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Dixième delights
Tim Heald
I FIRST went to Paris with my father in the 1950s. My black and white box
Brownie picture shows him standing in the Champs-Elysées staring ferociously at
a map held between extended arms. He’s lost. It makes me wonder how we won the
war. A decade or so earlier he’d been awarded an MC and an immediate DSO
fighting through Europe and here he is, a newly retired colonel, adrift in tweed
a mile or so from where our BEA flight touched down at Le Bourget.
I don’t know what he’d have thought if he were still alive and realised that his
son had, half a century later, gone back to Paris by train through the Chunnel
thanks to a special offer on the internet from Britain’s largest supermarket
chain. It was a Christmas present to my wife: Eurostar and a couple of nights at
the Grand Hotel for £119 a head.
Part of the attraction of this trip was the 10th arrondissement. The 10th is as
unfashionable as the Tesco offer was naff. In the past, whenever I’ve arrived at
the Gare du Nord I’ve headed straight for the Métro or the taxi rank and
high-tailed it somewhere else. You wouldn’t hang around near the station any
more than a visitor to London would spend all their time within walking distance
of Paddington or Waterloo.
And yet I’ve been visiting Paris on and off for half a century, never staying
terribly long, often on my way somewhere else. I love it for its familiarity and
its foreignness, for the way in which it has come to symbolise safe abroad.
Going back regularly is half the fun, but even after all these years of
acquaintance I had only the flimsiest fix on the Dixième. I hadn’t even enjoyed
a meal at the Terrasse du Nord, the famous brasserie just over the road from the
Gare du Nord which is a sort of upmarket station buffet. I hadn’t the foggiest
idea who lived there or if there was anything in the Dixième I ought to see. The
district was virtually off my map.
The Dixième was the historian Richard Cobb’s first arrondissement and of all
Englishmen, Richard — who was both my academic and, unbelievably, my ‘moral’
tutor for three years — was possibly the most Parisian Englishman ever. Someone
once told him that he spoke French ‘comme un titi parisien’ and it was the
compliment he valued more highly than any. It was worth more to him than his
Légion d’honneur or his CBE.
In his characteristic slim volume called Promenades, Richard devotes an entire
chapter to ‘Le Dixième’. It was not just that it represented his first taste and
smell of the city, it also had a sort of nondescript scruffiness that appealed
to him.
Tim Heald
Article first published in the
The Spectator, 18 February 2006
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