Quel jour sommes-nous…*

Every once in a while I will hang out with a different man. Even as Monsieur L and I do almost everything together, sometimes I miss the company of women, but short of women, another man will do! [Parisian girlfriends are impossibly hard to come by, but I do get some female friends visiting with me from time to time.]

I met G a few years ago on the doorstep of “The Red Wheelbarrow”, the English bookstore that has since moved onto Rue Saint-Paul, and where we both know the owner. I was immediately taken by him. He is soft-spoken, friendly and has a gentle way about him. He and his partner live across the street in the historically infamous Hôtel de Brinvilliers [sometimes also known as the Hôtel d'Aubray], with their kitchen window looking over to our living room windows, from which Monsieur L will whistle for their attention sometimes!

G usually has time to just roll around with me in the neighbourhood or attend specific events for art and books, and the day always passes sweetly by. On this particular day, we had a mission. G had received an invitation to a private label sale nearby that would be on for only three days. We decided to be the first ones there to have the pick of the crop, but eager beavers that we were, we actually showed up too early. The location was not far from one of my favourite spots, Le Sévigné, across from a lovely little park. The restaurant had undergone a mild renovation but still offered up the same fare – a varied selection of quiches and large servings of their irresistible in-house tarte tatin with fresh cream!

We restrained ourselves to just tea for me and coffee for G since it was well before lunchtime and we chatted away until closer to the opening time of the sale. I love this quieter pocket of the Marais even though it is only a block or so north of the hyper trendy and busy shopping strip of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois. I can imagine the young and adventurous Marie de Rabutin-Chantal [before she became the much fêted Madame de Sévigné] wandering up the Rue de Turenne from her home in the Place des Vosges [still the Place Royale when she was growing up there] on a warm spring day and gazing up at the windows of the other elegant hôtel particuliers to see if she could entice a playmate to come down and join her for a promenade…and perhaps even an escapade or two!

G pointed up at the top floor of one such mansion on the street named after her, the Rue de Sévigné, and mentioned that he had considered buying that apartment before the one in the Hôtel de Brinvilliers became available. I envied his casual insouciance concerning the choice of residences amidst such a magnificent array of historically rich buildings!

Well then, onto choices regarding much more frivolous things! The sale for the end of season leftovers from the Marithé et François Girbaud line was housed in a large atelier space in the courtyard of one of these hôtels. We had to divest ourselves of all coats and bags just inside the door, and fortunately it wasn’t a jam-packed affair as these sales can tend to be. We took our time sorting through the numerous racks, G in the men’s section and me completely buried in the women’s. I am not a fashion hound and even though I liked the edgier styling of this label, the sale prices were not lowered enough to induce me to buy by the armful.

Monsieur L eventually joined us to break for lunch [although he did get caught up in the ferreting frenzy for a while in the accessories section!] We walked up to the Centre Culturel Suedois [since renamed Institut Suedois] housed in the Hôtel de Marle that dates from the 16th century. It was restored by the Swedish government in the early 1970′s to locate its cultural centre in Paris, with a year round programming of exhibitions, musical and dance performances, plays, and literary and film events. The little café within its cobbley courtyard offers up Swedish specialties for light lunches to the sounds of lilting Swedish voices.

Contented with our nordic interlude and with our trifle purchases in hand, we meandered home through the narrow sidestreets of this living museum that is the Marais. Monsieur L had other business to attend to so I decided to return with G to his place. We gossiped intensely as I sipped fragrant tea and he did his ironing. And so passes another easy and genial day… that perhaps even the gracious Madame de Sévigné herself would have taken pleasure in!

*”Quel jour sommes-nous

Nous sommes tous les jours

Mon amie

Nous sommes toute la vie…”

[from "Chanson" by Jacques Prévert, 1900-1977]

Tired Saboteurs

One Sunday morning we discovered that our bicycles had been sabotaged, the tires viciously slashed. Then we noticed that it wasn’t just ours but every bike on our block had endured a deflation. We have been parking our bikes outside locked against sign posts and drainpipes for years with nary an incident such as this. It is, after all, a quiet street with sedate neighbours and the odd gallery opening crowd once a month. True, there are lots of students about, studious English-learning students from the University of Paris campus down the street, but they all leave before night falls…and I doubt that they come prowling back in the midnight hour to unleash some gleeful vandalizing.

We were quite perturbed and decided to walk further afield to see if vélos on the neighbouring streets had suffered similar assaults. And wouldn’t you know it, the “tirenators” had been extremely diligent all night long – every single bike parked at every stand and post on every street and boulevard corner had been molested and were all looking flatly sorry for themselves.

Monsieur L assessed that it was a violation worth reporting to the Prefecture de Police. The station house for the 4ème Arrondissement was close by on the Boulevard Bourdon off the Bastille. We were interviewed promptly and thoroughly by a brusque female brigadier major and provided with a copy each of a “Compte Rendu d’Infraction Initial” [detailing the "Proces Verbal"] and a “Recepisse de Declaration“. It was the first time that I had been put through the paces by the French police, and hopefully it will be the last.

Before we left the Commissariat Central, some of the officers assigned to investigate the widespread tire maiming crime joked that perhaps the bicycle repair shops were hungry and needed to pump up business, [I know, obvious pun].

The tiring situation [I know, another bad pun] dealt with, we walked on to the nearby Marché d’Aligre to forget about ours and hundreds of other poor mutilated bikes amidst the mayhem of bargaining with Arab dealers over one euro junk. [More about this hustling and bustling flea market in another post.] The smell of roasting chicken from inside the market hall enticed us to buy one for lunch and we headed home to console ourselves gastronomically.

Later that evening while out for our after dinner stroll, we thought we should find more secure spots to leave our bikes overnight. [Bikes are not welcomed in the courtyard of Monsieur L's building, although I do sometimes sneak mine in and lock it under the stairwell. When I am not in Paris, she goes into hiding in a closet space on a landing above.]

We transformed into stealth seekers under the cover of night and slipped into neighbouring courtyards to survey for a little “couchette” lot for our traumatized bikes. All the years that I have stayed on this street, I have yet to enter into more than two or three of the massive portal doors that I would walk by almost everyday. Filtering through some of them that evening was a revelation to the incredible private spaces and homes behind those doors. Some of the enormous courtyards are linked in a series of lush gardens and paved pathways, so one could go in from one street and exit onto another. The varying stylistic features of the buildings were softlighted by exterior lamps and one could look into lit rooms for the myriad details revealed within.

These are urban hamlets with their medieval ambience tucked away in a living museum metropolis of touristic awe. And they are precious historical pods that few ever see, and hopefully, their very insularity will guarantee that they will keep on existing in this tranquil village within this great city.

It was a visceral and enlightening clandestine jaunt through time lost, and in the end we felt that we could not impose our modern day machinery into another’s world, as we could not daily intrude upon their serene lives to retrieve them.

Mon joli vélo sans souci…

La Brinvilliers est en l’air…

“Well, it’s all over and done with. Brinvilliers is in the air…”, a famously quoted declaration written by Madame de Sévigné to her daughter after witnessing the burning of the beheaded body of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, to indicate that her foul ashes had finally been dispersed into the wind, perhaps to afflict those breathing it in with the same poisoning proclivity that had brought the malevolent Marquise to such a well-deserved fate.

Across the street from Monsieur L’s building is an unassuming hôtel particulier signified only by a macabre history involving this infamous female serial killer who was willingly and skillfully mentored by her resourceful but depraved lover. This was big freakish news back in the 17th century and apparently inspired some copy-cat murders amongst certain unhappy aristocratic wives, [headlined then as "Affair of the Poisons"].

Marie Madeleine Marguerite d’Aubray was born in Paris in 1630 and married off to the Marquis de Brinvilliers in 1651. She was not particularly fond of her husband and just as well that he was away often. She soon fell under the spell of one Godin de Sainte-Croix, a calvary officer, who was quickly dispatched to the Bastille prison by her father to end their affair. As destiny would have it, Sainte-Croix learned a new trick from an Italian poisoner while languishing in jail, and as soon as he got out, quickly brought the little Marquise up to speed. They experimented with various concoctions and even managed to administer them to some patients of a nearby hospital to observe the effects.

Their first target victim was the Marquise’s own father who had forced her into a loveless marriage and then so rudely had Sainte-Croix incarcerated for pleasuring her. It took a few attempts, but when it finally worked on her father, she decided to dispatch her brothers as well to inherit the whole family fortune herself. With that successful double poisoning committed, her husband was next in line. However, Sainte-Croix had a change of heart because he did not wish to be burdened with the Marquise any further, and thereby quickly provided some antidote to the poor husband before the poison could work its magic.

Soon after, Sainte-Croix mysteriously died, apparently of natural causes, but really?? Who would have thought…and coincidentally, documents were found amongst his possessions that meticulously noted his ingenious collaboration with the Marquise. She managed to elude capture in France but was eventually found hiding in a convent in Belgium and brought back to Paris to be executed at the Place de Grève in July, 1676.

Today the Hôtel de Brinvilliers has been divided into several apartments, some of which are occupied by distinguished but discreet families. There is a large courtyard with a magnificent private garden belonging to one of the owners and we used to hear the calls of an exotic bird coming from it. Sometimes it seemed to be answering the practice notes of our in-house concert violinist, and the spontaneous duet that filled the stillness of a Paris dusk was always sublimely heart-felt.

Every so often we are invited over to friends’ apartment on the top floor facing our building for card games and dinner parties. I have never broached the subject of lingering spirits and ghostly presences with them, partly because I don’t really believe… and yet I have felt what could be called “energy fields”, and even quite sure that I had seen smoky puffs of unexplainable origins. I do love a skin-tingling ghost story and will suspend my disbelief for certain experientially “proven” haunted buildings.

Late one evening as we were descending the grand staircase in the Hôtel de Brinvilliers, I distinctly felt something in the air…the shadows cast from the lone chandelier over the stairs were long and deep, and the air chilled and sharp. There were dark, dark corners and disappearing hallways…

Monsieur L was somewhat skeptical [but I could tell that he was a little spooked as well]. I had my little camera with me and decided to take some quick shots all around to see what will appear…

Was the Marquise hiding in the lacy shadows that night, her repentant spirit still seeking forgiveness for her wicked misdeeds from her long departed descendants, or is it an unrepentant wraith unable to find a peaceful rest from her terrible murderous spree?

Our friends had already shut and locked their door before we had reached the stairway and we did not want to return and disturb them with our sensations. We have kept this to ourselves, and perhaps on another evening, when the mood strikes, the lovely and long-dead Marquise may be felt hovering in her namesake domain…casting her malignity into the air once again…

[Addendum: If one is ever kindly offered "les poudres de succession", please do not snort it, nor mix it into a cocktail drink, nor dust it upon one's clean body after a bath!  Or one could find oneself the fallen victim of a trend begun once long ago by one brazen and decadent Marquise.]

Village Saint-Paul

A block from the Seine in the Marais is the village that my Parisian life revolves around. For over ten years now it has been my periodic home away from home. On the days when I don’t leave its boundaries, I will triangulate between the apartment and the Monoprix or the Franprix [for groceries and sundries] and the river to clear my head. I run into neighbours who are art gallery owners, antique dealers, an English-language bookstore keeper who came from the same part of the country where I also live, a well-known artist who owns the second floor of our building, and the butcher, baker and mobile knife-grinder.

It is a quiet, orderly, charmed world we look down upon from the fourth floor apartment above. Students from the English department of the University of Paris stroll leisurely by to their campus down the street, younger children scurry by in the opposite direction towards their lycées, the odd small groups on their historic buildings tours, and antique lovers browsing the shops within the maze-like courtyards of the Village Saint-Paul and the surrounding streets.

Sadly, much has already been changing within the last few years in the area. Many of the tiny antique and brocante stores in the Village Saint-Paul are giving way to trendier design boutiques geared towards younger tastes. The changing flavour of the neighbourhood is even reflected in the daily offering at the artisanal boulangerie on Rue Saint-Paul which has added doughnuts and muffins to their usual pastry selection. I must admit I was a little turned off by these inclusions, not that I have anything against such american staples, but it was jarring to see nonetheless.

No doubt once the long time horse butcher on Rue Saint-Antoine retires, his been there forever store will be converted into another hip clothing boutique or chinese take-out or the ubiquitous chain boulangerie Paul. And we will not have the butcher’s restless wife to gossip about anymore! [I have yet to try their horsemeat tartare that Monsieur L has the occasional craving for.]

Monsieur L has been frequenting the nearby Sanglier traiteur since he was the same height as the wild boar statue guarding the front door, and it is still the nostalgic favourite to come for the rotisserie chicken, coquilles St. Jacques and crème brûlée – [lucky me is always greeted by this delightful creamy mouth orgasm upon my arrivals to Paris]. After such an indulgent lunch, we’ll walk across the street and cut through the courtyard of the Hôtel de Sully into the Place des Vosges to rest our full bellies on a park bench, or head the other direction across the Pont Marie to walk it off around the more touristy Ile Saint-Louis, avoiding the long line-up for luxury ice-cream at Berthillon [whatever the weather].

Feeling ever more the certified villager of this lovely area of Paris, I will defend it possessively and compare it much more favourably to other parts of the city. In his convincing pride-of-place way, Monsieur L has always maintained that his street is the best street to live on, and on those luminous tranquil days perched high above the Village Saint-Paul with a view of the splendid dome of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, it is an assertion that is easy to believe.

Paris, Paris, toujours Paris…

I am a grand lover of la belle France, and Monsieur L tells me I am more french than most french…which I have graciously accepted as a double-edged compliment, but is, I believe, a very sincere, and perhaps even the ultimate, praise coming from a patriotic and unmodern frenchman!

I don’t live in France all the time [although I plan to grow older and sexier there someday], but I do enjoy intensive and pleasurable episodes there regularly. My home base is Paris, and together with Monsieur L, we have explored much of France as well.

The view from his apartment glories in the changing light, the cinematic skies, the ancient rooftops of myriad shapes and sizes, the puffing chimney pots, and the neighbours’ uninhibited vie intérieure. The church bells toll on the hour, reverberating over our domestic soundscape.

Once every few weeks, the vitrier with sheets of glass on his back stands at the end of the street crying out his presence, and Monsieur L will lean out one of the windows to call him in to fix a broken pane in the little window on the landing outside the apartment.

Monsieur le vitrier is old and getting older with no successor to pass on his trade…another living remnant of the past soon faded away from the medieval streets of the Marais.