Who hasn’t heard, and adored, the legendary song originally written in 1928 by Cole Porter for a French singer named Irène Bordoni. Since then there have been some thirty interpretations of it, the most famous ones among them by Frank Sinatra and by Ella Fitzgerald in the 1960s.

But let’s stop humming for a while because the story I intend to recount today has little to do with music. It’s actually about a suburb north-west of Paris called Levallois. I admit it’s a bit of a tongue-twister for non-French speakers but try it this way: Lay-va-lo-ah!

A commune of about 65,000 inhabitants today, Levallois initially used to be an industrial town until World War II, replete with factories and ramshackle residences for mill workers.

Practically all the major French manufacturing units were based in Levallois. Just to give you a few famous examples, the plant where parts for the Statue of Liberty as well as for the Eiffel Tower were built was situated here and the Citroën motor company put together its fabled 2CV coupé at its Levallois workshop for 40 years.

With steam-age technology completely replaced by electronic power, Levallois was by and by abandoned by big companies and started resembling an impoverished setting ideally fit to welcome hordes of immigrants, who had already started taking over the poorer Parisian suburbs by the early 1980s.

Then something unexpected happened in 1983. Patrick Balkany, son of Hungarian immigrant parents and only in his early 30s, won the election to become the mayor of Levallois. His dream was to turn this cluttered suburb along the bank of the river Seine into a beautiful city. He negotiated with French and international firms the idea of demolishing the crumbling old buildings and rising in their places modern glass-and-steel structures for their offices.

The money thus raised was used to create wider roads, parks, schools, hospitals as well as apartment buildings. The few 18th century stone-built private houses and public monuments were left untouched.

Today, 30 years later, Levallois is a graceful town of wide spaces with green trees and lawns. Special care has been taken not to build skyscrapers or weird ice-cream topped structures that are typical landmarks, say in Hong Kong or Dubai. Patrick Balkany, now in his early 60s, has been re-elected the mayor of Levallois a number of times.

Now we can come back to the bees who form the symbol in the Levallois monogram, a tribute as a matter of fact to the working class origins of the city. You also see three of them painted on large, white buses that are a frequent sight on the streets here. To the Levallois residents these buses are familiarly known as Les Abeilles, or the bees. Levallois is the only city in the world to have a free bus service.

Les Abeilles leave the city hall buzzing in two opposite directions and tracing, theoretically at least, the figure of ‘8’ to cover the entire town; but actually they zigzag through the streets to stop in front of all the schools, hospitals, gymnasiums and youth centres covering a distance of 100 kilometres every day.

Though there is never any checking aboard the bees to verify if a passenger is really a Levallois resident, it is common understanding that priority belongs to a certain category of citizens. At some hours of the day healthy passengers willingly abstain from boarding them in order to leave the seats for school-going children, old people and handicapped persons.

Launching the project was not any easy matter for the mayor. The first to object was the Paris metro company one of whose lines covers three stations in this suburb. The next was the commercial bus service and then there were taxi drivers who all complained that running a free transport service was unfair competition.

“We had hard time convincing everyone that our intentions were good,” says Bruno Robineau, the man in charge of Les Abeilles service. “But at the end we won. And we don’t create pollution. You can cover the end of a bee’s exhaust pipe with your white handkerchief, it’ll stay clean. We’re already working on another project and in the next three years all the bees will turn electric.”

And how much does this free transport system cost the city of Levallois?

Robineau smiles: “Well, everything has a price. The buses have cost us 230,000 euros a piece. Then we spend about 100,000 euros a year on technical maintenance and as much for salaries of the staff. But the people are very satisfied …and that’s all that matters!”

—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

(ZafMasud@gmail.com)