The Paris Metro is a world unto itself, practical and fantastical, romantic and heartless, dangerous and cocoon-like; a world of paradoxes captured in Luc Besson's 1985 film, Subway. It is all things to all men and women, arty, brutal, reeking - still - of garlic, wet wool, newspaper ink and burning rubber. No other tube system in the world has the Metro's unique combination of sweat and poetry. Its stations echo French military victories: Austerlitz, Iena, Solferino, Sebastopol, Bir Hakim.
As a supervisor at the Porte de Clignancourt terminus, 31-year-old Eric Dugardin has seen it all: birth and death, ignominy and courage - especially ignominy. Warring gangs of teenagers from the banlieues have besieged Dugardin's carriages in groups of up to 100. Last winter they went through an entire train, taking passengers' money and jewellery. Mechanical failures that block tunnels and force him to disembark thousands of passengers are Dugardin's daily bread and butter. Several times a week he has to cut the electrical current to protect a graffitti artist inside a tunnel. Dugardin has no remedy for the latest plague of vandalism: Gravage, or the scoring of train windows with industrial diamonds - a fad that has also struck the Dublin DART.
Dugardin and his staff on Line Four recently received badges from the Paris Metro authority, RATP, showing a smiling, caterpillar-like train with the words "100 ans", a coffee-table history of the Paris Metro and invitations to a reception celebrating the 100th anniversary this month of one of the world's best underground systems.
But Line Four is the worst of the 14 Paris subway routes and its battle-hardened employees are unfazed by the fanfare surrounding the anniversary. Any Metro driver will tell you that Line Four has the roughest clientele, especially north of the Seine. It is the "ligne speed", they say, with the most passengers, the shortest intervals between trains and labyrinthine mega-stations such as Gare du Nord, Les Halles, St Michel and Montparnasse. Large numbers of homeless people congregate on Line Four's platforms, drawn by the warmth from the 34-year-old trains' rubber tyres.
"We took the benches out at Les Halles to discourage the tramps, but they stayed anyway - you can't budge them," says 22-year-old Andy Smagghe, a Metro driver of Flemish origin. Line 4 is the only Metro route that employs sniffer dogs to empty the trains before they are parked. "On other lines, some of the drivers let the tramps stay in their trains overnight," Smagghe says. Out of pity? "Sympathy, not pity," he answers. "Pity is too strong a word for it".
Four years ago, Dugardin recalls a woman giving birth on the Metro platform at the Gare du Nord. But death is more common. There were 164 attempted suicides in the Paris Metro in 1998, of which seven were successful. Each time, a loudspeaker chillingly announces that traffic is interrupted because of "un accident grave de voyageur". The problem has led the Paris fire department - responsible for Metro rescues - to develop special equipment: small camionnettes ("truck-lets") to lift trains off the tracks, and large inflatable cushions which, when inserted between the platform and the train, tilt the train enough to extract a body.
Income-tax deadlines and the year-end holidays are peak suicide season in the Paris Metro. A significant proportion of drivers' three-month training is devoted to preparing them for the likelihood that someone will jump in front of their train and, since September 1999, there's been a team of psychologists on call to help drivers after it takes place.
"The first time it happened to me was at Alesia (Metro station) four years ago," Dugardin says. "I was in the cabin with the female driver. It takes a fraction of a second - you don't see whether it's a man or a woman, young or old. It makes you ill, but unfortunately you get used to it. I've been through it four or five times since. First you call the fire department. You try to help the driver - some of them get pretty upset - then you make everyone leave the station, because there are always people looking for cheap thrills. If the person is dead it takes about an hour to get the trains running, longer if they are only injured."
It should be said that statistically the odds of getting hurt in the Paris Metro are tiny, that most routes do not have the nasty vinyl seats and fetid air of Line Four. The new showcase "Meteor" Line 14 that opened two years ago contains spotless, hitech, automatically piloted trains, shafts of daylight and a giant terrarium. But who needs to go from the Bibliotheque Francois Mitterrand to La Madeleine?
At the end of the 19th century, when the Paris Metro was planned, its opponents called it the Necropolitain instead of the Metropolitai n. The writer Leon Bloy wrote in 1904 that the subway gave him "the impression of the death of the human soul". Drivers say short working hours, relatively high salaries and early retirement are the job's main attractions. "After a few years, the drivers get depressed," Smagghe says. "Sometimes bus drivers switch to the Metro because the money is better, but they can't stand it so they go back to the surface."
Dugardin is more philosophical. "You see everything from A to Z," he says. "From well-off people to the poorest. And believe me, the better-off people are not the best behaved. You see men in suits and ties urinating on platforms . . . You become indifferent to this kind of thing, embittered. When people are underground, they lose their bearings - they think everything is permitted. They do things they wouldn't do in the street." He is disgusted by the passengers' lack of civic solidarity. It's a rare occurrence for someone to help one of the 2,000 annual victims of violence in the Metro. No one dares to chide those who smoke in trains, or interrupt the young people who methodically destroy windows.
A few weeks ago, Smagghe saw a well-dressed, middle-aged woman in her 40s pummel a Metro employee with her fists when passengers were told to leave a train that had broken down. "The poor guy just took it," he recalls. Two of his colleagues were recently injured when a teenager smashed their cabin window with a skateboard. "It's because we wear uniforms - there are a lot of young people rebelling, and to them we represent authority," Smagghe continues. On the night of the Euro 2000 final this month, a gang of youths destroyed a train on the central Chateau de Vincennes - La Defense line, breaking windows and forcing staff to evacuate passengers. The incident was never reported in the French press.
Then there are those the RATP must save from themselves. In the film Peur sur la ville, Jean-Paul Belmondo runs on the roof of a Metro train. "Every time the film is shown on television, some idiot tries it the next day," Smagghe says. He remembers finding a tramp lying sound asleep on the track, his hand just inches from the 750-volt electrical line that powers trains. "I turned off the current and woke him up - he was so drunk, he didn't know what he'd done."