the paris i knew text by ANNA DUBOSC I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the 18th arrondissement, between the Avenue de Saint-Ouen and the Place de Clichy. Almost all of my school friends were poor and lived near the Montmartre Cemetery in caretakers’ lodges, low-income housing, residential complexes from the 1970s with tinted glass railings, or those sad brick projects, which fill me with tenderness today. We led a frugal existence, too, but we wanted for nothing thanks to our marginality and to my mother’s poetry, her taste for disorder, and her indifference to material things, which made our lives luxurious. We ruled over a chaos of worthless objects. Furniture handed down to us or scavenged off the street, towers of leaflets, books, photographs, clothes, which we would buy by the pound at Guerrisol or the flea market at Saint-Ouen. The only object of value — a pearl necklace…