Paris Journal 2012 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Practically every day, I break the law in France. So do most women here, as far as I can see. It is illegal for a woman to wear trousers without first obtaining the permission of the préfecture, according to a 19th Century law that is still on the books. After the law was enacted, it was later modified to make exceptions for women who were holding the reins of a horse or a bicycle’s handlebars. All this useful information and more I have been learning lately on the web site for RFI, Radio France Internationale. The server for that web site is dreadfully slow, but the illuminating articles are worth the wait From another RFI article, I learned that while colony collapse syndrome has been adversely affecting bees in the countryside of France, the cities have become the better place for bees to be. Paris, for example, stopped using pesticides in the parks. So now bees, like so many others, like to be in Paris. Beekeeping classes at the Luxembourg gardens have a two-year waiting list, according to RFI. (In earlier years, I’ve mentioned the apiary – or rucher in French – in the Luxembourg gardens. For example, see the entry for July 8, 2009.) After reading one of this year’s entries in this Journal, my friend Judy asked a question about the nomenclature of streets in Paris. On a related topic, RFI published a recent article about the naming of avenue Auguste Blanqui in the 13th arrondissement. The author of the article, Amanda Morrow, was puzzled about the naming of this avenue. She understood that big important boulevards and the more important avenues in Paris are named after very important people, e.g., boulevard Haussmann, boulevard Saint Germain, avenue Félix Faure. She did not understand why an avenue would be named after Louis-Auguste Blanqui, a 19th Century violent, radical left-winger who nowadays would be classified as a terrorist. She asked schoolchildren leaving a school on that avenue if they knew who Louis-Auguste Blanqui was. Not one of them did. She asked a retired professor, who correctly answered that he was a left-wing politician who is now dead. Most adults she spoke to had no idea who the man was. He was president of the Paris Commune which ruled Paris briefly for a couple months in 1871. Then Amanda interviewed Oleg Kobtzeff, a political geographer at the American University in Paris (where our friend Roy teaches). Oleg is the one who said that there’s no question that Blanqui would today be identified a terrorist. Here’s a snippet from Amanda’s interview with Oleg: “He [Blanqui] would be on the hit list of numerous agencies throughout the world.” But, adds Kobtzeff, the names of socialist leaders, radical or otherwise, have been allowed to live on as Paris streets thanks to a spirit of political reconciliation following World War II. “You did have a very important communist and socialist influence in those years during the liberation of French territory from the Nazi occupiers. And in some cases, streets were named this way because municipal councils leaned more towards the left,” Kobtzeff says. “Also, the naming of these streets is a way of taming these radicals. By making them part of the institutions, by making them household names, you make them much less dangerous. Hmmm. Can you imagine an avenue Osama Bin Laden? I think not. For 15 years, I have enjoyed looking into the street names that we see on our walks through Paris. I love a city that names streets after mathematicians, scientists, doctors, schoolteachers, poets, philosophers, and singers. I use the camera instead of a notebook to make a record of a street name by photographing the sign, and then the next morning, I’d look that person up to learn about their contributions to society. What a fun way to learn more history! For example, years ago, I simply had to learn about Félix Faure, because we so enjoy walking along that avenue. I learned that he was President of France from 1895 until he died in 1899 while, well, er, you know – he was doing something with a woman (not his wife). Or she was doing something to him. This ignominious end is the source of lots of jokes – puns, really – in French. I won’t go into them here, but you can read about this in Wikipedia. Last night, I wanted to walk down the rue Saint Charles, all the way to the rue Balard, and then up that street to the beginning of the avenue Émile Zola, which we took to the rue des Entrepreneurs, up the rue du Commerce, where we dined once again at Le Commerce Café. This neighborhood pub was hoppin’ last night. It is just the kind of place where people in the ‘hood like to go for a casual Sunday night dinner with family or friends. We were seated by a server whom we did not recognize, and so he didn’t know that we were regulars. He didn’t wheel over the blackboard listing daily specials, and so I walked over to it to take a look. As I sat back down, the other server, whom we do recognize, rolled the blackboard over to us with apologies. When our server returned, he raised his eyebrow and gave me a look of surprised approval when I ordered the souris d’agneau special of the day (lamb shank!). He must have heard Tom and I speak English to each other when we entered, and he assumed wrongly that we would not and could not order from the blackboard. I hate it when a server makes that assumption. Lots of Americans can read and speak French! Tom ordered his usual beef Carpaccio with fries on the side. It arrived with an especially nice looking salad this time. The food did not arrive quickly this time; and that was fine with us. As usual, the Sunday lamb shank was delivered on an enormous pile of buttery puréed potatoes, with a very nice pool of gravy. The lamb, moist and tender, fell off the bone. It was delicious comfort food. But there was no way I could come close to eating all of it. Tom, however, managed pretty well and so continued on to dessert. He ordered the café gourmand, expecting that this would include the hazelnut cake and apples-and-cream concoction again. But no, instead of the hazelnut cake, he was given a slice of very rich, dark chocolate flourless cake. It was fantastic, and so was that apples-and-cream thing, which also had plenty of caramel sauce this time (Tom let me taste both). The place was so busy that we were asked to pay at the bar, where we were joined by customers from two of our server’s other tables. It was just more efficient for him to handle one of us after the other, right there at the cash register. It was like paying up at Bob Evans restaurants. As much as Le Commerce Café is a model of efficiency, we still enjoyed the sense of having had a very leisurely Sunday dinner, followed by a short and pleasant stroll home. In the evenings at home, we typically read. In prior years, we would buy one French and one English newspaper to read each day. That became increasingly difficult on Sundays and holidays, when so many news stands are closed. We also grew tired of Le Parisien’s yellow journalism, and the type size and prose structure is tedious in Le Monde. The International Herald Tribune has been pared down so much and its price increased so much that we are better off reading the New York Times online. I also read individual pieces from Le Parisien online. I’ve been discovering additional reading resources online. One of these days, I will make a list of them for you all. We did buy Le Parisien on each of the two Fridays so far this month. Mostly, this was so we would have the TV magazine that is included on Fridays, and therefore we’d have the schedule for the broadcasts of the Tour de France and the Quatorze Juillet parade. These two papers have provided a few entertaining morsels. For example, on Friday the 13th, on page 10, Le Parisien published a news story on the startling subject of a small crow that was terrorizing some poor woman in Froidefontaine, a town in the region of Belfort, which borders Switzerland. The residents of Froidefontaine have given this annoying and scary bird an English name, Shadow. Three times now, Shadow has attacked Patricia Glasser, a resident of the town, inflicting serious wounds on her arms and neck. She’s afraid; who wouldn’t be? At first, the crow made strange noises when he saw Patricia. Then he attacked from above. Now he comes to her house and makes noises on the aluminum liner at the top of Patricia’s chimney. The darn bird even follows her, several kilometers, when she drives to work. The nuisance-animal control officers have been notified, but crows are cunning. They see a man with a gun, and they vanish. The experts think Shadow was kept as a pet, and so lost his natural fear of humans. When he became trouble, he was probably released into the wild. This behavioral problem also occurs among raptors who have been kept in captivity. The plan to kill Shadow has caused some animal rights people to rise to his defense. They have collected 500 signatures on an online petition to save Shadow’s life. Meanwhile, five ravens and crows have been slaughtered in Froidefontaine . . . but Shadow still flies free. Never feed the wildlife!
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Monday, July 16, 2012
Looking
into a window of a chocolate shop on the rue Saint Charles, we admired the
packaging for the vacation season.
La
Cabane, a florist shop on the rue Balard, where the windows are trimmed in
moss-covered pieces of wood. The
street is named for a chemist who discovered the element called bromine in
1826.
The
lamb shank special at Le Commerce Café (above), and the beef Carpaccio
(below.
The
mirrored ceiling in the back part of the dining room allows you to see what
the diners across the room are eating, or drawing, in this case.
Le
Commerce Café. |
