Lindsay Lowend and the electrocuted dog

Last week we went to see Lindsay Lowend play at "La Bellevilloise". This venue, in the heart of Paris' 20th arrondissement, is three blocks away from where we used to live on the rue de l'Est so I know the neighborhood well.

"Un rond, c'est un carré qui a mal tourné", rue de l'Est
© Perry Tak - 08/2007 Les rues de Paris

We found a parking spot on the rue des Pyénées, right next to the Place du Guignier. A guignier is a kind of cherry tree although the only cherries I've ever seen in this place are in the stalls on market day.

place du Guignier - "Ceci n'est pas un Magritte"
© Jacques Deneux - 04/2009 Les rues de Paris

La Place du Guignier may seem calm and picturesque but for me it will always be:

The place of the electrocuted dog

after an incident that took place on Sunday, 27 January 2013. One of our neighbors, a middle-aged woman, owned a small, black, yappy dog. The dog would stand at the sliding glass windows on the second floor and bark incessantly at passersby, in particular at those accompanied by dogs which happened to be our case. That evening the neighboor took her dog for a walk in the square around the corner from the apartment. The weather had been damp, through a kind of "capillarity", some stripped wires electrified the metal manhole cover. When the small, black dog (yes, I know the photo accompanying the article shows a white dog but it is a stock photo, the dog was black), anyhow, when the tiny dog walked across the electrified manhole cover he received a discharge of about 180 volts. The woman tried to rescue her dog and she also received an electrical shock but she was not killed. It was, indeed, a rather tragic occurrence and one that certainly marked my memory. This story, however, did not impress the person accompanying me.




As usual, Lindsay Lowend's show was great...

 and I even got my picture with him!

The "Garde-Manger"

For years I have been fascinated by the day-to-day living conditions of Jacky's childhood in the working class neighborhood of Belleville in the 20th arrondissement of Paris or what I call his Le Ballon Rouge childhood (aka "The Red Balloon", the 1956 children's film classic by Albert Lamorisse). This is more than simply a fortuitous reference as the film was shot on location in Ménilmontant which is a part of Belleville and in 1956 Jacky was 7 years old, about the age of the film's protagonist. For me, it seems a childhood out of a totally different era and much more exotic than my pre Castro Cuban and post Castro American one...

Although his family was solidly middle class (after all his father was an engineer and made a good living), his stingy housewife mother of Auvergnat descent refused to move to a nicer, (i.e., more expensive) neighborhood. He fondly recalls the narrow cobblestone streets, the steep stairs, the dilapidated buildings, the neighborhood cinemas, cafés and shops and most of all, the hilly, weed covered vacant lot where the film's climax takes place: it was his playground as well as that of the gamins shown in the film.

He recalls less fondly his mother's centime pinching ways: the tiny family apartment of 31 square meters (or 333.68 square feet) for a family of four. His mother's adamant refusal to buy a television set, his father who designed vehicles but would not drive a car, the fold-out bed in a corner of the living-dining room on which he slept until he left for the army at age 19 and having to bathe either in a zinc tub in the family kitchen or at the public bain-douches.

In 1989 when we were in Paris for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Jacky's niggardly mother would not allow us to stay in their apartment (even though she and his sister were out of town). The best she could do for us was to allow us to stay in a vacant apartment in the building to which she held the keys. The apartment was, indeed, completely vacant, so we slept on inflatable mattresses on the floor and only ate take out food with plastic utensils, having no means to cook. But we had hot water, electricity, a roof over our heads and no Paris hotel expenses.

It was in that apartment that I discovered what Jacky referred to as the "frigo parisien" (aka "garde-manger") in the kitchen cum bathroom (i.e., a shower stall set up in one corner of the kitchen, the toilet was in a separate closet-like room by the entry).


A common feature of parisian apartments starting the end of the 19th century, the "garde-manger" (aka pantry) or "frigo parisien" is commonly found under the kitchen windows. It is a cabinet with louvers and screening used to store food. When we first visited the Paris apartment we bought, one of the first items that caught my attention was the under the window kitchen pantry. It was, in my mind, a definite exotic plus.

But this cabinet's interior had been panelled, the screening and louvers blocked, the doors and locks covered with layers and layers of paint. I knew I had my work cut out for me. As soon as we bought the apartment, one of the first things I did was to strip the paint from the doors and the locks.

Then, I tore out all of the panelling and the rusty screening and replaced it with new, clean plastic screening, stapled into place.


Eh, voila, my finished "frigo parisien"!