A pre-euro memory: Saturday morning at the Marché de Montreuil, the vendors at the used-clothes booths crying out “Quartre pour dix!” This is how I kept my closet full during my and Michael’s La Boheme days living in the 20th, or “Red” (red for Communist) arrondissement of Paris. Quartre pour dix—four for ten in English. Four items of clothing for ten francs! Could you beat it? Every frosty Saturday morning Michael and I would walk across the bridge over the monstrous peripheral highway ( La Route Nationale Périphérique ) and travel from a quaint little rundown neighborhood of cobblestone streets and mansard roofs to a huge cacophonous bazaar filled with shouting Arabs. I miss plunging my hands into the heaps and heaps of old clothes. Clothes that made the circuitous route from volume dealers in the US to volume dealers in Haiti—yes, Haiti , the used-clothes capital of the world—to the volume dealers in Europe, to the very bin I was forcefully rummaging through, elbowing out my spa...
