People in Paris 2: The metro

As promised, the next leg of the guided tour of the human oddities that populate Paris. Today we are going to be looking at the metro, which is where the oddballs of Paris congregate.

LIGHTER MAN

If you go from anywhere to anywhere by metro in Paris, chances are you’ll have to change lines at Châtelet station. And when that happens, sooner or later you will have to negotiate the conveyor belts. They are installed to help you get from one end of an unfeasibly long corridor to the other, which is all well and good, but I have never made it the length of the conveyor belts without coming within inches of murdering somebody. Groups of tourists clog them up, sauntering along while consulting their maps, periodically stopping across the breadth of the belt so that nobody can get past. People with ridiculously bulky coats plod along them, bearing large bags of shopping, keeping to the right as is appropriate but still blocking the passage with their bags. Enamoured couples stand there, not even bothering to walk, so lost in each other’s embrace that they don’t notice how many commuters they are tripping up with their protruding feet. Teenagers glued to their phones walk slower and slower until they grind to a halt completely, causing the people walking behind them to pile up on top of them. It is a very fortunate thing indeed that I do not habitually carry large blunt objects around with me, because otherwise I would have battered a number of people to death by now. I am often overcome with a barely resistible urge to deliver an almighty push to the person in front of me, causing everyone on the belt to go toppling like dominoes. I have now taken to avoiding the conveyor belts altogether. I can get to the other end of the corridor faster by walking on solid ground.

I’m not the only person who feels like this. There was once a young man on the belt in front of me, growling and grinding his teeth and looking as furious as I felt as he kept trying to overtake people but not being able to squeeze past. Eventually he heaved a mighty sigh, pulled a lighter out of his pocket, lit it, and ran the flame along the handrail. There are worse ways to let off steam.

SAINT LAZARE – METRO GUARDS

In Japan, people are employed on the metro to shove passengers onto the trains at rush hour. In Paris, people are employed to stand in front of the train doors at rush hour to stop too many people getting on. 

Japan

Paris

SAINT LAZARE – TERMINUS

The metro line 14 terminates at Saint Lazare. When it stops there, a little jingle is played and you are told to get off in three languages. The glass doors between the platform and the train have big red “do not enter” signs on them so you know not to get on the train. So why on earth are there always people who stay on the train and others waiting on the platform who merrily board the train as it arrives at the terminus?

One evening I decided to stay on the train at Saint Lazare, to see what would happen. As it drew away from the station, I had the surreal impression of being carried away from the world as we know it and beyond a border that no human should cross. The carriage was eerily silent. A man wandered down the aisle in my direction, but he didn't appear to see me. It was as if we were occupying different astral planes. I half expected to be able to pass my hand through him. 

Fifty metres or so down the track, the train stopped, sat there for a few minutes, and then changed direction and trundled back to the station, stopping at the opposite platform. But that doesn't explain why those people on the train were there in the first place. 

HARIBOS

A man boarded the train, deposited himself purposefully in the only free seat, and started rummaging in his bag. He withdrew from it a bag of Haribo’s cola bottles and a sheaf of spreadsheets and spent the next twenty minutes studying the spreadsheets, steadily working his way through the packet of sweets. He timed the exercise so perfectly that he swallowed the last cola bottle just as he arrived at his stop.

PICTURESQUE WOMAN

A voluminous lady of advanced years waddled onto the metro and seated herself regally on a fold-down seat, depositing a vast supermarket bag at her feet. Her hair was swept up into a chignon, topped by a pink cap, one of her shoes was laced with a black lace and the other with a red lace, and her features were enhanced by bright blue eyeshadow and fluorescent pink lipstick.

Out of the depths of her coat pocket, she produced  small magnifying glass, which she held up to one eye as she squinted at the plan of the metro line, which was stuck up above the door. Then she put the magnifying glass away and started digging determinedly in her plastic bag, which proved to be stuffed full of envelopes, brochures, and other assorted bits of paper. She extracted a small brown envelope, a roll of sellotape and a pair of scissors, and proceeded to stick down the flap of the envelope as thoroughly as any envelope flap has ever been stuck down. Then she deposited it all back into the bag and squinted at the line plan through her magnifying glass again.

UNDERAGE DRINKING

I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when I saw two sweet-looking boys, aged not more than nine or ten, sitting on the metro, peeling the label off a beer bottle.

“Surely not,” I thought. “They probably just found the bottle somewhere and want to put flowers in it.”

One of the boys caught me looking at them and just stared straight back at me.

As they got off the train, that same boy looked me squarely in the eye and took a swig from the bottle. Then they pranced off down the platform, and I was left wondering if their parents even knew that they were using public transport on their own, let alone what they were drinking in the process. They probably lit up cigarettes as soon as they were out of the station.