The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino

headed to the butcher shop, where they thought my rodent problem was hilarious.
    “You’re American, so use your gun!” said Sébastien, my favorite butcher. He pretended to shoot a rifle. “Poof! It’s dead.”
    Maybe Sébastien would be my savior. “Are you a hunter? Do you know how to hunt mice?”
    “The only thing I hunt is beautiful women,” he said.
    The butchers got an even bigger laugh out of that. Then they sent me off to talk to the real rodent expert, Yves Chataigner, the cheesemonger two doors down.
    When you’re in a war over who gets the cheese, it pays to be preemptive. Yves has a regular arrangement with a commercial exterminator. He advised me to put a small piece of aged Comté cheese on the traps. It costs about thirty euros a pound. He cut me a piece to taste and said there was no charge.
    Why aged Comté, which is more expensive than young Comté or Gruyère?
    “It’s got a good, strong rind,” he said.
    “What’s rind got to do with it?”
    A female customer jumped into the conversation.
    “You have to have a strong rind and jam it in the trap at just the right level,” she said. “A smart mouse knows how to grab the cheese before the trap strikes.” Then she advised me never to buy ready-made glue traps but to make my own; she launched into a long, detailed explanation of how to construct them. She said that the pungent smell of old kitty litter might be effective—cat urine can be a powerful deterrent—and that barn owls can kill more than a dozen mice a night. I was out of my league. How did this woman, dressed in elegant white, know so much about rodents? “Ha, ha!” she laughed. “I’ve had a country house for years! You learn about rodents. You kill the rats, of course. But the mice! They’re rather sweet-looking. Just enjoy them.”
    I should have known that the French would like rodents. A number of the fables of Jean de La Fontaine involve mice or rats,which are often portrayed as kind, curious, and generous rather than dirty, disease-bearing, and disgusting. In “The Lion and the Rat,” for example, the rat displays patience and perseverance in saving the life of the King of the Beasts. In “The Cat and an Old Rat,” the experienced rat is too clever to be deceived by the cat’s tricks. In “The Rat and the Oyster,” the country rat “of little brains” shows gumption and curiosity in exploring the world, but his naïveté and innocence land him inside the oyster’s grip.
    I tried to think of our French mouse as a small version of Remy, the anthropomorphic French rodent in the 2007 film Ratatouille . Remy appreciated good food and longed to cook. He was the secret “little chef” for Linguini, a garbage boy at a fancy Paris restaurant. Remy wanted to be a real chef, but he knew he would always be seen as a rat. “I pretend to be a rat for my father; I pretend to be a human through Linguini,” Remy says during one poignant moment in the film.
    I didn’t get the chance to befriend our mouse. In the days that followed, it did not return. Ilda, the concierge, reported a sighting in one of the converted maids’ rooms on the sixth floor. Just like Remy in Ratatouille, it had good taste. It ate pistachios and a piece of chocolate cake but didn’t touch the garbage.



 
    THE MEANING OF MARTYRDOM
    . . .
    The other day when I was walking I got to thinking.
How do the French name their streets?
    —A RT BUCHWALD ,
AMERICAN HUMOR COLUMNIST

    P ARIS HAS MORE THAN SIXTY-TWO HUNDRED STREETS, boulevards, avenues, and passages. Their names fall into several categories: kings (Henri IV, François I), American presidents (Wilson, Roosevelt), military victories (Iéna, Aboukir), important dates (September 4, after the day in 1870 when the Third Republic was created; November 11, after Armistice Day, marking the end of World War I), trades (bakers, drapers), about 175 saints (Jean, Paul, Georges), cities of the world (Tehran, Cairo, Rome), and the eccentric (Street of