Ep 80 - Navigating “Metro Boulot Dodo” with Andrew Martin

Parisians go about the daily grind just like any other urban denizens. In Paris specifically, the expression metro-boulot-dodo – metro, work, sleep – is used to evoke the somewhat mind-numbing nature of that day-to-day. Author Andrew Martin's Metropolitain: An Ode to the Paris Metro delves into the reality of Paris’ métropolitan, from its beginnings as an echo of London’s Underground to a social and aesthetic touchstone of the City of Light.



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Credits 
Host: Emily Monaco. @Emily_in_France; Website: http://www.tomatokumato.com and http://www.emilymmonaco.com
Producer: Jennifer Geraghty. @jennyphoria; Website: http://jennyphoria.com

Music Credits 
Édith Piaf - La Vie en Rose (DeliFB Lofi Remix) 
🎵 MSKD Sounds:  https://www.instagram.com/mskd_sounds/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRql...  https://soundcloud.com/mskd_sounds
🎵 DeliFB:  https://www.youtube.com/c/DeliFB  https://soundcloud.com/delifb  https://www.instagram.com/cativo.kevin/  https://twitter.com/DeliciousFB 

About Us 
From one Emily in Paris to another... just speaking French isn't enough to understand the intricacies of the locals, but it's definitely a good place to start. Famously defended by armed "immortals" of the Académie Française (no, we're not making this up) the French language is filled with clues that show interested outsiders what, exactly, makes the French tick. 

Each episode, listen in as Emily Monaco and an expert take a deep dive into a word that helps us gain a keener understanding of the French.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are listening to Navigating the French on Paris Underground Radio.
For more great content and a bonus episode of Navigating
the French, please join us on Patreon.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hello and welcome to Navigating the French, the podcast where
each episode we take a look at a French word
and try and see what it tells us about French culture.
I'm your host, Emily Monaco. Today I'm joined by Andrew Martin,
author of Mitro Puritan, an Ode to the Paris Metro.
He's here to discuss the expression mitro bulou dudu, the

(00:35):
Parisian idiom evoking the daily grind, and its relationship with
the history and esthetic of lu Mitro. Welcome Andrew to
the podcast. I'm so excited to have you on. I
would love it if you could share just a little
bit about who you are and what you do with
our listeners.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Thank you for having me. I'm a journalist and an author.
I've written many books, probably about thirty, mainly novels, but
also some nonfiction, and the sum of the nonfiction is
about railways. I have an interest in railways, I think
because my dad worked on the railways, and my most
recent train book is about the Paris Metro and it's
called Metropolitane and then I've forgotten what the subtitle is,

(01:20):
but it's something like a love letter to the Paris Metro,
an owed to the Paris Metro.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Well, I'm excited to chat with you about the Metro.
And I think you also have a new novel that
you have coming out. Can you tell us a little
bit about that?

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Yes, thank you for bringing that up. I have a
novel just out a couple of weeks ago called The
Night in Venice, set in Venice in nineteen eleven. It's
a sort of murder mystery or a psychological thriller, supposedly
about a young woman, a girl of fourteen, who dreams
or possibly really did murder her guardian in Venice, and

(01:56):
she doesn't know if it's real or not, and she
wonders around Venice thinking about this and worrying.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Basically, that sounds very intriguing. I'm sure that it'd be
exciting to inhabit another perspective after all of your time
working and writing about trains, Are there any trains?

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Are are there is a train? Because a girl goes
to Venice on the train, as you would have to
in nineteen eleven. I deliberately made a mistake in the
description of the train, just because I didn't care and
I wasn't required to be strictly accurate, which I am
when I write a nonfiction railwaybel So I just kind

(02:33):
of threw in a mistake see if anybody would notice.
I think I was allowed to do that since it's fiction.
I won't book what the mistake was.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Well, I'm very excited to hear about what the process
was like when you were writing your book about the
Paris Metro. So before you started this book, how familiar
were you with Paris in general and with the Paris
Metro in particular.

Speaker 3 (02:55):
Well, I visited Paris regularly. When I first met my
wife quite a long time ago, now about certenty five
years ago, she was actually living in Paris, so I
used to go there quite a lot to see her,
and I suppose I've been two or three times every
year ever since. Like euro a star and I sometimes

(03:16):
try and blag a press strip on your stuff, but
I've never lived in Paris, and so that was something
that made me wary of writing about the Metro. But
when I began writing the book, I didn't begin to
go there quite a lot, and stayed for a couple
of weeks there. But people might detect from reading the

(03:37):
book that I've never actually lived in Paris, because I
like the Metro and a lot of people who use
it every day seem not to or am not as
keen on it as I am.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Well, the fact that you like the Metro and that
your book is indeed an ode to the Metro, I
think is something that would reflect well on sort of
the original design of the Metro, which you go into
in your book. You know, the ways in which the
Paris Metro was one of the earlier underground systems and
was designed I believe in contrast to the London Underground.

(04:10):
Is that is that right? Yes?

Speaker 3 (04:12):
The London Underground was designed in the British way, in
other words, by private enterprise less ironically a French term,
and it evolved chaotically between eighteen sixty three and still
evolving now. And it was built by various private companies
who were then formed into something called a public corporation

(04:33):
in nineteen thirty three under the banner of London Transport.
But before then it had just been a lot of
separate companies, whereas the Paris Metro was built in the
French way, more organized, in a more sort of socialistic way.
It was built by the Corporation of Paris very quickly,
most of it between about nineteen hundred and nineteen ten.

(04:55):
It was built to call into a plan, so therefore
very different process to the London Underground. And also they
benefited from building so much later than the London Underground
because they didn't have to bother with having steam trains
in underground tunnels, which the early underground did and which
it never worked, you know, because he couldn't breathe. So

(05:16):
they started straight away with electricity.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Amazing, and the Paris Metro, you know. One of the
other things that I think makes it stand out and
tourists definitely notice it, is that, as compared to the
London Underground or indeed the subway system in New York
City where I'm from, the entrances have a certain saminess,
a consistency to them in Paris, and I believe that

(05:39):
was by design. Originally, they were always planning on making
the Paris Metro have this sort of consistency to it.
Can you tell me a little bit about the way
in which these entrances were designed and how that contrasts
with other underground systems in the rest of the world.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
Well, the Paris Metro is beautiful, and it was always
intended to be beautiful, because that's how they work in Paris.
Paris was itself and is a beautiful city, and so
there was no question of having a metro system that
would disrupt the beauty of the streets. The whole point
of the Metro was that it wouldn't have an industrial character,

(06:15):
so very few of the stations have surface buildings, whereas
most underground stations in central London do have surface buildings,
often beautiful ones. But in Paris they weren't going to
build a great, big railway station on the streets, so
the entrances are very slight. And the head of the

(06:35):
metro's name might temporarily forgotten, was keen on Art Nouveau,
and he had seen the work of Hector Guimar, who
was a rising star of Art Nouveau, who had created
some buildings in Paris which were very curvacious in the
Art Nouveau's style and very spectacular, and these were admired

(06:59):
by the Chapo was the boss of the Metro, and
he recruited Gema to design the Metro entrances, which are
like kind of large giant flats lilies of the valley,
two of them sort of arching towards each other, and
in place of the actual lily or the flower, you
have a lamp which is illuminated at night red or orange.

(07:20):
So you have these kind of jungly iron sculptures to
denote the Metro entrances. Sometimes there's just art nouveaux railings
without the actual lamp standards or without the flowers, and
sometimes a Metro entrance is just a staircase in the street.
But yes, the entrances are very distinctive the Gema entrances,

(07:43):
although they faded from fashion in the mid twenties centur
and apparently a lot of them were decommissioned then, and
not all of them survive, and you could buy them
quite cheaply, you know, from scrap dealers and things. But
now they are revered and admired and they are what
people tend to remember about the Metro. I suppose the
Metro is also a beautiful underground, and it's beautiful underground
by virtue of its elegance and simplicity. And the basic

(08:07):
template was that the platforms would be arched over with
white tiles, and the white tiles would have beveled edges,
so they would sparkle under electric light. It's a very
neat idea. And the other virtue of esthetic virtue of
the Metro compared to the underground is that the arch
covers encompasses two railway lines, which is companion of one

(08:31):
line going in one direction, one line going in the other,
like a normal big railway, whereas in the underground most
of the underground the trains are like rats in a
drain pipe, one train in one round deep tunnel. Metro
will get onto this in a minute, but the Metro
is close to the surface and you have these arched vaults.
And a friend of mine, Julian Pepinster, who has written

(08:53):
book about the Metro himself and who works for the Metros,
says that they always reminded him of the wine cellar
of a chateau, which which is a very nice thing
to be reminded of. And I agree. So that's the
They are the two basic principles of Metro elegance, the
gema entrances and the wine cellar like vault.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
That seems very appropriate for France in general to have
a metro system that reminds you of wine cellars. You
mentioned another really important element that makes the Paris metro
stand out, especially as compared to the London underground, which
is that it's relatively close to the surface. Could you
tell me a little bit about what contributed forth making
that decision.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Well, it's obviously beneficial to have the lines close to
the surface because then you don't have to spend a
lot of time descending towards them, and so usually on
the metro you just walk down the staircase, which is
not ideal if you're disabled, and the access for disabled
per is not good on the metro. But yeah, you
usually just walk down the staircase to get to the platform.

(09:56):
And this is because the lines are built close to
the surface, and they are built close to the surface
because the geology of Paris permitted that there's no reason
not to build them close to the surface, whereas in
London that the geology is not right for that. There's
kind of unstable gravel apparently close to the surface in
much of London, whereas deep down in London, about forty
feet down and deeper, you have clay and clay is

(10:20):
ideal for creating deep level tunnels, so that it's essentially
to do with the difference the different geology. And in London,
the underground is concentrated in North London because that's where
most of the clay is, so South London is not
as well served by the underground because the geology wasn't
right there. It was unstable all the way down I

(10:42):
think in South London. But the closeness to the surface
in Paris allows that vault like shape to be created.
You couldn't have that shape deep below ground because it
wouldn't be the right structure. It would collapse.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
And in addition to the metro stations being close to
the surface, which makes them I guess more accessible for
some and as you mentioned, quite rightly inaccessible for others,
considering that we don't have that many lift access metro
stations here in Paris. One other way in which the
metro in Paris seems to me to be more accessible,
more approachable than in other big cities, is that there

(11:17):
are station stops fairly well spread out throughout Paris, and
it's rare that you'd have to walk more than ten
minutes within the city limits to get to a stop.
Was that by design?

Speaker 3 (11:28):
Do you think the original plan was to have a
Metro station within five hundred meters of wherever you were
in Paris, and that's was largely carried out. But I
should mention that this I'm only talking about Paris proper, yes,
not the suburbs of Paris. So the Metro served Paris
proper brilliantly, but the suburbs were rather left out in

(11:51):
the cold, and then they later on got their own,
bigger rill way. They arear but that's not ideal, and
now there's an a tech to rectify that problem by
the building of I think it's four new metro life
which will serve the suburbs. So for the first time
now there is a plan to take the Metro out

(12:12):
into the suburbs. But that is a major weakness of
the Metro. It has been a sort of elitist railway
and I sort of acknowledge that in my book.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Well, I think that's a really interesting way to segue
into the other element of the Metro, which is the
social side of it, because we've talked about the esthetics,
which I think is a really culturally important element in
French society. But The expression that I thought of when
we were planning to speak today is this idea of
metrobulu dudu, and that kind of evokes that unpleasantness surrounding

(12:47):
the Metro that you said quite rightly. Because you haven't
lived in Paris, maybe you don't feel it the same way.
But I think a lot of Parisians don't really like
the Metro and they kind of throw it into the
same category asido, which is sleep. So you're kind of
in this rat race mindset. If you're enjoying this podcast,

(13:07):
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(13:29):
City of Muses, now available wherever you listen to podcasts
Navigating the French. You'll be right back after a word
from our sponsors, and now back to navigating the French
from a cultural standpoint in Paris, just from your perspective.
Having done this research, do you get the sense that
the Metro holds a particular cultural space cultural relevancy in

(13:54):
the Parisian mindset.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Well, I think that expression metro does rex to sort
of unhappiness with the Metro. The Metro is seen as being,
you know, just like facilitating the daily grind. It's something
that it's like a trap, and I can see that
in some of the stations, especially the ones north of

(14:16):
Ga San Lazare Online thirteen, which get particularly crowded, like
La Fourche is warmer, but those lines there's actually Metro
staff on the platform who push people into the trains.
I think like in Japan oh Adam.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
I used to watch Mari Santoine, I know near up
near laft washe and I remember being pushed onto the
Metro in the morning when you changed at laft Wash.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
Those trains are more I think, more crowded even than
the most crowded underground trains, and have been on them
when they are very crowded. I don't really mind of
because there's little windows on the trains at at the
moment they're quite old stock little windows that are open.
I get claustrophobic on the underground, which is an odd
thing because I've written a book about the underground as
well in Fact two. But because you can't open the windows,

(15:05):
but you can on lots of the older Metro trains.
But I can see why if I was using those
stations every day, I wouldn't probably have written a book
about the Metro. Another one that gets very crountry in
the same area north of son As Liege. But that's
a particularly beautiful station because of these murals depicting the
Belgian city of Liege. So that's a strange mixture. I

(15:26):
wonder if if the people on the crowded trains ever
think about how beautiful that station is. Maybe they've just
got used to it. But on the other hand, the
Metro is very efficient, and I've very seldom been on
a train that's got stopped in a tunnel on the Metro,
whereas it happens all the time on the underground. And
I think this is partly because the Metro is simply constructed. Basically,
the lines go from one end to another and then

(15:48):
and then back. If the trains go from one into another,
then back, whereas on the underground you've got lots of
bifurcations and lots of branches. There's a branch at Ler forche,
but that's unusual on the Metro. It's it's a very
simple operation and the trains come into the stations quickly,
with a short to dwell time. In other words, the
train seems to race into the station stop for quite

(16:11):
a short time. Everyone gets on and off and it
races away again. And this happens every thirty seconds in Russia.
It's a greater frequency than on most of the underground
and the Parisians are very well drilled. They get on
and off quickly. As soon as the train becomes even
slightly crowded. Everyone's sitting on the fold down seats, stands
up on their seats, snap back upright again. So in

(16:33):
a way, you know, the French behave correctly. They move
fast when they're on the Metro, and it's like it's
like a speeded up film. It always seems to me.
And you mentioned other things have matters of etiquette. One
important thing is that when you are on those collapsible seats,
you do stand up when the Metro gets crowded. Everyone

(16:54):
abays that very rigorously, I would say, like on the
London under iid not supposed to make I contact. Although
I've seen more flirtation between people on the Metro than
than on the underground, and I've a couple of times
seen a man walk up to a woman under his
phone number. I don't I've ever seen that on the underground.
Another thing wouldn't do is on the automated lines like

(17:15):
one for fourteen, there's a mock control panel at the
front of the trains. I think there is unfoulteen that
certainly is on one and four. This is for kids
to sit at the phone and pretend that they're driving
the train, so I think it'd be rude for an
adult to sit there.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Oh man, that's adorable, and I like what you're talking
what you're saying about this sort of I think that
the French are very attuned to sort of the social
contract in a way that Americans I, counting myself definitely aren't.
So this idea that you know you would notice that
the train is getting fallen, stand up if you're sitting
on the flip down seat, or potentially make it easy

(17:54):
for people to get off the train before you try
and board the train. Not make eye contact. Obviously, are all,
you know, essential things. I think one thing I've also
noticed is that people don't usually eat on the Metro,
and if they do, definitely get the hairy eyeball from
other passengers.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
Yeah, that's just the French, you know, they do everything
more esthetically than the English. So people don't walk around
the street drinking cans of beer, and they don't do
that on the Metro. You're not allowed to drink alcohol
on the underground, but people certainly do eat burgers on
the underground and drink coffee and tea, and I've never
seen that on the Metro, and I think that that's

(18:35):
part of the just the general elegance of Paris.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Well, speaking of that elegance, the Paris Metro has captivated
so many artists and novelists and filmmakers. I mean, you
go from Zazidnu Metro, you know, classic book, and you
have appearances of the Metro and many other works of art.
Were there any that inspired you as you were working
on this book, any that you found, you know, particularly

(19:02):
beautiful or haunting or true to life.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
I don't think the Metro seems to come up in
many novels, or at least not many that I've found
out about. I did read a novel called The Girl
who Reads on the Metro by Christine fairy Flurry excuse
my pronunciation, that's probably wrong. That came out in twenty seventeen,
and that's about a young woman who has a miserable
time on the metro. Very much is Metro Buldo, and

(19:30):
she's on the Line six, which is one of the
more beautiful lines because it's elevated. I forgot to say
that some of the Metro is elevated, and when it's elevated,
it just rolls, you know, in a very regal way
on along the beautiful boulevards. Line six and Line two
have long elevated sections. That's a novel set on the Metro,
and I'm reading that novel, I kept thinking, why doesn't

(19:52):
she acknowledge that she's on one of the most beautiful
stretches of the Paris Metro, but she didn't see it
like that.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Especially six, which crosses the river and you get this
view of the Eiffel Tower at one point.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, on the bridge called beier Hakien, which actually does
come up in the film Las Tango in Paris, which
is a problematic film. I think because it's got Marlon
Branda in the middle of some kind of angst that
I don't understand, having sex with a woman just in

(20:25):
a flat very near that elevated section of line six.
And the film is punctuated with beautiful shots of the
metro trains on line six. That's why I've watched that
film several times. For the Metro for the seventies metro
trains which were green and looked like little tin boxes,
except the red one, which was first class, and there's

(20:46):
lots of shots of these on them, and they they
kind of seem to symbolize something as they rattle past
the flat where these this couple have their liars on,
but I don't know what it symbolizes. But Last Time
When Paris is a great metro film. And another great
Metro film is La Samurai, starring Alain Delon as an assassin,
and there's a chase sequence on the Metro on nine

(21:09):
to eleven, and this is a very It is a
color film, but many very monochromatic. Delon always wears a
pale mac and a gray fedora. He lives in an
apartment which is almost entirely gray or light blue. He
steals cars only ever gray citron and the chase sequence
on the Metro, it really shows you the whiteness of

(21:30):
the stations and the sort of, you know, the elegance
of the color scheme of the Metro. It's fairness and
its plainness. And he does that thing of getting on
the train and as it's about to depart, he gets off,
leaps off at the last minute because he's being chased
by actually by a policewoman. And this has been copied
in hundreds of films ever since. So that's another of

(21:50):
my favorite Metro films. And then there's a Diva where
a guy rides his motorbike through the Metro. You've probably
seen that and Subway and these films, the latter two
films made in the eighties. They concentrate on the parts
of the Metro that had colored tiles, because the Metro
lost faith in the white tiles at a certain point
in the sixties, and so some stations became colored with

(22:12):
often orange tiles, and there's like a sort of an
acquiet taste. I think a few of them survive, although
there's been a reversion to white tiles recently. But yeah,
there's four Metro films but I've found very few metro novels.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, I think the one you mentioned and Zazi Dono
Metro by Raymond Keno are two of the only ones
that I know.

Speaker 3 (22:35):
Yeah, Zazi is great. I love it, But she's not.
But the joke is that she's never on the Metro. Sure,
but maybe she is briefly and she's asleep I think
for a second, where her whole ambition is to go
on the Metro.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
But there's a strike, yes, which is another important cultural
element of the Metro, and I think a lot of
people's frustration with.

Speaker 4 (22:55):
It is that we do tend to have not just
strikes of transport people, but regular strikes, almost seasonal strikes that.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Tend to take at the end of the year. Could
you sort of give us a bit of an insight
into the cultural relevance of why we see so much striking.
I mean, I know France likes a strike, but why
specifically of metro workers.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
I don't know. I think France is a more unionized
country than Britain, and it's basically well, I think it's
kind of more left wing country, or at least it
has been in recent years, and so I'm not sure
why it happens a lot on the Metro, but I
do know that I have been inconvenienced a lot by
strikes on the Metro. I won't spend the night on

(23:42):
a sleeper train in a Parisian station I'll remember the
name of in a minute, because there was a strike
and the train didn't leave the station, so I just
slept on the train in the station. I'd say about
one in ten times that I've been to Paris there's
been some kind of public transport strike. Not for me
to sort of comment on it, really, it's not my country, no.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
But I remember once being very inconvenienced by it, coming
back from London and having to walk home to the
seventh from Gauduna because the Metro was on strike. So
it's definitely something that a lot of Parisians have to
live with, live through. If you're enjoying this episode of
Navigating the French, you may also be interested in our
sister podcast, Romancing in Paris, which delves into love, lust

(24:24):
and so much more in the City of Light. Navigating
the French will be right back after a word from
our sponsors, and now back to Navigating the French. You
did mention earlier something that I wanted to hear a
bit more about, which is some of these stations that
are just so beautiful, like Lieze you mentioned. There are

(24:44):
other stations like the one beneath us homon Neal for example,
that kind of or the one beneath the louver that
reflect a little bit what's going on above the surface.
Do you have any personal favorites among the metro stations.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Well, you have these themes stations which varied between very spectacular,
like the one under the louver, which has replicas of
artworks that are in the loof and which is very
beautifully lit. It's very gloomy, you know, just like a
museum would be, I suppose. Then there's the one that's
shaped like Captain Nemo's submarine, which is lined with copper panels.

(25:21):
Which one is that one? I can't remember? Think, Yeah,
that's that's probably my favorite, because that really is completely surreal.
And these little portholes with what appeared to be objects
floating in a green sea beyond the porthal. That's really
dreamy and I could imagine that if you've never been

(25:41):
there before, and say you fell asleep on the metro
train and woke up in that station, you would be
really freaked out. These stations are much more theatrical than
anything in London, although there's one Parmontier which is I
can't remember what line it's on, but that's dedicated to
celebrating the potato and it's just like a little exhibition

(26:02):
you'd see in an infant school done by the kids.
So that's quite touchingly, sort of modest that one. It's
got a sort of Trellis effect on the platform walls
to sort of indicate that you're in a sort of
market garden or in the countryside or something, and then
lots of little panels giving information about how the potato
came to France. I think it says a lot about

(26:23):
the theatricality of the French that you do have these
themed stations. But I think my favorite lines are in
a way the elevated ones, because they're just so brazen,
and the lines are carried on these sort of Corinthian
columns that are spray painted silver, and there's no apology
made for the metro. It just rolls down the middle
of these beautiful streets, your level with about the kind

(26:45):
of third story or fourth story of the houseman buildings
that you go past, and apparently I was told the
Metro does not reduce the value of the property in
those streets. Oh wow, And so I'd really like to
live on one of the streets and I'll watch the
Metro trains are bad, Metro.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
All night, which is nice if you're living.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
No, no, it would be annoying, I suppose if it did.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
I know. There's also a handful of decommissioned sort of
ghost stations in Paris. Do you get the sense that
there's a particular interest in those stations among Parisians or
among French people, or are they kind of left to
link languish in history.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Well, in the war in nineteen thirty nine, I think
about half the Metro was closed down, and then most
of it gradually reopened during the war, and then after
the war about a dozen stations remained closed and they
all most of them gradually reopened, but four never reopened.
And one of them is Saint Martin, which is on

(27:45):
linees eight and nine. And I went there on a
nocturnal tour of the Metro, a special excursion, and so
I had to look at that station. I remember on
some of the posters survive on the tunnel walls, and
there was one advertising a three she don't think you'd
get now, And there was an advert for some kind
of disinfectant which was very beautifully done. It was a

(28:06):
little green man, like a sort of elf or a
faery advertising some kind of disinfectant, and I think this
advert would have dated from the nineteen thirties. Then there's Haxo,
which is again probably not pronouncing it right, which is
in a little abandoned tunnel off Port Delila and Hakso

(28:26):
is a station that never actually opened for complicated reasons,
so it's just like a cave. They never put the
tiles on it either, but you can visit it on
special tours. And then at Port Delila itself there is
the Cinema Platform, which is an abandoned platform where they
shoot films. So when you see a metro station in
a film, it might be masquerading as a station in

(28:49):
the middle of Paris, but it might well be that
cinema platform at Lila. And you have original fixtures there,
like the little wooden stool that the ticket checker would
have sat on, and there's also wooden booths which would
have been a station master's office. These have gone from
most of the Metro, but they survive at the cinema

(29:10):
platform in Lela, and that's sometimes home to the public
as well.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Gosh, that must be such an interesting thing to visit
and potentially a setting for your next novel. I don't
know if you're planning on setting a novel in the
Paris Metro, but those ghost stations are definitely interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
I have mentioned the Metro in novels. No one's filmed
my books yet, but I suppose. Yeah, I think it's
time for a Metro novel.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
One. What are you working on now? What's your next project?

Speaker 3 (29:38):
I'm writing a book, a nonfiction book about trades to
the seaside in Britain.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Oh, how lovely. Well, we'll keep an eye out for that,
and I will put links to your books, specifically your
new novel about Venice and this book about the Paris Metro,
for anybody who wants to learn a bit more about
the Metro in Paris. Thank you so much Andrew for
joining me today on the podcast. It's been such a
pleasure chatting with you and learning all about your passion

(30:04):
for trains in general and the Metro in particular. Thanks books,
Thank you so much. Have a fantastic rest of your day.
This has been Navigating the French. You can find more
from me Emily Monico at Emily Underscore in Underscore France,
on Twitter and Instagram. This podcast is produced by Paris
Underground Radio. To listen to other episodes of this podcast,

(30:26):
or to discover more podcasts like it, please visit Paris
Underground Radio dot com. Thanks for listening and abientu.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
This episode of Navigating the French was produced by Jennifer
Garrity for Paris Underground Radio. For more great content, join
us on Patreon at Patreon dot com slash Paris Underground
Radio