George Augustus Sala

Charles Dickens didn’t write the description of Dublin’s Coombe that’s often attributed to him. Instead, in 1853, he dispatched George Sala, a journalist for Dickens’s Household Words, who found in the area:

an almost indescribable aspect of dirt and confusion, semi-continental picturesqueness, shabbiness – less the shabbiness of dirt than that of untidiness – over-population, and frowsiness generally, perfectly original and peculiarly its own.

Read my article about Sala’s visit to Dublin here.

I’ve also written about the Liberties and the Coombe areas here, here, and here.

The first thing you notice when you arrive at the none-more brutalist Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport is the smell: you’re underground, on a travelator bringing you towards the baggage claim, and the smell of wet clay hangs in the air. Immediately, the smell is familiar, and immediately you know you’re in Paris.

Obviously there are other smells that hit you later: like the somewhat forbidding odour of glue and bleached paper that you get when you enter la Hune bookshop in St-Germain des Pres; the pong of sewerage in the courtyard of your apartment block, telling you something about the difficulty of splicing the technology of 20th century hygiene onto mid -19th century design; the acrid smell of cheap aftershave and body odour on ligne 2 of the metro, as you pass through the Stalingrad and Barbes-Rochechouart stations. And the sharp smell of stale piss in the latter station as you change from one line to another.

There are other places which pretend that these common spaces don’t exist: what immediately springs to mind is the reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale, which takes an age to enter because of a complex procedure of bag-checking, card-validating, escalator-riding, place-booking, and book-ordering. The design of the place seems to be in part a joke on the puny scale of the average human being: ‘you want to use the bathroom, or take a break? First you must walk half a mile to the nearest exit.’

While it’s a very interesting building, and quite pleasant to work in, the BnF is as far from the everyday realities of Parisian pungency as you can get: clearly it’s positing itself as an astringently Cartesian mind, opposed to the rest of Paris’s bodily funk.