Among the literary cafes and the chic boutiques of the St.-Germain-des-Prés quartier of Paris, an impish man with a wad of newspapers makes the rounds, his trademark cry of “Ça y est!” or “That’s it!” echoing down narrow cobblestone streets, reports The New York Times.
Ali Akbar of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, is a man with a ready smile who has been hawking newspapers for a half-century. Sometimes he spices his offerings with made-up stories. “Ça y est! The war is over, Putin asks forgiveness!” was one recent pitch that caused grim hilarity.
From the Café de Flore to the Brasserie Lipp, two famed establishments where food and culture are intertwined, Mr. Akbar plies a dying trade in a dwindling commodity. He is considered to be the last newspaper hawker in France.
The profession may have reached its zenith in Paris in 1960, when Jean Seberg was immortalized on film with several newspapers under her arm crying “New York Herald Tribune!” as she strolled on the Champs-Élysées pursued by Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Nobody in Jean-Luc Godard’s classic movie “Breathless” is buying The Trib except Belmondo, who is unhappy the paper has no horoscope but unhappier still to discover that his charm makes little impression on the beauty and faux American innocence of Seberg, yet another foreigner smitten by Paris and angling to make a buck.
Mr. Akbar is one of them, too. “Sah-Yay!” is roughly how his cry to buy sounds. Through persistence and good humor he has become “part of the cultural fabric of Paris,” said David-Hervé Boutin, an entrepreneur active in the arts.
Such is Mr. Akbar’s renown that President Emmanuel Macron recently awarded him a Légion d’Honneur, the Republic’s highest order of merit. It will be conferred at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace in the fall.
“Perhaps it will help me get my French passport!” said Mr. Akbar, who sometimes has a withering take on life, having seen much of its underside. He has a residence permit, but his application for French nationality is mired in Gallic bureaucracy.
Mr. Akbar himself moves at startling speed. A sinewy bundle of energy at 72, he clocks several miles a day, selling Le Monde, Les Echos and other daily newspapers from around noon until midnight. Dismissive of the digital, he has become a human networker of a district once dear to Sartre and Hemingway, now overrun by brand-hungry tourists.
“How are you, dear Ali?” says Véronique Voss, a psychotherapist, as he enters the Café Fleurus near the Jardin du Luxembourg. “I worried about you yesterday because it was so hot.”
Heat does not deter Mr. Akbar, who has known worse. He thanks Ms. Voss with a big smile and takes off his dark blue Le Monde cap. “When you have nothing, you take whatever you can get,” he tells me. “I had nothing.”
Read more of this article from The New York Times.