LOVE LOCKS AND SHORT CONS

CULTURE FLOURISHES ON PONT DES ARTS.

The Pont des Arts used to be just a simple pedestrian bridge joining the left bank of the Seine to the Louvre. That was before its open-mesh wire railings made it ideal for so-called cadenas d’amour or love locks. Lovers, to demonstrate their fidelity, wrote their names on a padlock, attached it to the bridge, and threw the key into the Seine. When the open-work wire fences filled up, they attached their lock to one already in place, until locks-locked-to-other locks dangled like jungle vines. By 2014, the number of locks on Pont des Arts was estimated at a million and their weight at 45 tonnes. When a fence tore loose and fell into the Seine, the city replaced the fences with ugly glass panels,  and the cadenas disappeared - along with the wire railings, another small loss to the city’s artistic heritage.

I went by Pont des Arts earlier this week, and was immediately targeted by an insistent young woman who thrust a clipboard at me and demanded I sign a petition. That old scam again? I suppose I should be grateful that this tradition of Paris street life at least still survived.  If I did stop and sign, she would demand a cash contribution to her illusory charity. For a time in the ‘eighties, families operated in teams, an adult thrusting the clipboard under one’s nose while one or more children, out of sight, groped for your handbag or wallet. Was this, in fact, the same clipboard, reverently passed down through the generations, along with details of the scam? A touching example of a venerable tradition reaffirmed.

 What next? Maybe the return of that piece of street theatre involving an apparently gold ring. Pretending to pick it up from the pavement, a woman innocently asks a passer-by “Is this yours?” Most ignore her but, out of every three or four tries, someone stops and listens as the finder explains that, though she knows she should take this valuable item to the police in hopes of a reward, she might be willing to leave it with her new friend - for a small payment, of course…

It was confidence trickery at its simplest, but surprisingly effective. Fortunately for its victims, however, skilled executants were rare. One learned to spot the sudden stoop, apparently to pick up the ring but actually to drop it. “No, dear,” one wanted to say, “don’t let us see you put it there. And pause for a second or two, as if you were wondering what to do.” I actually tried this once, but the woman just glared, muttered the Croatian or Bulgarian version of “Do I tell you how to do your job?”, and went back to scanning the crowd for a new victim.  Quite right too. Where else but on Pont des Arts should one be free to pursue the oldest art of all, that of not giving a sucker an even break?