The French substitute for oil—wine...

The French substitute for oil—wine...

Singer Sacha Distel lost his voice a quarter of an hour after beginning a performance at the Hilton Hotel in the principality of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. He was flown to France and prescribed a month’s rest.

The nationalist singer Michel Sardou, for his part, is bravely fighting the desert that defeated his colleague—or, more precisely, the Arab oil princes. In a song called “They Have Oil, But Nothing More,” Sardou says, among other things: “They have oil in the rocks for thirty years, and we have wheat in the fields and white wine for a thousand years.” As someone familiar with white wine’s warming properties, I can testify here that it certainly makes a suitable energy substitute for many French people.

“When their oil runs out,” Sardou also says, “they will come to us to ask for bread and drink Charles Martel cognac.” In the meantime, they are doing that even today, and getting everything without any problems...

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The next generation of the “clochards”

A new generation of “clochards” is growing in Paris. Sad but true. Here and there, in the Latin Quarter, at Place de la Contrescarpe, one can still find “intellectuals [illegible],” as once on the banks of the Seine, where a highway runs today.

By day—in the street, and at the metro stations—at night, a “human bundle” is sometimes folded up inside plastic or cardboard, something one could step on if, of course, the smell wafting over a great distance had not driven you in another direction. A despairing poet, a surgeon who made, as they say, a fatal mistake and decided to atone. A lawyer who got into trouble; or actors without a stage, like those from Rue Mouffetard who sometimes wear women’s clothes and sweep cars with a broom, and sometimes tie an old telephone to a road sign with a piece of string and have a very witty conversation with God. But in fact, the overwhelming majority of them have always been people from prisons and hospitals who failed to fit into society, discharged soldiers and husbands who could not make things work, and worn-out prostitutes.

The much sadder truth today is that among Paris’s five thousand beggars, the main component is “the new generation.” Unemployed young people and delinquents. 500 of them are under the age of 26. The new generation is more violent, less philosophical, and very unpopular with “the old-timers.” And so fights proliferate within the class that, rightly or wrongly, symbolized for the whole world the embodiment of stoic calm in our times. Many clochards need emergency treatment. Biology, too, takes its toll. A clochard’s life expectancy has never been among the highest.

But there are always some who still take their role seriously. Some of them are “imported.” Like, for example, the 40-year-old clochard, a Russian Jew among the first to leave in 1973. Also among the first “dropouts” in Vienna. In 1974 he arrived in Paris and fulfilled the dream of his life. He became a clochard, and chose for himself a respectable “residential neighborhood” near Place de l’Étoile, opposite the splendid offices of a large bank. Most of the time he remains silent and sometimes answers only when addressed in Yiddish. If immigration from Russia failed to improve our demographic situation, it contributed, at least, to preserving the clochard’s eroding classical image.

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The French Connection is alive and well

Two Turks and six kilograms of raw morphine seized near Marseille were enough to convince people that the famous “French Connection” had come back to life, even if, at this stage, on a smaller scale. But investigators fear that this small beginning will grow into something big.

The heroin-smuggling route from the Middle East to the refineries of Marseille has therefore opened again. In the past year, one refinery laboratory has already been discovered inside a cave in Marseille, and a smuggling network employing French chemists in Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, has been uncovered. French police investigators believe that the people reviving the “French Connection” are made up of: several members of the old “Connection” who served relatively light sentences and have already been released from prison; several “small fish” in the network who were never caught; and new people—mainly chemists who saw that there are kinds of laboratories in which one can make much more money...

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The hen that laid golden eggs...

The Lebanese industrialist, Shauqi Gusug, set up a food factory unlike any other near the city of Nîmes. Mr. Gusug makes eggs—or, more precisely, long eggs.

But his factory is neither a henhouse nor an incubator. Its machines simply break ordinary eggs, separate the white from the yolk, and reassemble the parts into a “monster” eighteen centimeters long and five centimeters wide, representing the contents of about seven “ordinary” eggs. The product is frozen and intended for export, mainly to Saudi Arabia and the emirates of the Persian Gulf, which suffer from a shortage of eggs.