I wish you could sit in on a dinner I have with Madame.
Tonight we had this stuff kind of mashed potatoes with crust and meat..., and then rocket salad, and of course cheese, and then for dessert these little glaces things, basically just raspberry sorbet and pistachio cake surrounded by fromage blanc (literally, white cheese, but really it’s has the consistency and texture of plain unflavored yogurt, and tastes only slightly worse. The French eat it as a dessert or sometimes as breakfast– added to jelly or heaps of table sugar, it is not that bad). The little dessert things were then dusted with gold sugar and garnished with a single raspberry on each one. I don’t know what gold sugar is made out of, it might just be gold dust for all I know, and for the wealth that inhabits the arrondissement in which I live, I would not doubt it. At boulangeries all the time, though, there are things in the window with just the slightest sifting of gold powder on top, or sometimes there will be a cake sitting in a bowl of silver... things the size and shape of almonds, but shiny smooth silver, and completely edible. I have a theory they are those same things that used to garnish cakes in the 80's, the ones my cousins and I used to eat by the handful until my grandmother read that they were full of mercury and made us stop.
But the French still use mercury thermometers, so I guess that is why they don’t care.
Anyway, at dinner tonight, other than the fact that it was super-elegant, Madame’s five-year-old grandson is in town, so he ate with us. All through dinner, I just kept thinking of how much he reminded me of the five-year-old boy I nannied for last year in ATL. So adorable, so shy, and so much more fluent in French than I am. Madame made him say "Bonsoir, Blair" when I walked in, because, as she said, "It is so difficult in France to teach children to address people when they greet them! Always, it is just ‘bonjour,’ or ‘bonsoir,’ and never with the appropriate title!" He was so well behaved, sitting still and grinning when Madame realized halfway through dinner that he had lipstick on his cheek from where she had kissed him and tried to wipe it off for him. He blushed bright red but didn’t even flinch, and all I could think was "If only I could introduce him to my favorite babysitting charge ever– Victoire and FG would be such good friends!"
Today I went to the Grands Magasins, primarily because I forgot how much I detest them. The Grands Magasins are the huge department stores one street over from the Champs-Elysees in the 9eme arrondissement. At Christmas they turn into the general equivalent of Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, and Saks in NYC, with huge window displays and amazing decorations. The only difference is that they are exactly that busy all year long, which I don’t understand at all because 1) tourists don’t know about them and 2) the French hate places like that, preferring to do their shopping in boutiques. The woman I live with, for example, when she goes grocery shopping, goes to Monoprix for food, then on the way home stops at the boucherie for meat, the boulangerie for bread, the marche for fruit, and the fromagerie for cheese, and that is not unusual. Anyway, I don’t detest the Grands Magasins, really, but I only really enjoy going if I have no great purpose and just want to wander around for awhile seeing the great things that rich people buy. But if you actually need something, whether it is a jacket or a purse, or (God forbid) a piece of jewelry, you are basically out of luck, because the places are so dang huge that there is no way you could ever see it all, which is so intimidating to me... and then of course everything is grouped by brand instead of article, so you have to wander through all of Marc Jacobs formalwear just to get to the Christian Leboutin pumps you wanted to check out, before you realize they cost approximately the same as a semester at Emory U. There are really two specific grands magasins– Printemps and Galeries Lafayette. Galeries Lafayette (the women’s part) covers a full city block and is 10 stories tall. The men’s part is half a block and 9 stories, and the other half of that block is the "home store," where they sell everything that is not men’s or women’s clothing. The other grand magasin (which means, literally, "huge store") is Printemps, the layout of which is significantly more confusing, but the prices of which are slightly more affordable. It was here that I first saw absinthe for sale in Paris, a pyramid of it in the middle of the men’s necktie section (what did I say about the organization?) for the bargain price of 95 Euro a bottle, glowing so green it might turn those who drink it into radioactive kung-fu practicing, sewer-inhabiting turtles.
BUT the cupola of Printemps makes it all worthwhile; it’s a wonder of Art Nouveau architecture, all stained glass that makes the Notre Dame rose window look tiny. PLUS you can climb up into the cupola, and all the way around the bottom edge there is the most amazing panorama of Paris I have ever seen. My two favorite views of Paris are the view from Trocadero, which is high enough that you can see just the landmarks, from East to West, the Sacre Coeur, Saint-Sulpice, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Invalides, and Tour Montparnasse. And it’s about a block from my apartment, so that makes it handy too. On top of Printemps, though, all you can see is just layer after layer of hundred-year-old Parisian buildings, stretching into infinity. It’s amazing. Pink, beige, gray, brown, cream, white and yellow, one after another, with their terra cotta chimneys sticking up from the roof, broken up occasionally by a roof terrace garden, a tiny blip of green in the otherwise quaintly industrial civilization of Paris. And the deli on that top level is bon marche enough that even American college students can afford to eat there.
I think the reason so few French people move to the US is simply that. If you’ve spent the first half of your life in the capital of a city so consumed with the idea of beauty, how could you leave and go to America, which is full of beautiful things and amazing sights and places, but also full of things like... subdivisions. And gas stations. And cars with fake wood paneling on the sides.
I’m not saying I’m from an ugly country. I’m just saying the beauty of "the New World," even now, is in the wild parts– the woods and the lakes and the mountains and the fields and the beaches and not the man-made architectural wonders the way it is here. Which is due to the mindset of the people that settled it and even more the financial status and prioritization that was necessary when they exited the Mayflower... plus it wasn’t Columbus’ fault that he discovered it after the end of the Baroque period, when architecture when downhill permanently.
I’ve taken too many art history classes in the last 2 years.
As always, if it’s not baroque...
B