Don’t let the punaises bite

Hot October and pest panic

Dear Friend,

I hope you’ve had a good week. It’s been unseasonably warm here in Paris. Yesterday I was cycling east from my home towards the Canal de l'Ourcq and I thought to myself. ‘ah, I love spring!’, my mind flicking through a slideshow of months of March past. I then, of course, quickly remembered it was October.

I bought a PROPER camera and have been enjoying playing with my new toy around sunny Paris this weekend. This is in the Jardin des Plantes in the Latin Quarter.

This is sunny terrace time by the Canal de l’Ourcq

By Jules Joffrin Metro in the 18th arrondissement

This week, several people have asked me what I think about the purported Bed Bugs (punaises de lit) Crisis in Paris. Now, I would love to say that I have never experienced a bed bugs problem here, but that’s not completely true. On an A-Level trip to Paris, I shared a room with three friends in a 2-star hotel near Bastille. One by one, each night, another one of them got got by the critters. For some reason, the bugs were never interested in me (a little hurtful), but my poor friends were covered in pink and incredibly itchy sores. As soon as we realised that bed bugs were the culprits, we entered into a protracted, and at times tough, series of negotiations with the surly hotel manager to refund some of our nights so we could leave early. 

At first, he appeared intractable. “Mais non mesdemoiselles, there are no punaises in my establishment! You have been going out in the evening, hanging out with god knows ‘oo…maybe you ‘ave been touching some dogs, or some boys!, and got some fleas.” We had all of us just gained an A-Level in French, and though the syllabus had not specifically prepared us for this situation, we knew how to conjugate French verbs in at least three tenses and we were determined to WIN!

Even then, we knew we would need paperwork to triumph in this case. This was before widespread smartphones, so we made our way to the internet café on the corner of our street, which we had been using to check our Myspace every evening, We printed out reams of webpages on bed bugs, complete with imagery of what their bites looked like, matching EXACTLY the welts on my friends’ arms and legs. We marched back to the hotel reception and made our case. The surly manager was cornered, almost outplayed. “Ok ok ok,” he said, “I have a solution. How about you do not have to pay for the last night AND I give you a bottle of champagne!?”. We stood our ground, we didn’t want to toast the infestation with bubbles, we wanted what was due. “Non monsieur,” we told him, before trailing tiredly but resolutely up to our bug-infested room. This negotiation wasn’t over.

The next morning, three quarters of our number itching maddeningly, we were ready for the End Game. A large group of German tourists with big rucksacks came in enquiring about the hotel. We began to tell them in English not to book because of our bed bugs and just the mention put them off, they walked out. “Non! Attendez,” Surly Manager called out the door after them, but it was too late – he’d lost customers. He realised, then, that he didn’t want us to be there any longer, causing trouble. He looked at us wearily. “Ok, four nights refund,” he said, “and you leave right away”. We’d got what we needed. As we collected our cash from his hands, he looked at us almost fearfully: “How old are you girls?”. We told him we were 18. “Dix-huit ans !!”, he exclaimed, “vous êtes des femmes fortes…comme Margaret Thatcher !” (you are strong women, like Margaret Thatcher). 

–

So I can’t say that I have never had bed bug issues in Paris (though, once more, they were not interested in me FOR SOME REASON), but I will say it’s not a problem I’ve experienced since. That’s not to say there aren’t bed bugs, there certainly are, but I don’t think more than you would expect for a big city with lots of coming and going, and the general consensus seems to be that the panic and media coverage is overblown. Parisians themselves seem to be reacting with characteristic nonchalance, even derison, to the brouhaha. Yesterday I was on the Metro when, as it often does, the train stopped in a tunnel and the lights went out. A middle-aged woman who was sitting diagonally across from me stood up and exclaimed “OH NON! The bed bugs come out in the dark!”, then sat down and burst out laughing at her blague. 

My instinct on this is that this problem is not necessarily worse now than it has been historically, but rather there is extra scrutiny on Paris just now because the city just hosted fashion week and continues to host the Rugby World Cup (a seemingly never-ending tournament, by the way! Paris is still full of small flocks of slightly bewildered looking English-speaking rugby fans) and of course because the Olympics are coming up fast next summer. A few weeks ago I wrote about a similar media swirl regarding Paris’s rats and concluded that, to some degree, Paris is also a victim of its own idol status on these matters: for some, Paris is so revered and idolised that the presence of dirt, grime and pest here seems to be EXTRA insulting, as thrown into relief by the French capital’s glistening romantic reputation. 

But I also wanted to check my sense against one of the wisest and crowd-think-resistant people I know, my neighbour Dr. D. She confirmed that she doesn’t think the problem is particularly different in nature or general volume at the moment, suggesting that rather  people are more aware of the signs of bed bugs, and that bed bug levels would have also gone down during the pandemic while the city was locked down, so the volume feels higher now because it’s returned back up to more normal levels. She certainly considered that there was undue panic around the issue. This evening she told me a short anecdote to illustrate this. “I called my friend in Israel, who was upset and scared with the Hamas attacks and the fighting. She is meant to travel to Paris in a few weeks and she asked me: ‘but what about the bed bugs? Is it safe?’”. 

---

Thirty-second book club

I’m still getting through The Goldfinch and very much enjoying Donna Tartt’s tight and effective prose. It won’t spoil anything to say there is a scene early on set in a gallery in New York, which features a tall, graceful elderly man with a hunched back. Yesterday I went to the Gertrude Stein And Pablo Picasso Exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg on the edge of the Luxembourg Garden, which was interesting, but so busy that I ended up observing the people around me just as much as the paintings and artefacts and I noticed a man who looked exactly like the character described in the book. I snapped a couple of secret photos of him and painted/drew them afterwards. His beard was extraordinary. 

---

Thank you to those who wrote back to my letter about Frances the baker and the secrets of croissants last week! She is great and so were your letters. Please do write back to me in comments or email if you wish to, I am always happy to receive the post. 

If you like these letters, please do share them on.

Have a lovely week! 

Yours, 

Hannah