This Harpy Breed
By PETER MICHAELS Since I have been on safari for a home of my own on and off for the past eight years or so, I believe that I have tracked down just about every variety of real estate which grows in this
complex jungle: the artist's studio in Mont- parnasse with a huge window a cat-walk half- way up to the ceiling fol access to the bedroom, and carvings fro:n Dahomey on the walls (£65 monthly, furnished); the standard four rooms with obscure corridors and stuccoed ceilings up five liftless floors of an unattractive building in a noisy commercial street (price £6,500, plus a good £1,000-worth of much-needed modernisa- tion); the sexy pica a-terre near the Etoile, two rooms in Empire furniture and golden drapes, kitchenette and shower, no daylight (£55 monthly); a very rational habitation unit, three brand-new rooms with the latest conveniences and a balcony in a suburban block of 110 similar ones, all the delights of a TB sanatorium (price £9,000, interior paintwork at buyer's cost); three communicating attics full of charm in the Latin Quarter, no room for a bath (price £3,500, mildew included); a penthouse at a posh address (price £11,000, terrace included, £700 extra for a garage); the functional two-room flat in bourgeois surroundings, AD 1935 and poky (£45 per month rent, furnished excruciatingly); luxury quarters up a marble staircase, one huge room, three nor- mal ones (price £14,000, fine nickel fittings thrown in); a gabled old house in a wood fifteen miles from town with dry-rot in every floorboard and a roof as leaky as the agent's promises (a bargain at £7,450, with weeds in the garden up to your armpits); or, finally, a noble abode in an eighteenth-century mansion behind the National Assembly with antiques and tapestries (not for sale, not for rent, a favour to a man of taste at £200 a month, strictly cash).
Over the same period, I have made the acquain- tance of as wide a range of owners and agents as I would wish on my worst dentist. The agents are a vicious breed, shifty, grasping and under- equipped (they rarely have a car), who work on the principle that a panicked client and a stam- peded owner yield the highest average rate of commission. Some are too haughty to deal with any human being beneath ambassadorial rank,
To the immed;-'e oost-war eye. no doubt Paris looked refreshingly whole. somewhat dowdy, certainly, and rather old-fashioned, but practically undamaged. Not a great deal was built between 1920 and 1939 years during which the population remained remarkably steady, and the few modern buildings around Passy or the Bois de Boulogne had time to blend in with the general picture of grey, down-at-heel but cosy nineteenth-century metropolis. Amongst the many problems requiring immediate attention, housing certainly did not seem to be the most urgent.
PARIS
Yet such reserves as there may then have been were quickly absorbed. First there was an influx from badly hit areas in Northern France and the return of prisoners deportees and refugees from the Occupation Next, the natural demand, bottled lip for five years or more, and the marriage boom made inroads on the supply of dwellings. After that. the foreigners began to arrive again: students artists, wealthy expat- riates, diplomats end a new animal, the inter- national functionary attached to OEEC, NATO, or UNESCO. By 1950, the scramble for flats was savage, unfurnished ones for rent became un- available for the ordinary mortal without con- nections, and a flourishing black market arose in furnished apartments at fancy prices; to further enhance the seeker's infuriation and despair, there were some apartments with rents pegged at ridiculously low levels in which unbudging tenants in privileged postures were paying per- haps £25 a year for ten rooms in a choice loca- tion. By the middle Fifties the number of families forced to live in hotel rooms, maids' quarters or insalubrious digs was alarming, and Europe's best-fed nation began to realise that it was also one of the worst-housed. It was only when their worries brought the colons, or their capital, scurrying home and speculation assumed fantas- tic proportionS, with property values doubling in a few years, that private contractors took heart., By then, crowds of fly-by-night agents were reap- ing handsome profits by bribing concierges, hounding the relatives of the recently deceased and splitting fees with informers who were prowl- ing in search of negotiable accommodation.
or with less than the annual profits of the House of Dior jingling about in his pockets, while others assume blandly that their clients are really clowns who, when they sas, they are after three rooms and a bath, mean either one room and a hall or nine kitchens and a lodge. A few trade on the natural tendency of the foreigner to turn to his own kind in need : they cater especially to North and South Americans, overseas, military and diplomatic personnel. One of these, a grossly misplaced American, turned out to have a know- ledge of French such as one might acquire from an itinerant Bulgar in Oklahoma and occasioned a farce of riotous confusion whilst 'bargaining' with a French landlady. a harpy of impeccably aristocratic perniciousness.
Landlords, like tneir kind everywhere, incline to be wary and are, for the most part, bereft of either a sense of humour or a sense of propor- tion The female of the species is many times worse than the male, be she letting or selling, she will try to squeeze blood out of each last curtain rod and ring the change on every irrelevant sentimentality in the book. If the lease is in question she will prefer a foreigner who cannot appeal to the authorities against eviction, but if a sale is being discussed it is done on the assump- tion that anybody from abroad is either Rocke- feller using an aiias. )r his heir. It should be added that, since France is an unprejudiced democracy, there is no discrimination of any kind: the first corner is just as entitled to a flat as he is to a suite at the Ritz, and on the same terms.
Whether the halcyon days of little places on the Left Bank for next-IJ-nothing will ever return is open to considerable doubt. There are indica- tions that the peak housing shortage is past and that, with builders bMsy everywhere, supply may catch up with demat L The French, as a whole, are averse to paying out a large proportion of their income in rent and will put up with a lot of discomfort which other people would not tolerate; while this attitude persists, the pros- pects for cheap commercial speculators are dim. Many a conventional Parisian facade hides dank slums, and numerous unsafe buildings are con- demned each year--of which a fair proportion continue to be innabited In a city where bath- rooms are still a 'Lowry enjoyed by under one- third of the population, and even running water is by no means everybody's birthright, much clearly remains to be done.
If you have been toying with the idea of estab- lishing yourself in one of those love-nests one reads about in novels, forget about it at once. A more realistic apprcach to living in Paris today is either to camp r. the Bois de Boulogne (a one- flap tent, several venerable trees, £2 monthly ground-rent) or to crag over your own houseboat from Richmond or Chelsea to moor in the Seine,
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