Post #744423 by Club Nouméa on Mon, Jun 8, 2015 4:31 AM

Beneath the Paving Stones there's a Beach...

Sous les pavés, la plage...

An expression from May 1968, when protesting students began noticing the sand used as a base layer beneath the Parisian paving stones that they were prising up in order to throw them at French riot police. The slogan became ubiquitous, suggesting that life could be something better than the cold hard 20th-century realities offered by the technocratic Fifth Republic. It was in keeping with the escapism espoused by past generations of French thinkers, from Diderot through to Loti.

On the face of it, Paris is not a prime destination if you are interested in the South Pacific. It is literally as far away from the South Pacific as you can get without leaving the planet. From New Zealand, a typical travel time from door to door, including time spent in transit and catching public transport in-between the 3 or 4 flights required to get to Paris, is 35 hours. If you fly in via Frankfurt (cheaper airfares), it can take as much as 40 hours. It is with a wry smile that New Zealanders overhear Americans in Paris, complaining about their terrible jet-lag after an 8-hour flight.

I first travelled to Paris in 1991 as a student doing thesis research on the French Pacific (Paris has better libraries and archives than the French Pacific does) and when I arrived I was completely zonked out. The plan was to check into a cheap student hostel, but the catch was you couldn't book in advance; you just had to roll up and take your chances. I ended up in a hotel for the first couple of nights before finally shifting into one of the hostel's Dickensian dormitories in the Latin Quarter.

It was cheap, but it was also winter, it was cold, and it was grim. I felt perpetually tired from lack of sleep. I have never stayed in a dormitory ever since - there's always a snorer, there's always some drunk who staggers in at 2am falling over the furniture, or some lothario who decides to bring his girlfriend back for some late-night entertainment.

The homesickness was broken by long-distance phone calls home. I soon discovered that most Parisian public phone boxes were useless as they were located on busy intersections and you couldn't hear a thing for traffic noise. It was not long before I discovered there were two phone boxes on a quiet back street called Rue Monsieur Le Prince:

This is where they used to be - with the 21st-century advent of cell phones, public phone boxes are a dying breed in France these days. It was on one of those walks to call home that I discovered La Librairie du Pacifique (the Pacific Bookshop), just up the street, at number 32 Rue Monsieur Le Prince. This is what it looks like today: sadly, it is the chi-chi Parisian antithesis of what the bookshop was all about:

The Librairie du Pacifique stood out from its drab surroundings - the frontage was painted a bright aquamarine blue. There were Tahitian necklaces in the window, tikis inside the doorway, and once you pushed open the door tentatively, the owner seem to pop out from nowhere with a warm greeting.

I was greeted by a big barrel-chested gentleman in a Tahitian shirt and chatted to him about New Caledonia as I tried to take everything in. The shop itself was staggering, being packed to the ceiling with all sorts of books about the South Pacific, as well as records, tiki carvings for sale, and other trinkets and odds and ends.

Here is a link with some photos of the owner, Maurice Bitter, and the interior of his shop:

http://www.christianschoettl.com/article-maurice-bitter-la-librairie-du-pacifique-111457579.html

From my first encounter with him, I was aware that M. Bitter was one of those gentlemen you only infrequently encounter in your lifetime. From his knowledge of the Pacific and his amazing collection of books, it was clear he was a great traveller and he knew his stuff. It was only later that I found out the true breadth and scope of his life experience.

I guessed from his French accent and his surname that he was probably from Alsace but have not been able to confirm this since. I did not know at that time that he was also Jewish and, from what I have found out, had a rough time as a young man during World War II. He went on to work for the French public broadcasting corporation ORTF and, by the early 60s, was a broadcaster and sound recordist. It is no accident that he recorded the Adolph Eichmann trial in 1961, after the prominent Nazi had been abducted from Argentina by the Mossad and brought to Israel to be tried for his crimes against humanity.

It was during these years working in broadcasting that Maurice Bitter travelled. The ORTF was a global organisation, serving the whole French-speaking world. He ended up recording over 50 LPs of field recordings, from a Haitian voodoo ritual, through to music from places like Ceylon, Laos, Cambodia, Peru and Bulgaria. But the greater part of his recordings were devoted to his true love, the French Pacific:

I am going to blow a horn and call him the French Alan Lomax, because of all the ground he covered and the sheer scope of his releases.

Here is a sample of just one of his field recordings, of a young Tahitian singing a song called "Te Uru" (Breadfruit):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiqZ-Jqxr-I

That's Maurice at the end, asking the singer about the song...

Maurice Bitter also wrote and published various books on the French Pacific. Sadly, he died over ten years ago. He was a gentleman and a scholar with a great love for the Pacific Islands who deserves to be remembered more widely beyond the people whose lives he touched. Whenever I go to Paris, I still frequent the Asian restaurants along Rue Monsieur Le Prince and, walking past number 32, I pause to remember the warm Pacific-style greeting he gave me when I walked into his bookstore as a young student.

Toto, j'ai l'impression que nous ne sommes plus au Kansas !

[ Edited by: Club Nouméa 2015-06-08 04:58 ]

[ Edited by: Club Nouméa 2015-06-09 15:32 ]