An Irishman's Diary

IN SEARCH of a metaphor for the euro zone crisis, the BBC sent a camera crew on Wednesday to the Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris. It was a perfect site for the job.

For one thing it offers a view of the financial district, rattled earlier that day by the downgrading of two French banks. Then there are its famous 12 roads, radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, like the stars on the EU flag. And finally, there is the traffic, snaking anarchically around the giant monument in a dozen different directions.

In my limited understanding of the finance crisis, euro zone leaders have about 10 fewer options than drivers at the Place Charles de Gaulle do. But even so, the junction was an ideal visual backdrop, and the reporter laid it on thick. EU leaders were “caught in a chaotic circle”, he said. It was “hard to see how they could avoid a crash”.

Indeed, whatever about the euro zone, the Place CDG’s infamy is such, I understand, that local car insurers either don’t cover accidents there or routinely settle them on a 50:50 basis, regardless of fault. Not that I have any personal experience.

Like the Moulin Rouge, driving around the Arc de Triomphe is a Parisian entertainment form I have yet to try. That said, I have negotiated it on a rental bike without incident and have also walked across it a few times and lived.

On my most recent attempt, last month, I did suffer some minor damage. But this was only to my wallet, and to a lesser extent my pride, after part-falling for what is apparently one of the best-known con tricks in the city. In my defence, I was slightly distracted at the time. I was waiting to cross the widest of the 12 roads, Avenue Foch, while also listening to a voicemail on my phone.

Furthermore, I had just visited the Irish Embassy, on nearby Rue Rude. And maybe the part of my brain normally responsible for street-wisdom was still reflecting on the potential embarrassment of the embassy’s address for anyone who mispronounces “Foch” with a hard “C”. In which case, the building is located at the junction of Foch and Rude. And try saying that in a hurry.

Anyway, there I was – with my mind somewhere else – when a passer-by stopped and picked up something at my feet. " C'est le votre?" he asked, holding a thick, gold-coloured ring. No, it wasn't mine, I said, whereupon he did a good impression of being about to keep it himself, before changing his mind and thrusting into my hand, with a gesture indicating that the luck had obviously been meant for me.

Then he was gone. Except he wasn’t, really. A moment later, he was back, as if he had also just remembered that he was hungry and had no money. So, even as the penny dropped, I gave him two or three euro. And when he suggested this wasn’t enough, I also gave him back the ring, with a gesture indicating that he obviously needed the luck more than I did.

Despite being ahead on the deal, he didn’t look entirely happy. But, of course, the ring was probably made of brass. So was the man’s neck. Even as I watched him – not 10 yards away – he brazenly attempted the same trick on a couple waiting to cross the road. I was tempted to say something Foch and Rude to him, only my French wasn’t good enough.

THE RUE Rude, incidentally, is named for the 19th-century sculptor Francois Rude, whose work includes some of the Arc de Triomphe’s friezes. Specifically, he designed a tableau on it that depicts French soldiers going off to war.

And speaking of metaphors and omens, how about this? Part of the Rude piece is a figure representing the French republic. So when, one day in 1916, the sword in the figure’s hand broke away, the friezes were quickly covered to hide the accident. And with some justification. Maybe the sword of the republic could have chosen even more ominous moments to fall off, but not many. It was the first day of the Battle of Verdun.

As a metaphor for the euro zone crisis, meanwhile, the Place CDG lacks one obvious feature, a Greek exit. But it does, ominously, have an Irish one, in the Avenue MacMahon, named for Patrice de Mac-Mahon, who was descended from a Limerick family (and further back, probably, from the Monaghan clan) but rose to be a French general and eventually the first president of the Third Republic.

If it is ominous, though, the Avenue Mac Mahon could equally be a symbol of hope, suggesting there is a way out from even the deepest of crises. As general, after all, Mac Mahon shared responsibility for the humiliation of 1870, when the Prussians crushed France; and for the horrors that followed, when the French army crushed its own compatriots in the Paris Commune.

He then inherited a country crippled with war reparations. Yet within a few years he was presiding over the opening of the sumptuous Opera Garnier and the rise of Belle Époque Paris. And although an arch-conservative and royalist, he is remembered as a good and honest man, albeit one known for a certain naivete, especially in his verbal utterances.

I’m tempted to think he would have fallen for the ring trick too. In any case, he is alleged once to have said that typhoid fever was “a terrible sickness”, because “Either you die from it or you become an idiot. And I know what I’m talking about, I had it.”