Arose with gratitude to a Parisian pink sky early Saturday morning and ordered a strong coffee and croissant to the room. In an effort to avoid the stroller set and midday tire kickers, I had only the briefest of breakfasts, strapped on my most comfortable of shoes, and caught a cab for Porte Clignancourt, an enormous flea market on the outskirts of Paris.
Properly known as Les Puces de Saint-Ouen, but commonly known as Les Puces (The Fleas), the market has its roots in the late 1700s, when rag-and-bone men roamed the neighborhoods of Paris, scouring garbage piles and back alleys to unearth rags, bones, metals and other junk to clean and resell. Also referred to as pêcheurs de lune or moonlight fishermen, these men would hunt and pick at night and set up temporary stalls in sketchy neighborhoods to sell their finds during the day. After the outbreak of cholera in the 1830s, markets were banned in Paris, which was followed by a period of aggressive urban planning, driving the crocheteurs or pickers to the outskirts of the city. They found refuge near the city gates of Kremlin Bicêtre, Montreuil, Vanves, and Porte de Clignancourt.
It was within the corridor separating Paris from the town of St.-Ouen that the Cligancourt flea market began, the authorities there taking measures in 1885 to make it safer and cleaner. While streets were paved and walkways created, the traders created groups of stalls to attract customers, and by the turn-of-the-century, Parisian collectors and antique dealers were picking from the pickers. The area provided the additional benefit of being a duty-free zone, exempt from Paris taxes as it was outside the city limits.
Men such as Monsieur Romain Vernaison, who owned acreage in Cliganacourt in the 1920s, transformed the rag-and-bone shantytowns into covered marketplaces with hundreds of stalls. Next arrived an Albanian prince, who opened Malik’s Marketplace, specializing in second-hand clothes, old uniforms, helmets, and cameras. Off the main drag of rue de Rosiers lie dozen of other markets: Marché Malassis, (toys, vintage cameras and furniture), Marché Dauphine (furniture, ceramics), Marché Biron (quality furniture, glass and giltwood), and Marché Vernaison (fashion, books, prints and kitchenware). Rents increased dramatically as antique dealers moved in next door to the bric-a-brac salesmen, eliminating the dumpster-dive vibe almost entirely. After the French Liberation, the opening days were set in stone: Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
But I had only Saturday to shop, the worst day to negotiate and the biggest surge of crowds. The market gets trampled by 120,000-150,000 people from around the world each weekend; some dealers, some shoppers, some thrill seekers. But there’s no thrill in elbowing past thousands and thousands of people, no matter how special the piece or inexpensive the price. As it’s the largest antique market in the world, with more than 2,500 dealers spread across more than 17 acres, I had to strategize my day.
First stop was to visit Isabel, an older, elfin French woman who specializes in tools from the 18th and 19th century. She has pickers scouring the French countryside to source her pieces. She explained she’d like to shop for her own finds, but the old men with the goodies won’t sell to her, not because she is a woman, but because she’s Parisian. Her walls bowed under the weight of ancient leather-making and woodworking tools, butchering equipment, cooking utensils, and winemaking apparatus. Iron and wood are her stock in trade, which appeals to my East Coast primitive aesthetic. After warm greetings, I quickly made decisions: a cheese cutter’s double-handled knife, a butcher’s saw with an unusual oak handle, several heavy meat cleavers, a glass wine thief, a carbon steel fileting knife, wood boards and bowls, a meat scale, and an apiarian’s knife with a lovely patina, owing to its years being conditioned by honey.
Isabel had the day to write my invoice and wrap my treasures for travel, as I dashed off to my next stop with a promise to return later. Hurriedly, I walked several blocks past shops displaying heavy art deco furniture, leather club chairs, and gaudy gilded mirrors. Waiters in black and red jackets, smoking cigarettes with the mild annoyance perfected by the French, were setting tables on sidewalks for the midday lunch break, still a blessedly sacrosanct Gallic tradition.
The open-air Marché Paul Bert, one of the two markets owned by the Duke of Westminster, is a favorite roam. Once I passed through its gates, I hit my breaks, took a deep breath to get into the zone, and put on my foraging eyes.
A porcelain rabbit terrine with glass eyes dating to the early 1900s was hard to refuse, and I negotiated hard for a moody oil painting of hanging game birds that I’ll keep for myself. Into my market bag, now bulging with booty, went weighty deco soup spoons, forged iron meat hooks, unusual glass plates for serving mussels, and copper canelé molds for baking the special cakes of Bordeaux. A pair of chairs piqued my fetish for Finnish furniture, and I couldn’t resist a French industrial table lamp with a swinging pendulum, which will grace my desk. Suspecting the large advertising sign for vermouth was a reproduction, it remained on the shop wall, but the candlesticks made from wild boar hooves trotted home with me.
Come lunchtime, the dealers set up tables in their shops and stalls with spreads worthy of a Cote Sud cover: crudité and charcouterie, cheese and fruit, baguettes and shared bottles of inexpensive French wine poured into chipped ceramic cups. Old linens were pressed into service and the aroma of strong Gaulouises’ cigarettes laced the warm, late summer air. Sartre’s spirit was alive and well at these quintessentially French tables: the notion of authenticity and being true to one’s internal flame despite outside influences; of being wholly responsible for giving one’s life meaning and living it fully; of coming to terms with the material world.
My wallet was empty of euros and my credit cards scratched from use. With more than 11 million bargain-hunters combing through the market annually, the dealers are accustomed to the intricacies of doing business with Americans, Brits, Indians, Russians, Chinese, and Japanese alike. Struggling with both the exchange rate and the costs of shipping, the pencil with which I negotiated was sharpened to a razor’s edge. And even though most shopkeepers spoke English, my lack of fluency in their language did little to endear me.
But none of us were here to make friends.
My head was swimming with numbers and unfamiliar words and haunting images of pieces not purchased, and my shoulders ached from hauling loaded bags. I collapsed onto a rattan chair at an empty table at Paul Bert, a bustling restaurant at the gate of the market. The same surly waitress who always treats me with great disdain didn’t disappoint, managing to completely ignore me even as she brought me lunch.
Understanding the inevitability of my return to Isabel’s shop to settle my substantial tab, I ignored my usual edict of no wine midday and ordered a carafe of rustic Bandol to accompany my lunch, the house special. A very large cast iron tureen of steaming onion soup was set before me. Served with a bowl and ladle, it was thick with knots of cipollini rings, silken beef stock, hunks of chewy, day-old bread, and handfuls of grated Gruyere, gooey and browned. The whole mélange was topped with a raw egg, which cooked in the bubbling liquid, binding the flavors together.
As the French consider it rude to drop a check on a dining table before it’s requested, I lingered over an espresso, a chocolate pot de crème, and the secondhand smoke blown in my direction by the young girl sitting behind me. It’s easy to understand why Clignancourt’s flea market, Les Puces de Saint-Ouen, which celebrated its 100th birthday in 1985, was declared a protected architectural heritage site. Both aesthetically and spiritually, the French are adamant about protecting their inimitable way of life.
#france #parisfleamarket #clignancourt #paris #culinary #inthespiritofsartre