It’s a cool, calm evening so far, just past 2am. I’ve parted ways with friends who are moving on from the bar to a club, and I find a Velib rent-a-bike to ride home. Something catches my eye as I head through Belleville.

A man is swinging an object that looks like a long stick or a branch at people on the side-walk.

It’s a knife. He’s cut at least a couple of people already and continues to walk and slash, as if possessed.

I ride ahead, stop and dismount, and eye him carefully from a few meters away. I realise I don’t have much time before he makes his next move. His eyes are blurred, his clothes dirty and dishevelled.  He’s standing there holding the knife as though catching his breath during a brief lull in battle.

I try to throw the bike at him. The bloody thing is so heavy it falls short of the maniac, who turns and runs.

Then from my left, five or six young men – friends of a man he had stabbed – fly past. By the time I catch up to them, he’s pasted on the ground, getting the last blows of what seemed a proper pummelling.

But he’s still refusing to let go of the knife. I take it upon myself to bend down to yell in his ear in rather coarse French that he shan’t ever awake unless he releases the blade.

“Lache ton putain arme ou je te tue!” So he does, not knowing it’s the voice of the man who tried to wound him with a Velib.

He receives a few kicks, punches and other after-thoughts from men who could have been far less hospitable to our deranged fellow traveller. When the cops arrive they fail to convey their gratitude to the young vigilantes, and tell them to remain where they are. Les mecs du quartier think they’re being held as suspects, and they’re furious. A new chapter is about to open.

I approach the cops: “Not to tell you how to do your job, but you might want to let them know they’re witnesses.”

I don’t wait for the slow-moving officers to wrap it all up, and it’s hard to say how it might end. The young men were either detained and interrogated or questioned and released, depending on which cop got to them, and how successful the youngsters were in keeping their cool.

As I ride away, cops are blocking off roads and stopping groups of young men – even though it was a group of young men who rounded up the drunken swordsman.

Given the stakes that the wayward fellow was playing for, I found it all remarkably contained when he was apprehended. One man wanting to give him a prolonged kicking was steered away by his more business-like colleagues.  He shows us why he’s so angry, lifting up his jacket to reveal a blood-stained t-shirt covering a wound that is still open and untreated.

Another passer-by reveals a bloody hand, and asks, abashedly, if anyone has something to stem the bleeding.

I offer to bind it with my scarf, but he shakes his head: “No, thanks,” he says. “Don’t worry….T’en fais pas.”

So I shout out for tissues among the crowd that had suddenly formed in the aftermath.

This young man wouldn’t hear of me sullying my clothes for a mere flesh wound.
It is Paris, after all.