Conversation Entre Les Tourterelles

Madame Tourterelle: It was terrible.

Monsieur Tourterelle: Yes, you told me. I believe you.

Madame Tourterelle: But you weren’t there. You can’t imagine how sad it was. As if you were watching one of our children—but fifty times as heavy, with no wings—try to fly from the nest a few days after he was hatched.

Monsieur Tourterelle: That I can’t imagine. We guard them and feed them day and night until they’re strong enough to fly on their own.

Madame Tourterelle: Humans really don’t have wings.

Monsieur Tourterelle: That’s obvious.

Madame Tourterelle: But this is the first time I felt it viscerally.

Monsieur Tourterelle: Was he fully fledged?

Madame T: Oh yes. You knew him. The one who put out morsels for us on his windowsill.

Monsieur T.: He never had any others of his kind visiting him.

Madame T.: This is what I don’t understand. In Asia, humans are rarely alone. Or that’s what my great-great grandmother told me.

Monsieur T.: I heard the same thing from my great-grandfather, who lived in Key West. He said humans knocked on the doors of new neighbors, and welcomed them, invited them over.

Madame T.: The woman who lived below him was a world traveler, a wise, warm-hearted soul. I heard her say the other day—

Monsieur T.: —Oh dovey, don’t tell me you’re learning human speech now!?

Madame T.: What else do I have to do all night, sitting on those eggs? She leaves her windows open. Friends visit. I heard her telling one of them about the fall. She said she’d wanted to welcome him to the building when he moved in. But you don’t do that in France. She’d heard from his landlord that he was French, but not from Paris, an engineer in his 30s, shy. That was all she knew.

Monsieur T.: Did she see him fall?

Madame T.: Are you asking me a sensationalistic question?

Monsieur T.: Non, ma chère, I’m just wondering if he got confused and thought he could fly.

Madame T.: He jumped! The woman was so shaken, thinking if only this custom of reserve between neighbors wasn’t so strong here, she would have welcomed him, been a friend.

Monsieur T.: Because he was lonely.

Madame T.: Of course he was. It’s easy for us tourterelles. We pair up, have two kids every few months, help each other feed and raise them, and stay together for life.

Monsieur T.: Life seems to be more complicated for humans.

Madame T.: Coo COO coo. That’s the truth. Did you find us another home?

Monsieur T.: I did. It’s in the fifth arrondissement, quite beautiful, among some pink geraniums.

Madame T.: You’re wonderful. Is it safe?

Monsieur T.: These particular humans never open their windows.

Madame T.: Is it soft?

Monsieur T.: A bit too twiggy for my taste.

Madame T.: I’ll fluff it up with some feathers.

Monsieur T: There IS one thing… A human on the next floor up seems like a spy or something. He has this thing set up that looks like a miniature Eiffel Tower holding a big round eye that’s watching the nest. Sometimes two of them take turns looking through that eye.

Madame T.: They’re probably studying us for hints on how to live. How to be calm, productive and peaceful. Content with whatever life brings your way.

Monsieur T.: As long as it’s not a hawk.

Madame T.: Oui, mon amour, anything but that. Shall we help them out?

Monsieur T.: Coo COO coo!

Big Girls Do Cry

How in the name of Godot are we going to get fluent in French?

Richard’s about to return for his fall session at L’Alliance Francaise, and is not at all pleased with his progress to date. He's still in what he describes as the first-person pointing and grunting stage, although his pointing and grunting accent is superb.

I’m trying a different approach. Either an hour (minimum) a day of conversation in French, or an hour (minimum) of French film or TV show. You think getting into a French conversation is so easy? All the natives want to practice their English on me—English that is already fluent—but I bat them down, pretend not to understand English, or tell them they can practice their English on Americans who don’t want to learn French.

I’ve taken French classes, in high school. Madame Martineau was good for the grammar, good for the accent.

I’ve tried learning French online. Forget it. E-mail and Facebook, not to mention writing, are plenty on the small screen.

A film or TV drama—that’s my favorite way. Because nothing is better than a story. Some things are as good, but nothing is better.

Next is news. If you watch for an hour, the same news repeats, and you can scoop up new words when the same stories loop around again.

And sometimes an educational program gives you intensive familiarity with the vocabulary of one realm, food, for instance. The other night I watched a French journalist go from one location to another in Switzerland, interviewing food producers. She began on a farm high in the Alps, then swooped down to a chocolate factory in Zurich.

She was a perfect interviewer/hostess, friendly and subtly attuned to each person she interviewed, not so beautiful that she intimidated her interviewees, but a comely companion for bopping all over from valley to mountain and city to lake.

She spoke to a cheese maker and his family high on a mountain farm, to a bonneted chocolate maker, to a fisherman on Lac Leman, to a cherry grower (the dark are the best), to a German-speaking sausage maker who included the cherry grower’s cherries in his sausages, to the head of a finishing school where women from around the world learned to set a table à la Francaise and à l’Anglais. (To do it à la Francaise you put the wine glass smack in the center above the head of the plate-- metaphor for the reign of the grape in France?) The women were taught how to measure equidistant between the plates and line them up precisely the same distance from the edge of the table. The kind of thing you don’t learn as a young maenad in Berkeley.

Then there was the Frenchman who looked like a much taller Roman Polanski. He took the journalist on a river cruise, and talked eloquently about the smells of plants along the river in that sensual French way (she seemed smitten), then they disembarked, hopped on his Harley and roared up to his hillside restaurant where he cooked up something tasty for her. I know it was tasty from the sounds she was making, though I’m not sure what it was—I was distracted by the chemistry between the two of them. The moral of the story? You can look like a rat but if you’re humming that sensual tune, who cares, there’s magic in the air. 

Then there was the two-hour history of feminism in France, from the ‘60s ‘til today. You think that women really haven’t come very far? Think again. This was an eye-opener. From the early image of a Frenchman opening a girlie magazine in the mid-‘60s (“Oh la vache! Oh, la pute!) to the ‘70s, which seems to have been the wake up call for Frenchwomen, when it seemed that every prominent Frenchwoman in the country signed a document insisting that women, and only women, should have a say in whether they have the right to choose an abortion. 

 

Every Frenchwoman whose name you’ve ever heard from that era was interviewed in period footage, and spoke out with great dignity and conviction—and charm! Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Greco, Simone de Beauvoir, and many more.

Bardot by Jef Aerosol

Men were interviewed on the streets as well. The humorless, straight-jacketed types all said women should stay at home, they don’t belong in the workplace. The men you’d want to know, the ones with juice in them said, Why not, if they want to work?

(To control or not to control, that is the question. Which brings to mind that late medieval English story, Sir Gawain and the Lady Ragnell, about what women really want.

Those Celtic storytellers knew the answer to Freud’s question centuries before he posed it.) 

Slowly, women are shown entering government. Slowly, women are hired as news anchors. A few here and there, including a smart, sassy, dimpled, smiling young Anne Sinclair, now Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s wife. (You know, the one who gave the NYC hotel maid such a gracious thank-you tip?)

And then, a woman anchoring nearly every TV news hour, and then… two evening anchors, both women.

**

And lastly, to get my daily French language dose, I’ve descended to watching an occasional reality show, a level to which I was never tempted in the U.S. Okay, maybe this is a concept that has already been embraced in the U.S., too, but I doubt it. I watched a show called “Belle Toute Nue.”

Here’s the basic theme: a woman with a zaftig figure comes on the show ready for transformation. To lose weight? you ask.

Mais non!

To become “bien dans sa peau,” to fully embrace herself as she is.

Her transformative wizard is a delightful, stylish, warmhearted guy named William. If he isn’t gay, he’s a terrific actor. And if he weren’t gay, I doubt that a single woman would allow him to take the liberties he takes with them.

There is a formula here. I know because I’ve watched the show twice. A woman arrives at William’s dressing room studio. He has a heart-to-heart with her about her body image. She cries.

One was a 19-year-old blonde who’d gained 30 pounds in three months because of an illness, and kept gaining. Another is a woman in her early 40s who won’t let her husband get physically close to her.

The stages:

Stage one: Confession.

William gently, lovingly asks the woman about her body image. She weeps. He asks her questions. She answers. He asks her to strip down to panties and bra and stand in front of a big three-way mirror. She is to go down her body, feature by feature, describing how she feels about each part.

Here. And here. She points to her thighs, her stomach. Again, she weeps.

But one of the women has to concede that she likes her eyes.

And the other likes her calves, sort of.

Stage Two: Lineup/Cattle Call

William leads the blindfolded woman into a room where five buxom abundant-bodied women in fetching lingerie (lined up according to size) are dancing to festive music. When they stop, the woman is asked to “take her place” according to size. Is she bigger than this one? Smaller than that one? She has no idea. She chooses a spot, slides in between two women.

No, says William. That is not your place. Try again.

She studies the women, fascinated. Again, she picks the wrong spot between two even larger women.

At last William shows her that, actually, she is the smallest of these women. And they’re all beauties. So perhaps (she thinks) she’s not all that big, that bad.

Stage three:

This is the part I can’t imagine seeing on an American “reality” TV show. But maybe I’m wrong. Readers, you tell me.

One day, as the woman walks through Paris, wearing camouflage clothes well chosen to hide her body, she bumps—serendipitously!—into William. To the young woman who works in a farmers’ market, he says, I was just on my way to shop for veggies—maybe you’d come along and give me some shopping tips?

They chat among the vegetables, and suddenly her hand flies up to her mouth. She has spotted the photo card among the eggplants—a photo of her wearing nothing but panties and a bra! Oh my God! she exclaims. And then—another photo! And another! In every vegetable bin, there is a big photo of her nearly naked body. And at the end of the market: Oh no! A giant poster of her, the same image.

William stops passersby to point at the poster and ask what they think of this woman.

Jolie. Sympa. Belle poitrine. Etc.

She listens while young and old, male and female appraise her, and mostly praise her.

Hairspray

Stage four:

A clothes shopping trip, of course. William is the personal shopper of most women’s dreams. In ten minutes flat, he’s discovered her favorite colors, and whipped off the racks dresses, a trench coat, blouses, jeans, beautiful shoes, belts. And lingerie. French lingerie. A fitter comes to get that bra just right.

Do clothes make the man? I don’t know, but they THRILL the woman. Dessert is a many-petalled long red silk strapless dress (it looks like a Valentino) that is smashing, and she looks smashing in it.

Stage five:

Hair and makeup, Parisian stylists and makeup artist. One woman goes from a hairdo that looks like a limp brown mouse died on her head to electric white-blonde Sharon Stone short. Transformed!

Another from nondescript blondie to blonde China doll, straight bangs, long bob. Dazzling.

Stage six:

The show. The climax. The reveal.

Knowing that the 19-year-old is mesmerized by the Folies Bergère dancers, William takes her to the Folies Bergère, where she is trained by their choreographer and taken on stage looking like a Seventeen magazine cover girl movie star showgirl, and—husband and friends in the theater audience—does a strip tease fan dance with the Folies Bergère dancers cavorting around her.

The married 40-something-year-old poses nude (tastefully) with her Sharon Stone hair and new violet glasses for a photo session, and stage show for her husband and family and friends on a revolving stage with other zaftig women flanking her.

The show succeeds in giving these women the feeling of being “bien dans sa peau,” which is the very thing that is so striking about Parisian women. It’s really a question of attitude, isn’t it? Just watch her walk down the street.

It also succeeded in teaching me some essential new French phrases like: 

Il veut aider les femmes se débarrasser des complexes. (He wants to help women get rid of complexes.)

Vous ne sauriez croire combien un bon saucisson se marie avec quelques cerises. (You wouldn’t believe how good sausage and cherries are together.)

**

 P.S. I can’t believe we missed this event right at the end of our street.

The Greek Gods and Goddesses Consider Proust

“A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.”

     —Part 1, Combray, “Swann’s Way,” Marcel Proust

Hestia: Proust’s home:

I am standing before the walls of his recreated bedroom.

It’s a facsimile, I know, but the walls are lined with the same material.

I have known this story for years, but it’s the thing that moves me, that opens the door to my soul.

Look at this harsh desk—lacquered black, uninviting. But the narrow brass bed with its dusky blue spread—this is where he wrote most of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, lying down, late at night, the cork preventing the light and the sounds and dust of Boulevard Haussmann from intruding upon the unwinding of memory. 

A friend of his, the writer, Countess Anna de Noailles, suggested lining the room with cork.

I search all over Paris for the café in which I can write. But what I really want is a cork-lined room, where I won’t need a fan to block out the sounds of neighbors.

Did any writer who ever lived create a better shell to protect his delicate sensitivity? Like a hermit crab.

Artemis:

Marcel Proust, whose Sun in Cancer in his natal horoscope is reflected in his deep ties to his mother, memory and nature. Has any writer ever written so many lush metaphors about flowers and trees?

“It was in the Month of Mary that I remember beginning to be fond of hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, which was so holy but which we had the right to enter, they were put up on the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they took part, their branches running out among the candles and holy vessels, attached horizontally to one another in a festive preparation and made even lovelier by the festoons of their foliage, on which were scattered in profusion, as on a bridal train, little bunches of buds of a dazzling whiteness. But, though I dared not do more than steal a glance at them, I felt that the ceremonious preparations were alive and that it was nature herself who, by carving those indentations in the leaves, by adding the supreme ornament of those white buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a popular festivity and a mystical celebration. Higher up, their corollas opened here and there with a careless grace, still holding so casually, like a last and vaporous adornment, the bouquets of stamens, delicate as gossamer, which clouded them entirely, that in following, in trying to mime deep inside myself the motion of their flowering, I imagined it as the quick and thoughtless movement of the head, with coquettish glance and contracted eyes, of a young girl in white, dreamy and alive.”

            —Part One, Combray, “Swann in Love”

Hermes:

I am in the midst of the great adventure of reading Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, nearly finished with Lydia Davis’s translation of Volume One, Swann’s Way.

“What ravishes me is his metaphors,” I say to Helen.

“Ah, yes,” she says. “I returned to Proust when America invaded Iraq. An antidote. Before that, I’d never made it through more than 40 pages.”

“Same with me. Ouch!” I say as the acupuncture needle pierces my thigh. “But this time I’m finally ready for him.”

“I read ten pages a day,” she says. “And got through about 1,000 pages.” She finishes with two needles near my ankles. “What stayed with me is his definition of genius: ‘to transpose and transform.’ It sounds trivial to use this as an example, but I thought of that watching a documentary on Coco Chanel. Do you know where she got the idea of those boxy jackets with trim?”

“Let me guess. From military jackets?”

“No. From a bellboy in front of an Austrian hotel where she was staying. He wore a little Tyrolean jacket.”

“That’s it! She transposed and transformed the design.”

She leaves me to float down the river of meditation.

I think of the dinner the night before on our friends’ boat on the Seine, of the meal Jeannette created for the seven of us.

Daedalus: the craftsman:

This perspective, this genre, close first person, subjective stream of consciousness, stories in poetic prose, memories of the artist’s life: this is it for me. Memories told through the senses, things, the real.

The tug back to writing fiction, reading Proust.

Yet wanting to continue writing about the present.

How to braid the past and the present? What to call these pieces, bits, threads?

“When all of that was finished, there came a work of art composed expressly for us, but more particularly dedicated to my father who was so fond of it, a chocolate custard, the product of Francoise’s personal inspiration and attention, ephemeral and light as an occasional piece into which she put all her talent. If anyone had refused to taste it, saying: “I’m finished, I’m not hungry any more,” that person would immediately have been relegated to the rank of those barbarians who, even in a gift an artist makes them of one of his works, scrutinize its weight and its material when the only things of value in it are its intention and its signature. To leave even a single drop of it on the plate would have been to display the same impoliteness as to stand up before the end of a piece under the very nose of the composer.”

            --Part One, Combray, in “Swann’s Way” 

Ares: Proust’s possessions:

In Proust’s room at the Musée Carnavalet, the following furniture and objects are gathered from the three successive homes he held in Paris after the death of his parents: 102 Boulevard Haussmann (December 1906-June 1919):

8 bis, rue Laurent Pichat (July-September 1919);

44, rue Hamelin (October 1919-16 November 1922). 

Lit (bed)

Bureau (desk)

Bibliothèque (library)

Chaise longue (chaise lounge)

Tapis (rug)

Portrait du docteur Adrien Proust, père de l'écrivain, par Louise Brouardel (portrait of Doctor Adrien Proust, father of the writer)

Plaque de jade, cadeau de la comtesse de Nouailles (jade plaque, gift of the countess of N.)

Glace à main (hand mirror)

Brosse avec monogramme en argent (brush with silver monogram)

Épingle de cravate, en or et corail, par Cartier (gold and coral tie pin)

Plateau en métal argenté (silver metal tray)

Canne, cadeau du marquis d’Albuféra (cane, gift of marquis d’Albuféra)

Pelisse en loutre (exposée occasionellement) (an otter fur coat (occasionally displayed))

            --Don de M. Jacques Guérin, 1973

Fauteuil (chair)

Paravent (screen)

Table de chevet (bedside table) 

Table de nuit à abattants (bedside table with flaps) 

Lampe (lamp)

Miroir (mirror)

Essuie-plumes en laiton (brass feather duster)

Plumier en palissandre (rosewood pencil box) 

Encrier (inkwell)

Montre gousset (pocket watch) 

Épingle de cravate ornie d’une perle (tie pin with a pearl)

Agenda, cadeau de Mme Straus (calendar, gift of M. S.)

Brosse de toilette en ivoire (ivory clothing brush)

Brosse à chapeau en ébène (ebony hat brush)

Brosse à chapeau en palissandre (rosewood cap brush)

Chausse-pied en ivoire (ivory shoe horn)

“L’Offrande à L’Amour” groupe en porcelaine de Meissen, d’ après Fragonard

            --Don de Mme Odile Gerandan, en souvenir de Céleste Albaret, sa mère

But it is not until I visit the Musée Carnavalet a second time that I see the objects that mean the most to me: a stack of notebooks on the shelves of the bedside table, medium size with lightweight cardboard covers, like the ones that Moleskin makes. They are probably facsimiles, but I instantly know that I’ll settle on this size, this kind, after all my experiments with writing notebooks.

Athena:

After his parents died, Proust withdrew more and more from the world. He was enabled to do so because of his inherited wealth, what Virginia Woolf advised writers to have: a room of one’s own and 500 pounds a year.

“What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable--now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech--and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading LEAR or EMMA or LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.”

            —Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

Dionysus:

Proust on being possessed by erotic love: 

“Swann remained there, disconsolate, embarrassed and yet happy, with this envelope which Odette had handed over to him quite fearlessly, so absolute was her confidence in his discretion, but through the transparent glazing of which was revealed to him, along with the secret of an incident which he would never have believed it possible to discover, a little of Odette’s life, as in a narrow illuminated section cut directly out of the unknown. Then his jealousy had an independent, selfish vitality, voracious for anything that would feed it, even at Swann’s own expense. Now it had something to feed on and Swann was going to be able to begin worrying each day over the visitors Odette might have received at about five o’clock, and begin trying to learn where Forcheville had been at that hour…. His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.”

            —Part Two, Swann in Love, “Swann’s Way”

Aphrodite:

Proust as (literary) aphrodisiac:

"Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures--there's something sexual in it--that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that.... How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped--and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp."

            --Virginia Woolf (before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway)

Demeter:

Proust, whose health was delicate most of his life. In the room at the Carnavalet, his silver metal tray is powdered white from the medicine he took for his asthma.

Apollo:

Proust, who circulated in the fashionable Paris salons of the early twentieth century, before retiring from social life to write during most of his waking hours the last fifteen years of his life.

What an unerring eye he has for the snobbery, falsities and malice of the hostesses, courtesans and aristocratic gentlemen of his social circles.

“It was after dinner at the Verdurins’. Either because Forcheville, feeling that Saniette, his brother-in-law, was not in favor in their house, wanted to use him as a whipping boy and shine in front of them at his expense, or because he had been irritated by a clumsy remark which Saniette had just made to him and which, in fact, had gone unnoticed by those present, who were not aware of the unpleasant allusion it might contain quite contrary to the intentions of the one who had uttered it without any malice, or finally because he had been looking for an opportunity to induce them to banish from the house someone who was too well acquainted with him and whom he knew to be so refined that he felt embarrassed at certain moments merely by his presence, Forcheville answered this clumsy remark of Saniette’s with such coarseness, hurling insults at him, and emboldened, as he shouted, by Saniette’s pain, his dismay, his entreaties, that the wretched man, after asking Mme. Verdurin if he ought to stay, and receiving no answer, had left the house stammering, tears in his eyes. Odette had watched this scene impassively, but when the door closed on Saniette, lowering as it were by several notches her face’s habitual expression, so as to be able to find herself, in her baseness, on an equal footing with Forcheville, she had put a sparkle in her eyes with a sly smile of congratulations for the audacity he had shown, of mockery for the man who had been its victim; she had cast him a glance of complicity in evil which was so clearly intended to say: “That finished him off, or I’m very much mistaken. Did you see how pathetic he looked? He was actually crying,” that Forcheville, when his eyes met that glance, sobering in a moment from the anger or simulation of anger which still warmed him, smiled and answered:

            “He needed only to be friendly, and he would still be here. A good rebuke does a man no harm at any age.””

            —Part Two, Swann in Love, “Swann’s Way”

  

Zeus:

Like most great geniuses, Proust had profound mystical vision. I think of William Blake, of W. B. Yeats, of Albert Einstein, who said, “We can only draw lines after Him.” 

“I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us."

“It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.” 

            —Part 1, Combray, “Swann’s Way”

Hermes:

“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

            --Marcel Proust

Writing in Cafés

Most of the time, I write at home, but the other day, mulling over a journal piece I intended to write, I thought, why not try writing in a café today? Especially since the journal post included the mention of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who used to escape the chill of their apartments by writing in Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots at Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

I would have to try out a few cafés to discover which has the best ambiance, the best conditions for writing.

It’s the hottest April and May on record in Paris, so open windows were one requirement. A good table for writing was another. And not too noisy.

After a brisk 25-minute walk, I arrived at my chosen café. Already, one advantage of writing in cafés was apparent—a good walk stimulates the mind.

What was it Friedrich Nietzsche said? “A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”

The café was crowded and noisy, but perhaps it would be quieter upstairs. I asked the woman at the cash register, “Are you serving upstairs?”

“Oui, Madame,” said a blonde woman whose hair was unusually short for a French woman.

The upstairs floor was L-shaped. A woman sat at the head of the “L,” a man in a corner at the foot. Both were focused, writing and reading. I picked a table halfway between the two and arranged my notebooks, colored pencils and pen on the table before me.

Behind me there was greenery in the open window that muffled the sounds from the street. In spite of the heat, a slight breeze brushed my shoulders.

A waiter appeared shortly. He was warm and twinkly, if a bit nervous, and took my order for a Badoit and green tea from Japan.

What luck! I’d found my perfect writer’s café on the first try!

I caught up on my soul-map, the daily mandala I draw of twelve colors, a daily check-in that keeps me on track in the twelve realms of my life.

The waiter returned. He seemed nervous, and sure enough, he spilled the sparkling water. But he swiftly recovered, grabbing the bottle, apologizing, drying the table, and wheeling off to bring me a replacement. Nothing on the table had gotten wet.

By the time he returned, I’d finished my mandala, and opened my notebook, ready to begin writing.

A kite string of fluttering women were heading up the stairs. I couldn’t see them yet, but I could certainly hear them, shouting in Italian. They must be on the way to the bathroom, I thought. Such noisy revelers would find no one up here to observe them and little to observe.

But no! Like a gaggle of chattering mockingbirds, they twittered past me, one male among them, and crowded around a table two tables away. Another straggled past in a red shirt, red jeans, a voice like a fire alarm.

How far away could I move and manage to outdistance their voices? I carried my Badoit, tea and notebooks to the opposite end of the room, and slid into the farthest booth. No, still too loud. I moved to the table opposite, directly in front of the two open wings of the window, poured my tea, took a sip and lifted my pen.

A man in a gray suit came up the stairs, looked around the spacious room, and slid into the booth I’d just vacated, directly across from me. He arranged a notebook and book on the table, then stood up and closed the two leaves of the window.

“Oh non, monsieur, s'il vous plaît, il fait trop chaud pour avoir les fenêtres fermées[1].”

He nodded pleasantly and opened one of them, leaving the other closed. “Voilà!” he said.

It was still too hot at my table. I looked around the room. There were at least three other windows, but all were too close to the noisy Italians.

I finished my tea, packed up my bag, and headed downstairs. The man in the gray tailored suit leapt up and reached the stairs just ahead of me. What was he doing?

While I paid at the register, he stood beside me and chatted with the cashier.

I walked a ways to the next appealing café. This one had no upstairs floor. But look! There in the corner, out of the main flow of people and traffic were two empty tables.

Just as I settled in at one, a man signaled me from halfway across the room, accompanied by a younger woman.

He gestured, Was the table next to mine available?

Yes, I nodded. He maneuvered his way through tables and chairs and took a seat against the wall next to me. He turned to me and grinned, as if happy to have company. But where was his female companion…?

I glanced outside and saw that she was the hostess of the restaurant.

A handsome humorless waiter came to take my order: a Perrier and a fresh fruit salad.

“Are you together?” he asked the man to my left.

“Oui,” he said, and pushing his table up against mine, said to me, “Vous permettez?” 

Was I going to humiliate him in front of the waiter and other diners? No.

As soon as the waiter took his order for a beer, he introduced himself.

I told him I was here to write, as soon as I’d finished “supper.”

“Oh,” he said. “You’re a writer. I’m a painter.” And he pulled out photos of his paintings for me to admire.  He looked Spanish, like Javier Bardem, stocky and dark-haired, but his accent was pure Parisian.

Did I have children? he asked.

“No,” I said.

Was I married? 

(If my wedding ring were any thicker it could be refashioned into a bracelet.) “Yes,” I said, “very happily married.”

 

“Ahhh,” he said, with heightened interest.

“Not just married,” I said. “He’s my soul mate.”

“Ah ha!” he said, with even greater relish. (Nothing like a challenge for a hunter.)

My fruit salad and sparkling water had arrived. I would talk to him while I ate, then excuse myself to write.

“And you,” I asked, “have you found your soul mate?”

“Yes,” he said. “She’s older than me. A writer. No children. We’ve been together for a year.”

And then came the key piece of information: “And she’s out of town till Monday.”

“I see,” I said. (And I did.)

“She would like us to live together but I prefer to keep my own place.”

I bet you do, I thought. Lucky woman, I thought, with such a devoted mate.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We were now in tedious territory.

Did he ask for my number? Of course he did.

Did I give it? Just guess.

How much more interesting a conversation would be if a woman said what she was really thinking: An older writer, is she? I must be your type.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact you are.

Just think, if I hadn’t met Richard, and you had met me before your girlfriend—let’s call her Diane—I could be the one begging you to move in with me, and you could try to seduce Diane the instant I left town!

I don’t follow you.

Oh, you know, women are pretty interchangeable, don’t you think?

Well, I don’t know that I’d go that far…

Monsieur, I have an idea. Let me guess ten things about you.

Who would turn down an invitation like that?

All right, he said.

But you cannot speak while I guess. All you can do is tell me how many of my guesses were correct, after all ten. I don’t even want to know which.

All right! he said. You’re on!

1)      You’re alcoholic. (The smell of addictive drinking is different from a beer or two on the breath.)

2)      You have never been faithful to a woman in your life.

3)      Your greatest gift is your lovemaking. You’re not even interested much in painting.

4)      It’s easy for you to pick up women because you’re very handsome.

5)      You feel sad about your life, but you’re not sure why.

6)      You hate solitude.

7)      You think psychotherapy, introspection of any kind is stupid, a waste of time.

8)      There is an emptiness in you that nothing fills.

9)      You have herpes (I can see it on your lip).

10)    You hope that you’ll stumble upon some woman who is not only smart, but wise, to help you make sense of your baffling life.

Nine, he said. But this, he said, touching his lip, is not herpes. I cut myself shaving.

I nodded. It appeared to me that he hadn’t shaved in several days.

I ate my fruit salad, then told him politely that I needed to write.

He smiled and scribbled down his website. “Come to my art show!” he said, then waved goodbye.

I smiled, and took out my notebook, but the writing focus had flown. So I packed up my notebooks and pen, and walked home.

But I cannot tell you a few truths I sensed about him without telling you a truth about myself: the encounter pleased me! We women are divided creatures. We want to get our work done without annoying interruptions. When we’ve found our true love, wild horses can’t tempt us away. Yet, what delight to know we’re still considered fair game for handsome hunters.

The next day I stayed in and wrote for four hours straight. And then had a delicious evening with my true love.

The street art photographed in this edition of Paris Play is primarily by Tristan des Limbes, who has recently been blanketing Paris with marvelous, and occasionally grotesque, drawings.

---

[1] Oh no, sir, please, it’s too hot to have the windows closed.

Castor and Pollux

One of my favorite words, one of those words that exist in one language and are difficult to translate into another, is zeitgeist. In German this means “spirit of the time.” I think it applies not just to an era, a decade, but also a year, and even a day. As I write more about daily life in this Paris journal, I notice more and more that there is a spirit of the day, if you simply pay attention. Often you can’t see it until the day is done, and looking backwards, you notice the pattern, the leitmotif, the zeitgeist.

I usually make the 45-minute walk to see my acupuncturist in the seventh arrondissement. Wednesday, I needed to write a bit longer, so for the first time I took the Métro.

Crossing rue des Écoles, a block from our house, a flock of school children were crossing in front of me. A couple of young women in their 20’s were herding the children across the street. Many of them wore little backpacks, and most of them went two-by-two up Cardinal Lemoine. As I passed, I heard their musical chatter, and then at the front of the flock, saw a couple of boys holding hands. They were close friends, speaking perfect French, little brooks of sparkling clarity. I asked the dark-haired young woman how old the children were.

“Quatre et Cinq,” she said.

Adorable, yet, descending the steps to the Métro, I felt melancholy. These four-year-olds and five-year-olds spoke far better French than I would ever speak. 

           *                       *                            *

I'm always hungry after my acupuncture session, so my ritual is to stop at the Italian trattoria on rue de Sèvres, and have a little pasta or fish. Tonight the Coquilles Saint-Jacques looked exquisite. A place must have ravishing food for me to be willing to stand up at a counter while I’m eating. Here, I stand.

The owner/chef was big-bellied, stolid with black hair and a slow manner. His assistant, a young woman with short red hair and a tattoo on her neck, which after much searching between us in French, English and Italian, I figured out was an elf, had a dancing humor in her eyes and mouth—like a dolphin…or an elf! Just seeing her expression made me happy.

As I waited for my Coquilles Saint-Jacques, I stood behind two boys, maybe twelve years old. They reminded me of the four- or five-year-old boys holding hands, the closeness and innocence of young boys who aren’t embarrassed to show their affection towards one another. They were asking the chef about various dishes with such gastronomic confidence, I was sure they could only be French. I could see how close they were, how similar their body language and voices. I felt a great love towards the two of them, the innocence of boys before the self-consciousness of adolescence begins. And there was some quicksilver lightness about them that was quintessentially French.

Ahh, my Coquilles Saint-Jacques was ready. I placed it on the counter and lifted my fork.

“Pardon,” I heard, and glanced over to see the shorter of the two boys looking up at me with such sweetness in his face that I put down my fork.

“Do you mind,” he asked delicately in French, “if we ask you what nationality you are?”

Oh good, a game. “You must guess!” I said.

The two boys jumped in. “French?” said the smaller one. (That instantly wiped out the melancholy of listening to the children earlier.)

“Noooo,” I said.

“German!” said the taller boy.

“No.”

“Italian?”

“No.”

The red-haired girl was laughing quietly behind the counter, a Celtic elf.   

“Polish!”

“Noo.”

“Spanish!” said the taller one, who stood slightly behind the shorter. Both had John Lennon glasses on, and were slender and sensitive and smart.

I shook my head. “You two seem like twins,” I said. “But not identical.”

“We’re brothers,” said the shorter one.

“And you’re how old?”

I am thirteen.”

“And I am eleven,” said the taller.

“And what is your age difference?”

“18 months!” said the older and shorter.

“Just like my sister and me. We are very close, just like you two.”

They both nodded, Yes, we are.

“Portuguese!” said the younger one.

“Nooo.”

“Wait, let’s slow down,” said the older. “Let’s look at the physiognomy of her face.”

He pondered. “You’re not Chinese.”

“You can see that I’m not,” I said.

“English?”

“Now you’re getting warmer. Some of my ancestors were English long ago.”

The older one looked hesitant. “You won’t get angry if I ask you something?”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t think you’re American because you aren’t obese.”

I laughed. “Well, you’re right and you’re wrong. I am American. And you’re right, there are more obese Americans than French.”

“Because of the fast food?” asked the older.

“Maybe, partly. Do you live in Paris?”

“Yes, we are Parisian.”

“You walk a lot here, so almost no one is fat.”

“Don’t people walk in the United States?”

“Yes, but not as much. We drive a lot. And not everyone is fat. And Americans have many wonderful qualities.”

“Like what?” He asked the question with great delicacy, signaling me that he wasn’t asking this as a challenge, but was just curious.

“Oh, energy, exuberance, spontanei—” I couldn’t get the word out in French.

The younger brother tried one translation, and the older brother corrected him. “No, she means spontaneity.”

The older brother was doing all the interviewing now. I thought of my sister, Jane, and how close we were at these boys’ age, and still are. Also how when we were children, I talked too much, so that she talked too little. Though she’s certainly made up for it since.

“Well,” said the older brother, “you see, we were only thinking of Europe.”

The younger one nodded.

They both noticed that my Coquilles Saint-Jacques was getting cold, and said goodbye. Then turned around at the door and asked, “Do you live in this neighborhood?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“How often do you come back?”

“Every other Wednesday, about this time. And I always come here for dinner.”

“Well, we’ll see you back here then,” he said, and they turned to go. “Arrivederci,” they called to the Italians behind the counter and slipped out into the street.

“They were adorable!” said elf girl.

“Weren’t they?” I said.

The dish was amazingly good. I’d bring some home for Richard. Plus some of that risotto with lemon.

I ate and thought about these two twin-like brothers, and earlier, the two four or five-year-olds holding hands. The two older boys had such a quicksilver intelligence and sensitivity. What empathy in a boy that age. He knew that a disparaging comment about Americans could very well hurt my feelings, even if it didn’t apply to me. They were sensitive enough to realize that people identify with their nationality and where they live. I thought of adults we know from other parts of the country who didn’t hesitate to make rude remarks about Los Angeles when we lived there.

They made me think of the Celtic roots of French culture, a heritage that traveled up from Crete and Greece through Spain and France and as far north as England. The courtesy, the light intelligence and spiritual sensitivity, it runs through La Chanson de Roland, the troubador tales, Chaucer, Blake, and up to the present time; it is evident in democratic ideals and the courteous treatment of women.

Later, at home, Richard wolfed the Coquilles Saint- Jacques and agreed that they were superb. I looked up the astrological aspects that day, looking for the pattern, the zeitgeist, and saw that the moon was in Gemini. The Dioscuri, the Twins of the zodiac, are ruled by Hermes, who in ancient Egypt was the god Thoth. An ibis-headed god, he was the scribe, the magician, the poet, the one who named things.

In Greek myth, the twins were brothers, boxers and horsemen, who so loved each other that when Castor died, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin, and they were transformed into the constellation of Gemini.

Mercury/Hermes was the favorite god of the Celts, a tribe who were fond of magic and poetry. And these twin-like brothers seemed to me to appear suddenly (as Hermes always does) to offer some magic words: do not despair. You haven’t lost your voice here in France--that was a fine conversation. And making French friends may not be so difficult after all.