The Marché Poncelet and its Sounds

ONE WEEK AGO, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I emerged from the overcrowded retail emporium, La Fnac, into the Avenue des Ternes in the 17^th arrondissement. Outside the store I found a brass trio from the Armée du Salut (the Salvation Army) braving the cold to give their rendition of some popular Christmas carols.

I stopped to listen to them and then, after leaving a contribution in their collecting tin, I walked round the corner into one of my favourite Parisian street markets, the Marché Poncelet.

Within a stone’s throw of the Arc de Triomphe, the Marché Poncelet occupies part of the Rue Poncelet and the Rue de Bayen. Around its edges you can find stalls selling flowers, chocolates, clothes, household goods, jewellery, trinkets and souvenirs but at its heart is the fresh food, the fruit, vegetables, seafood, artisan cheese and freshly baked bread that really makes this market so popular and gives it the reputation of being one of the best food markets in Paris.

The sounds of the Marché Poncelet:

As well as the colourful cornucopia of fresh food and other goods on display, the Marché Poncelet also boasts a fascinating soundscape. Like in most markets, the stallholders here are not shy about advertising their wares by shouting to attract the attention of customers but this market is in the centre of Paris and so, unlike many of the markets at the periphery of the city, the language here is exclusively French. Compare for example, the sounds of this market with the sounds of the Marché Barbès I recorded a few weeks ago where French is barely spoken at all.

Exploring how the soundscape of the city changes from the centre to the periphery is one of the things I find endlessly fascinating about exploring the sounds of Paris.

Perhaps it’s just my natural curiosity, but I always find myself looking for ‘connections’ when I visit places in Paris. Of course, connections between sound and place are at the heart of the work I do here but sometimes I stumble across other, often more abstruse, connections. Take for example the connection between the Marché Poncelet and projective geometry …

The Marché Poncelet takes its name from rue Poncelet, which was named after the French engineer and mathematician, Jean-Victor Poncelet (1788-1867).

Poncelet’s most notable mathematical work was in projective geometry, in particular, his work on Feuerbach’s theorem. He also made discoveries about projective harmonic conjugates among which were the poles and polar lines associated with conic sections. These discoveries led to the principle of duality and also aided in the development of complex numbers and projective geometry.

Of course, Poncelet’s mathematics is all gobbledegook to me but maybe the vendor in the picture above is on to something with his clémentines arranged geometrically.

The Marché Poncelet should certainly be on your ‘to-do’ list if you’re in Paris and once there, I recommend that you stop off at Daguerre Marée, which just has to be one of the very best seafood shops in town!

Here are some more sights of the Marché Poncelet: