The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs Read Online Free

that hung in front of the shop: “The fish store will close for good on October 31, 2012. Thank you. The Management.”
    Because Marc refused to discuss the impending closure, Évelyne, who rarely ventured into the shop, came to do the talking.“There are things I can’t pay for,” she confessed. “I have no shame in saying it.”
    To any customer willing to listen, she said, “This is going to kill the bottom of the rue des Martyrs! This is a little village. Parents bring their kids here to teach them about food.”
    Her greatest fear was that a shoe store would move in. The more she talked, the darker her predictions: “If there’s no fish shop, the neighborhood is dead!”
    Everyone had an opinion about what could happen next, and all of the opinions were negative. Maybe the Carrefour supermarket next door would break down the walls and expand. Maybe yet another cheese shop or bakery would take over. No one had much hope that another fishmonger would move in.
    “Where will we go for fish?” one customer lamented. “Picard?” Picard is a national all-frozen-food supermarket chain with an outlet around the corner. Its frozen red mullet is half the price of the fresh counterpart at La Poissonnerie Bleue, but Picard is viewed with disdain by traditional French cooks. The dirty little secret is that some Picard fish is pas mal, which in French doesn’t mean “not bad”; it actually means pretty good, only no one was admitting that in this crisis.
    There was a smaller fresh-fish store several blocks up the street, but for residents of the lower rue des Martyrs, that was a world away. “Too far, too far,” said Yves Chataigner, who runs a cheese shop with his wife Annick, at No. 3 rue des Martyrs. “It might as well be New York.”
    It wasn’t only that. The distant shop offered less choice, was owned by a chain, and employed fishmongers who didn’t bother to learn their clients’ names or fish preferences. (When I asked them for their reaction to the impending closure of their maincompetition below, they replied with Gallic shrugs.) It was also up the hill, an incline that gets steeper as the street moves north, toward Montmartre.
    “How will all the old grandmas get their fish?” asked Valérie Levin, the baker’s wife across the street.
    Since this is France, where people hold the government responsible for just about anything that goes wrong, Valérie insisted that city hall should guarantee access to fresh fish. “The authorities have an obligation to put a fish store here, a civic obligation,” she said. She circulated a petition demanding a fishmonger. Two hundred people signed.
    Not everyone was sad. Some thought La Poissonnerie Bleue was old-fashioned on a street beginning to turn hip. The presentation was predictable, not innovative. “The ‘look’ of the fish is not sexy,” said one customer. “There’s nothing to astonish me, to take my breath away.”
    I asked Jacques Bravo, then the local mayor of the Ninth Arrondissement, if he could help the Briolays. Each of Paris’s twenty administrative units, or arrondissements, has its own mayor. Although these mini-mayors report to the head mayor of Paris, they have considerable authority over their own domains.
    Bravo’s wife had rushed home a few days before to tell him that something terrible was happening to La Poissonnerie Bleue, that the entire street was talking about it. Bravo was resigned to the inevitable. The next Sunday morning, he turned up on the rue des Martyrs in a gray cashmere scarf and a pin-striped suit with a red rosette pinned to the left lapel designating him as an officier of the Legion of Honor. He shook a lot of hands before delivering the bad news. He had been presented just the day before with many delicate details about what had gone wrong. “Ilove this family,” he said. “They’re very honorable. But it will be impossible to save them.” Nevertheless, he had solidarity with fish, if not with the fishmonger.