Among the Fleas

In a burst of moral indignation, the city fathers of Paris once ordered a roundup of vagrants. The police herded together a motley crowd of itinerant peddlers, rag and iron merchants, sidewalk salesmen. Loaded down with their bundles, dragging handcarts behind them, they straggled past Montmartre, cut through the Porte de Clignancourt and onto the plain of Saint-Ouen, where the army occasionally held maneuvers. Here the evicted peddlers settled down, offered their trinkets for sale to passersby. When the army seemed not to object, they put up awnings over their merchandise, built flimsy wooden booths. They sold everything from ormolu clocks to cracked washbasins, and one of their most popular items was a cheap, "hard" mattress, usually filled with fleas. Thus, back in the 1890s, the famed Paris Flea Market began.

The merchants of the Flea Market last week were once again under pressure from the authorities to move. Their Marche aux Puces has grown into a cluster of six slightly separated markets, a jumble of tumble-down booths and rachitic sheds threaded by wandering, roofed passageways and covering an area of 150 acres. There are about 1,500 shops, employing some 10,000 people, with a yearly turnover estimated at $23 million--one-quarter of it in hard currency.

Bird baths & Bikes. On dusty tables and counters in the dark little shops lie Baccarat crystal, Sevres china, slightly used false teeth, kitchen gadgets, books, paintings, precious stones, carpets, birdbaths, old bicycle tires, bottles. A browser once found, between a bust and a bidet, Fragonard's painting, La Chemise Enlevee, and bought it for 20 francs; it is now worth millions of francs. Other lucky buyers uncovered original works sold in their impoverished days by Vlaminck, Cezanne, Utrillo, Modigliani.

But there has been bamboozlement along with the bargains. Student copies of the works of famous painters have been sold to the unwary. And prices for authentic antiques can often be higher in the Flea Market than in the expensive antique shops of the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Honore--in fact, canny antique dealers work both sides of the street. Sitting in their shop armchairs, slowly polishing their copper casseroles and warming pans, the dealers are well aware of the old truth that the more of a mess surrounds an object, the more a customer thinks he has made a find.

Golden Eggs. But the suburbs of Paris have slowly closed in on the Flea Market. Bulldozers appeared on the old Saint-Ouen parade ground. Four big housing developments rose 14 stories above the plain. Schools, children's playgrounds, sport fields, tree-lined avenues, a hospital annex are planned--and the Flea Market is in the way.

Mayor Fernand Lefort called in the Association of Flea Market Merchants, showed off designs for a handsome new Flea Market of 1,000 booths--even, for old times' sake, arranged in a labyrinth pattern of circling passageways, yet leaving room for five new housing blocks.

The anarchists of the Flea Market suspiciously studied the plan. Who would pay for it? The government--alors, c,a va. But it was not grand enough. They countered with an elaborate design of their own: a grandiose belt of buildings, at the center of which would stand the market. The entrance to this pushcart palace would be a monumental door, flanked by two towers.

The mayor and his councilors groaned, complained that the design looked more like the Brussels World's Fair than a Flea Market, noted that it saved little if any ground for housing developments, and that its cost would be beyond the resources of Saint-Ouen or the government. But, Mayor Lefort assured the skeptical Fleas, Saint-Ouen has only their own best interests at heart: "There is no question of suppressing the Flea Market. It is one of the hens that lays golden eggs for France."

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