Pub quizzes are very much a British tradition.
In Paris, screaming answers to general knowledge questions is seen as a bit too earnestly competitive, sort of quirky and embarrassing. But in those first few weeks of lockdown in March, general knowledge quizzes became immensely popular, after a Parisian actor, Noam Cartozo, went viral on social media streaming videos of his street’s nightly quiz.
In the videos posted on Instagram, Cartozo would stand at his window in a tuxedo and shout, “Bienvenue à Questions pour un…” and the street would respond in chorus, “…Balcon!”
Questions pour un Balcon was Cartozo’s take on the French TV quiz show Questions pour un Champion—again a British import as it was based on the 80s-era British game show Going for Gold.
“Who was the US president before Barack Obama?”
“What is the capital of Senegal?”
“In what cartoon would you find the character Mushu?”
As lockdown continued, the questions became more diverse, and Cartozo swapped his tuxedo for fancy dress: Spiderman, Harry Potter and the Easter bunny. People watched online from Senegal, Belgium, Canada and Australia. Thousands of people knew the Parisian street rue Saint-Bernard.
Just over a kilometre away from Cartozo and his street that would soon become famous, my boyfriend and I had just moved into a new apartment.
We moved to the area a week before lockdown began, so knew no one in the buildings around us. We were still unpacking cardboard boxes, and also learning to live with each other for the first time.
One cold evening in that first week, the thumping, rousing sound of the song “Bella Ciao” being played from across the street made us pull back our balcony doors and step out. That song was the anthem of lockdown in Europe. We had seen the Italians singing it, and when lockdown reached us we did it too, and the Germans did, and the Spanish. It was that song that trickled out of our neighbours’ windows and brought people in my street to their windows and balconies every night those first weeks of lockdown in March.
In the evenings, we would sing “Bella Ciao” and stick around to applaud the health workers. Then, like putting more coins in the jukebox, our music catalogue gradually broadened: from the classic French song of resistance “Résiste” by France Gall, to the Spice Girls and The Kooks.
Each night we got to know each other a little better. We shouted our names across the street, and sellotaped or tied sheets of paper to our balconies or window railings with writing in childish capitals: Clémentine, Catherine, Éric, Jordan, Sandrine, Rémi, Adrien, Florence and Pierre. We asked, “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?” Florence worked in marketing, and Pierre was an expert in cheese and wine. Clémentine was a nurse, working long hours at the local hospital, and Rémi worked as a sound engineer. Some of the group were still able to work from home, but some of us had lost our jobs when the pandemic hit. We learnt all of these things about each other over drinks: what the French call an apéro, a preprandial natter accompanied by wine or beer or whatever’s still in your lockdown cupboards.
What’s strange to think of, now that lockdowns are over and we can be close to people again, is how utterly normal it became to have an apéro roughly 40 metres away from the other guests. We could have been in each other’s sitting rooms. The gulf of the road between us was crossed so easily.
Our balconies and windows became our social lives. Everything was condensed into those rectangular panes of glass opposite us, like living in an advent calendar. We waited for them to open every night so that we could play, and during the days we discussed our neighbours’ lives behind the curtains, speculated about what we weren’t privy to.
Inspired by the rue Saint-Bernard, our street wanted to do our own Questions pour un Balcon. We weren’t alone: all across Paris fierce battles of general knowledge raged between pairs and impairs—the even- and odd-numbered sides of the street.
In general, the architecture of Paris lends itself well to pub quizzes. The city’s density and the symmetry of the streets provide a perfect level playing field. For the first time ever, you wanted to be able to hear your neighbours shouting.
In our street, my boyfriend and I were on the odd numbered side, the impairs, but we were hindered by a crucial structural problem: the configuration of our balconies made it hard to cooperate between households.
I blame Baron Hausmann. The pairs side is the Hausmannian part of the street: a smooth, straight external wall made of limestone, ornate, thin, black curled railings over the windows. You just have to poke your head outside your window to parley with your allies on the same side. Us impairs, however, are on the ugly, modernist side, where the balconies jut out at jazzy angles, deliberately arranged so that your neighbours can’t be seen nor heard. We had reassured ourselves when we moved in that it was like what Parisians say about the Tour Montparnasse: it has the best view in Paris, because it’s the only place where you can’t see the building.
The date for the quiz was set: we were going to go all out on Easter weekend, like good French Catholics. The questions were culled from Florence’s ancient game of Trivial Pursuit and chosen at random, giving anyone who had grown up in France in the ‘80s a distinct advantage. We’d joked about competing for rolls of toilet roll or bags of flour—still precious commodities at this point—but the prize was in the end an enormous chocolate hen bought from the supermarket downstairs.
We gathered on the balcony for the nightly applause, drinks in hand, and cheersed across the road at each other. The apartment opposite us dragged an amplifier to the window. My boyfriend set up his microphone. We rolled through what had become our classic songs by now, a medley from the street’s resident musicians. Passers-by walking in the street below looked up and applauded or danced. It was still bright, we refilled our glasses, and Pierre, the night’s compère, began the quiz.
The impairs could barely hear the questions, and I think we lost. But what I remember is the sense of competition, us laughing so loudly we missed what people said, the light fading as we yelled out the answers or squealed at some injustice or cheered for an unseen teammate on the same side of the road. We craned our necks out over the balcony to speak to our neighbours one floor above, holding out an empty wine glass suggestively; they laughed and leaned out and poured wine into the glass from a height, sloshing it onto the road. On the other side of the street, Jordan carefully put a handful of cigarettes in a plastic bag and lowered it to waiting hands. We squeezed ourselves into one corner of our balcony, bending out over the balustrade so we could see other people poking out of their windows further down the same street, and waved madly, drunkenly.
That day was the birthday of our upstairs neighbour, or maybe it had already passed or was going to be in the week to come, but it didn’t matter: everyone sang to him. He won the chocolate hen, which we tied to a mop and proffered from our balcony, standing on a stool so he could reach it, and when he grabbed it the street cheered.
It was darker now. It was like we were in some huge bar full of friends. In four weeks, our individual worlds had shrunk to the walls of our apartments, but in that time our friendship circle had become an entire street.
We all ate dinner together: people dragging tables or propping up chairs next to their windows and lighting candles that they stuck in the flowerpots attached to the railings. We ate on our balcony by candlelight and watched each window light up, squares of orange in the warm evening. After everyone had eaten, and cleared away, we leaned out into the night and smoked cigarettes and chatted, low voices over the music coming from somewhere. The whole city fell silent but for our one street. Some people went to bed, waving a last goodnight before closing their advent calendar window. Then a low, slow song came on, and the silhouettes in each window merged as they danced together, a head on a shoulder, faces unrecognisable in the dark.
When lockdown ended in May, we all met up for a real, face-to-face apéro in one of the apartments. It was strange how completely different these people were from the characters we thought we had got to know. It was strange, even, how different their faces looked close up.
Five months later, a nighttime curfew has now descended on Paris, but we don’t meet at our windows and balconies anymore. We still wave at each other from across the street, and we say hello if we bump into each other at the supermarket. But we’ll never get that sense of closeness back, a sense of solidarity and camaraderie that suffused an entire street for two months. Our social lives have again unfurled across the city, although we still reminisce about Questions pour un Balcon and that Easter quiz. I think that I have never seen Paris so beautiful as on that April night, shut inside our own apartment, surrounded by strangers we felt we knew.
Catherine Bennett (twitter) is a journalist based in Paris, France. She writes about French news, politics, cities and feminist issues.
Image based on Paris, modern balconies by George Turner under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license, and released under the same license.