Survivors

Getting onto the RER into Paris, a young woman bounced past us and laid a carefully printed card on the seat facing us. It said she was unemployed, had two young children etc etc and she was asking us to pay her something......
Later, near the Notre Dame, we saw a huge old man bundled up, not begging but just sitting there, and with two puppies snuggled into his jacket.
Nearby, an old woman sat patiently on the pavement with her back to the parapet of the bridge, not begging, sharing her little mat with a rabbit. The rabbit wore a smart red jacket and was nibbling some biscuits. The woman had a bunch of grass and herbs beside her, ready to give to the rabbit later on.
These last two people were the classic clochards of the Paris streets, honourable, resourceful, calm. The girl on the train was part of a huge international network of 'workers', slaves maybe, possibly trafficked, whose gatherings are paid to the organisers.  I last reported on this phenomenon when we were in Albania in the summer - at Durres, where the girl begging had a drugged baby on her shoulder, and a very sinister man was not far away, sitting on the pavement in the happy evening crowds, hitting another baby on the ground in front of him. This is a new industry - the pitiful pitch, the tug at the heart strings, the use of children in 3D or in reported form ('I have two children....'). I saw this typical family at Gare du Nord on Saturday.  Nathalie says their 'nationality' changes according to what wars are in the news.

On Facebook, I had posted a video clip showing the beam of laser light swinging round in the darkness, filmed from the kitchen window of this apartment about 8km away... And a friend riposted that this was the same beam of light searching out the homeless so they can be swept from the streets: she hates Macron and his policies.   But I think it's more complicated than she suggests.   Of course there are desperate people whose only resource is the pavement and a bit of cardboard and their numbers are growing, but they are not all the same.
I am reminded of a trip I made to Dublin in the 1970s and seeing barefoot children begging on the Halfpenny Bridge in the bitter cold. I had never seen anything like that in England, so sheltered was I from poverty in those days.    Ireland was all too familiar with it, the hedge schools, the outcasts and denial.  It's all crept nearer now.
How do people or things survive?
We went for a hot chocolate, and the couple sitting behind me were deep in conversation in English. He was a smart young lawyer, French, briefing his client on what was likely to happen.  He said, they were lucky to have been allocated to a certain judge who was known to deal swiftly with cases. He thought the hearing would be deferred to June. He thought she was likely to get a prison sentence, maybe 7 or 8 years, but it was her first offence, so it was likely to be suspended and so as long as she kept out of trouble, she would not actually go to jail.   She was youngish, had bare ankles (that is the fashion at the moment).  Andrew thought she was Russian. They were speaking in English as a shared or common language......
We went towards Notre Dame, intending to go in but diverted into the Archaeology Crypt instead. This area was destined to become a carpark in 1965, but the architect, one M Fleury, realised the importance of what they found when they started digging and the area eventually became a fascinating and compact underground museum describing the ancient history of the city, and the carpark was built slightly further to the south, towards the present bank of the river.   The jumble of stones, walls, ditches, doorways, steps, benches, slabs and pavements is almost impossible to interpret as you look at it now, but has had decades of interpretation and analysis , and the presentations and explanations are very clear. From the Romans onwards, this tiny bit of the Ile de la Cité has been valued for its location and everything and everyone has been here.  By the 17thC there were so many babies being abandoned that the authorities realised they had a problem, and by the 18th there was a positive torrent of newborns being left in doorways (too young to beg for themselves).  A special hospital was set up and at first these children were well cared-for, but it rapidly deteriorated into squalor and agony (not least because pigs and chickens were reared in the same premises, so disease spread very rapidly).

I liked very much three delicate wooden spoons dug up from the mud, with tiny little finials, and these elegant practical little things were 800 years old.

Who, and what, survives?

We then walked to the Tour de Jean sans Peur, a remarkable medieval structure (c1409) which was a triumphalist gesture made by an ambitious aristocrat known as Jean sans Peur (Fearless John) who wanted to sneer at his rival the Duc of Burgundy. He built it as part of his palace on the edge of Paris as it was then, part of the city wall.... Later, the palace disappeared, the estate was chopped up, new boundaries appeared nearby, and slums grew up all around it. The tower was used for lodgings, warehousing, a dumping ground. Probably a brothel.  Not till the mid-19thC, when a new road was being pushed through the slums, and the surrounding buildings were demolished, did anyone realise it was there. It's five storeys high, and is more or less just a staircase with a couple of small rooms leading off at the top, and with an astonishing tree carved of stone on the fourth floor. The tree is the newel post for the stair, and has branches spreading right across the little vaulted ceiling. The branches are covered in stone leaves of three varieties - oak, hawthorn and hops, which each refer to the John's family origins.

It's definitely worth a visit next time you come to Paris, and you'll find it at 20 rue Etienne-Marcel, just north of les Halles.   It removes that fascinating Parisian veneer of uniform pretty buildings and straight avenues, and shows you the old history underneath. It's a true survivor.