Haute Crotture and Other Excretions

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Diane et Blonde, chiennes de la meute de Louis XIV (Detaille de Diane) 1702, par Alexandre-François Desportes (1661-1743), La Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris.

Detail of Diane from Diane and Blonde, bitches from Louis XIV's pack o' dogs by Alexandre-François Desportes

Renifleurs et Renifleuses:

Even the most nimble and alert French fashion slave, gingerly stepping over the ubiquitous turds of Paris's oh-so-hip-at-the-moment miniature French bulldogs, has yet to make the connection between the "Merde!" she shouts when she inevitably missteps and ruins her expensive shoes and the "Merde!" her neighbors shout after stepping in her miniature bulldog's unretrieved crottes.

Until madame makes that connection, there is little hope for France's oh-so-hip-at-the-moment, miniature-bulldog President to dramatically reduce the public payroll as he's promised; if President Sarkozy doesn't sustain the enormous number of vigilant Propreté de Paris employees who scrub the streets here, the city's lovely cobblestones could disappear beneath the muck faster than a Parisian dog owner can squeal, "Quel bon chien! Qui est le petit bon chien de maman? C'est toi! Oui, c'est toi! "

Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, added an item to the city's official "To Do" list in October regarding his own new pet pee-ve. Following a particularly revelrous evening of beer drinking on the occasion of this year's rugby World Cup championships, a larger proportion than usual of the city's male population was relieving itself against the grand Hôtel de Ville (city hall) just as hizzonner was arriving for work. Reeking with displeasure, Delanoë announced his intention to modify the ingrained urination behavior of Parisians, a great many of whom simply unzip and let loose wherever they're standing, whenever nature calls. (The most interesting example of this I have witnessed personally was during rush hour in the Châtelet Metro station when a man in a business suit stepped to the side of the crowded and bustling connector passageway between the 1 and 4 lines, undid the fly of his well-pressed trousers, and peed in the company of his fellow commuters.)

The mayor thought he'd had the problem zipped up in February 2006, when he abolished usage fees for the city's 200-plus public toilets—in the following 12-months the flow of patrons to the toilets increased by over 650%—but he's realized a strong message is needed, too. This he plans to deliver directly to the offenders using newfangled undulating walls that spray urine back on the urinators, a concept described by the walls' architect as l'arroseur arrosé ("the sprinkler, sprinkled").

Time will tell if the mayor's sprinkler-sprinkling campaign will succeed, but I stand behind him. On my particular street in the Marais district—a short residential block adjacent to some popular watering holes and therefore convenient for full-bladdered bar patrons who prefer its seventeeth-century charms to the bars' less-picturesque twentieth-century plumbing facilities—the stench can become pretty awful on warm days between disinfections.

A number of friends have asked me the origins of my street's name—the rue des Guillemites. Through cursory inquiries, I've determined that the Guillemites were an order of seventeeth-century monks named for St. Guillaume de Malavalle, a figure from the twelfth century who was excommunicated for reasons no longer known. What happened to the monks is also a mystery, although my guess is that Guillaume's tonsured little acolytes were driven from my neighborhood for incessant and incorrigible public urination. I can just imagine that a Marais homeowner in the up-and-coming new quartier, worried that local clergymen with self-control issues threatened his property values, said, "Enough!" and put his foot down (looking for a clean spot first, of course). I admit that my research has turned up nothing to back up this historical hypothesis, but it would even explain Guillaume's excommunication. God surely wouldn't tolerate such behavior in heaven, and for eternity, ferchrissakes.

I also believe that the name of Guillaume’s hometown, Malavalle, might mean a) "foul-smelling valley" or b) "to no avail," inspired either by a) the odor of its streets or b) the futility of attempts by its mayor to curb the urinary transgressions of its citizens, but I can find nothing to prove this theory, either. The only assumption I can make about the dearth of historical evidence regarding the circumstances of his excommunication, or to corroborate my suspicions about the disappearance of his followers, is that Guillaume's brother, Jeb de Malavalle, must have successfully purged Vatican files regarding these matters, as a favor to their mother.

My neighborhood is filled with ancient streets that have interesting histories, both documented and imagined by me as a way of occupying my mind as I scrape my shoes each evening on the curb outside my home. The nearby rue des Blancs Manteaux was so named for the white coats worn by nuns who resided there, an order that I tell myself was made up of former cleaning ladies whom God (before the falling out with St. G.) called to serve the Guillemite monks by scrubbing their odiferous deposits from the city's ancient metro stations and government buildings. I even suspect the better-known Carmelite nuns were originally Blancs Manteaux girls who left the Marais along with their Guillemite brothers, and got their name from the stubborn caramel-colored stains left on the hems of their previously white frocks by the dog feces through which they were dragged on a daily basis.

Paris has been the birthplace of some stranger fashion milestones, and judging from the number of oh-so-hip miniature bulldogs here today—and their resulting countless crottes—I don't think my particular revisionist history seems so far-fetched.

À la prochaine fois...

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