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Mathilde Panot drew a few nervous glances from her fellow MPs as she stood in France’s National Assembly this week brandishing a glass vial. Inside, she declared, were some of the bedbugs that have “turned the lives of millions of our infested citizens into a nightmare”. France, she said, was sleep-deprived, in a state of paranoia, with people becoming socially isolated.
“A wave of panic has seized the country,” Panot said. “Bedbugs are proliferating in all public spaces: schools, hospitals, the workplace, retirement homes, prisons, trains and even cinemas”. It was time for the government to act: France needed a national disinfection service, effective and free for all. Never mind its creaking state and sky-high public spending.
The people of Paris and other French cities have indeed worked themselves into a frenzy in recent days over the bedbug plague. Horror stories — and gruesome pictures — have spread on social media faster than a mite can lay its eggs: the upholstery of a train seat crawling with bugs, the reddened, puffy skin of a bitten cinema goer.
France’s broadcast media quickly crawled all over the story. After the Paris metro operator said there were no bedbugs in its carriages, one channel dispatched a reporter and camera crew to check. Viewers have been treated to mind-boggling levels of detail about the little bloodsuckers. Males can copulate up to 200 times a day. Females, once inseminated, can store sperm for a long time.
“How do you create a nationwide psychosis?” asked chat show host Yann Barthès as he lampooned the media coverage. “Simple. Turn on the telly.”
La presse anglophone has, with a touch of glee, seized on Paris’s discomfort, pointing to the damage to the capital’s glossy reputation less than a year before it hosts the Olympic Games. Would American tourists still pay top-dollar for its luxury hotels? And how long before France’s bugs cross the Channel and invade the UK? asked the British tabloids, somewhat predictably.
I regret to report they are already here, at least in my corner of north London. Early this summer, our daughter complained, with her customary profanity, about small brown beetles in her bed. Our error was under- not over-reaction. Stop fussing, we told her, putting it down to teenage histrionics. A few blasts of fly spray would do the trick.
Bedbugs? Surely not. You’d find those in 1950s doss houses or cheap hotels, not our clean home. In our ignorance, we saw them as a pest of the past. But not, it turns out, in our house’s upper reaches. The critters’ persistence and our daughter’s continuing expletives (so sorry, for the sleepless nights and paranoia!) forced us to confront our real enemy: cimex lectularius.
The Parisian panic made me wonder: have they been hiding in that bed frame ever since we brought it back from the flat where we lived in Paris over a decade ago? Or did they hitch a ride with me or the family on several trips to France this year?
Travelling bedbugs are a thing, I’ve learnt, and they are one reason why my city is ridden with them — just like the French capital.
“There are loads in London,” said James, who arrived this week with his steam cleaner to boil our bugs away (chemicals are less effective now that noxious DDT is banned). “It is one of the most common forms of infestation. It wasn’t really a problem during the pandemic when people didn’t travel. But it is now. You can even get them from the bus.”
James’s services come at a hefty price of several hundred pounds. They had better work. Otherwise the psychosis in our household may reach French levels of seriousness.
The furore in France has stung government officials into holding a crisis meeting to address the scourge. Perhaps one day they will set up a national disinfection service. Then I’ll be looking across the channel in envy.
ben.hall@ft.com
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