Eavesdropping in Paris

In a crowd, you’re just one of the overheard.

Walking down Rue des Martyrs the other day I crossed paths with a young father and his three-or-so-year-old son. A police car was racing up the street in the opposite direction, siren blaring and lights flashing. When I passed the guy, I heard him saying to the kid, in a patient pedagogical tone of voice, “No, it’s not a taxidermist. It’s the police.”

I love absurd julienne slices of life like that. To put it another way, I am an incorrigible snoop. For me, one of the advantages of living in a big city is having lots of opportunities to eavesdrop on strangers.

Here’s another of my favorites: I was standing at the bar in one of those alleged “Irish pubs” that Paris seems to have on every block when I overheard the following exchange (in English):

Young guy (to bartender): “I’ll have a Guinness please.”

Guy next to him: “Hi! Are you Irish?”

Young guy: “No, American.”

Guy next to him (shouting): “I should f–ing kill you!”

Fortunately, the verbal violence was not followed by physical. So we didn’t have to call a taxidermist.

I should also admit that my unsavory curiosity extends beyond the audible. During last summer’s heat wave I went to my favorite butcher’s shop on Rue Lepic to get a chicken. Since this was France, where butchers keep poultry carcasses whole until purchased, the bird had to be beheaded and befeeted and begutted and so forth, which takes a while, and since I was also very thirsty I decided to do my waiting at the café across the street in the company of a glass of something cold.

Once inside I immediately noticed two things:

1) I was in the now-famous Café des 2 Moulins, as seen in the hit movie Amélie – which I realized not so much from recognizing it as from ruling out any other explanation for the high density of Japanese tourists and wall-sized Amélie posters.

2) A fair number of the other patrons were would-be writers from out of town.

How could I tell? They were young, seated alone in a famous café with a notebook and pencil in front of them, staring thoughtfully and distractedly into the distance. It’s the look, also quite common around Saint Germain, that says, “Here’s me: writer. In Paris!”

I happened to be sitting just behind a young woman in the sidewalk (smoking) section who looked to be about the right age for Creative Writing 102. Her table held a ruled tablet open to the first page with two and a half lines scribbled on it, a brimming full ashtray and three empty coffee cups. She was nursing her fourth and, to complete the tableau, wearing a beret.
Being me, I was aching to see what she had written. To my delight she got up to go to the WC, giving me a clear look at her novel in progress. Here’s what she had so far (quoted in its entirety and translated verbatim from the French):

“The telephone rang in the big apartment. Michelle, groggy after yet another long night of lovemaking,…”

I guess she was drinking decaf, because that was it. And she didn’t make any more progress by the time I drank up, paid up and went back across the street to pick up my dinner, so I never did find out who was calling Michelle and why. I like to think it was a taxidermist, phoning to say, “I should f–ing kill you!” If she could write her way out of that opening, she’d have a future in fiction.

© 2010 Paris Update