Free The Paris Deadline by Max Byrd Page A

there before nine," he reminded me, "while Mr. Hawkins is free."
         Reluctantly I tucked my journals and note cards away. Then I led Bill Shirer out into the rain.
         We were going four or five blocks south on the rue du Louvre, which was at that hour a busy, fractious, wildly overcrowded commercial street, one of the main arteries into the great fruit and vegetable market at les Halles. It was also the street that housed the offices of our main rival newspaper, the New York Herald. Eric Hawkins was the Herald 's Managing Editor and Bill Shirer wanted to meet him as a favor in return for the journals he had brought, probably with the idea of angling for a better job.
         But Eric Hawkins and every other newspaperman in Paris would have been amused by the thought that the Herald and the Tribune were rivals. In 1926 there were three English-language papers in Paris—us, the tiny Paris Times , which was a four-page spin-off of its granddaddy in London; and, leading the pack with a daily circulation of almost 20,000 copies, as Gertrude Stein was supposed to call it, "the dear dear dear old Herald. " It was rightly

said that the Trib was so far behind the Herald that we had to give away free copies in hôtel lobbies, but that was actually a trick the Colonel had borrowed from his circulation wars in Chicago. As far as I knew the Colonel stuck with nothing that wasn't showing a profit.
         "I come to the markets here with Root sometimes," Shirer told me. "He knows a restaurant here."
         Which was what they would put on Root's tombstone, I thought, pulling my collar up against the rain. "He Knew a Restaurant."
         A policeman on a huge chestnut-colored horse was directing traffic at the chaotic western gate to les Halles, and we stopped in the middle of the slippery cobblestones. I looked at the horse's great wet haunches rippling with tension, like muscles under a silken tent, and thought of all the horses I had seen in the rainy fields of the Marne, hauling or feeding or lying blown apart in the mud.
         I like open-air markets, I always have. I like the sprawl, the noise, the general air of unorganized energy that does not march, or counter-march, or bivouac. I understand the impulse that makes tourists finish up their revels with a pre-dawn visit here to quaff raw, dauntingly alcoholic farmers' red table wine and slurp thick onion soup with a spoon the size of a ladle, while they watch the market stalls open.
         We paused for a line of stooped, burly-shouldered men to pass in front of us. These were called les forts des Halles—the strong men of the markets. Back then they didn't use motorized dollies or scooters to move the merchandise around. The forts just piled their loads onto wooden frames that looked like shelves, and strapped the frames to their backs with canvas belts.
         They didn't use crates either—this was long before people hid their vegetables and fruits behind wooden slats. At les Halles they carried them off the trucks or horse-drawn carts and stacked them loose on the ground in the long barn-like pavilions. Outside

on the pavement, Shirer and I had to navigate our way through what looked like an exploded cornucopia. Even in cold, drizzly December there was French abundance—white beans from Normandy, carrots and cauliflowers from the rich black fields to the east, oranges and lemons from Provence.
         Root had written a quite beautiful article on les Halles, the kind of thing that was so good and unexpected in a newspaper that it made you think the Colonel actually had his eye on something besides the profit line. I still remembered one sentence by heart: "Unpackaged vegetables and fruit covered the sidewalks, arranged by skillful and loving hands into colorful masterpieces of edible architecture—red pyramids of radishes, green cubes of cabbage, purple parallelpipeds of eggplants."
         "It's not as grand as I thought," muttered Shirer when we