Hello everyone. My name's Oliver G. This is the Earful Tower podcast. I'm here to bring you to Paris,

even if just for about half an hour a week. That's my job. That's what I'm going to do. And where usually

I would do an interview with some kind of guests talking about their life in Paris. Today it's not

like that. Today it's about a street. And before we get into the street, I need to rewind. This is a story

I'd been meaning to tell quite differently, but that story got frozen in time when the lockdown

happened. And then, as I'm in lockdown myself in quarantine in Paris, I got thinking about

this story that I wanted to do. And I thought of the parallel how it's also been

frozen in time, and I thought it'd make a kind of cool podcast episode, so that's what we're

going to talk about today. It's the story of a Paris street in Montmart that's been frozen in

1941 due to these pretty extraordinary circumstances. But for me to tell you that story, with the help of some of the characters who are in it,

then we need to rewind a little first.

We need to start at the beginning.

So something you should know about me is that I love an aimless walk in Paris.

Now, Parisians love doing that too.

They've even invented a word for it to flane.

Well, I wouldn't say to flane.

They'd just say flane, which means to walk aimlessly, essentially.

And if you do that, if you're a person who likes to walk without any purpose, then you're

a flaneur, unless you're a woman, and then you're a flaneur unless you're a woman and then you're a flaneurs.

Now if flannering was an Olympic sport, I'd say that I'd finish up on the podium somewhere.

I do it very regularly, especially in Montmart where I live.

Now, I think that Montmart is particularly good for walking around.

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