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is transparent the way an ant farm is transparent: with a cutaway front so that you can see the action even if you can't affect it. But what has always given Paris its peculiar grace and favor is that things that are hidden away elsewhere (like, say, adulteries) are all out in the open here, while things that are all out in the open elsewhere are hidden away here (like, say, the way you get an apartment). A Pans you can see right through hardly seems worth having.
     
    The Strike
     
     
    The "generalized" strike that the big French labor federations have called—making a fastidious distinction between what they're doing now and the "general" strike that they may yet get around to—has shut down Paris. The commuter and intercity trains haven't run for two weeks, not even the TGV, the famous fast train between Paris and the South. The Metro is closed down (the crickets who live beneath the rails are said to be perishing for lack of the heat they normally get from the friction of the trains running above, and their plight has become a minor cause celebre here). There are no buses, and the post office has stopped delivering the mail. Even le Paris touristique has been snapped shut. The Ritz has had a dropoff in occupancy of 25 percent (at the height of the terrorist bombing campaign, a few months ago, the rate was near normal, which suggests that the rich would rather risk being blown to bits than have a hard time finding a taxi). The Louvre, like a city under siege, has been struggling to stay open and can guarantee only a narrow access corridor, leading directly from the entrance to the Mona Lisa. The government has even commandeered the bateaux-mouches— those ugly, flat-bottomed open-air tourist boats that ply the tourist sights year-round—and has turned them into ferryboats to get commuters up and down the Seine.
     
    I think that I only really began to grasp just how serious the strike was when the chickens stopped rotating at the outdoor market in my neighborhood. Several poultry merchants there keep chickens and coquelets and rabbits and pheasants spitted and broiling on outdoor rotisseries all through the year, even in August and in the quiet days after Christmas. One afternoon a few days into the strike I walked over to the market to check on the progress of a turkey I had ordered from one of the rotisseurs, to be sent up from the country for a belated Thanksgiving, and I noticed that he had unspitted all his birds and turned off the grill. This seemed to me one of those signs that reporters abroad are supposed to treat as portents ("It has long been said in the bazaars that when the chickens stop turning, the government will fall"), and as I approached to ask what he was doing, he gestured grimly in the direction of the boulevard Saint-Germain.
    "Ca commence," he said grimly. It's beginning, though what, exactly, was beginning I wasn't sure.
    "The turkey, it's still on its way?" I asked, with the stupid inconsequence common to people caught up in revolutions. (" Rien ," Louis XVI noted in his diary the day the Bastille was stormed.)
    He shook his head gravely, implying, I thought for a moment, that the strike might have spread to the fowl too. Then he gestured again toward the boulevard.
    For about ten solid blocks, on each side of the boulevard aint-Germain a row of tourist buses was parked; that, considering the severity with which the cops normally enforce the no-parking regulations, was in itself a near-insurrectionary sight.
    The buses bore on their windshields notices indicating where their journeys had begun—Lyons, Grenoble, Bordeaux—and, in their side windows, little stickers saying "FO," for Force Ouvriere, or Workers' Force. (Despite the militant name, it is the more moderate of the big French labor federations.) Inside, the bus drivers looked bored and sleepy after the long trip in from the provinces. But between the two rows of buses thousands of FO members, from all across France, were marching up