These numbers do show natality declining toward the national average, but only slowly. N some places France already looks like a Muslim country. A quarter of Marseille's population of 800,000 is Muslim, and La Bricarde is a mixture of North African exoticism and Continental decadence. Lotto tickets are the most popular commodity in the rinky-dink variety store that serves the complex. On a fall day recently, in the blistering heat of the central courtyard, a teen-age girl in a tight black sweater walked with two pregnant friends past an old lady in a djellaba.
Satellite dishes run up the sides of the towers like buttons on a shirt.
Rock bluffs reminiscent of Arizona loom behind the towers. On several hot summer nights in recent years the residents of La Bricarde have staged their own spectacular variant on Strasbourg's rodeo, stealing cars from the city below, setting them on fire, and launching them from the bluffs. Bonnet also has clients in the center city, but La Bricarde is the focus of almost all of his work, and it worries him. This is one of those certain neighborhoods. It was built with government help, on the condition that the store owners hire half their employees from the projects nearby.