Another day I was sitting at my favorite classy lunch joint, Elgi, outside Arts et Métiers, where I had my IR class. I was eating my favorite bagel concoction with fancy ham and tomatoes when “Team Gaga” showed up. Apparently Lady Gaga was doing an interview next-door with Jean-Paul Gaultier. All in a day’s work in Paris.
We also had a trip one glorious day – one in a never-ending succession of cloud-free skies – to the chateaux of Fontainebleau and Vaux-le-Vicomte, not too far beyond Paris. Fontainebleau was originally built by Francois I in the 16th century (a pretty big deal as far as kings go), though its roots go back to the 12th century. Napoleon renovated the chateau and made it even more opulent after some neglect (and worse) during the Revolution. So today, much that you can see inside bears an unmistakable “N”. After our tour, we strolled around the glistening lake with its little rowboat-accessible getaway and a plethora of swans. Very serene. Vaux-le-Vicomte is unusual because it belonged to Nicolas Fouquet, who was not a king – he was finance minister to Louis XIV. Only Louis decided the chateau was too nice and had Fouquet imprisoned in it. This was demonstrated nicely by very ominous basement displays with chains and creepy music. Once we had climbed to the top of the belltower at V-le-V and seen the gardens, we couldn’t stay indoors there, either. So we lay down in the grass and relished this sleepy Saturday afternoon spent with the kings of France.
Another time, several of us ventured to the far eastern edge of the city where begins the Promenade Plantée. We made sure to stop at the most famous bakery that makes this (see picture) kind of special Jewish cake and take one for the road – can’t remember what it’s called, but there are raisins and sugar and its fried and great. The PP is an old elevated railroad that is now an elevated park that runs almost 3 miles from Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes. It’s mostly filled with rollerbladers (still SUCH a thing in Paris), people running in fashion sneakers and turtlenecks (also a big thing), and people with nice dogs.
The last couple weeks were filled with nuits folles. CUPA threw us a luxurious goodbye dinner at a great restaurant whose name is lost to the ages somewhere near Étienne Marcel. First there was fancy champagne and then fish that came wrapped in some kind of foil boat. Mostly there was just a lot of chaleur because we were all together for the last time. And it really was a great group of people, the students and the CUPA team both. Everyone was smart and serious about learning something in France, but equally fun to be around. From the dinner we proceeded to where else but… the mosquée. That was actually the night that the waiters, Naimi and Belkacem, first discovered I spoke some Arabic and we totally bonded. Some of my best memories there – sampling pistachio sweets while reminiscing about the last several months through the clouds of hookah smoke floating through the orange trees in the tea room’s courtyard. Around midnight, Nathaniel’s host brother, Yves-Marie, invited us to meet him and his friend Geoffroy by Notre Dame. We went with them to play round after round of a card game called président by the Seine. At last, French friends, we thought. The last metro long gone, I hopped on the trusty Noctilien from Saint-Michel. The night bus (always an oasis of crazy hurtling through the darkness) was even more of a circus than usual, with one hallucinating gentleman kindly informing every passenger individually that “la vie est belle.” The woman he was ostensibly with was crasser: “Les filles qui prennent le bus sont des putes!” she informed us with a great sense of urgency. Then I realized I’d forgotten my key at home. Disaster. I had to wake up my host dad at 4am in shame… miraculously, he came to the door giggling in a blue silk bathrobe. He thought the whole thing was hilarious and we rigoler-ed together a little.
The next night, Yves-Marie and Geoffroy invited us all to a party with their French friends at Nathaniel and Yves-Marie’s apartment. Rachel made her famous mac ‘n cheese, but the French still turned up their noses at it. Mixing cheeses = deal-breaker. It was really fun (at last) to socialize for real with French people our age. I wish I’d been more successful at that all semester, but I fell into the same trap as every other American study abroad student.
Somehow we still managed to rouse ourselves from Issy at 5am, assemble snacks (thanks to my amazing host mom, who packed me, among other things, a giant bag of crunchy rice bears), and get on the train. This was a repetition of my post-sleepless night in Nantes. Rouen was beautiful. We left from the Gare St-Lazare, all the while thinking how Monet our day was shaping up to be. After departing the bustle of the city for the bucolic Norman countryside, we found ourselves looking up at the impressive façade of Rouen Cathedral in one of its (many) luminous states. Rouen is a city of 500,000, but everything about it is charming – and it seemed particularly quiet for some reason. Though less than 70 miles from Paris, the half-timbered houses lining Rouen’s streets give it a very different feel from the capital. Obviously the city is known also for the burning of Joan of Arc. Today there is a very modern church and memorial to her in the center, though it was closed for a ceremony. We were on a special tour by one of Claire’s church history professors, so we learned a lot about ecclesiastical architecture and visited a number of smaller churches like the 15th-century Church of Saint-Maclou. On our way back to the train, wepassed by the reconstructed Palais de Justice, which used to be the seat of the Norman Parliament.
^Not quite up to par with Monet, but I tried
Around that time, I also paid a visit at last to the Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris. It’s in the Marais, housed in side-by-side hôtels particuliers – fancy townhouses. Just about everything is there: the personal effects of Robespierre, Proust’s bed, signposts belonging to 18th-century shopkeepers. Personally I liked the old paintings of Paris by lesser-known painters that showed the neighborhoods I had come to know well.
Some other things we did. Isabella invited us at last to visit her infamous neighborhood of Porte de Saint-Ouen and equally infamous host mom known as Marie-Do. It was a fantastic buffet-style dinner and I had a lengthy conversation with an architect about French vs. American perceptions of the Strauss-Kahn case. He was very critical of what he said was our tendency to always believe the victim even before trial, which I couldn’t really disagree with, although this conversation was long before serious doubts were cast on the woman’s background
Our crew also hit up Café de la Paix, and I got to become one of those people I always wondered about when I walked home from the Opera along Boulevard des Capucines. The tea was pretty average, but I’m glad to say I’ve been there. I kept thinking of a song by the French singer Thomas Fersen by the same name (“Un rendez-vous/à la brasserie/du Café de la Paix/je t’attendrai…). The evening continued at the Theatre de la Madeleine, where I went to see the Beckett play Fin de Partie (known in the original English as Endgame) with my meufs Rachel and Isabella. It basically involved an elderly actor with a ton of energy sitting in a chair in the middle of the stage and musing as he approaches the end of his life.
Another day, we visited the jardins du Palais Royal. According to David McCullough’s book The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, which I’m reading now, these gardens were a great source of joy to Americans visiting the city in the 19th century, too. They’re elegant rather than vast or lush, and surrounded by an arcade housing the chicest of antiquarian and fashion boutiques. Maybe the same day, we imbibed the chocolate of Angelina. It’s the fanciest hot chocolate joint in Paris, on Rue de Rivoli near Concorde.
It was especially hard to say goodbye to all the great gardens of Paris. People actually use them! DC is not about parks unless you live in one, sadly. But Claire and I spent one afternoon that last week, for example, reading aloud from Lolita in the reclining green chairs in front of the Senate in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
All too soon, though, came the time for departure of Rachel and Nathaniel. Lunch began at Genia, naturally, and then we reconnected later at the Louvre while I, in the intervening hours, visited a mediocre exhibit by architect Zaha Hadid in the courtyard of the Institut du Monde Arabe and then took a stroll through the Jardin des Plantes (aka botanical garden). It was a day with a remarkably dramatic sky, and it was much colder than any Parisian day had been in months. With our appetite for art (especially the grand format room with Raft of the Medusa, Liberty Guiding the People, the Death of Sardanapalus) satisfied, we went to satisfying our other appetite (FOOD) at La Fourmi Ailée near Saint-Michel. All I remember is that there were bookshelves on the walls, which won me over immediately, and I ate handcrafted gnocchi. This night also, then, involved the mosquee, followed by a stint at Crocodile involving blueberry cream apple champagne with a Haribo crocodile floating inside. But where else could we end the night but at the Seine? It started well… each of us saying in turn one thing we’d miss. It was very late, though, and when it’s late, even on the weekend, the creepers come out. Our first acquaintance turned out not to be that: he was Marc-Antoine, also known as Bob Dylan. A skinny little guy in torn jeans, a plaid shirt, and a newsboy cap, he was eager to discuss the Greenwich Village music scene with us. He eagerly asked us if we’d ever heard of the ‘60s folk singer Karen Dalton and said he liked to come sit by the water when it is abandoned like this to drink a beer, smoke a cigarette, and ponder deep thoughts. Unfortunately, Bob Dylan was not the only one prowling about that night… the Seine was pretty deserted (our mistake) by this time of night and a group of three troublemakers came over to hassle our group. Sensing they were sort of dangerous, I grabbed my purse and another and booked it down the bank to find the other girls, who’d gone to find a bathroom. In the meantime, one of the other guys grabbed Isabella’s purse and took off, strewing everything in the river. We were able to recover a few cards and things that hadn’t made it in, but then I spied Isabella’s journal bobbing many feet below… the one thing she cared deeply about losing. By some grand act of fate and a valiant effort by Rachel to climb down the side of the bank into the Seine, the journal floated its way downstream directly to a small set of steps leading down from the bank. Nothing else was saved. But the next day, Isabella and Marie-Do were able to painstakingly dry each page with toilet paper and a hair dryer. We said goodbye to Nathaniel at the Noctilien stop on the Ile-de-la-Cité by the Pont Saint-Michel, the streets deserted and all of us in wonder about how our night of reminiscences had morphed into this emotional final act. Back home, none of us slept. I had one hour or so until I was going to meet Rachel and Isabella at the RoissyBus stop down the street to say goodbye to Rachel.
That day was very strange, both for not sleeping and because my friends were all gone or traveling except Isabella. After a few strange hours of rest, I awoke to a raucous 67th birthday party lunch for my host mom, attended by about 10 silver-haired French aristocrats. I should’ve known it wouldn’t be staid, though, not with my host family… at some point, two of the men got up and began waltzing around the room while several of the others banged their plates like cymbals. Then my host mom and her best friend got up and tangoed. Then Brigitte put on a ludicrous bilingual recording of Joyeux Anniversaire/Happy Birthday that honestly sounded like it came from a children’s circus or something and they sang and danced to it. I wasn’t sure how to participate…
Eventually the guests migrated into the salon for coffee, chocolate, and gossip, and I went to get my daily dose of taxidermy. I met Isabella at Deyrolles, the oldest taxidermist in Paris. The top floor of the store is covered floor-to-ceiling with stuffed animals from pigeons to polar bears. (God knows why anyone would pay 100 euros for a stuffed pigeon, I’m pretty sure you could just pick one off yourself in the park, but to each his own!) There’s a zebra, a lion, antelopes, owls, bobcats, and an entire room of butterflies. Whatever you could need… but really, how often can they sell a stuffed polar bear? What does one do with that?! A great mystery.
The next day, I finally got to experience the Marais’s L’As Du Falafel, Paris’s most famous falafel joint. They take your order when you line up at the window and then at lightning speed whip you up a mouth-watering concoction… which we took with us to Place des Vosges, where half the city of Paris seemed to be out sunbathing. Later, I went to Isabella’s chorus concert at a little church at Porte de Bagnolet on the eastern outskirts of the city. It’s a very different Paris out there – non-descript, shops shuttered, more uncomfortable for a woman walking alone – but the church was full of life. I think it was the same day, then, that we went out to dinner around Voltaire with Claire and her mom. The next day, after nutella banane crepes, we also had to say goodbye to Claire who was headed home to study Latin for the summer. And then we were two veuves (the French word for widows) – as Isabella liked to say.
It’s sort of crazy how people from every part of your life tend to turn up in Paris. I found out that my friend Mary Chesus from LINC in Egypt was visiting Paris with her boyfriend before heading back to California to start her real job. I hadn’t seen her since 2006, but I saw them 3 times that week and we just picked up where we left off 5 years ago in Cairo.
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