Le Ventre de Paris

The City of Light, with her smooth surfaces and comme-il-faut beauty, her orderly suppressed sentiments and preciosity, must be hiding the belly of the beast somewhere. (Molière immortalized the preciosity of 17th century Paris in Les Précieuses Ridicules, depicting a refinement that denied the very existence of a body. Customs still preserve a certain legacy, for example corporeal functions are not mentioned in polite language. Few people will acknowledge that you just sneezed.)

Danse macabre guard of Les Innocents

But Paris had quite a belly, immortalized in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris. Today les jolies rues  Montorgueil and Montmartre, white and gentrified, have lovely cafés and galleries. But for more than 800 years this quartier was Paris' digestive system. From about 1100 AD Paris' central food market fed the hundreds of thousands of the capital city at what is now Forum des Halles. Till the French Revolution, thieves and crooked merchants of the food chain were pilloried in stocks that slowly rotated by the market. The adjacent cemetery of Les Innocents was practically festive. In the 19th century elaborate cast iron Beaux Arts halls was built to house the plethora of foods and drinks and abundant consumption that fascinated Zola with its enormous vaults and covered passageways.

Eglise St. Eustache

Zola's novel elaborately describes the merchants and the fat, greasy mouths of the feasting Parisians, the underworld and the plenty in this belly of the city where digestion and indigestion closed in on the anorexic, famished and repulsed hero, Florent. (In fact I believe Paris' astrological sign is Virgo, who rules digestion.) Jacques recalls les Halles of the 1960's, a raucous colorful world of boisterous activity all night long, as the truckers brought in their goods, the grocers picked up their wares, the days and nights of incessant va et vient. Les forts des halles, the truckdrivers, were picturesque characters who would visit the prostitutes lined up along rue St. Denis as they waited to unload their goods. The commotion made Les Halles beloved to the bourgeoisie who dined there on soupe a l'oignon apres l'opera at Pied de Chochon or Chien qui Fume, both restaurants still there. But soup is now being served, Soupe a l'Eustache, where the cavernous St. Eustache feeds the hungry. Long lines of surprising kinds of faces wait for their soup alongside the genteel parks of Les Halles (even a dog run!). I had no idea all these Parisians needed an evening soup.

And now the belly seems to rumble underneath, where the RERs bring in banlieusards who hang out in the underground mall. On certain nights, at certain hours, the atmosphere bristles with danger, rebellious kids massing, police every few feet, staring each other down. And Parisians still mourn Le Ventre de Paris, which departed in 1971 from Paris' center, where a belly belongs.