the big Gruyere - under Paris

With metro tunnels, sewers, old quarries and catacombs crisscrossing under its streets, Paris is a city of layers. And Charles Axel Guillaumot is often credited with saving the city from collapsing into them. Traces of him – and key moments in history such as the French revolution – can still be found underground today.

If you want to know anything about what’s underneath Paris, you could try to find some cataphiles, people who spend time exploring the catacombs with flashlights and waders. But for the history, the man to talk to is Gilles Thomas, my friend.
A wiry, moustached man, Thomas works for the city of Paris, but he is passionate about what’s underneath it, both physically and historically.
The authorities, he says, are only interested in the structural soundness of what’s above ground - he's interested in preserving the history underneath.

The buildings of Paris were built out of the limestone and gypsum – or plaster of Paris – dug out of its belly. The Romans, who founded the city on the Ile de la Cité, found limestone along the riverbanks. “Then the city grew,” explains Thomas. “Around the 12th and 13th century, there was a big demand for stone, because there was a spike in the population of Paris and of religiosity.”

The Notre Dame cathedral was built around this time, along with several other churches, all of them needing stone, which meant digging further underground. Initially, the quarries were far outside the city, beneath fields. But then the city expanded and those fields became city streets.

“Paris, as it grew, was built over the old quarries,” says Thomas. And over the years, people forgot about the quarries and continued to build on top of them - until they started collapsing.That’s where Guillaumot comes in. An architect for King Louis XVI, he was appointed 334 years ago on 4 April 1777 as the city’s first Inspecteur des Carrières, Quarries Inspector.

He was given three tasks, explains Thomas, “to look for all the empty spaces under Paris; to make a map of them; and to reinforce anything under public streets and buildings belonging to the king.”
“Before the year 1777, the temples, palaces, houses and the public streets of several parts of Paris and its surrounding areas, were about to sink into giant pits,” Guillaumot wrote in a 1797 memoir.

He quickly realised that reinforcing the quarries was a long-term project, so he needed to put a system in place. “Neither I nor my collaborators will see the end of it,” he wrote. “Others will have this opportunity, but I have reason to believe that we have paved the road for them, and they will not have any fundamental changes to make on the system that I implemented.”

The system involved building walls - underground – along the perimeters of buildings, which still exist today.
A limestone quarry under the Cochin hospital in the 14th arrondisement still exists today, maintained by an association that has an agreement with the city to renovate and maintain it.

Gilles Thomas works with the association, and insisted on giving a tour, saying that the only way to truly appreciate the history of the quarries is to see it for yourself. The Cochin quarry is not far from the official catacombs, which are open to the public, but it is certainly not as easy to find. Navigating through the hospital’s emergency room entrance, winding through the hospital grounds, Thomas heads into an underground parking area where there is a non-descript door.
Behind the door is a room with old photos and maps of what’s underneath the streets: blue for the empty spaces, brown for the masses left to hold up the quarry ceilings, all laid out in a rough grid.Another door leads to a long concrete stairway that was built in the 1930s when the city turned underground spaces under administrative buildings into bunkers.

And about 20 metres down is the entrance to the quarry.Unlike the public catacombs, which are mainly hallways packed with human bones, this quarry has open spaces with columns. The walls are limestone, the ground is packed dust. Street signs are engraved on columns and walls.
"When you are above ground, you can ask people for directions,” Thomas points out but in the 18th century Guillaumot and his workers had to wander in the dark, holding candles to light their way.

Traces of the first quarry inspector are everywhere, as each reinforcement wall and pillar has a code engraved on it, like 1G1786, which indicates the first column built by Guillaumot in 1786.

Every engraving had a date, but Thomas says you will be hard-pressed to find 1789, the year of the French revolution.
“You’ll see 1777, and years during the revolution, but there are very few from 1789, because it was year when there were other things to think about,” he says.

Guillaumot was imprisoned during the revolution, and removed from his position because he had been appointed by the king.
Later, in 1795, he was given his job back. He reappears on inscriptions with dates referencing the republican calendar, which was introduced between 1792 and 1806. The inscription 22.G.12R indicates the 22nd column built by Guillaumot during the 12th year of the French republic.

Thomas says the work of the Quarries Inspector continued through all of the upheavals of French history.
“Whatever the troubled history in Paris and in France, there was always being work done the quarries - during the revolution, during the terreur,” he says. And traces of this remain: street signs with scratched-out fleur de lys, the royal symbol, because in 1793, anything having to do with royalty was systematically destroyed.

Or not quite everything. Ten signs with fleur de lys remain underground.

“There are so few, that there is an explanation for each one,” he says. The one above the number 270, for example, survived because it was in a pool of water. Another one was on the back of a sign that had been recarved.

In 1794, all references to religion were destroyed. Signs for streets named after saints, like Rue Saint Jacques or Rue Saint Paul were changed, above and below ground.

“The plaques made during the revolution just say Rue Jacques,” says Thomas. “And during the restoration, as there is no room between Rue and Jacques, some just carved a little “St” over it.”Vestiges of this still exist above ground. Look closely at the stone carved street signs on the corner of Rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques and Rue Fossés Saint Jacques, you can see that the Saint was scratched out and put back. The same exists on Rue Saint Paul in the Marais.

Nearing the end of the tour, we come across members of the association setting up an underground lunch, taking a break from their renovation work.And then it was time to walk back through the ages: through the 19th-century tunnels, up the 20th-century stairwell and into the air of the 21st century.
Cara - Tuesday

rules of shopping in Paris

Have you ever wondered about the Paris shops with a sign 'entrée libre' - not so common any more - but you can still find shops with a sign on the door reading “entrée libre”— literally “free” or “unrestricted entry.” When I first visited here this struck me as very odd. Why have a sign on a store announcing that people can come in? Isn’t that pretty much what having a store is all about? Isn’t it kind of like having a sign on a preschool saying “children allowed”? I imagined an entrepreneur giving a pitch to potential investors: “I’ve got this incredible revolutionary idea for a retail venture. You’ll probably think I'm crazy but just hear me out. What I’m going to do is rent a ground-floor storefront space, fix it up nicely, stock it with products, and then — hold on to your seats now, because this is the really beautiful part — I’m actually going to let people come in, off the street, and purchase the goods! Yes! Try to picture it! But we’ve got to move fast before someone else beats us to it!”
Later it occurred to me that maybe the reason for the entrée libre sign was to distinguish these shops from the exclusive jewelers and antique dealers that only receive customers by appointment. But even that turned out to be wrong. The point is this: traditionally, entry to a French retail outlet is by default not free and unrestricted — the understanding is that once you set foot inside you are going to buy something. You can’t be “just looking.” I say “traditionally” because most stores no longer observe this custom. Over the past 20 years or so, entrée libre has become the default — except for food shops, which are still the holdout. That’s why most butchers, bakers, greengrocers and fish mongers are open to the street or have a huge display window: you’re supposed to be able to see their wares before entering and refrain from taking up their space, time, attention and oxygen unless you have firm plans to blow some euros.
But the first rule of course is to say Bonjour/Madame Monsieur and make eye contact with the shopkeeper. If you don't that's a sign of disrespect and that you are a foreigner. After all, this is the shopkeeper's 'maison' and you as such are a semi-invited guest.
Shoppers violate this rule at their peril. I once went to a wine shop hoping to find a specific brand of an obscure aperitif. There were four or five customers ahead of me and only one clerk. All of the bottles on sale were readily visible and, seeing that they didn’t have what I wanted and that it might be 15 minutes before I could even explain this (another unposted rule: no talking to the sales staff out of turn), I wheeled around and headed for the door. The clerk was vividly unhappy about this and called after me, “Oh, Madame!” with a look of outraged exasperation on his face, as though I had just loudly released a fog of paint-blistering flatulence and was now fleeing the scene. In the civic interest, I would suggest that to avoid confusion, the remaining non-entrée libre stores put up a notice saying the exact opposite: “sortie payante” – entry may be free, but getting out is going to cost you.


Cara - Tuesday home respite from the road

What the French are obsessing about, Chirac, ETA, diamonds in the drain

Here's the update on Chirac; no guillotine and not even a trial.

Following up on Chirac’s case from last week’s post - his criminal trial began Monday, but it was quickly suspended. Mr. Chirac, 78, the first head of state to be tried since the Vichy leader Philippe Pétain was convicted of treason in 1945, is accused of padding the Paris payroll with ghost workers who were political cronies while he was mayor from 1977 to 1995.

But on Monday, his lawyers challenged a previous decision to dismiss a statute of limitations on the charges, arguing that it violated the Constitution. The judge suspended the hearing, saying he would rule later on whether the issue should be evaluated by the Court of Cassation, which could delay the trial for months. So, as some Paris pundits predict, a lot might happen before then. Or not.



This weekend a Basque ETA leader, one of four ETA suspects, was discovered in an operation by French police and the antiterrorist unit. This strikes home since Murder in Passy, my new book set in 1997, deals with the ETA and the Basque struggle. Even now they are still making headlines.

Arriola, alias 'Xarlas', the "new military chief of ETA," was arrested in a house where firearms and documents were seized.

ETA is blamed for the deaths of 829 people in its four-decade campaign of bombings and shootings to force the creation of a Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France.





Spanish authorities believe their campaign against ETA has crippled its operational capacity, with dozens of arrests, including a number of top leaders, made in co-operation with France.

ETA declared on January 10 a "permanent and general ceasefire" to be verified by the international community.

It was the first unilateral declaration of a permanent ceasefire in ETA's campaign of bombings and shootings for a homeland independent of Spain. But Spain's Prime Minister rejected the declaration, saying he wanted nothing less than ETA's dissolution, and the authorities have vowed to hunt down ETA members.ETA had announced a ceasefire in March 2006 within the framework of negotiations with Madrid. But nine months later, it set off a bomb in the car park of Madrid's airport, killing two men.

There has been no attack on Spanish soil since August 2009.



Remember those jewels thieves in drag who robbed Harry Winston’s off the Champs Elysees a few Christmasses ago?


Part of the loot has been discovered in a sewer drain on the outskirts of Paris. Nineteen rings and three sets of earrings – one pair valued at €14 million were dug up from a drain hidden in a plastic container set in a cement mold inside the sewer. The bold Harry Winston jewel robbery on Dec. 5, 2008, netted the thieves – some dressed as women and wearing wigs – gems and bejewelled watches worth up to €85 million

The Harry Winston boutique is on a street off the Champs-Elysees Avenue dotted with fashion houses and cafés. The robbery, carried out while Christmas shoppers strolled outside, was among the most audacious in France in recent memory.



The heist's suspected mastermind, had been sentenced to 15 years in prison in a drug trafficking case. On a tip, Police discovered stolen jewellery and €760,000 at his house. And in the drain.

A guard at the Harry Winston boutique put police on the trail of the suspects. When investigators learned that an Israeli was expected in Paris to buy some of the stolen jewels, police moved in to make the arrests.

Cara - Tuesday on the book tour

a man walks into a room with a gun....

Raymond Chandler is quoted as saying whenever he ran out of ideas when writing he always fell back on having a man walk into a room with a gun.
Today we'd want to know the model and a plethora of other things about this gun. And of course nowadays really shooting one is almost mandatory if you're writing crime fiction.

I get a lot of questions about ‘flics’. That’s the term for police in Paris my French friends use. I use flic in my books and people always ask does that mean ‘cop’ and I say oui. Some Parisians still call police ‘poulet’ which means chicken. It’s not prejorative but stems from the ancient days when the Prefecture, the Paris central police building, was built over the old chicken market. Go figure but the name’s stuck over the centuries. “Gendarmes’ aren’t exactly police since 1) they’re under the Ministry of Defense kind of para-military 2) they only operate outside Paris

Paris has it’s own force so to speak and yet there are lots of divisions and bureaus and some fall under the Ministry of Interior and some under the Ministry of Defense. It gets ‘tres complique’ as they say and I’ve got the organizational charts and diagrams a Police commissioner gave me somewhere but hey…I’d rather tell you about a memorable occasion with the flics when I got to shoot a gun. Over the years researching in Paris for my books, I’ve met private detectives, flics, some ministry officials who greatly contribute to details and procedure in my work. They help me a lot and I’m eternally grateful.

But it happened by chance one day that I got to go a Paris Police firing range. Pure luck and incredible timing, as a lot of things do in Paris; the right time, the right person and my friend’s cousin. My friend, (name withheld to protect the undercover officer’s ID), is a Paris Police officer, she used to be a ‘flic’ and walk the street beat for ten years in the Bastille area. Now she’s in a mobile undercover squad and can’t tell me the name of it – secret – but at this time she walked the beat. We were having lunch in a Montmartre bistro and I was asking about her cases, her co-workers and somehow we got around to gun practice. I think I said, ‘so I guess you have to go outside of Paris to keep up your skills or something, right?’ I mean I couldn’t imagine a densely populated city like Paris with firing ranges. She blinked ‘Not at all, I practice not far from here. Matter of fact my cousin supervises the range.’ Needless to say, after I ordered her a special dessert she said ‘Like to see it? I’ll call and see if he’s there.’

It was a hot September day, I wore flipflops and light pants but that didn’t deter me.’I'd love to,” I said and thank God I had my camera. After several calls and arrangements, we hopped in (name withheld) car and ended up under railway lines in an old rail warehouse. Nothing official, no signs only a fence to cross. Not far from the the Gare du Nord but in Paris. (Name withheld) cousin seemed thrilled to see her and there was lots of cheek kissing with him and with all the ‘flics’ and CRS the riot squad guys there practicing. I think we kissed about six guys. Can you imagine doing that here? But in France that’s what you do, even if you don’t know each other. It’s like a handshake.

Inside it was pure warehouse with redpaper figure targets at one end, a tar-like stretch with white lines in between and just plop yourself where you like and start shooting at the end. I mean all the distance markers were in meters and I felt clueless. One flic smiled, pointed at the target ‘take it from here’ then he handed me a Manhurin hand gun.

(They now use Sig Sauers but in 2005 when I went to the range – and my hair was red then – the flics still used Manhurin.) Just like that. Weren’t you supposed to wear ear muffs and visors? I must have looked surprised because they all burst out laughing ‘Silleee amercaine’ then handed me ear muffs and a visor. I shot beebee guns when I was a kid, but only a real pistol once at a practice firing range in San Francisco. And that had been six years before. I smiled and said ‘(Name withheld) you go first.’

Well (Name withheld) did and hit the target’s face bullseye about ten times. Now my turn. Everyone was smiling and watching me, standing in a skirt and flipflops. The Manhurin was heavy and I kept closing my eyes every time I fired…a big no no. Total amateur me. The upshot being I at least hit the paper 7 out of 10 times. I don’t think those flics ever laughed that hard at the firing range before.

‘Don’t you want to bring your trophy home,’(Name withheld) asked. So we tramped over the tar-like stretch with spent bullet casings and got them. I picked up a few spent shells, put them in a Baggie so I’d have them to refer to when I got home. Outside the range they figured they’d have more fun and decided to handcuff me.

Flashing ahead…back home in San Francisco two weeks later, unpacking my suitcase. There’s the baggie with the shell casings…how in the heck did that go through security in my luggage? I’d forgotten about it. And then I put my flipflops on but they were scruntchy and hard. So I turned them over and found the flipflop soles studded with bullet casings. They must have melted in from tar-like surface. And these had gone thru security too…Make you wonder doesn’t it about TSA…
Nothing to do with this post but a photo from CrimeFest in Bristol with Peter, Emily and Stan after a whiff of Yrsaa's shark!

Cara - Tuesday
Book Launch next week