THE SAINT-PLACIDE METRO STATION was nearest to my language school, in Paris.
More Gallic irony, because that particular Métro entrance was anything but placid. The south-east orientation of the entrance tunnel, urged along by the transit snakes roaring through the darkness below, caused a ferocious headwind as I kite-winged down the staircase. But that was part of my exhilaration: A tempest of change, storm-tossing me forward!
The station was named for Saint Placid, who was rescued from drowning when Saint Benedict ordered Saint Maurus to run across the surface of a pond to rescue his brother. All three thereby qualified for beatification, which must have made them glad they hadn’t simply gone out for breakfast that morning, instead.
This trio of saints had nothing on their brother Saint Augustine, of course, who worked hard at sinning, perhaps to up the juiciness factor for his own Confessions. If only I’d had that idea! I invoke him here as the patron saint of memoir, a French word that translates roughly as “TMI for fun and profit.”
Augustine practically invented oversharing, as his libertine youth included premarital adventurism, blood lust at coliseum spectacles, and—brace yourself—stealing pears in an orchard. Thank goodness he converted to Christianity at age 32 (aka: the boring part of his life), or nobody would ever pick up another memoir, aside from his.
I considered myself something of a Saint-Placide miracle, as well, having been granted a means to run under the surface of Paris without personally burrowing under Montmartre or drowning in the Seine. The Vatican—to the extent that it acknowledges anything in atheistic, orally-fixated France—ought to beatify Fulgence Bienvenüe, the transportation engineer who built the Metro and rescued Paris from 10,000 horses, each of which produced 50 pounds of manure a day. I’ll do the math for you: That’s half a million pounds of merde! hitting the streets every 24 hours.
According to Susan Plotkin’s boring-sounding-but-actually-fascinating The Paris Metro: A Ticket to History, mass transit in Paris in the 1870s was more like mess transit, with a hundred million passengers crossing the city in horse-drawn omnibuses while pressing scented hankies to their noses. It makes the clamor and stink of today’s New York subway seem like a flight on Aladdin's rug.
This being France, they fought over a solution for twenty-five years, with the city leaders of Paris prevailing against the effete railroad barons on behalf of les citoyens, to build transit for masses, rather than the elites. Enter St. Fulgence—see, it works—a one-armed railroad engineer who designed the water-delivery sluices that brought l’eau to the city, laid out the roadbed for the Place de la République, and installed a cable car to the top of Belleville hill.
These accomplishments qualified him for the Metro job, though, as Plotkin points out, with just one arm, Fulgence Bienvenüe personally couldn’t wield a shovel. Construction on the first six lines began in 1880s, in advance of the world showing up for the Exposition Universelle in 1890. The first line, connecting west to east, was completed in just sixteen months, and sixteen million passengers rode it that first year.
The horse-apple avalanche was over.
M. Bienvenüe continued burrowing beneath Paris for another 35 years, retiring at age 82 with twelve of thirteen lines completed and the Maine metro station—underneath the La Tour Montparnasse—renamed in his honor. Beats walking across a lake to rescue a sinking monk.
Bienvenüe got the horse manure off the boulevards, but, blessedly, he did not eliminate the fragrance of mass transport. From my first moments underground I was intoxicated by the perfume of the modern day Metro, which, to my nose, beat the ones emanating from the boulangerie near the entrance to the Saint-Placide Metro station.
The comforting scent of pain au chocolat roots you in place, to inhale and savor right now, while the far-reaching fragrance of the Metro is suggestive, transporting. As a sommelier of mass transit, I would describe its “nose” as the waft of burning leaves combined with an off-gassing of fresh rubber and the tang of dark mustard. There are notes of urine and burning brake pads and ripe citizenry in there, too.
Tant pis: The Métro is a complex sensory experience.
It has been triggering for me, during a lifetime of visits. The brain’s olfactory bulb nestles next to the hippocampus, the seat of learning and memory, which explains why fragrance is my ultimate Métro connection. Even now I associate eau de underground with my first discovery of Paris: I was a mole using smell to propel me through mental tunnels toward vivid memories.
*On Fridays I run excerpts from The Road to Elsewhere, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. Or dive in here, here, or even here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter has arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere. If it’s too much to read, just look at the illustrations. They’re my favorite part, too.