The Merry Month of May (14 page)

“Plenty of time for her to go out marching against grown-up police later, if she has to,” Madame smiled, as I finished my beer and paid at the cash desk. “She’s not even University yet.”

“But I will be!” Marcelline said.

“Plenty of time, plenty of time,” Madame said. “You be careful over there,” she said to me, as Marcel the brother-in-law shook hands with me formally for having stoppped by.

I nodded and winked at them.

Harry had said the same thing about being careful over there. Well, I certainly intended to be careful. The footbridge seemed equally crowded with people going to the Left Bank and people coming from the Left Bank.

There was a steady two-way stream across the Cité behind Notre-Dame, and on the Pont de l’Archevêché. The Left Bank quai was jammed up, with a veritable mob of people moving under the leafy shade trees. But the old cathedral looked the same. That old stone barn, raised to tribal blood gods, had been sitting there on its haunches brooding over the bloodletting rituals of mankind for centuries. Beautiful and useless, it squatted over us all. With its high-flung buttresses and stained windows it was certainly a monument, to something or other. In the street lots of the children carried balloons.

I did not feel scared. It was impossible to feel afraid in the gay excitement. This was completely different from the war, and the dense excitement that comes on you like an additional weight of gravity, before going into an attack.

I crossed the Quai de Montebello, after waiting on the traffic light. I entered the narrow mouth of the rue des Bernardins. At once, the crowd stopped moving so much, became almost stationary.

In front of me mainly what I could see were the backs of many heads. Mostly they were the backs of heads of Arab Algerians, who largely lived in this quarter. It is as easy to tell an Algerian by the back of his head as it is a Chinese. They shuffled and craned, but forward movement had stopped. They were not densely massed, and it was easy to slip in and out among them.

Up ahead a big roar went up from the Place Maubert, fading swiftly as it was passed backward through the crowd by all the heads in front of me. The crowd stirred a little on its feet. I went on, slipping in and out, slipping in and out.

At the moment I did not give a damn, and I wanted to see what all this crap was about, that Harry had been talking about in the past few days so proprietarily.

You have to understand the topography of the Left Bank and the place of the Place Maubert in it, to understand its importance during the weeks of rioting. The Seine flows through Paris in one long curve from the East to the Southwest, cutting off as it does so about one-third of the city from the other two-thirds. This one-third is called the Left Bank, and of it about one-fifth, roughly bounded by the Boulevard Raspail on the West and the rue Monge on the East, is called the Latin Quarter. The area is largely dominated by the great pile of the Panthéon, which was built on just about the top of the area’s one hill. It was built as a church, but later was taken over and made into a lay memorial to the French Revolution and to France. The bloodletting rituals played an important part in its history too, and were conspicuously present in its murals and sculpture. A couple of blocks below it, west and toward the river, lies the Sorbonne. And a couple of blocks below that is the junction of the boulevards St.-Michel and St.-Germain.

These two main arteries cross the area of the Latin Quarter in roughly the shape of a crucifix, if you placed Christ’s head at the river. And their junction, called the Carrefour St.-Michel, is the spiritual and emotional heart of the
Quartier Latin.
From it Boul’ St.-Germain curves gently northeast to meet the river at the Pont Sully, and about halfway between these points on the Boulevard lies the Place Maubert.

Maubert is a sort of arrowhead-shaped square and market into which run about six streets, two of which run steeply uphill crossing the rue des Écoles (Street of Schools to you, in English), and dead-end themselves in the big square that surrounds the huge mass of the Panthéon.

Thus, this area is almost in the heart of University ground. The students could descend easily in swarms to fight there from their home-base around the Sorbonne and the Panthéon. They could, as well, fade away and retreat back up the hill when over-matched or out-powered. And the Place Maubert, in addition to having the largest local food market in the area, also had the advantage of being supremely disruptive of traffic, always a student objective, since it junctioned with a main artery from the south side of Paris, which was the rue Monge.

It was almost as good a place to fight as the symbolic Carrefour St.-Michel, and some ways was even better since it had more choice of escape routes and its arrowhead square gave more room to maneuver. It was the perfect place for the students to make a diversionary fight when they wanted to take pressure off the Carrefour.

I came out of the rue des Bernardins into Maubert in exactly the kind of situation Harry had told me to avoid. The police were preparing themselves to charge the students’ barricade. I came out right in among the extreme left of their line. I could have laughed out loud, thinking of Harry, except I realized instantly that any laughter would be exceedingly out of place right here and now.

Across the square a kind of not quite visible fog hung everywhere. The sweetish, acrid smell of tear gas was strong. Already, my eyes felt scratchy. Four automobiles and a couple of grocery bikecarts lay on their sides across the Boulevard St.-Germain right in front of me, but the students had abandoned this barricade. They had slipped their line left over to the mouth of rue Monge across the square, where they had pushed a couple of cars out but hadn’t had time to overturn them. Behind these they pranced, and jumped up and down, and chanted, and whistled and yelled at the police. A couple of them threw one each of the square granite paving stones with which so much of Paris is paved, which fell far short of the police line.

A policeman darted out, threw a gas grenade, which fell just in front of the cars, exploded with a puff, and then lay there smoking.

These were the CRS, armed with the long hickory riot sticks, and carrying shields. They had a different kind of helmet, with a silver strip of ornament running back along the crown. A couple of them right beside me who could not have been more than 19 down there inside their uniforms, goggles, helmets and gloves, glared at me with all the bloodthirst of dedicated head-hunters.

I stopped dead still. There were other people standing around, too. But they had been there. And I was new. In fact, all around the square things were going on normally, only inches it seemed away from the combat. People went into the
tabac
and bought cigarettes and came back out to watch. I stood absolutely still, my hands quiet at my sides. The two boys muttered something, growled almost, tapped their sticks suggestively in their palms, and glared absolutely wall-eyed at me, like horses, with wild-eyed absolutely contemptuous insult.

I knew explosive hatred when I saw it. Every animal does. So much adrenalin pumped into a system has to have release, and the animal part recognizes that. I could probably have backed off, with an obsequious movement. But some other part of me calmly did not think that was the right thing to do, and said quietly inside my head: stand your ground; just, don’t move. But then, any movement of mine at all might have triggered them, and both of them would have me on the ground that quick and be on me beating me. So we stood. Then the officer down the line shouted a command, and my two boys turned and began with the rest of the line to run across the
Place.
One’s coattails brushed me. The moment was over, I was no longer the subject of attentions.

Across the square the students, there were about 30 of them, faded away: into the side streets, or running back uphill up rue Monge. They stopped after they had gone one block. The police stopped after they had passed the improvised two-car barricade.

Of course, everywhere traffic had ceased on the two thoroughfares. I got out a cigarette, and noticed somewhat abstractedly that my hands were shaking a little. I still was not scared, and had not been.

The students had certainly made a mess of the square. Broken glass, wet black ashes of cardboard and wooden crates, piles of the paving stones, and the overturned cars with their windshields and headlights all broken out now littered the area. Large light patches of yellow sand showed where the paving stones had been taken up by the hundreds, the thousands. Fire trucks had sprayed the burning crates and boxes, and the water had carried the greasy black filth of the ashes everywhere. Every shop in the market around the square was closed and shuttered. It was for just this the French all had and firmly maintained iron shutters on their shops. Two ambulances stood silent in the middle of the street, their top lights winking. Units of Red Cross men in their gray uniforms and white helmets waited together, smoking and looking tired and occasionally shrugging their shoulders at each other and at the entire panorama. There were quite a few American and British tourists with cameras, taking pictures. Platoons of the
Gendarmes Mobiles,
different in their black jackets and blue pants from the CRS, stood around holding their unloaded carbines like quarterstaffs, waiting for orders.

For some reason I did not know, a platoon of these filed out and replaced the group of CRS who had captured the two-car barricade.

Public-service workers were already at work struggling to clear the streets.

A block away the students jeered.

The platoon of
Gendarmes Mobiles
got ready to advance another block.

I had noticed that the nearer you got to Maubert and the action the less talking and laughing there was among the crowd. By the same token, I had noticed immediately that the nearer you got to the real action, the less nervous the crowd became, and therefore the less prone to turn and flee a few yards at the first cry or wave of movement up front.

Harry was quite right when he said there was a curious ritualistic quality about it. It was as if there were a tacit but definite set of rules both sides abided by. The police did not really try to capture the students, and the students did not really try to stay and fight hand-to-hand on their barricades. The volleys of paving stones by the students seemed to reach a definite peak and subside, after which the police would prepare to make their charge. It was like a ritual dance almost. There was always a 20 to 40 yard no-man’s-land between the two, with the students on the defensive and retreating slowly, while the police took the offensive by charging, but slowly enough to let the defenders retreat. Their strategy obviously was to take over more and more blocks of streets, while herding the students back away from the Sorbonne until they dispersed. The tactic of the police was to keep close enough and charging, so as not to give the students time to pull up paving stones and erect new serious barricades.

I followed them for maybe an hour. The students backed up rue Monge to rue des Écoles, then backed around to the left on Écoles. The police followed them street by street, charging but never quite reaching them. At the rue Cardinal Lemoine the students turned to the right back uphill, backing toward the Place de la Contrescarpe, another hotbed of student activity like Maubert.

Twice, following Harry’s advice, I circled around on another street to change sides from one side to the other. On these unfought-over streets everything went on normally, and people shopped, though there was a saturation of excitement in the air. On the student side, there were many more students than were out in the street fighting, sort of following along and watching. There were tourists, taking the eternal pictures. Everybody was weeping copiously, and grinning, laughing. On the police side, I was belly-shoved once in the chest by a
Gendarme Mobile,
and told to get back, stay back, when I peered around a corner too quickly after a platoon that was just passing. The original unit of
Gendarmes Mobiles
had been joined by two others, so that they moved up the street after the students in a leapfrogging way, from both sidewalks and in the center.

I saw one student taken in. I did not see him actually captured, so I did not know how they got him. But I saw two
Gendarmes Mobiles
carrying their carbines at the balance in one hand, turn him over to three CRS who were lurking around. There were pairs and trios of CRS all around. It apparently was their job to take care of the captures. These three CRS carried the rubber
matraques
with the iron rod in the center, which while they probably shocked and hurt as much or more than the hickory sticks, did less physical damage. They clubbed the student to the ground with their
matraques,
while he tried to protect his head with his arms, and then got him by the armpits and rushed him wobbling away, his feet half dragging. His eyes were glazed and his mouth hung open, and there were various little streams of blood running down his head out of his long, somewhat greasy hair.

The clubbing was absolutely unnecessary, since he was half out and already bleeding somewhat, when the
Gendarmes Mobiles
turned him over.

And behind me out in the street the other fighting students were shouting and laughing, went on roaring and throwing, having the time of their lives, with a kind of marvelous self-righteousness I had not seen since my own college days and our ‘raids’.

Soon after this I left them. They were still backing up the rue Cardinal Lemoine toward Contrescarpe. The excitement was intense, and it never let up. It was so emotionally exhausting that in time it exhausted you physically as well. I walked back down the hill on Cardinal Lemoine, to pick up a carton of cigarettes at my local
tabac
at the corner of St.-Germain, cross the Pont de la Tournelle and go on home. On my way, I saw a CRS man who evidently had just come off duty, and was on his way home to supper. He had taken off his helmet, and was wearing his cloth overseas cap. He carried his helmet close to his leg, his hand wrapped in the straps, as if trying to make it unobtrusive; or as if signaling with it in a quiet way that he was not working now. He did not have a riot stick, and he did not look guilty. He looked like a working man going home to supper. I got my cigarettes, crossed the bridge past the two camions of CRS still sitting on it there, walked on home to shower and leave my cigarettes, and then went on down to the Gallaghers’ where the American group should be meeting.