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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Samaritaine department store sits, vast and proud and ten stories high, on the right edge of the Seine; its terrace commands the best view of Paris around, its roof flies two pennants, its prow-shaped front seems more docked than settled on the riverbank. It's one of the great turn-of-the-nineteenth-century department stores, of the sort that inspired Zola to write "The Ladies' Paradise," at a time when Paris department stores were supreme in Europe for range and luxury, temples of goods and depots of capitalism; the name derives from a medieval water pump on the site associated with the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel parable. "You can find everything at Samaritaine" was the store's motto for decades, and it was, give or take a baseball mitt, true.
Then, on June 15th of this year, Paris awoke to find the store closed, apparently for good, and for no very clear reason. The ostensible explanation was that the Paris health department had declared it a firetrap. (The employees had had about a week's notice.) As a consequence, the store would have to be shut for renovation that might last four or five or even six years. But after all this time and all of a sudden? Rumors ran to fill the space left by fact; there were those who insisted that they had seen a secret model of a transformed store, which would, after the employees were let go, become a hotel--or perhaps a bank, or a corporate headquarters, or even, in the New York manner, condos with river views for the rich. The odd thing was that, far from being orphaned by some failed family firm, the store was owned by L.V.M.H., one of the great French conglomerates, whose success in the global marketplace contradicts the myth of France as a society bloquee. L.V.M.H. insists that it intends to reopen the Samaritaine as a department store, but it understands, perhaps, that only an imposed or invented crisis can clear the way (and, the employees fear, get rid of the employees' union) for whatever it is, exactly, that it wants to do. In order to renovate the store, you have to close it and pretend that it will never open again.
The mysteriously shuttered department store remains not so much a symbol of the French crisis as an example of the thing itself: a beautiful and legendary success of modernity, trembling at the approach of the postmodern, with plenty of money behind it but no clear path forward, caught in a miasma of regulation, rumor, and discontented workers. In fact, with the serendipity beloved of nineteenth-century novelists and metaphor-mongering foreign correspondents, the back of the closed and confused Samaritaine is only a few blocks from the courtyard of the Hotel de Ville, the city hall, where, on the morning of July 6th, all of Paris was focussed, waiting for the announcement from Singapore about the choice of the city to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. To a degree that was almost touching in its excess, people in Paris seemed convinced that France had a lock on the games, and, even stranger, they actually seemed to care--as though the fate of the most beautiful of cities were balanced on the question of whether or not a group of international bureaucrats would give it permission to host a two-week track meet seven years from now. A giant neon banner had been strung across the front of the Assemblee Nationale proclaiming "Paris: 2012," and was obviously meant to hang there triumphantly through the Bastille Day celebrations, a few days later.
The certainty was only slightly disturbed by the French promotional clip that played over and over again on television that morning, in alternation with the British promotional clip. The French clip was a lovely but nostalgic thing showing the Eiffel Tower with the Olympic rings exploding above it in fireworks, and images of the last Paris Olympics, in 1924, while the British clip was sharp and savvy and forward-looking, showing a multicultural London brought suddenly alive by athletics. Yet when the name "London" was announced, a punch-in-the-stomach silence struck Paris. The French Olympians insisted that the British had somehow cheated, or failed to show "fair play"--an idiom borrowed from...
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