Madame F - Fernande to her friends - lives just around the corner from the canal bridge where Arletty pronounced the famous question: "Atmosphere?", with all that heavy Parisian irony. The Hotel du Nord, backdrop and title of the film, is still there, the canal and surroundings still one of the cool places to be, in Paris, in the summer. At 87, Fernande well remembers the film, having been a bit of a goer herself, once. Although the younger crowd find the Canal very branche, and are willing to pay higher prices to live on or near it, Fernande invariably turns her back on it and prefers to reach back towards the streets where she used to live, eating lunch every day in one of the cheap places along the rue St Maur, and having shandies with anyone who'll co-operate, and she's always willing to pay. She is well known to the new Arab and Berber owners of the rundown cafes with rotting awnings and poster photos of hillsides in Kabylie. Shandies remind her of the good times, when Georges was alive.
Fernande has two minders, although she'd rather have none, and there is some doubt as to whether she really needs any of them or if they actually need her more. One of them is a plump Portuguese with a pathological fear of old women being swindled, who watches over Fernande like a hawk. The Portuguese reports to the other minder, a cousin of Fernande, who is after the inheritance, and has every interest in keeping it intact.
Fernande dresses in vivid colours for preference, flowered dresses with matching cardigans, shoes and jackets. Her former neighbour, Zorica, says she used to be very chic indeed, although now she looks slightly dishevelled and has a tendency to slouch, moving in and out of the conversation and giving the minders the excuse to pretend she's lost the run of herself. She loves food and drink and if there are amuse-gueules on the table she digs into them absentmindedly before anyone else or before the drinks are served, suggesting that she is not quite with it. Another thing that annoys the minders is when she manages to give them the slip, which is as often as possible. It is quite a feat for her to make it all the way down the stairs where she lives, then hobble along the ill-mended streets and up another stairs - this is not a neighbourhood with many lifts, or even the space to install them, if there were the money - where she almost collapses after the effort and excitement of her escape. She often takes refuge with Zorica, where they chat and watch soaps for hours, talking intermittently, misunderstanding each other frequently. Fernande is on the ball for most things, yet can surprisingly have forgotten long-time neighbours or acquaintances in the house. Zorica, a foreigner and illiterate to boot, for whom Fernande read letters and interpreted bills over the years, merely shakes her head: Fernande can do no wrong. Zorica perceives her like a mother, and has missed her desperately since she moved. The reason Mme F moved was to look after her sister in a brand new apartment down the street: new building, public housing. Now that the sister has died, Mme F, as well as feeling lonely, is hoping City Hall will give her the rubber stamp to stay there, but of course city hall are saying "Why don't you go back to your own apartment?" Mme F likes it in the new building, where she has a view of the early 17th-century Hopital St Louis, and in the distance Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur. Although it's a bit lonely, she manipulates the neighbours to do the shopping for her. The only shopping she does herself now is for amuse- gueules, in the Chinese or Arab late-night groceries. The minders are terrified she'll be mugged.
YET Mme F can take care of herself. When the ground floor garage owner complains that she watered him as well as her geraniums, she silences him: "And we're supposed to breathe exhaust fumes and say nothing, I suppose?" She is especially vigilant for car horn abuse, and rushed out recently to shake her fist at two motorbike policemen - who had the temerity to tootle their sirens gently once or twice behind a vehicle momentarily abandoned in the middle of the street. "Do you want to deafen us or what?" she roared. "Oh, ca va, ca va," the policemen replied impatiently.
Yet the Portuguese minder tells stories to anyone who'll listen, about other old ladies she's known who were had by crooks before leaving this world. Although she prefaces the stories with a "Look at me, I'm hardly a likely candidate to be a racist," her stories are always just that. One old lady almost signed to purchase land and build a holiday complex on the Moroccan coast, she says, proposed to her by the Moroccan doctor treating her in the hospital. "Found it in a drawer after she died," says the minder. "He's left now and gone home, so I can talk about it." Listening to the Portuguese, one would be forgiven for thinking the whole quarter was full of rich elderly ladies and foreign crooks: she says another woman was pulling 6,000 francs a week from a bank account and handing it over to someone who did her weekly shopping. "She was black," the Portuguese says loudly, glaring balefully down the street.
The Portuguese may be a bit paranoid, but she is an excellent watchdog for Mme F's cousin. One thing is sure: old Fernande might be losing her marbles, but her absentmindedness is in direct proportion to the person she is dealing with. She has neighbours she likes, and has given them many of her belongings. The Portuguese, however, is convinced that the neighbours, a youngish couple, are robbing Mme F, slowly but surely. She has been to their apartment, she says, and seen the stuff there. The Portuguese and the inheriting cousin have warned Fernande, over and over, never to open the door to anyone. Fernande shrugs and says "No pockets in a shroud". She hopes to have got rid of most of her belongings before she passes on, and cares not a whit for the inheriting cousin or the Portuguese. "They are a pain," she says. When she really needs help they are never too pleased to be asked, so the hell with them. She tends to get very annoyed about the non-co-operation of her poor old feet and legs, and often has to be assisted home after one of her shandy escapades. The minders say she should use the walking stick they got her.