PARIS LETTER
I am wntmg this piece on a desk which I had to buy two
years ago at the flea-market, because the object you are most unlikely
to find in a Parisian furnished flat (or a hotel room, for that matter) is
a comfortable desk, that is, a surface stable enough to stand the thumping
of the typewriter, and sufficiently large to allow for a minimum of dis–
order: the blank paper, a couple of magazines, the ashtray and the
cigarettes. I need a pencil to mark something down I want to include
in this "letter," I open the right-hand drawer, and I am seized by a
familiar feeling of nausea: there are three or four pencil stubs, a piece
of seersucker material, blotting paper, envelopes, a couple of those tiny
notebooks from the 42nd Street Five and T en.
In
a few days, all this
will have to be collected and packed together with the rest of our odds
and ends. We have to move, for the third time in twelve months. The
first time it was because of the greed of a high-class bitch, who had
found an American diplomat willing to pay three times as much as we
did for the flat. The second time the separation was amiable and agreed
upon in advance. This time, it is the City of Paris itself that forces us
out. Nothing doing.
It
is written in the statutes : no subletting. We are
subletting, of course, like two-thirds of the foreigners who have come
to Paris after the war (the other third being made up of those who can
afford to buy a place, or pay a lot of money for the
pas de porte–
"the keys," that is). We are in a flagrant state of delinquency, and even
more so is the old lady who was counting on the money we gave her
every month to pay for her room and board, and who now will have an
apartment, and no board, while we shall have to look frantically for
another opportunity to commit the same offense.
The case is pure. No individual greed is involved. There will be no
profit for anybody, except for the prestige of the written rules of the
H.B.M., the Habitations Bon Marche, an institution founded by the City
of Paris in 1920, at a time when the Administration was not so adminis–
trative and, in addition to enforcing rules, built a number of moderately
priced apartment houses. Strict rules were then set forth, and never
suspended or modified thereafter.
It
has merely become impossible to find
a place to live without violating some law. But:
L ex Vincit Tempus,
says threateningly the inscription carved on the building of the Police
Judiciaire, Quai des Orfevres. We shall move out.
