Dans les Pas de Mme. Sévigné

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Bonnes Mesdames et Bons Messieurs,

I know I've been remiss in not reporting sooner, but it's been hard to fit in any writing what with settling in and all, so now I thought I'd post a little visual of my new neighborhood and apartment as well as a bit of news. The new version of iMovie is infuriating to work with (and I'm a crappy photographer) so forgive me for the quality; I simply lost patience with the entire endeavor.

As a note of explanation, this weekend the French are having what are called Les Journées Européenes du Patrimoine, ("European Heritage Days," sort of), during which hundreds of historical and cultural sites throughout France that are not normally open to the public or usually charge admission -- more than 700 venues in Paris alone -- shirk their fees or cloaks of privacy and admit the masses to view their glory. My neighborhood, Le Marais, is one of the oldest quartiers, having escaped Baron Haussmann's wrecking balls during the 19th century and Le Corbusier's ambitions of the 20th, so there are many of these historic sites within a few steps of where I live.

This video shows the following:

On the rue Vieilles-du-Temple, one block over from my apartment, is the magnificent Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, built in the late 1650s and perhaps most noted for having been the residence of Pierre Beaumarchais who wrote "The Marriage of Figaro" on which Mozart based his opera. Its original owner, Jean-Baptiste Amelot de Bisseuil, was a bit sun-obsessed, and there are images everywhere in the mansion's carvings and worn frescoes reflecting his solar passions. (You will note a couple of the surviving sundials of wrought iron protruding from the walls that cast shadows against the painted time scales.)

The Journées du Patrimoine's tours of the Hôtel led visitors through the two courtyards from its front entrance on rue Vieilles-du-Temple and out the back door on the next street over, the rue des Guillemites where I live. Just to give you some idea of where I live you will see in the video the bright red door of the Hôtel Amelot's rear exitway, after which the camera turns around to show my house, built during the same period of the 17th century. (It's the one with the blue-green door to the right of the graffito of an A that's been spray-painted in the more contemporary style. I've marked my dining room window to try to give you all an idea of how it all fits together. I hope it's at least vaguely successful.)

The rest of the video gives a complete tour of my swanky Marais apartment (which I did not tidy up before filming, sorry) with its two courtyard views, then some random photos and clips from my meanderings yesterday in the 'hood, along the rue des Rosiers and, lastly, into the Musée Carnavalet, the former home of Mme. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal la Marquise de Sévigné, best know for her prolific, humorous letters to her daughter. I read that at some point she discovered her missives were being copied and published, so she began to compose them accordingly, knowing they would reach a larger audience. You might say Mme. Sévigné was well ahead of her time, or as I now like to think of her, La Mère du Blog.

Et voilà, le video:



Le Marais is, of course, a spectacular neighborhood and as you can see from my modest A/V effort, my apartment is incredibly bright, airy, and comfortable. But as I suspected when I rented it from afar, sight unseen, there are drawbacks to living here. Its inherent picturesque-ness makes this area a major tourist draw, and that combined with it being Paris's primary gay neighborhood make it an extremely expensive place for normal day-to-day activities. The horrifying result of attracting so many TWo-Income-No-Kid tourists is that a simple petit dejeuner of coffee, croissant, and orange juice can cost as much as €13.00 (US$18.00 at today's exchange rate). I have found breakfast available for as low as €8.00 (US$11.00), but that is hardly a bargain, especially if one aspires to become a regular at the nearest caffeine emporium. Shopping is similarly fiscally excruciating, and until the weather turns nasty there is also a preponderance of drunken street revelry each night by tourists and locals alike who come to absorb the $8 beers and $10 cocktails served in Le Marais's numerous watering holes.

The place has quieted down considerably since I arrived last Tuesday, however. My Eurostar train car from London was filled with Scotsmen in skirts and plumed tam-o-shanters and those dead animal thingies they wear over the crotches of their kilts, en route to invade Paris on the occasion of the World Cup rugby finals. As the train emerged from the Chunnel and roared across the Norman landscape famed (among other things) for previous foreign occupations and invasions, one Scot produced a large boom box from among his satchels of haggis and whiskey and suddenly the coach was filled with the sack-of-angry-cats-like screeching of bagpipe music. I was too horrified (and I admit a bit intimidated) to ask them to spare Humanity such an affront, and fortunately the speed with which one can now travel by rail brought us to Paris before I had to break a window and leap to my death and the certain release it would provide me from such aural misery.

The Scots disembarked and marched single file down the platform of the Gare du Nord, chanting auld Scots battle hymns on their way to find a bar to "tak a guid bucket." And many a guid bucket they tuk, filling the streets of Paris with their drunken wailing for the next two days. There wasn't a quartier in the city spared their presence, and their alcohol intake and volume increased exponentially when the Scottish team won their match and overtook the French in the race for the Cup.

You could sense the entire city of Paris -- not just the people, but each and every cafe and cobblestone -- heave a collective sigh of relief when these people finally abandoned France and hauled their drunken kilt-covered feather-tammed rugby-fan asses back to Britain, but although I too was glad to be rid of them I confess that there was one nice thing about their presence here: It may be the only time since we squandered our good will with the French people that Americans, by contrast, seemed quiet, polite, and well-educated.

I don't mean for my first dispatch from France to be so filled with complaint. It really is great to be here, although I realized yesterday that I've been playing an unhealthy sort of game with myself to make the experience most comfortable: When it suits me I pretend I am on vacation (this excuses my spending a fortune for breakfast instead of preparing it at home, and I don't miss my friends as much as I would if I admitted to myself I won't see you all for a very long time), but when it suits me better I pretend I am a permanent resident -- a more relaxing way to bide my time; believing my stay here is unlimited, I don't feel rushed to see the sights all at once or fuss with choices about how I might spend my day.

And then, of course, there's the always entertaining and often embarrassing experience of living in a place where my language skills are horribly wanting. As I've mentioned, the Marais is Paris's gay neighborhood. (As I described it to a friend the other day it is exactly like San Francisco's Castro district if the Castro were clean, cobblestoned, and French. In other words, it is nothing at all like the Castro except for the preponderance of gay bars and bookstores.) On my first night here, having spoken no French in nearly a year save for telling my taxi driver from Gare du Nord the address of my apartment, I was approached by a young man who I believed was trying to sell me an exercise video. It took me quite an embarrassingly long time to realize that he didn't say "Tae-Bo," but "tu es beau," but by the time I figured it out, he was well on his way down the street and I felt I would look REALLY foolish to all the people sitting in the cafe I was standing in front of to shout down the street with my bad French accent, «JE TE COMPRENDS MAINTENANT! MERCI BEAUCOUP, MONSIEUR!!»

When I first came up with this crazy scheme to attempt to live abroad I worried that such a big move, all alone, is much harder when one is 50 than 20, but what I didn't realize is that I don't embarrass as easily in middle age as I did when I was younger -- an unanticipated upside. I've had foreign language brain farts like the one above when I was younger that haunted me for years and still make perspiration bead on my brow when I recall them, but in this case I just found it extremely amusing. So much so that I would find myself laughing out loud to myself whenever I recalled it. The following night I went to a jazz club down the street and I remembered the t'es beau incident just as I happened to be looking at the singer, Gwen Sampé, who was at the bar prior to her performance. (An astounding performance, by the way, and way too hard to describe in a rambling train-of-thought blog entry such as this. I will attempt that at a later date.) When I let out an involuntary, Tourette's-like laugh at myself, it started a conversation with her that continued with her and some of her friends after the show, and now just in the past two days that new friendship has led to my meeting a number of additional people who provide the potential for a new social circle -- something I didn't expect would be so quick to occur.

More news as it develops. I am off to rustle up a pear tart from the patisserie down the street, an addiction to which I knew from past visits I was in danger of succumbing and which, I am ashamed to say, may require professional help to kick. I will let you know if it becomes a problem in need of intervention.

À t'à l'heure

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