Les Clochards

Along Manhattan's broken-spirited Bowery, they would be called bums, but the sentimental Parisians have a fancier name for those uncounted thousands of their compatriots who, unshaved, unwashed and unnoticed, scratch out a life al fresco in the shadows of Notre-Dame, the teeming Les Halles markets and the Seine bridges. The French of Paris call their dedicated bums les clochards (ones who limp), and think of them as the spiritual descendants of the great and vagrant Francois Villon.

To one Parisian, however, the bums of Paris are no proper bums at all, but merely aggravated psychological cases eager for reclamation. After a painstaking study for a doctorate at the Sorbonne, Psychologist Alexandre Vexliard reported in a thesis that some 50% of the Paris clochards are not drinking men. that many of them do useful and vital work at the city's markets and that most of them are "redeemable" to society. The bums of Paris reacted with outraged pride to these black charges.

"I do not doubt," wrote 29-year-old Clerk William Borst, onetime clochard, to Le Monde, "that M. Vexliard's work is a masterpiece of erudition . . . but has he roamed the streets on a winter night looking for a corner to sleep in? Has he had a fist fight over a rotten Camembert? Has he had his shirt full of lice? I am only a former clochard but I affirm that 99.5% of clochards drink. The only thing for which a clochard ever stirs is red wine. Real clochards are not redeemable. They are Bohemians and will fall to pieces the minute they are subjected to discipline."

In a dingy corner behind the Hotel de Ville, where they sleep huddled together with a flea-ridden dog, a clochard and his wife were equally insulted by the notion that they are redeemable. "It may be all right for the likes of you," said the woman, "but we don't like washing. When it gets too cold here, my husband insults a gendarme and he takes us to the police station for the night. But that's all right --they don't make you wash." A famed Parisian clochard is white-bearded "Pere Noel," 63-year-old Andre Guillemin. a former schoolmaster who took to drink and vagabondage after a marital breakup. Unlike many of his fellows, Guillemin varies the day's ragpicking and garbage-stealing routine with occasional browsing at the Seine bookstalls. He looked up from a book and philosophized sourly: "Put money in the pockets of a clochard and he becomes a tourist."

Unimpressed, Psychologist Vexliard stuck to his guns. "Less than one in ten of these unfortunates," he insisted, "wants to be a bum."

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