high-tailed it somewhere else. You wouldn’t hang around near the station any more than a visitor to London would spend all their time within walking distance of Paddington or Waterloo.

And yet I’ve been visiting Paris on and off for half a century, never staying terribly long, often on my way somewhere else. I love it for its familiarity and its foreignness, for the way in which it has come to symbolise safe abroad. Going back regularly is half the fun, but even after all these years of acquaintance I had only the flimsiest fix on the Dixième. I hadn’t even enjoyed a meal at the Terrasse du Nord, the famous brasserie just over the road from the Gare du Nord which is a sort of upmarket station buffet. I hadn’t the foggiest idea who lived there or if there was anything in the Dixième I ought to see. The district was virtually off my map.

The Dixième was the historian Richard Cobb’s first arrondissement and of all Englishmen, Richard — who was both my academic and, unbelievably, my ‘moral’ tutor for three years — was possibly the most Parisian Englishman ever. Someone once told him that he spoke French ‘comme un titi parisien’ and it was the compliment he valued more highly than any. It was worth more to him than his Légion d’honneur or his CBE.

In his characteristic slim volume called Promenades, Richard devotes an entire chapter to ‘Le Dixième’. It was not just that it represented his first taste and smell of the city, it also had a sort of nondescript scruffiness that appealed to him.

‘The Dixième arrondissement, as far as I know, possesses no literature, and it has been sung about by no poet,’ he wrote, wondering if it were simply a place through which people walked to and from work, ‘a sort of surface Métro.’ Once grand, it had become less so by the 1930s when Cobb first lived there, and the doors on the other apartments in his building ‘bore the names of Polish furriers and tailors, of private detective agencies, of doctors, though probably not very good doctors’.

I dare say these inhabitants are still there, but near our hotel on the Boulevard de Strasbourg it was men and women out of Africa who were most in evidence. A few yards away there was a busy block of black beauty salons straightening hair and selling gaudy wig extensions. On our first day, as we walked shivering through a wind-chilled city to lunch in the Boulevard St Denis, we passed a shop called the ‘Wembley Stores’ advertising goods from Africa, Mauritius, Pakistan and India, and just before we reached our destination we passed two little alleyways full of nothing but small Indian restaurants serving food from places like Pondicherry and other parts of the francophone subcontinent.

We stopped for onion soup and steak tartare at the Brasserie Julien, a typical brass and plush, stained-glass-window sort of place which is symbolic of what Paris was and has become. At first glance the Julien is gloriously unchanged, a relic of the good old days and one of three famous brasseries which happen to be in the 10th.

The others are Flo and the Terrasse du Nord and all have lost their independence, having been subsumed into a brasserie chain run by an enterprising former waiter called M. Bucher. When one brasserie, the Balzar on the Left Bank, was threatened with takeover the clientele rebelled and staged what was, in effect, an eat-in (where else but Paris?). It made no difference and Balzar is now part of the Bucher chain along with all the others. Does this matter? They’re not McDonald’s and brasserie food is by definition on the mass-produced side. Traditionalists think it matters very much; tourists on the whole won’t notice.

Another feature of the Dixième is the Canal St Martin, which cuts across one of the Seine’s great loops and used to supply the main slaughterhouse at La Villette. Part of it has been tarmacked over and President Pompidou had an ambitious plan to do the whole thing properly and convert it into a four-lane highway. Mercifully this didn’t happen and the waterway flows quietly to the Place République from the huge Bassin de la Villette, which was bitterly cold and bleak when we were there, but must be positively frolicsome in summer with new cinema complexes, restaurants and even boules. Much planting and landscaping has been taking place round the old round tollhouse in the middle of the Place Stalingrad, and the green metallic footbridges which criss-cross the water give the area an oddly unexpected air of old Amsterdam. One gem, completely unknown to me, is the 17th-century Hôpital St-Louis, originally built for plague victims and now a magnificent courtyard along similar lines to the Place des Vosges. It also has a jewel of a chapel complete with the sort of elderly female worshippers that Professor Cobb would have recognised at once.

We also did the excellent St Quentin Market and had supper at a theatre restaurant called Chez Arthur which had black and white photos of famous French thesps of whom I recognised only Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Depardieu, and where the patron stood behind the bar polishing glasses and shaking hands with regulars before they were taken off to their usual tables and poured flutes of champagne without having to ask.

And, no, we didn’t spend our entire time in the grotty old Dixième. We walked down to the river and across to the Musée d’Orsay where we spent practically the entire day looking at Impressionists before stopping for just the one at the Deux Magots and spending the evening with lucky friends who live in an apartment a stone’s throw from the Pont Neuf.

Finally we lugged our bags on foot to the station and returned to Cornwall via London with an overnight at the Ritz to avoid any suggestion of anticlimax. It was, I have to admit, much grander than the Grand or indeed practically anything in the Dixième, but I’m glad we spent time there, wistfully following in the footsteps of l’étonnant Cobb and experiencing the ordinariness of everyday abroad.

It felt like the real thing.