You tell us about security guards…
Who are waiting for you on the Figaro website and who in real life monitor a piece of the city between the 19th arrondissement of Paris and Aubervilliers, a green space designed for walks and employees’ lunch break picnics…
… But this northern linear forest, nice name, is closed to the public, abandoned to drug trafficking and prostitution… And sometimes from this forest emerge those that a local policeman calls zombies, I quote “drug addicts in need who break car windows to collect change, urinate and defecate in parking lots”, who beg and attack, can be crazy people who pull out the knife, and are proof, continues the policeman, of a country that is third-party world…
… But this third world, where we also find migrants, I read again, is on the path of the employees of an ultra-modern building, Millénaire 4, occupied by BNP Paribas… Bank employees sometimes harassed and attacked, to whom we recommend not walking alone, and to follow a map provided by the bank, recommended route in green, not recommended route in red… And there are also the security guards dressed in black, who scan the linear forest, who crisscross the sector , and who, upon request, escort BNP Paribas employees from the office to the RER station “Rosa Parks” (named after a black fighter against segregation) and the employees feel, escorted, as important as Beyoncé…
And what is not uninteresting either, beyond the sadness of this urban story, is to read that employees, certainly reassured by the security guards, also say that this protection does not solve the problem, that the drug addicts who are in distress and should be taken care of; a police officer chimes in, “they need to be treated, it’s a public health issue,” he says, it’s more pleasant to read than the word zombie, insecurity doesn’t stop you from thinking.
On the Le Monde website you read other drug stories – the newspaper publishes a special issue on trafficking, it’s chilling, fascinating and strange at the same time…
And so I read the story of a Roubaix network which flooded France with cocaine from Surinam transported in the bodies of mules, that’s the expression, Guyanese, and this network was backed by a rap group, which in its songs rocked itself, the protagonists of the traffic appeared in the clips and the lyrics were explicit, “I have my guys who sell my dope”, “The solution is on the plane, my “mules” bring it to you…”, it simplified the investigation… But what are the bandits thinking?
I also read another network, this one from Marseillewhose profits were invested in stone, in luxury towers in Dubai… This at least has the appearance of logic…
In the public good I have a tenderness for a woman who must have been very rough, and has not had an easy life, the newspaper kindly tells me, since the time she was locked up in the women’s section of the prison. Dijon that the newspaper explores…
What she did, she says nothing, what she is, a lady with braided white hair who ties woolen hearts in her cell for the supervisor and the boss, who have become “my family, my stars”, she says, she feels free locked up, safer than outside, she knits with wooden picks because needles are forbidden, she no longer has anyone outside, but when she comes out in years she will give embroidery lessons…
We also talk about loneliness…
Which a woman entered exactly a year ago, and who speaks to us in West France and La Dépêche, her name is Lydie Despaux, and on November 4 last year, her husband Frédéric who was an elite agent of Enedis, one of those sent urgently to restore our power lines after disasters, her husband Frédéric, who left to save Brittany, she said, after the Avian storm, died of electrocution in Pont-Aven where people sometimes paint, where a street bears his name, and what is eating away at Lydie, a year later, is is that we don’t know how why the accident happened…
It’s one of those wounds – those crevices of existence that our newspapers convey… The Independent tells me the tribute returned by a village, Alenya dressed in white to a teenager named Emilio found beaten to death in the home of his mother and stepfather, children who do not understand carry his photo. Le Dauphiné tells Romans about the trauma of the Romanais-Péageois Rugby club, where 22-year-old Nicolas played, who was killed just before All Saints’ Day in front of a discotheque, and to which a nurse of his age, Clara held his hand until the end… The Roman Tollois Rugby club was also that of young Thomas, stabbed to death in a ballroom brawl in Crépol, it will be a year in two weeks… Why them, what fate?
In Free Maine I read a footballer from ES Moncé en Velin, Alain Gouffier, who lived a stone’s throw from the stadium, an irreplaceable volunteer, the man of the snacks, the jokes during the matches, and who still played like a veteran and who collapsed yesterday after his match, dead in front of his friends, and it would be a beautiful death for an artist, if it wasn’t very early at 64 years old…
These tragedies are worlds, each of them – I’m talking about it today when Samuel Paty who was a free man and belongs to us is on the front pages of newspapers disparate in their titles… “Eight suspects before justice”, says Sud- West, “Trial of a murderous escalation”, says the Republican East, “Trial of a terrible spiral”, says Libération, “Trial of a manhunt”, says l’Humanité, “Trial of fanaticism Islamist” says Le Figaro, who, with the Cross, alone dares this word… These differences are our mental landscapes…
On the Nouvel obs website I read, led by the actress Judith Godrèche, a harsh address to the jurors of the Fémina Prize so that they do not crown the essay on “Meetoo vertigo” by the journalist Caroline Fourest. This battle also tells us.
And you finally tell us about a dress…
To appease us with luxury… The dress that the regent Marie de Medici wore at the christening of the future Louis XIII and which the Populaire du Center and the Mountain marvels at me, this dress was adorned with 32,000 freshwater pearls, from all over Europe, and for these pearls, we had sacrificed 32 million pearl mussels… Because it is a ratio of only one mussel in a thousand is the bearer of pearl…
But this massacre is dated… because after centuries of luxury coquetry, trinkets, and pollution of the rivers, the time has come to save the mussel, which survives in Haute-Vienne on the Briance or in Creuse on the Béraude, the Gosne , Gartempe or Grand Rieu, and watched over by the Conservatory of Natural Spaces of Nouvelle-Aquitaine.
We follow the females, the laying of eggs, we follow a fish, the brown trout, whose gills serve as a cradle for larvae invisible to the naked eye…
For the mussels to reproduce, it is necessary to find 10 to 30 trout per 100 m2 of watercourse. Not easy… So, we collect larvae in Limousin to send them to Brittany to a fish farm where the trout are waiting for them, 800 larvae per trout, they will be housed for a few months in the host trout, our future mussels, then will return to their element, the sediments of a river whose current they filter…
If they live, they prove that our rivers are alive and fresh… They are a constantly renewed miracle. I read that out of a million larvae produced, less than ten will manage to become a young mussel. I read that some mussels then live to be a hundred years old, and that an octogenarian that researchers have spotted and named L29 still lays thousands of eggs placed in nursery facilities in Brittany. What life would she tell me about?
In Provence I read and salivate at the happiness of Romain Paro, a fishmonger in Aix, who after years of searching acquired a Royal Lampris, aka “the salmon of the gods”, which he cuts with the rare pleasure of his customers in mind…
In the DNA I read a portrait sublimely written by a sublime man of books and letters, bibliophile writer born in Saverne and who in the Morvan lives away from the world, in a melancholy which he says “touches on holiness”, making faces reappear in him alumni: Gérard Oberlé, who is the French brother of the American Jim Harrison and who in his childhood dreamed of being kidnapped by bohemians…
In the Lorraine Republican, I read a village, Olley, whose inhabitants voted, they want to be called from now on “burnt asses”, it’s another homage to the language.
