Bad samaritans

After spending a quiet afternoon reading at the Place du Châtelet, I entered the Châtelet metro in order to catch the line 7 in time for dinner back in Villejuif. Upon descending the three-or-so staircases leading to a great walkway which boasts the busiest correspondence in the city, I noticed a crowd forming at the threshold of an escalator.

The focal point of the scene was two hulking men of African descent manhandling a smallish, white photographer, who more or less resembled Harry Potter aged thirty years, complete with a pasty complexion, shaggy brown hair, and thick-rimmed glasses. The photographer was shaking from head to toe as the men tried to pry a camera from his hands. I gathered from the photographer's stuttering French and the accented, deep-throated exhortations of the two men that the photographer had unwittingly snapped a shot of the two men and his buddies, who apparently didn't agree with it. In one instance, the huskier of the two men violently shook the little photographer, who was now even more visibly convulsing from fear and on the edge of tears. But he was an artist...

Perhaps louder than the one-way, verbal jousting of the two men was the ubiquitous silence and complacency assumed by the growing crowd, who like many French people were keen on witnessing a free spectacle, especially in times of economic crisis. (My girlfriend tells me this is a common French characteristic.) Myself included. For a passing moment I thought of intervening, but then I remembered what you're supposed to do in France. So I quickly reached for my own camera in the hope of taking my own prize-winning snapshot of deep Paris-suburb social tension, and at the risk of a black eye and swift deportation (my titre de séjour is still processing). But to my own benefit the battery was dead. Also like a good Parisian I checked the time and it was nearing 19h, so I shrugged and left for dinner. I was supposed to pick up fresh apples.

I don't know what became of the unfortunate little photographer with thick-rimmed glasses. Nor do I want to.