This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

31st October 2009

For people who have never been to Paris, the Gare du Nord is an evocative symbol: busiest train station in Europe, point of arrival and departure for millions of international travellers annually and, over the course of its 150 year history (one imagines), scene of many a romantic moon-and-mist rendezvous.

But Parisians know that, like the Gare St Lazare, the Gare de l’Est and various other glamorous-sounding transport terminals in the city of love – or light, or any cliché of your choice – when you get right down to it, the Gare du Nord is just another station. Which means that it’s dirty, it smells of urine and it’s full of people who want to be somewhere else.

For me, the name conjures a different feeling: the prospect of incarceration.

I was fresh out of varsity when I first encountered Paris. I had a course in French behind me, enough Francs in my wallet to pay for a few nights at a cheap pension, and almost no budgeting ability whatsoever. Fast forward a few days and, unsurprisingly, by the time I was ready to begin the second leg of my not-so-grand European tour – an overnight train to Rome via Milan – I had run out of cash.

This didn’t worry me; my barely-touched credit card was ready and waiting for precisely such an event. There was one minor hitch: for the life of me I couldn’t remember the PIN code, so withdrawing money from an ATM wasn’t an option for the foreseeable future. But I wasn’t panicking. I had my ticket to Rome, I was at the famous Gard du Nord, my train was leaving in fifteen minutes – what more could I want?

Food. After a day of museums and galleries and long boulevards, with nothing since a croissant or a croque-monsieur (I forget which) for breakfast, it occurred to me that food was precisely what I could want, and did want. I was absolutely ravenous.

Hunger drove me out of the waiting room, past the smirks of a group of hoodies – this was the nineties, but the French have always been ahead of fashion, even amongst disaffected teenagers – towards a moustachioed man wearing a beret and selling baguettes (you couldn’t make that up) at a platform kiosk.

Perfect. Parfait. Perfectamundo.

I ordered a baguette and a cold drink, handed over my credit card in a debonair manner, with a shrug and a casual “Je n’ai pas de monnaie”, and started tucking in. The proprietor eyed me as I spilled Coke down my front and dropped crumbs on his counter while he swiped the card and waited for a response. I ate. He waited. I drank. He waited. And waited.

I don’t know how you say “Declined” in French, but it was clear what had happened. A frown became visible underneath his bushy moustache.

“Essayez encore une fois, si vous plez,” I stuttered, pieces of baguette coming out with each word – “Please try again,” or words to that effect.

After a few more failed attempts, the frown turned to a scowl, accompanied by a stream of choice French complaints that I could not understand. I smiled sheepishly, apologised and proffered him a half-eaten baguette and half-empty bottle. Pointing to a clock, I tried to explain that my train would be leaving soon and I had better be off.

No such luck. In a flash he leaped over the counter and wrestled my arms into a half-nelson position behind my back. “Au distributeur!” he barked, teaching me a new French word by frogmarching me to the nearest ATM (this being France, the land of no convenience, the nearest machine was outside the station and about four blocks away).

My attempts to explain the impediment of a forgotten PIN were futile. I cowed under his hostile gaze, entering numbers on the key-pad at random, silently petitioning St Christopher to come to the aid of a traveller in peril.

When there was no response (from either St Christopher or the ATM), a new cry was raised behind my back – “Au commissariat!” – and off we went into the night again, looking for a police station.

A few minutes of fruitless searching had an unexpected mollifying effect on my captor. He must have remembered his unmanned kiosk, now a soft target for les hoodies, and decided that the cost of a baguette and a soft drink was a small price to pay to be rid of this annoying foreigner. He let go of me and walked briskly back to the Gare du Nord in sullen silence, as I trailed behind him like a son who has disappointed his father.

Suffice it to say: I missed my train.