This is the metro entrance at Palais Royal at Place Colette. It was done for the Millenium and is made of hand blown glass from Murano Italy.

Ground-Less in France

The metro stops in Paris always, for the most part, fascinate me. I often sit there on the train as we come to stops and wonder how they came up with some of the names. Most, as you would think, are named after the street they are on or a major site nearby and the names are so interesting such as Stalingrad, Chemin Vert, Télégraphe, Picpus, Chateau d’Eau. I often want to get off and look to see where the names have come from. I’m sure French people know all about the history behind most names. I believe there is even a book out that would increase my knowledge, I just haven’t found one in English yet. It is part of the charm of Paris to see these names and be intrigued by them.
I have a few favorite metro stops. The Louvre Rivoli stop is full of carvings and sculptures such as the ones you will be seeing if you proceed inside to the museum. It is very classy and cultural and I’m wondering if they are copies as they are exposing them to those monsters that do the graffiti in the metro lines. The metro stop at Hotel de Ville at one time had a lot of interesting copies of paintings and photographs done through the years of events occurring at the Hotel including a beheading. I like looking at copies of paintings or drawings done many years ago and look at the style of clothing they wore or what transportation was being used or how the area surrounding the Hotel de Ville has changed. These pictures show pieces of history of this interesting and sometimes brutal city. Then one day, they were all gone and replaced with the history of many of the names of metro stops. I just have to remember to take my French dictionary so I can translate it all.
At Gare de Lyon, a metro stop for a train station, the stop has been made of gigantic columns of iron riveted together and painted bright yellow. It was designed by Eiffel, the man responsible for the Eiffel Tower. I don’t like this metro stop as it is very large and getting to another line always involves a long walk, but I enjoy going into the train station and looking at all of the trains sitting ready to head off into other parts of France and I love a restaurant here called Le Train Bleu that is a step back in time when people who traveled by train wanted luxury as they waited. This restaurant has high vaulted ceilings with scenes from all the parts of France that Gare de Lyon services. There are also gilded cherubs, lace curtains and bathrooms with dark wood doors and old marble sinks. A resident cat who usually sleeps in seldom used rooms. I like to take friends here for a drink and we all sit there amazed at the beauty of it.
One line, number 14, doesn’t have an engineer driving the train. It is all done automatically. The train track at the stop is covered over with a glass tube so people can’t get to the track (there are suicide attempts occasionally on the train tracks). You can get in the front car and sit at the window where the engineer once would have sat and watch the train whiz through the tunnels. The stops themselves are all new and clean with pink marble floors and what looks like tropical gardens behind glass. There is always a bad odor in the stops and in the trains on this line. I’ve heard it’s because the line is so far underground and near “wet” smelling soil and that everything mildews in the moisture or that it is so far underground it is near subterranean gas pockets. I’ve heard it is the fuel used by the trains. I don’t know. It’s just part of the experience of riding on line 14.
My favorite stop of all the Arts et Métiers on line 11 and which is lined entirely with copper. At first I thought it had been constructed to look like a submarine because there are round “windows” and rivets everywhere but above the track are gigantic models of gears and I found that it was supposed to be similar to being inside an engine. The stop is named after a fabulous and interesting museum, one of my favorites. I also like the Abesses stop for all of the wall paintings done by local artists. If you are feeling energetic you can climb the extremely long curving flight of stairs and be charmed by the art work. I delight in the metro entrance there, too, as it is one of two original remaining done by Guimaud in the art deco style.
I have seen a few fights on the metro lines. Twice I have seen men get into fist fights but they aren’t brutal. I guess, in the phrase I’ve heard my son use, they fight like girls with slapping and flapping their hands, but no fists. The most frightening time was when a homeless man boarded when I was on a train one morning. He was one of those scary ones who make eye contact and are belligerent. A young black man sat across the aisle from me and didn’t seem to be bothered by what the man was saying to him. I say he didn’t seem to be, but that was wrong as he suddenly stood up and did a karate kick right into the man’s head. The man went down in the aisle and the young man continued to kick him. Finally, someone got up and talked to him and he stopped. When the train pulled into the station he got off and went to a car several cars down. The homeless man stood up and actually looked around for his assailant hoping, I assume, to resume what he was saying. I was glad to get to my stop.
There are turnstiles to get into each metro station that require a ticket to get through. I often see young, and not so young, people jumping the gate. Sometimes someone will ask if they scoot in behind you and get in on your ticket. Sometimes they don’t ask and suddenly there is some guy behind you with his body pressed against yours which can be startling. Occasionally, there are security police waiting out of sight to give tickets to those not having tickets and the guilty are given large fines. If you let someone go through the stile with you, you get a fine, too. One time a young man in his 20’s tried to get through the gate with my husband and Maurice told him to go and buy his own ticket. We went on down to the waiting area for the train but soon the guy showed up. He had been drinking and started yelling at Maurice. Maurice told me later that he was threatening to push him in front of the train when it arrived. Maurice stood up to him, though, because he feels like people like this get away with threatening and the other person backs down. I was afraid the guy was going to attack Maurice and I got my purse ready to swing if he did. My purse is not a small dainty thing but back pack size and I have it loaded with so many things that I could do serious damage by using it as a weapon. Luckily, I didn’t have to. The guy eventually moved on down the line although he continued to yell things at us.
There are several metro stops that I hate and I often get out my metro map to see if I can avoid them. One is Chatelet which is huge, dirty, filled with people standing around looking like drug dealers to me and lots of teen-agers heading for the Les Halles shopping mall. If you don’t know which street exit you need you can be doomed to roam about for hours and start wondering if this will be another stanza in that song from the 60’s by the Kingston Trio in which they stated, “He Never Returned”. I was once looking for the St Eustache exit and found myself in the shopping mall when I took the wrong exit. Roaming around looking for exits, or sorties as they say here, I finally saw the cathedral through a window and was able to make my way there some time later.
I hate the Franklin D. Roosevelt stop as well. It looks like it hasn’t been touched since the 50’s to me, either by designers or cleaners. It is always dirty with water stains running down the walls and sagging ceilings. They were doing some sort of work there for a while and dozens of black electrical wires were just hanging there all within reach of anyone wanting to touch them. The ceilings are really low and give me a feeling of claustrophobia although I have never experienced this before in my life.
Montparnasse is a huge underground space. I think most of the population of Paris could use this as a bomb shelter if the need ever arose. One day I had an appointment on Blvd. Montparnasse. I thought I had given myself plenty of time. I got off of line 4 and started walking. And walking. After a while I came to one of those moving sidewalks. I was really running late by now so I moved to the left and started walking as fast as I could. I came to the exit I needed 10 minutes later. The area I came out to was also huge and confusing and I couldn’t even tell where Blvd. Montparnasse was as there were so many roads taking off from the roundabout. Luckily, the person I was meeting for my appointment was running late. After that, when I had to be at Montparnasse I took another metro line that involved changing twice so I could arrive closer to the exit I needed.
Then one day I read that a new “moving sidewalk” had been installed under Montparnasse. They were calling it the TGV People Mover. Well I thought this could be interesting. It apparently had been under study for years and had cost a fortune to build. As I had yet another appointment that day I decided to give it a try. Before I reached it I still had a ten minute walk but then I came to the old moving sidewalk area I had used before. And there it was looking rather like something out of Star Trek, all gleaming silver metal and flashing blue lights. At the entrance stood 8 young men there to help the uninitiated. I didn’t see them say or do a thing as the poor naive people about to launch themselves into the unknown went to the entrance.
I saw, at my feet, about 20 feet of thin, metal rollers whirling and turning. I stepped on and immediately grabbed the handle strip on the side as it was like suddenly being on skates. I wobbled and slipped around like a 5 year old on skates for the first time. A woman was in front of me and as she approached the flat rubber moving sidewalk there was a little hump. She almost went down. I decided to hop over the hump and as I landed the fast moving surface I came close to going down myself. Thank God I was wearing jogging shoes. I hoped if anyone approached this thing at the beginning wearing high heels that those helpful young men would direct them to the still present slow moving sidewalk.
Soon we were whizzing along. It was rather cool to pass the people slowly moving along side us like a Mercedes passing a Deux Chavaux on the motor way. Maybe this wasn’t so bad. Then I saw another little hump coming up and there were signs flashing in red and yellow to stop walking. I saw the same lady in front of me wobble and clutch the side. My heart started beating as if I were on a roller coaster getting near the top of the hill knowing that a horrible drop off was on the other side. I grasped the side handle with both hands deciding to “take” the little hump instead of jumping it. I went over and suddenly it was as if I was on ice. I gave a little scream and hung on tightly. A man next to me was doing the same thing and we exchanged glances that said, “Can you believe this?”. He said something in French but I have no idea what he said. Probably it was similar to what I was thinking - never again.
So that was it. My heart beating in my chest I staggered up the metro steps into the sun thankful to be alive. I plan on making two metro line changes the next time I come to Montparnasse. Maybe they should call this thing the TGV People Eater. The next time I was in this metro stop the “People Eater”had been shut down, and continued to be so 3 months later. I think I was not the only one to feel it was dangerous.