Scene from The Lavender Hill Mob

“I had a ticket that I’d bought at a Vélib stand, which wasn’t working,” said Sylvia Whitman, manager of a bookstore in the Latin Quarter. “When I found a stand that was working, there was a queue of people waiting to buy their ticket, but no queue for those who already had one. Yet when I went to get a bike everyone started shouting at me, yelling that they’d been waiting for an hour. What are you supposed to do?”

— from a November 22 story on the Paris transit strike in the International Herald Tribune

J and I spent three days in Paris at the end of our summer trip to France, and tried out a pair of Vélib bikes for fun. They’re clunky things, but perfectly suited for trundling around Paris; and you can’t beat the price: for transients such as ourselves there’s a 1 € registration fee for a single day’s subscription. The first 30 minutes of any rental period are free; an hour’s ride will cost you a measly euro: peanuts! The majority of the bike stands (which hold a dozen bicycles or so) are located near the standard tourist draws: the Eiffel Tower; Notre Dame; the Place des Vosges etc. Rental instructions are straight-forward, and are available in several languages on the Vélib kiosk’s display screen. When you’ve finished your ride, you need to find an open slot at one of the stands, and your rental period ends as soon as you’ve clicked your bicycle back into place.

The problem, of course, is what to do if you can’t find an open slot, and when we were there there were rumors of perpetually empty Vélib stands — the ones atop Montmartre, for example — and others — those at the foot of Montmartre — perpetually full. The Vélib system allegedly makes allowances for this kind of usage pattern, with trailers of Vélib bicycles being towed from “have” to “have not” stations behind the scenes. But the usage pattern for summer tourism is quite different from the needs of Parisian commuters, which leads (predictably) to the kinds of confrontations reported on above.

J and I picked our Vélib bikes from a stand on the Rue André Mazet, a quiet side-street where we could get a feel for the clunkers before we braved the Latin Quarter crowds. We managed to execute a few trial runs without flattening any pedestrians, wheeling in a series of slow, tight ovals between the curbs, and then set out tentatively along the Rue Saint-André des Arts, crossing the busy Boul Mich and Rue Saint-Jacques towards our hotel in the Marais—with a brief, reverential pause before Shakespeare and Company, the “bookstore in the Latin Quarter” referred to by the Herald Tribune.

At one time—during those distant Shakespeare and Company days—I considered myself part of an exclusive set: a tumbleweed! practically a Paris resident!; tourists were “the other”, and I one of the fortunate few allowed to sit behind the shop counter, looking past them through the open doorway—my open doorway—across the Seine to Notre Dame. George Whitman will be 94 years old this December; his cycle-commuting daughter Sylvia is now at the bookstore’s helm, and my infrequent visits to the shop have a distinctly nostalgic air.

I noticed, during this most recent trip to France, that a change seems to have come over me; I appear to have crossed an invisible threshold to another stage in life: I no longer deliberately avoid the standard “Paris tourist” activities as in days gone by.

I spent quite some time on one of our September afternoons, browsing at the bouquiniste stalls along the Quai François Mitterand, with the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against the skyline just downstream. It was not the books which drew me (although I did leaf through the antique postcards, translating fading messages with a voyeur’s eye); my main purpose was to examine the miniature models of the Eiffel Tower, offered in a wide range of sizes, materials and styles. These things, more than any other object, have for me always symbolized the cattle-like crowds of Paris tourists; I had avoided them—both tourists and Eiffel models—like the plague. This time, though, I found myself looking on the Eiffel miniatures quite fondly: was this an admission of defeat? capitulation? Or was it merely a new-found equanimity? I still don’t know…