![Photo of a young man on a phone in a Paris booth.
[Fernand Raynaud’s] sketches such as the one in which the Parisian tries to call the suburb of Asnieres and finds it so hopeless that he finally places the call through New York were within a hairline of possibility.
De Gaulle had declared the telephone to be “un gadget” (defined in the Petit Robert dictionary as “objet ménager amusant et nouveau”), and investment in telephone equipment was out of the question until after his retirement. - Mavis Gallant in “Paris: The Taste of a New Age” from Paris Notebooks
This helps to explain the mysterious vagaries of Parisian telephones as I experienced them in the 1960s and even the 1970s. Back then, public phones seemed to function only sporadically and apartments came with their own historically attached numbers and instruments, listed (if at all) under the name of some long-departed owner or tenant. Legend had it that obtaining a new number, under one’s own name, would take years, if not decades.
[Photo: Jean-Pierre Léaud in Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, 1968]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:wcdzwbjgo57a6y742bacd4mv/bafkreig5eunyoo3ymhdpxb62dqpqegkz6atnmmzlrlpzflq6gp5atuetr4)
Photo of a young man on a phone in a Paris booth. [Fernand Raynaud’s] sketches such as the one in which the Parisian tries to call the suburb of Asnieres and finds it so hopeless that he finally places the call through New York were within a hairline of possibility. De Gaulle had declared the telephone to be “un gadget” (defined in the Petit Robert dictionary as “objet ménager amusant et nouveau”), and investment in telephone equipment was out of the question until after his retirement. - Mavis Gallant in “Paris: The Taste of a New Age” from Paris Notebooks This helps to explain the mysterious vagaries of Parisian telephones as I experienced them in the 1960s and even the 1970s. Back then, public phones seemed to function only sporadically and apartments came with their own historically attached numbers and instruments, listed (if at all) under the name of some long-departed owner or tenant. Legend had it that obtaining a new number, under one’s own name, would take years, if not decades. [Photo: Jean-Pierre Léaud in Francois Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, 1968]
Here I plagiarize my own 2014 Tumblr post* (with some words by #MavisGallant) to enlarge upon an earlier skeet about the adventure of telephoning in #Paris.
*possibly already read by every one of my eight followers there.
