Métro stop Paris An underground history of the City of Light

IF the romance of Paris is a cultural commonplace, so too is its reputation for depths that can never be plumbed, a code that cannot be deciphered. "You might know every street in Paris," observed Henry Miller, one of the city's best-known expatriates, "and not know Paris." Cole Porter likewise cautioned that "you may know Paris, but you don't know Paree." Yet clichés (if you'll pardon the cliché) ring true for a reason; accordingly, "Métro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light" confirms the notion that there is always something more to learn about France's capital. Written by Gregor Dallas, this "thinker's guide to Paris" attempts to probe unexplored or underappreciated aspects of the city's history. To this end, Dallas, whose books include a study of the Loire peasantry and a biography of Georges Clemenceau, offers a dozen vignettes from different historical eras, each tale at least ostensibly associated with a specific Parisian neighborhood. The organizing principle of Dallas's investigation, he explains in the book's introduction, is the Parisian subway system: "I will take the traveler through the cheapest and most convenient system of transport: the city's underground, or 'métro' as it is known in Paris, and stop at certain key stations where we will observe a building, a street, a statue, a tombstone or some other landmark that will spark off a story that tells us a lot about the character of the city." Selecting 12 stops on five subway lines, he proceeds to construct what he rather grandly calls "a life cycle, beginning with death and ending with death": the tour begins at the Hell's Gate catacombs in southern Paris and ends at Oscar Wilde's grave at Père Lachaise cemetery in the east. Dallas offers no real justification for the choices of these or the other points on his itinerary, except the truism that "in death there is of course rebirth: a very Parisian theme, I would say." According to this (not altogether convincing) logic, the burial grounds that bookend his tour are necessary pendants to "the life of the city: its saints, its struggle for birth - and the rights of children - and the process by which art is born, in sculpture, in music, in cuisine, in literature and even in philosophy." The elements on this eclectic list in turn inform the rest of Dallas's "underground history." The city's saints are represented by St. Vincent de Paul, who in the 17th century established the city's first foundling hospital (Métro Stop 2: Gare du Nord); and by St. Denis, the first bishop of Paris, who after being decapitated at the Roman emperor's behest reportedly got up and walked out of the city with his head tucked under his arm (Métro Stop 6: Porte de Clignancourt). The arts come into focus in chapters on the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle (Métro Stop 4: Montparnasse), the composer Claude Debussy (Métro Stop 9: Opéra) and, to a lesser extent, the novelist Émile Zola (Métro Stop 7: Châtelet-Les Halles), whom Dallas invokes chiefly as a source of information on the vast expansion of the city's central marketplace during the Second Empire. (This may also be the section in which the author believes he has addressed "the process by which art is born...in cuisine," though in truth, descriptions of pungent cheeses and bloody meats drawn from Zola's novel "Le Ventre de Paris," or "The Belly of Paris," constitute the current book's sole culinary matter.) Philosophy makes its appearance in a predictable discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist thought, as articulated at the tables of Paris's legendary Café de Flore (Métro Stop 5: Saint-Germain-des-Prés). Politics, crucial to any account of Parisian life, takes center stage in the book's two strongest chapters: one on Oscar Wilde's improbable involvement in the Dreyfus Affair (Métro Stop 12: Père Lachaise) and one on the Marquis de Mores (Métro Stop 8: Porte de la Villette), a 19th-century free-trade activist with a fondness for cowboy costumes and a hatred of "parasitic" Jews. Although unfailingly colorful, these dramatis personae ultimately prove too disparate to yield any coherent picture of the city's "character." More disappointing still, Dallas's emphasis on his characters' exploits prevents him from paying any sustained attention to the sites that, he claims, inspire each story. By the end of the chapters on the Porte de Clignancourt, the Trocadéro and Montparnasse, in particular, I had almost completely lost sight of the geographical markers in question, for the simple reason that they figured so tangentially in the action. The central drama of the Trocadéro chapter, for instance, is Anaïs Nin's decision to abort the child she conceived while having extramarital affairs with both Henry Miller and the German psychoanalyst Otto Rank, who had moved to Paris after breaking with Freud. But although we learn that Rank lived near the Trocadéro and that there were many abortion clinics in the surrounding neighborhood (Dallas cannot and does not attempt to prove that Nin had the procedure near her lover's apartment), the monument itself practically disappears from view. That the chapter concludes with a comparison between the Trocadéro's wide-angled gray walls and "the thighs of a woman giving birth" does not, to my mind, help matters. Rather, it reads like a last-ditch - and distasteful - effort to reintroduce a geographical conceit that has long since fallen by the wayside. For this reason, the would-be tour-taker might want to ditch the book in favor of an actual jaunt to the City of Light. As Dallas himself modestly concedes, "it really would be better to take that trip and look for yourself." Nonetheless, "Métro Stop Paris" is not without its rewards. These reside principally in the book's abundance of such tantalizing biographical tidbits as the fact that Princess Marie Bonaparte was descended from "the founder of Monte Carlo's gambling casino - as few people knew." And that Marcel Proust's doctor tended to Debussy's first wife, Lilly, after she failed to kill herself with a revolver shot to the chest. And that Bourdelle's second wife was named Cléopâtre. And that Georges Clemenceau described Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer whose unjust imprisonment by French military officials at the end of the 19th century touched off the national scandal that immortalized his name, as looking like "a pencil merchant." And that the last word Otto Rank uttered on his deathbed was "Komisch." "Comical? Strange? Peculiar?" Dallas asks rhetorically of this last detail, reviewing the German word's multiple meanings. "Rank, 55 years old, carried the joke to his grave." Here again, we find that persistent myth of Paris - a riddle without an answer. Q.E.D.: You may know Paris, but you don't know Paree. 'Métro Stop Paris' confirms the notion that there is always something more to learn about the city. Caroline Weber, a professor of French literature at Barnard College, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review. Her "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution" recently appeared in paperback.

Paris' famous subterranean transport system, the Metro, offers at its every stop a particular slice of the city's grand history. Dallas doesn't dwell on the construction or history of this elegantly designed subway. Instead, he exploits the Metro's passageways to tell the human history of Paris. Selecting 12 stops, he recounts tales of some of the characters who inhabited each station's neighborhood. The Trocadero stop summons up memories of Anaïs Nin and her lover Dr. Rank.The Gare du Nord neighborhood once witnessed St. Vincent de Paul's exemplary charitable relief. The Parisian episode of St. Bartholomew's Massacre occurred near what would become the Saint-Paul station. The old terminus of Line 7 at Port de la Villette held Paris' stockyards, source of meats hawked in Les Halles. Saint-Germain-des- Près opens into the heart of Paris' intellectual soul, exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre. This is an unusual but remarkably readable guide to Paris.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2008 Booklist

Historian Dallas's conceit--a Metro tour of Paris in 12 episodes--offers a wonderful opportunity to examine key moments and characters in the city's history, which he does with verve, style and originality. All 12 tableaux are subtly linked by the themes of birth and death, which in Dallas's hands, permeate Paris's history through the centuries. The first stop is Denfert-Rochereau, in the part of Paris once called "Hell," where the catacombs are located and where the guillotine was moved in 1830. Indeed, there are several beheadings in Dallas's tales, not to mention the death of King Henri II in a jousting match, unleashing a bloodbath that included the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. The author offers irreverent appraisals of other royals and noblemen whose folly invariably led to bloodshed. On the other hand, the last stop is, fittingly, the Pe Lachaise cemetery, whose visitors, despite the surrounding graves, "have a glimpse of hope in their eyes: one soul may be gone, but another is always born." Dallas is equally adept at cultural, political and military history, presenting a close-up view of the now-demolished Les Halles through Zola's novel The Belly of Paris and a rousing account of the weeks leading up to the French Revolution. Anyone who loves Paris will love this book. (May) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.