This week, the bookshop opposite had a novel item in its window. Someone had glued dozens of antique tickets, stamps and receipts into a kind of mosaic. There were tickets for the bus and Metro; for the cinema and theatre; café receips; ID cards for students, pensioners, veterans…the detritus of a culture where nothing was entirely sure unless you could produce proof on paper.
It took me back to my first visits to France in the nineteen-seventies. In those day, a woman, usually middle-aged, guided you to your cinema seat and, as she did so, swished the coins in the small cloth sack at her waist, reminding you that this service traditionally called for a tip.
In post offices, we queued while clerks consulted dog-eared guides for the appropriate rate, then painstaking covered half the envelope with multi-coloured stamps. To mail a parcel took an hour of weighing, wrapping and labeling. Metal staples were forbidden, and insured packets had to be wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, and the knots sealed with red wax melted over a candle. (The first time I did this, I expected to hear a clatter of hooves and be told the three musketeers had arrived and were awaiting without.)
A rail trip to Lyon or Chartres could take as long to plan as an expedition up the Amazon, involving the consultation of minutely-printed timetables – and too bad if you failed to see the footnote explaining that a train didn’t run on Sundays or public holidays. Was next Wednesday a holiday? Ah, to establish that, m’sieur, one must consult yet another guide….
On the Metro, a poinçonneur clipped the ticket you’d just lined up for five minutes to buy. These self-important men in shabby cardigans and worn peaked caps were such a fixture that Serge Gainsbourg wrote a song about them, Le Poinçonneur de Lilas, and let himself be filmed, lean as a whippet and improbably urbane in a chic black suit, clipping tickets at the Porte des Lilas station, drifts of snippings littering his pointed black patent leather pumps like dandruff. His poinçonneur was, of course, a wild man in chains, dreaming of an ocean liner pulling into the station and whisking him away. And if that didn’t work…. “If I go crazy/I may take a gun/And make a hole, a little hole, the last little hole…..”
After the poinçonneur, one still had to face the portillon automatique, an electric gate that swung shut with a warning hoot to bar you from the platform as a train approached. Movies hinged on lovers separated by that gate, or thieves who slipped through as it closed, thumbing their noses at the pursuing flics.
On learned in time that over-staffing of public services was a state strategy, designed, like two years' compulsory military service, to soak up school leavers unqualified for anything else. That system exploded in les evenements of 1968, leading to post offices where a single bored employee guards a few self-service machines, and a computerised rail system of TGVs -Trains à Grande Vitesse - whisks us across the country in comfort and at speed.
Of course it's more efficient. But I think of Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid examining the barred windows and alarms of a bank.
"What happened to the old bank?" he asks. "It was beautiful."
"People kept robbing it," says the guard.
"Small price to pay for beauty," Butch scowls.
Exactly. And….well… sealing wax?
In the Montparnasse cemetery, I noticed that some people have improved on the Jewish tradition of placing a pebble on a grave by substituting a Metro ticket.
I found it funny on this past trip that I bought a little paper ticket for the metro and when it didn’t work, the attendant at the info booth scolded me for not writing my name and the date o bought the ticket on the ticket. 😂. She said, you know I could fine you 35 euros! I thought but didn’t say, what stops me from writing todays date on any old ticket I find... The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess. 😁