NIGHT “LIFE” IN PARIS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 892, 8 February 1930, Page 22

NIGHT “LIFE” IN PARIS

MUNICIPAL MYSTERIES • WEIRD CLEANING GEAR Things are seen in Paris streets, some of them phenomena of daily occurrence, which could not be conceived o fin other city, writes G. A. Martelli, in the London “Morning Post.” Where else in the world, for instance, is there anything comparable to those mysterious nocturnal activities, between the small hours and the dawn, which seem not to belong to any real world, but to be the grotesque and fantastic invention of an exotic imagination? Who that has gone home late enough to be early has not been met by those incredible apparitions ghoulish processions of scavengers, weird municipal vehicles, uncanny looking apparatus—and thought himself already visited with the nightmare resulting from his unwise revelling? One is sitting in a cafe, the last one open, alone with an innocent bock, when a piercing shriek, the screech and grind and rumble of wheels, the clatter of buffers, suddenly insults the night. Startled by the fiendish noise one looks up in alarm. A train, a real train, with locomotive, goods trucks, guard’s van, and steam whistle, is advancing down the middle of the street. The engine, of archaic design, might have come from the museum in Exhibition Road. Its bell-shaped funnel belches volumes of dirty yellow smoke amid which tongues of dull red flame confirm the diabolical character announced by the sounds of its approach. It drags a row of covered vans, immensely tall, on tiny wheels, reminiscent of Victorian bathing machines. On top of the last, enthroned on a sort of coachman’s box, sits the guard. By means of a long piece of string—or rather of several pieces knotted together—lie is able to communicate with his confrere on the footplate. He is also equipped with a little trumpet, which he sound's at every corner as one would the horn of a motorcar, though the utmost blast, produced is quite inaudible above the roar of the juggernaut’s progress. You gaze and rub your eyes, as one might at meeting some prehistoric monster, a dinosaur or a sabre-toothed tiger, in one of the avenues of the Luxembourg gardens. What, is it? Whence, and why, and whither? Nobody knows. Then there are the road sweeps. They have Renault motors of an obsolete pattern. The driver, sitting high above his whirling brush, reminds one of a man on a pennyfarthing- bicycle. The sweeps hunt in couples, and always seem to be bursting with energy. I once watched a pair of them scouring a rond-point. Like a pair of coquettish love birds they chased each other round and round, making a smaller circle each time. When every square inch of road had been polished, the leader of the two, after feinting twice at an opening, suddenly dived down a side street. The other was after like a knife, and they had vanishedin a moment; but for long after, their giddy gyrations could be heard fussily churning up the silence. Strangest of all are the subterranean operations. I think they must have something to do with, the sewers. Everything at all sinister in Paris has something to do with its sewers. It is a tradition, like crime in Limehouse. The bands employed on this Augean labour are heavily booted and

wear leather jerkins girt with great brass buckled belts. To come upon them at work is like stumbling on some plot to undermine Paris or deflect the course ot the Seine. A complex portable plant, of boilers, steam pumps, water tanks, and what not, completely blocks the street, across which great black pipes lie in serpentine coils. Front below the ground comes an awful gurgling’, as though the dregs of the earth itself were being sucked. Further down the road enormous four-or-five-horse wagons, carrying cylindrical cisterns, are drawn up as if for the start of a marathon. When the gurgle has become an agonised sob, the engines are all stopped, more of the conspirators emerge from holes and evil-looking passages, the pipes are disconnected and packed on their tumbrils, and every trace of the deed effaced. Then the whole cortege sets out for another quarter, leaving phe wagons to trundle oil in the direction of the quays.