Roundabout
Dans le Bazar
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN The main thing that stops one buying things (apart from the high price of almost everything) is the fact that one always wants most something once seen in a shop that can never be found again. This can happen in England, heaven knows, but the chances are you can find the same shoes in forty other branches, you can see a blouse in one chain store and find its twin in another; if it's Marks and Spencer you can even buy it in one store and take it back in another (the Selfridges ladies' room, I am told, does a quite remarkable turnover; and they have not yet found a way of stopping people buying things in the M & S next door and popping in to try them on). In Paris, if you lose a shop, it stays lost; there are old men wandering around the left bank even now looking for the shop where they think they once left a deposit on an early Picasso.
Whatever the shops are, they are small and individual; even things like buttons, which even in the big stores are miles better than they are in England, can support a small squat woman in a tiny shop in a smart area, selling nothing else at all, not even crochet hooks. There are unbearably tempting boutiques of good clothes which cost a fortune: one does not always realise that the lowest prices of the Haute Couture are
not all that much more expensive than the highest prices of the chic boutiques. There are shops which appear to sell nothing but hair- brushes, the shops of effeminate porcelain for bathrooms only; the decoration shops that sett that peculiarly French style of study-furniture, all black and gold and heavily shaded lights, that makes a room look like an exaggerated desk-set —these all strike one as typically French. But, of course, there are the big stores, too. The best-known are in fact extremely Americanised, and also cater well for Americans: you can buY a suit of armour in Le Printemps, or a hideously real-looking Colt .45 at Galeries LafaY- ette—in my case, not only could, but had to, having let it off by accident and made eight people leap about a foot in the air. These stores are not all that French: many is the time have listened to praise of the cheap French clothes therein, only to find they were actuallY made in Sweden, Britain or Hong Kong. Nor is it the established French bourgeoisie, 1 cannot help thinking, that goes wild for the Talc Perruque now on sale: half-wig and half-hat, it leaves the audience guessing as to whether Yml cannot bear to take your hat off or simply never wash your hair., No one ever doubts that for feminine flim- flam, Paris is the place. But I have long since given up bringing back things like scent and scarves, which are available here and cost fortune in either place; nowadays I go for some- thing a good deal earthier which seems to g° down just as well. Leaving the glittering grottoes behind, I go along the right bank in an unsmart direction, past the gardening shops and the Pet shops where the goldfish lie inertly a hundred to a tank and wicker birdcages look like some- thing out of Perrault; where even in the Novell' her drizzle the black rubber frogman stands outside his shop to advertise flippers and masks. Then I turn back into the steamy bright lights of the Hotel de Ville, and there is the Bazar. Paradoxically, though France goes in for little shops, it is in this clomping wooden-floored enor- mous general store that one gets the most over- Powering sense of typical down-to-earth French life.
The Bazar de l'HOtel de Ville at this time of year is lit up by surrealistic rabbits that flash off and on-inflatable versions of the same rabbit can be bought inside. I am told it has a good second-hand furniture shop, but I have never dared go near that-it is bad enough clank- ing home with the saucepans. This is a place that has every known version of every really utilitarian object: it supplies the workshops and the kitchens, the men who want butchers' knives big enough to fillet a dinosaur, the bicycle delivery people who want long wicker baskets for carrying on their backs, the mechanics who want the spare parts of cars. This is where you can get the corks for making wine and the vast straw-covered bottles; you can get 1. ats and crocks big enough to pickle your grandmother, you can buy ten different sizes of restaurant bread-cutter and choose the finger-plate for your door from a whole department devoted to nothing else. The bit I like best, tucked away on an upper floor, is the sign department. There are placards saying Terme le lundi' and 'Chien Mecham% you can buy 'No Parking' signs and the little tags that give the price per kilo; there are pretentious house names ('le Castel,' Mon Desir,"Weekend) and nothing gives off the raw commercial flavour of France better than a simple sign saying that the maximum length of time for which the fitting room may be occupied is twenty minutes, including dressing and un- dressing. The best of the lot are the pious phrases which the French apparently say to each other often enough to be worth having signs printed: • Be brief! Your minutes arc as precious as ours' and 'Dc la methode! Pour tout!' It all goes, somehow, with the knives and the casseroles, the corks and the baskets.
Urban Frenchwomen tell me that the old pat- tern of French life is breaking up; that the young Frenchwomen who come to England are amazed how the sophisticated English talk pas- sionately about food just when they, the Parisi- ennes, are losing interest. They say there are more tins and packets about every year (a habit picked up, I am sure, on the Cote d'Azur, where deep-freezes grow up between the villas). They say that even the tradition of the little dress- maker is giving way to the boutique, the ready- made garment; that the wood and stone crocks are increasingly replaced by plastic. (It is price- less " to see a trundling countrywoman using a plastic bucket to carry water from the well-but why not? No one needs a light bucket more than she.) Maybe so; maybe things are changing. Still, the hip-bath isn't plastic yet; the solidity of the Bazar will take .a lot of shifting.
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