We first met in the Luxembourg Garden where I was sitting by the small Statue of Liberty after my morning class at the Alliance Française of Paris. It was the fall after graduating from Ohio State and I was now ready to make something of myself though I didn’t yet know what. My parents were pleased that I was continuing my education. I was studying French at the Alliance and pastry-making at the Ferrandi Paris cooking school.

I’d bought myself an exquisite chocolate éclair on the way to the park. After creating an Instagram post of a selfie in which I’m holding up the éclair like the statue her torch (Statue of Delicious #paris #thelife #frenchpastry), I sat down nearby to enjoy the pastry with the intent of then studying the passé composé of irregular verbs.

“Bonjour Mademoiselle,” he said. I looked up. He had lovely little brown eyes and smoothed-down brown hair, greying at the temples.

“Bonjour Monsieur,” I answered.

He lifted his palm toward the chair beside me and asked if it was occupied. Understanding his request more from his gesture than from his words, I removed my notebook and purse from the seat so that he could take the chair. Instead of moving it further away, he sat down beside me. He excused himself for remarking but said that he detected un petit accent.

“Je suis américaine,” I said.

“Amay-we-can,” he echoed with a scrunched smile without parting his thin pink lips, then, immediately switching to English, he added, “your accent is very char-ming. Do you know why we have a Statue of Liberty here?” he asked.

I did not.

He said, “But you should because you are Amay-we-can, so I will explain to you.” And so he did, as he would teach me much else, with intense, informative, endearing condescension, before concluding, “You have so much to learn.”

On our first date, the following evening, he took me to a wonderful little bistro, where a surly waiter served us a nice house red. When he told me again that I was charming, I felt myself blush. He called me his Mona Lisa because my name is Liz. I called him Bruno because that is his so adorably French name. When I told him that I would like to try the French onion soup, he said that was for tourists and he recommended instead the bone marrow, telling me that there was a sincerity to the presentation and sensuality to the texture. I marveled at the way used adjectives to describe food and accepted his suggestion. He ordered the pâté for himself, which he ate with thick chunks of sourdough bread. Then chicken supreme for me and andouillette for himself. We shared profiteroles for dessert. He wiped the chocolate from my lips with his napkin.

Afterwards, we walked along the Seine, where he lit a cigarette, and when it was finished, he flicked the butt into the river then turned and kissed me as the Eiffel Tower sparkled as though on cue. His breath tasted of a mix of cigarettes, coffee, wine, intestinal sausage, and a breath mint. It was a beautiful spring evening in Paris. I remembered the old song. He took my hand and we walked on, eventually reaching my chambre de bonne in the Latin Quarter.

I had only had sex with boys my age before, so this was different. He was 20 years older than me and knew not only what he wanted, as did the boys, but how to please. I was glad that I’d shaved that morning. After making passionate love, he opened the French window to smoke as I lay naked and mostly satisfied beneath the sheet. Leaning against the wrought iron railing, he blew rings out toward the zinc rooftop across the courtyard.

If you crane your neck to the right, I said, you can see the top of Sacré Coeur.

“Socray Core,” he repeated, mocking the way I pronounced it, then he stepped toward me and brushed his hand against my cheek and said that his Mona Lisa had a charming accent. He said that he would help me with my French, when it improved, but for now it was best to continue in English. He told me that since I was new in Paris it was natural to admire “Socray Core” from the window but that a real Parisian looks discreetly into the windows across the courtyard to watch people undress, and he pointed to a woman across the courtyard and one floor below who was removing her blouse.

He then told me that his wife and children were returning from vacation the following day, but he would be available on Wednesday afternoon.

“You’re married?” I ask, redundantly.

He waved away both the smoke and my question. He said that he and his wife were now old friends and stayed together only for the three children, so I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about it. I ignored my mother’s voice in my head and thought, When in Paris…

Every Wednesday afternoon at about 5 o’clock (known here as 17 hour), he came up the stairs to my 7th-floor garret bearing gifts, either a pastry to die for or chocolates from what he said was the best chocolatier in Paris or a bottle of wine that he knew all about. Occasionally he would show up late, saying that he was stuck in court, and tell me that though he’d had a long, tiring day he couldn’t let a week go by without seeing his Mona Lisa. His Dior cologne arrived even more exhausted than he did, so several weeks into our relationship I asked him to shower on arrival. He said that despite man’s intelligence and ability to build great cities such as Paris, we are animals and should not fear our natural odors. I handed him a towel and reminded him that I was not born in the same den as he. He laughed and said that he would do anything to please this pretty lady.

He taught me many things. He taught me how to wear my hair and how to tilt my beret just so. He told me which exhibitions to see and how to appreciate movies without happy endings. He always left by 7:30—I should say 19:30. He called that a “reasonable hour for a lawyer.”

We rarely went out to dinner after that first time. He said that we had all we needed right here. The pastries and chocolates weren’t good for my diet but they were great for my Instagram.

We had plans to go to Deauville one weekend while his wife and children were visiting his mother-in-law in La Baule, but he texted me to say that his daughter was sick so we would do it another weekend. When I texted back to tell him that I was already waiting for him at the Gare Saint Lazare, adding an angry emoji, he texted back a reminder that he’d told me about his family responsibilities from the day we met and that he was the one with sick child, so I shouldn’t be a selfish about it.

The following Wednesday he brought me a gift as an apology. In a box bearing the name of a fancy shop on the rue Bonaparte in the Saint Germain Quarter there was a beautiful lavender scarf with a Galeries Lafayette label. He showed me different ways of wearing it, before lightly tying my wrists together with it while we made passionate love. He continued to teach me things, such as how to read the label of a bottle of wine and where I must go one day in Provence and when cherries are in season and why the Americans did not like the General de Gaulle.

In July, he told me that his wife and daughters had gone to Bormes les Mimosas for the summer and that he wouldn’t be joining them there until the end of the month, so we would have more time together over the next few weeks. “More time” ended up being two Mondays as well as the usual Wednesday. I suggested a weekend in Deauville but he said that there were too many lawyers in Deauville in summer. Instead, he said, it would be his pleasure to take me someplace nice for dinner on Wednesday. I’d been living in Paris for nine months by then so I knew right away that the bistro he’d selected in the Latin Quarter was unexceptional; it had only a 4.3 rating on Tripadvisor. But I was intent on enjoying myself. I’d checked out the menu online and asked AI what wine would go best with foie gras and pike quenelles, which I intended to order, and with whatever offal he might, and was told Pouilly Fuissé. So I proudly suggested that as we ordered. Instead, he asked the cute and efficient waiter for a bottle of a Sancerre red, telling me that I would understand the subtleties better with time. The young waiter nodded as he said, “Oui monsieur.” It took little time to discover that the Sancerre fell flat with my order. When I asked if he wanted to split an order of profiteroles for dessert, he said that I should profit from them (that was his profiterole joke) myself while he went outside for a smoke and to call his children. In his absence I chatted with the cute, young, efficient waiter, whose chestnut brown hair that fell adorably over his espresso eyes. He complimented me on my French and agreed that Pouilly Fuissé would have been the better choice. When he delivered the profiteroles, I asked him to take my picture with them. He sensed that Bruno and I were not married. He said that a man should not leave a charming young lady like me alone at the table. I agreed, and when he efficiently asked for my Instagram, I agreed to that and asked for his as well. His name is Pascal.

Pascal tells me that he adores me, and I feel the same. We’ve been together for three months now. He’s got me listening to rock from Brittany and using French slang, like kiffe for like and ouf for great, though we mostly speak in English. I’ve got him listening to Taylor Swift and wearing deodorant. We’re looking for a two-room flat to move into together. He supports my ambition of giving pastry tours to tourists while writing a book about how a girl from Ohio became a true Parisienne, illustrated with some of my Instagram photos, which he never fails to kiffe. When I tell him my dream of opening a donut, cupcake, cruffin and cake coffee shop that I would call Morning Liza, he says that would be ouf. I haven’t told him that my father runs the largest car dealership in Ohio, nor that I’ve been seeing my old lover on Wednesdays.

But I don’t have to think about the latter anymore because I told Bruno yesterday, after we made unimaginative love and while he was smoking by the window, that I wouldn’t be able to see him anymore because I was moving in with someone.

“A boy?” he asked, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth.

“A man,” I said.

He stubbed his cigarette in the flower box. He said that this—the two of us—hadn’t been working out for a while anyway because I was too much of a child and that I shouldn’t call him anymore, and anyway, he’d met someone more beautiful and mature, a real Parisienne. He then turned to look out the window, first to the right for brief glimpse at the top of Sacré Coeur then to the windows down below. It crossed my mind that I could push him over the railing then tell the police in perfect French, using the passé composé, that he jumped out when I told him it was over. But he’s taught me so much over the past year that I’m actually grateful to him. Anyway, I’d rather have the pleasure of watching him leave my apartment angry and forlorn, the way he likes movies to end. For myself, I still prefer a happy ending.

© 2026.

Cliché, a Paris Love Story by Lainey Harper. Lainey Harper is the pen name of a writer who’s leaving the dream.

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For most of my life in France, Paris was my compass. I taught at the Nouvelle Sorbonne and Sciences Po and lived just outside the city, close enough to feel its constant pulse. I drew energy from its rhythm, its lectures and cafés, its insistence on momentum. Which is why it still surprises me that my husband Pierre and I left that all behind for a 17th-century château in the Loire Valley. In Paris, my mind was always moving ahead, cataloguing lectures, meetings, errands, and ideas I wanted to explore. Here, there was nothing pressing, nothing urgent, and that empty space made me notice how I thought. Thoughts that normally skittered past caught themselves mid-flight, lingering long enough for me to consider them: memories of my childhood in Australia, music I had been playing, questions about the life we were beginning in this new place. It was strange, unsettling, and quietly exhilarating to feel my mind slowing, stretching, and expanding in ways I hadn’t realized it could.

I became aware of the rhythm of my breathing, of the subtle warmth of the stone under my hands, of the almost imperceptible shifts in light across the château walls. I noticed the crunch of my footsteps on the gravel, the whisper of the wind through the trees. For the first time in years, I could feel the shape of my thoughts as they moved, how they curved and bent around the silence instead of rushing past it. I realized I was paying attention not just to the world outside, but to the inner world that had been quieted by the constant pace of the city.

It was in that stillness that the château first revealed itself—not just its history, its stones, or its chapel, but the way it invited observation, reflection, and imagination. Every carved cross, every moss-softened stone, every mark etched by centuries of hands waited to be noticed. And when I finally looked up from my own thoughts, the fields blurred in the sun, the air thick with the scent of dry grass, the trees alive with birdsong. The silence remained, but it was no longer empty—it was full of possibilities I hadn’t seen before.

What drew us to Détilly wasn’t grandeur but the odd, intimate details that made the place human. The medieval chapel, dedicated to Notre-Dame de la Pitié and Saint Marc, bears crosses carved by the Knights Templar, reminders that this stretch of the Vienne River was once more frontier than refuge. I don’t consider myself mystical, but stepping into that space, I felt its weight. The chapel isn’t solemn so much as steady, a sanctuary where centuries and everyday life meet.

That same sense of continuity shaped how we saw our role here. From the start, we never felt like owners. We are caretakers—of leaking roofs, moss-softened stones, and a story that began long before us. Our Irish wolfhounds seem to know this better than anyone. Ramsès roams the grounds like a watchman, while his son, Aramis Destilly, lingers by the chapel door as if tuned to something the rest of us only half-hear.

Of course, history here isn’t just romance—it’s cracked stone, doors that stick, and roofs that groan under winter rain. Preservation is rarely dramatic; it’s patience, repetition, and learning to live with the slow, uneven tempo of a place that’s seen far more seasons than we have.

At Détilly, imagination rises differently. One afternoon I sat watching light shift across the west-facing chapel door, and from that stillness a scene for a novel took shape—something I never would have found in Paris’s constant rush. Guests at our summer writers’ retreat often feel it too. One, standing beneath the old arch, said she felt “history leaning close, but kindly.” Another, after an evening in the garden, told me she had “heard my thoughts for the first time in months.” I know what they mean. The château doesn’t just provide a backdrop—it participates.

And yet, the château’s voice is just as present in the mundane. The real surprise isn’t that we moved here, but that we’ve come to love the small, daily negotiations: coaxing life from a sulky boiler, finding warmth in stone that holds the cold, and tackling repairs that never quite end. None of this was in our plan, and maybe that’s why it feels so alive. There’s something steadying in that work, a quiet satisfaction that comes from tending to the place rather than simply fixing it. It isn’t about efficiency anymore, but about learning to move in step with the château’s slower rhythm, letting its needs shape the pace of our days—and, eventually, shape us.

Living at Détilly keeps us asking: What does it mean to dwell inside history? How do you make a life in walls that have already sheltered so many others? We don’t have the answers. For now, we walk the grounds with the dogs, patch the roof when it leaks, welcome guests when the season allows, and watch evening light pour through the chapel door.

Maybe that’s enough—to live alongside the past, not only to look at it, with all its imperfections, its demands, and the quiet rewards that come when you stop trying to shape a place and let it shape you.

Château de Détilly, 18 Rue des Fromentaux, 37420 Beaumont-en-Véron, is located near where the Vienne River joins the Loire, 5 miles from Chinon.

© 2025, Grahame Elliott

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As the train set out from Paris for the 2½-hour ride to Saint Malo (from there I would take a taxi to Dinard, across the bay), I wondered what I might write about. I had been to this corner of Brittany several times already, so I couldn’t, without putting on false airs of naiveté, write about first-time discovery. As a re-visitor I would have to find another angle, something more personal and insightful than “Brittany, wow!”

I made a list in my notebook of angles to consider based on my expectations of the weekend: seaside walks in Dinard, rampart strolls in Saint Malo, oysters, granite, crepes; or something with more of a storyline: taking a break from city life, visiting friends at their vacation home, spending the weekend with a couple when single. Maybe I would find something new and unexpected while there. I gazed out the window at the passing damp spring countryside and soon dozed off, awaking only as the train, having entered Brittany, approached Rennes before turning north to the coast.

My friends are warm, generous hosts. They laid out an abundance of pre-shucked oysters for lunch. With one of the couple we visited art galleries. We examined ads in the windows of real estate agencies. The other bought pastries, which we ate at teatime while watching a nature documentary on TV during a brief bout of rain. We separated and reunited. We went to their favorite creperie for dinner. Afterward, we lounged on long, deep couches in the living room. We removed our shoes at the door and wore slippers in the immaculate house.

I took seaside walks with the two of them, and with one or the other, and alone. I shot photos and videos as future prompts or reminders for the as-yet-undefined article: a statue of Alfred Hitchcock, cliffside and clifftop houses, rock, sea and sky, and more rock, sea and sky. Once, when taking the seaside walk alone, I watched a water walker, a grey figure in a grey sea against a grey sky. Later, rounding a bend, I observed two women approaching from the opposite direction with the hand of the one holding the crux of the elbow of the other, as friends and couples did more often long ago. Suddenly, one of the gals slipped on the damp seaside walk and let out a high-pitched yelp, but she was held secure by the grip of the other. They stood locked in place and laughed as though on the edge of a precipice. As I passed by, their broad smiles invited me, as their witness, to share in the joy of their accidental choreography. I obliged. Further on, I stared into the crevice of a dark, damp inlet and imagined that a hermit lived there. On the way back, I looked up to a steep-gabled Belle Epoque villa on the cliff and envisioned the ghost of an old aristocrat standing sentinel by a parted velvet curtain. I raised a hand and waved, and was amused by the thought that if anyone was actually looking down at the walkway just then, they would be startled to think that they were the one being watched.

With one or the other of the friends, or when the three of us were together, the conversations were fluid and droll, occasionally mutually mocking, at times requiring political or cultural or gastronomic analysis. We agreed, we disagreed, we informed each other, we told stories. The tête-à-têtes were more personal and jokey with the one, more work-related with the other, equally engaging, none troubling.

I enjoyed a restful, well-fed, sea-bracing stay. There had been but one moment of tension the entire time. At the end of the meal of enhanced leftovers the second evening, and in the midst of a light and teasing exchange about housework, a brusque gesture between me and the less prim of the couple caused the helpless slip of a wine glass that I failed to save and which then crashed onto the sparkling tile floor. The resulting tension was within the couple. My comment that luckily they hadn’t brought out their best stemware for me anyway failed to resonate as humor. Instead, I was told that I was “not helping” and shooed into the living room.

As far as I could tell, and like the shards themselves, no trace of the event remained by the time we all retired to the couches to watch an episode from season three of a Netflix series that the couple had been following. I had never seen the show, so one of them launched into explanation, perhaps excessive, and stopped the episode twice within the first few minutes to provide additional details, which aggravated the other, who then went upstairs for a bath, leaving the first to decide whether to watch the episode with me now or save it for later. I might have been wrong about the shards, I thought, as the one who remained pushed play.

On Sunday afternoon, after 48 hours in Dinard, I hugged and kissed the friends good-bye—they would soon be returning to Paris—and took the small ferry across the bay to Saint Malo. With no obligations in Paris until Monday afternoon, I’d decided to stay in the area another 24 hours. I didn’t have a care in the world. Being alone on a boat at sea after a warm embrace on the quay carried with it the thrill of solitary freedom and possibility. I stood at the stern by the fluttering French flag watching Dinard fall away, then turned to Saint Malo with its central steeple poking out from the level town, then back again to see Dinard receding beyond the bay, then again to Saint Malo growing larger. I felt eager, inspired, untethered and buoyant as I turned back and forth as the ferry approached the granite expanse of the walled town. That—that feeling, that sense of possibility—that’s something I could write about, I thought. It felt like the culmination of the weekend. But I had only just arrived at Saint Malo. I picked up my bag and disembarked.

I set off from the quay for the hotel where just that morning I’d reserved a room. My memory of previous visits to Saint Malo allowed me to find the hotel with a single glance at the map.

The hallway lobby sat still and quiet, with the only light coming from a tall side window. I rang the bell on the counter. After a moment, a door marked Privé opened and a woman with a tea-towel over the shoulder of her pale housedress shuffled out to greet me. She switched on a single light overhead but the ceiling was so high that the twilight atmosphere of the lobby barely changed, though I now saw that her housedress was pale blue and the tea-towel, which she set aside, dark grey. I said Bonjour, Madame, announced my name, and said that I’d called just that morning for the reservation. She repeated my name when she found it in the reservation book, said, “One night,” and asked if I’d have breakfast in the morning. “No thank you,” I replied. She then grabbed a key attached to a red tassel from a hook on the board behind the desk and invited me to follow her. She was welcoming enough, though I thought she could be warmer, even chatty, given that no one else seemed to be around. I supposed that I’d interrupted her cleaning.

While being shown to my room, I remarked on the quiet. She said nothing in return. I inquired if I was the only client for the night, half-hoping it were the case for the eerie pleasure it would give, half-hoping it weren’t for the mystery of encountering one or two other travelers. Her abrupt response, “No, there are others,” indicated that she had been offended by the question, perhaps compounded by my unwillingness to pay for a hotel breakfast.

I was given a large room on the second floor with a high ceiling, a king-size bed, and a view over a little square. It was quite attractive for the price, greatly reduced for this off-season Sunday night. If I cared to write about the hotel—handsome, comfortable, inexpensive—I’d need to ask her to see other rooms, and I’d then feel obliged to take breakfast, none of which interested me. She handed me the key and wished me a pleasant stay.

I set down my bag, removed my shoes to lie on the bed, as though that’s what I’d come for, then immediately put them back on. I took the foldable umbrella from my backpack and went out to explore the walled town.

After a few blocks I climbed onto the ramparts just as the blue sky was being overwhelmed by billowing smoke-like clouds. Wind roughened the sea. A mist enveloped me, then a light rain fell, but it only lasted several minutes before giving way to clear sky, until the smoky and darkening clouds reappeared as if out of nowhere, renewing the cycle of mist and rain before the return of a sky so startling blue that I thought this time it was meant to last through the day.

Across the estuary I spied the seaside promenade of Dinard that I’d walked along several times over the previous two days. The moment had come, I thought, to settle on the topic for an article. I’d lost the wave of feelings and thoughts of the crossing—something about freedom and possibility. I now had nearly the same view as from the ferry, yet the rocks, the sea, the sky, appealingly forceful and unstable as they were, now seemed more inevitable than promising. I tried to think of what I found especially interesting about Dinard or now Saint Malo. Interesting—such a bland word. Looking for “interesting” suggested boredom. I lifted my phone to photograph the statues on the ramparts of the navigator-explorer Jacques Cartier and the corsair Robert Surcouf and, beyond the ramparts, the island where writer-politician François-René de Chateaubriand was buried. Maybe the life or deeds of one or two of them could form the subject of an eventual article. Yet was anyone interested in these historical figures? I wasn’t. Anyway, I didn’t care to think about researching anything. What was left of them but statues for tourists to photograph? And here I was doing just that: taking pictures and making sweeping videos, recording what I saw, without particular interest or attention.

It made me feel like a bored tourist, looking for something to be “interesting.” Was I bored, already, with Saint Malo—rather, with myself in Saint Malo? Did I need to create anything at all from the weekend beyond my immediate enjoyment and thoughts, my time with friends, my encounter with the coast? I put away my phone, telling myself that I’d rather just walk, visit and explore than think that my footsteps or my surroundings needed to be organized thematically. No one was actually waiting for an article from me about Dinard or Saint Malo, or about Brittany at all for that matter. The prospect of not writing one, however, felt now like a failing given my earlier intent. But why feel married to intentions? If the original intent no longer inspired me then… Yet I was a travel writer—was I still?—and here I was.

I am here, I thought. I took in the view of the rugged coast, the powerful seascapes, the rocky outposts, the innumerable skies. I wanted to go out on the beach and down to the water.

I descended from the ramparts and exited the city gate to walk along the beach. It was low tide; water’s edge seemed unreasonably distant. An old fortress was planted on the rocks several hundred yards from the town walls. Vaguely linking the two was a dark, craggy outcrop that became increasingly nebulous as it approached the fortress. Mostly submerged at high tide, the uneven band of rock was now exposed. It promised a sweeping view of the walled town, the fortress, the ambiguous coast to one side, and to the other the wide beach and straight extension of the town with its thalassotherapy hotel complexes.

I stepped over the lower rocks then climbed onto the outcrop for a high central point of view. No, I wasn’t bored in the least. My mind at that moment felt as bright and clear and intangible as the naked blue sky overhead as the wind tugged at my jacket. I put my cap in pocket so that it I wouldn’t fly away. Minutes later, an unsettled and unsettling grey arrived like a lid over the mist that now surrounded me, and I sensed an unsettled and unsettling change within me as well. Turning west, I faced the formidable and uncompromising sea and felt it’s reflection in my churning mood. Then turning east, I fathomed an ambition—or was it a disillusion? —as relentless and stealthy as the remote tideline imperceptibly making its way toward me.

This was what I’d been looking for. I took the phone from my pocket to shoot a video of the full panorama, and in panning the surroundings I wondered if I truly felt any of what I’d just thought. Or was the sight of the changeable skies unattached to any needs, concerns, questions or desires of my own. Had I simply been reciting to myself seaside weather clichés as I stood straddling two boulders? What did I feel in this place? The wind blew strong. I looked away from the screen while still holding up the phone to complete another circular pan of the view, and then another. In doing so, I sensed a gap between what I saw and my own intimate experience of climbing along the rocks and standing there twisting and rotating as I shot the video. I sensed a metaphor of how cliché meets reality the way the sea meets the sky, whether as a clear line along the horizon or with no discernable separation. Or was that a simile? In trying to parse the comparison I lost hold of the original thought. And at that moment, I also lost my balance and slipped. I fell directly onto my rump on one of the boulders, dropping my phone in the process.

I was unharmed, I sensed that immediately, other than possibly a bruised buttock, but I also felt shaken by the realization that I’d come dreadfully close to falling between the rough and slippery rocks and risking serious injury. My phone had landed in a shallow, sandy pool. I climbed down to retrieve it and found with relief that it, too, was unharmed. How stupid, I thought, to have climbed along the slippery rocks, in this wind, with a phone in my hand no less, at my age! I wiped off the phone, placed it in my pocket, then slowly and carefully made my way back across the wet rocks. Once past the higher portion of the outcrop, I stepped over shallow pools of water and circumvented small boulders and rocks to reach open beach.

Yet I still felt the fright of the slip, the quickened heartbeat of a lucky escape. I envisioned the injury that might have occurred—a broken leg, a head wound, a fractured wrist, not to mention a busted phone. As I walked along the beach, I found myself spinning a yarn in which a traveler slips from a boulder, breaks his leg (and his phone) in the fall, and gets his foot caught between two rocks. No one hears him cry out as night falls and the inescapable tide rises.

The smoky sky had returned and was veering to charcoal. As a beating rain then fell, I realized that I’d dropped my umbrella when slipping on the rocks. Should I go looking for it now and truly risk harming myself? No. The rain drove me off the beach and back intra muros. I began to run in the direction of the hotel but after several minutes realized that I was lost. How could I be lost in such a rectilinear town that I’d visited several times in the past? I stopped under an awning to regain my bearings. Eventually, a man with a black labrador walked by as did other people. I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there before it registered that none of the passersby was holding up an umbrella; the rain had stopped. I recognized the shop across the street and was amused to realize that my hotel was just around the corner.

Rather than return to my room, however, I would find a place for dinner. I peered into restaurant windows for a seat and an atmosphere that would suit me, and eventually entered a pub. Strangely, while waiting for my order, I again felt the fright of the fall, as though stuck in that instant of losing control on the rocks, before I had landed unharmed. I remembered the women who’d laughed on the seaside walk when one had slipped, and how they’d invited me to share in their survivor’s joy and how I had. But now, once again, I found myself thinking of the harrowing tale of the man with the broken leg whose foot was stuck between rocks, out of view, in a dip in the outcrop, while the tide inexorably rose. I looked around the room for the type of character who might save me in that story. But why did I keep seeing myself as the protagonist in a panic before the rising tide when here I was, eating fish and chips, finishing a beer, ready to return to a pleasant hotel? Why couldn’t I let go of the tremor of near escape that I felt in my heart?

It stayed with me on the short walk back to the hotel, and into the dimly lit hallway lobby, and up the steep stairwell to my room. Looking at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, I was unable to shake the shiver of what might have happened. And once in the large bed, turned on my side with one arm wrapped around a long, firm pillow, I listened to my heartbeat repeating what-if-what-if-what-if-what-if as the tide rose. I must have fallen asleep before the water reached me.

The following morning, as the train left the station, I took out my notebook and pen. I read the list that I’d written at the start of the weekend: seaside walks in Dinard, rampart strolls in Saint Malo, oysters, granite, crepes; taking a break from city life, visiting friends at their vacation home, spending the weekend with a couple when single. I began to add to the list, starting with “the sensation of solitary freedom and possibility when crossing the bay,” but no sooner did I finish the line than I felt in my heartbeat the cry of the injured man faced with the rising tide: what-if-what-if-what-if-what-if. The train rolled south to Rennes. I gazed out the window at the fleeting tangle of trees. From Rennes the train turned east toward Paris, and somewhere, I wondered where exactly, the train left Brittany. It was in that somewhere that I decided I would have to save myself.

© 2024, Gary Lee Kraut

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… you’ve looked in many stores for a new armchair and finally select one from BHV Marais, the department store located across the street from City Hall. You choose the fabric and the color. It’s Oct 22. Delivery is promised in handwriting by the mannerly floor section manager: Délai : +/- 19 Janvier 2024 ou AVANT ! LE PLUS TOT POSSIBLE !! – [Delivery] Date: +/- 19 January 2024 or BEFORE! AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!)–capitals and exclamation points in the original. You have the choice between pick-up at the store or, for 115€, delivery chez vous. The delivery fee seems exorbitant. You’d rather ask a friend with a car to help then take him to dinner. You pay for the chair in full (717€), without delivery, and go about your Parisian life.

Six weeks later, you receive a text message from BHV announcing a delivery delay. The new date is 31 January. You respond that the delay is inacceptable. Your message is ignored. Mid-February, you receive a message announcing that the armchair will be available as of 28 February. This time the message promises, as compensation (dédommagement) free delivery/assembly (livraison/montage), “[normally] billed at 139€.”

A week later, you’ve received no further news of the actual delivery date. It’s now February 21, four months since you paid for the armchair. You’re in the area of BHV so you enter the department store to find someone to speak with. You’re pleased to come upon the same floor section manager who sold you the promise of an armchair. She’s chatting with a colleague.

You greet them kindly: Bonjour. They turn to you with wary expectation. Looking only at the floor section manager, you calmly explain that you’ve received several (plusieurs) delay notices for an armchair that you purchased from BHV Marais four months ago and counting, and still no armchair. She leads you over to her desk and looks up the purchase order, the one with the buoyant and promising capitals and exclamation points, in her own hand: Délai : +/- 19 Janvier 2024 ou AVANT ! LE PLUS TOT POSSIBLE !!

She immediately blames the delay on the supplier, with whom “we always have problems.” Annoyed by the immediate deflection of responsibility, you ask why she kept that detail from you when you purchased the armchair. She says that she didn’t know at the time. You tell her that you have no direct relationship with the supplier, only BHV, so that for you BHV is responsible. “It should arrive next week, monsieur,” she says. “C’est comme ça”—That’s the way it is.

There’s no greater sign of your acculturation in Paris than feeling properly self-righteous and seizing the proper moment to râler (grouse, gripe, grumble). This is it. The battlelines are drawn with a c’est comme ça. Her why-are-you-still-here expression tells you that she thinks that should be enough.

You hadn’t actually intended to râler, you’re not a râleur (grumbler) by nature but by cultural adoption. The floor section manager’s rigid refusal to acknowledge the store’s responsibility is a sign that the moment has come. If you don’t start now, you’ll find yourself wondering while in the metro or in bed or trying to work what you would say or write to best express your frustration with BHV. So you begin with the word that signals to all within hearing distance—the floor section manager and her colleague who is standing nearby. You look the floor section manager in the eye and tell her that the situation is inacceptable. If you’d known it would take so long for the armchair to arrive, you say, you wouldn’t have purchased it.

She returns your square look in the eye as her colleague moves a step closer. She looks to him, he looks to her, they both look to you.

“Un instant,” she says, a sign that she will look on her terminal for proof that the situation is more than acceptable because it is what it is. Indeed, she points at a spreadsheet on her screen and says, “They say it will arrive in one week.” She repeats the offer for free delivery or, she now adds, an 89€ refund. Her tone in presenting the choice is like that of a bored waiter proposing pommes frites or haricots verts. It also bothers you that she’s offering 89€ when the last message spoke of a 139€ delivery value and four months ago she’d offered delivery at 115€. You call her on it. She has an immediate answer: 115€ was an old price. It’s now 89€ for delivery and 139€ if the deliverymen mount the piece of furniture and dispose of the packaging. You tell her that the only mounting required is screwing on the legs.

You’re not sure what to say next and you don’t want to repeat inacceptable so you chose another missile of a word from the râleur’s handbook—you tell her that this is inadmissible.

“I explained the situation,” she says. “Do you understand?”—Vous comprenez? She may or may not be making reference to your accent, but leaving it at that she remains within the rules of engagement. Her colleague inches closer. He can’t seem to focus on his own job until the situation is resolved. You can tell he’s dying to get involved, and he does as he, too, says, “Do you understand?”

What you understand is that you are now culturally obliged to râler further.  You say, “I understand that delivery of my armchair is so long overdue that I’d like to a refund.”

“I’ve given you a choice, Monsieur,” she says. “Delivery at home or an 89€ refund and you pick up the merchandise.”

Yes, you know that you’ll presumably soon have your armchair, whether picked up with your friend’s help or delivered with the legs screwed on and the box removed, and that you can then decide for yourself if you ever want to shop at BHV again. So even though you’re unlikely to make any headway against a business as detached, in your experience, as BHV Marais, and a salesperson as doctrinaire as this, with a workplace rubbernecker by her side, you proceed to tell her (you don’t acknowledge him) that she’s presented you with a false choice (un faux choix), one that is intellectually dishonest (intellectuellement malhonnête; it’s an expression that would get you laughed out of Walmart, but here the number of syllables alone signals that you’re a worthy Parisian adversary) since any reasonable choice would involve a full refund (remboursement total).

As her colleague watches, ready to leap to her defense, she tries to goad you into insulting her personally by asking if you thought she “lied” (menti) when she gave you the original delivery deadline (délai de livraison). You know how this works: Calling her a liar (une menteuse) would label you an aggressor and allow her to call victory and store security. The rules of an in-store râlerie require steadfast concrete reasoning. You won’t fall into her emotional trap. So you tell her that you aren’t here to discuss her feelings. You tell her that you were “duped” (dupé) into buying the armchair, with her own handwriting as proof (la preuve). Four months after the original order, you tell her, the honest choice is between a total refund and, you now add, appropriate compensation.

She says, “Do you want to give me a delivery address or not?”

You’ve had your say and there’s nothing more to do here. Despite your elevated heartrate, you coolly give her your address for delivery, should you decide to accept it. Her colleague walks away. Obtaining an 89€ refund sounds too complicated and isn’t an acceptable number anyway. That thought leads you to declare one more time that the situation is inacceptable and to ask now for the contact information for the complaint department.

She writes down the customer service email address.

One might think that any store salesperson properly trained in customer service would know that few clients would bother making a complaint at that point—after all, the chair is due to be delivered in one week and you’ve apparently accepted free delivery—and so would revert to the customary etiquette of farewell, perhaps with a kind assurance that you’ll be happy with your beautiful armchair. If so, one hasn’t shopped in Paris. As she hands you the slip of paper with the email address, and apparently feeling the need for a final power play, the BHV floor section manager says, “Whatever you send will be forwarded to me and you already have my answer.” You now have no choice but to formalize your grievance (réclamation).

At home, you write to BHV Marais customer service. You keep your message short and direct, just the facts of the delay and the unacceptability and inadmissibility of the offer of simply free delivery. You include a scanned copy of the invoice with its capital letters and exclamation points. You make no personal comments about the floor section manager other than to note your incrédulité regarding her parting shot about this réclamation being dead in the water (lettre morte). You conclude by requesting a full refund for the as yet undelivered armchair.

You’ve done your Parisian best. You’ve presented logic, you didn’t once lose your temper, and you’ve made proper use of two of the three most important words in any proper râlerie: inacceptable and inadmissible, using them sparingly, while throwing in an incrédule and an intellectuellement malhônete to let customer service know that you’re no stranger to complaint departments in France. For the time being you’ve refrained from using the third important word, scandaleux, so as to deploy it at the appropriate time with the appropriate interlocuteur.

Two days later you receive a message signed with a guy’s first name inviting you to please be assured that your request is being treated by the head of the concerned department so as to provide you with a response, and thanking you for your understanding. Business-speak for good luck (bonne chance). Since you’re also invited to rate and comment on his response, you give it a 1 of 5 and comment that the client is only reassured when a matter has been fully resolved, and you thank him in return for his understanding.

Several days later, on a Sunday afternoon, you get a phone call from BHV customer service. The female voice is young and sweet and her words are spoken with a smile. You’re offered free delivery (with the legs screwed on and the box disposed of) plus a 60-euro refund. You comment on the strangeness of that number, 60, remarking that it seems to be resting on its way somewhere. She explains that that’s the amount the manufacturer is willing to reimburse and they won’t give more. Since the number is clearly n’importe quoi (rubbish), you tell her that it is inacceptable for BHV to deflect responsibility in this manner. You further tell her that the so-called free delivery isn’t truly a gift because you had planned on picking the armchair up yourself at the store in January. She responds that delivery nevertheless costs BHV and that you could be reimbursed 89€ if you still wanted to pick up the merchandise. Actually, you would like it delivered but are still annoyed that she’s using 89€ as the figure for dédommagement. You tell her that 89€ is n’importe quoi given that BHV’s text mentioned a delivery value of 139€. She says she doesn’t understand. She says this with such innocent-sounding sincerity that you’re about to lose your own thread of logic, when suddenly you remember that you’re the wronged party and have yet to deploy the most important term of any self-righteous râleur. You use it now.

C’est scandaleux, you say.

You take a deep breath then launch into a mild rant about being dupé by BHV from the start and the floor manager’s faux choix, which was intellectuellement malhonnête, and how your many followers, as they say in French, will soon know that this is inacceptable, inadmissible and scandaleux, until finally she interrupts.

Monsieur, she says, you didn’t let me finish my proposition. You’ll get free delivery and assembly of the armchair, 60€ refunded through your credit card, and a 50€ voucher for in-house purchase.

Whether or not the extra 50€ came from your excellent and emphatic use of inacceptable, inadmissible and scandaleux, you can’t tell. But you know that this is clearly the moment for you to stop de râler and to accept that the négociation has come to an end.

So, with the proper air of resignation, you accept her proposition. And like that, the unacceptability and the scandalousness of the situation disappear like vampires at sunrise.

Once you’ve accepted the offer, you and the customer service rep discuss how and when all this will occur. Her voice is even more soothing and reassuring than before as she explains the timing: the armchair delivered next week, the voucher from BHV within 24 hours, the refund from the manufacturer in 2-4 weeks*. You can nearly smell the floral scent of her perfume. Your own tone is melodious, with a hint of sandalwood, as you provide her with your email address and mailing address. When she says that she knows where that is, you tell her to stop by sometime to see your armchair. The banter is so light and cheery that you nearly forget that you’ll both be glad when the conversation is over. But the time has come for her to ask if there’s anything else she can do for you today, for you to say, “No, that’s all,” and to wish each other un bon dimanche, a good Sunday. She will then return to other dissatisfied clients and you can now decide how strongly you want to advise against ordering anything from BHV Marais.

Very strongly indeed.

© 2024, Gary Lee Kraut

*Six weeks later, when the 60€ has failed to arrive, you wonder if BHV has pocketed the refund from the manufacturer.

The post You know you live in Paris when… BHV Marais and the vocabulary of complaint appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

… there’s a public transportation strike going on and your good friend Achmed is staying with you for several days because he can’t get to work from his home in the suburbs. From Monday through Thursday you have dinner together. He then goes to sleep by 9:30 since he needs to get up by 5 to make his way to work. An easy houseguest. You both figure he’ll be with you for just those few days, but the strike continues. He goes home for the weekend then returns Monday evening for a second week.

This time he arrives bearing gifts. There’s a box of camembert, since he knows that you like cheese, and a Tupperware of cornes de gazelle, gazelle horns. He knows that you like them, too.

After dinner, while Achmed enjoys his customary yogurt (“No,” he said when you offered to buy some, “I’ll bring my own, I know what I like”), you serve yourself one of the gazelle horns. It has almond chips on the outside and a sweet almond-orange-blossom filling. Delicious. It’s the best gazelle horn that you’ve ever had and you tell him so. “Normal,” he says, “c’est de chez moi.” His sister in Algiers made them. They were delivered over the weekend by a visiting cousin. They’re all for you, he says; he has another dozen at home. Just save him the Tupperware.

Achmed knows that you like gazelle horns because last week when you went together to an Algerian restaurant for take-out portions of a stew called chorba you bought a powdered-sugar-coated gazelle horn for dessert even though he told you not to. You’d thought that he was saying that because he believes you eat too many sweets, but he was actually trying to warning you off without saying so in front of the owner. It turned out to be hard, stale and too sugary. “I told you,” he said. “I knew they were industrial, not homemade, and could have been sitting there for weeks.”

He then tells you the following story: Many years ago, soon after he arrived in France, he bought a gazelle horn at a Tunisian bakery. The owner had told him that it was freshly made. Achmed took it home to have after dinner. When he tried to break it in half he couldn’t. He took a knife to it and even then had to insist until it finally splintered apart. And it tasted like plaster. The following day he returned the shards to the bakery and told the Tunisian owner that his so-called fresh gazelle horn was stale. The guy offered to exchange it for a new one. Achmed said, “If you can easily cut into one of those on your shelf, I’ll buy them all.” The guy picked one up and tried to break it in two but it was hard as rock. He asked if Achmed wanted a refund. Achmed said, “No, but I’m never coming back to your bakery. My name isn’t Jean-Paul or Pierre-Jacques. Maybe they’ll keep coming back for more, but not me. I’m from Algiers. You can’t get away with that with someone from Algeria.”

You ask how he knew that the chorba we’d had last week was homemade. “Because I’ve seen the kitchen, I’ve spoken with the chef, and I’ve also seen the truck that delivers the pastries.”

You allow yourself then to broach the subject of the camembert. “Excuse me for mentioning this,” you say, “but the camembert you brought—and I thank you for it—won’t be good for the same reason: it’s hard, pasteurized and industrial. It’s camembert in name only. I don’t mean to offend you, I just want to let you know that if you’re going to buy a camembert it should be Camembert de Normandie, made from raw milk.”

“I’m not offended,” says Achmed. “I just didn’t think you were so French.”

© 2019, 2021, Gary Lee Kraut

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Not to be outdone by the Christo-wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, Bernard Arnault, chairman of Dior and LVMH, has had a monumental building on the Champs-Elysées wrapped following “Christian Dior’s original drawings of 1955 that were recently discovered in the Dior archives,” according to the Dior company’s press release. The release emphasizes that no public funds were used to wrap the building and that Dior will recoup the expense by selling products presented on the somewhat recyclable wrap. Nevertheless, public security forces were called in to control crowds dressed in the “new look” who attended the inauguration of the Dior wrap.

Only those showing a Louis Vuitton bag or the credit card receipt for an equivalently priced bag were admitted inside. Scanners denied entrance to numerous holders of knock-off bags. (Authentic LV bags were available at a stand specially installed next door for foreign visitors.)  Several anti-baggers demanding a free memorabilia Dior swatch were arrested.

In inaugurating the Dior wrap, Mayor (and presidential candidate) Anne Hidago said, “Arnault overwhelms us, prods us, makes us talk, so whatever he wants to do is fine by my administration.” She would neither confirm nor deny that François Pinault, another French billionaire, has recently applied for permission to wrap a building on Boulevard Haussmann. But she did say: “My friend François Pinault just finished unwrapping the Bourse de Commerce gift that Parisians bought for him for 86 million euros, so that will likely keep him happy until Christmas.”

Meanwhile, at the top of the Champs-Elysées, the Christo-wrapped Arc de Triomphe continues to dazzle.

© 2021, Gary Lee Kraut

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… her streets were cold and gray. It was March 1952. My husband had been recalled for the Korean War and sent to France as part of a bomber wing Eisenhower promised NATO in the early days of the Cold War.

Twenty-four years old at the time, married almost a year, I arrived in the city of my dreams ready to be seduced by her warmth and historic charm. Expecting beauty and light in a city with echoes of Victor Hugo, Degas and Maurice Chevalier, we got somber darkness and bone chilling weather. We drove through grim streets, rundown houses on either side, to our hotel, a turn-of-the-century hostelry with a shabby lobby and a cage elevator. My husband had selected the one-star Napoleon Bonaparte, partly for its price, 3500 francs (about $10) for a double room, and partly for its view. The 1952 Michelin indicated that it overlooked the Arc de Triomphe. Obviously, M. Michelin had made his notes on a clear day. On this day, fog and drizzle prevented us from seeing more than an outline of that venerable monument or anything else. Looking out the hotel window, my only thought was: what was all the fuss about? I had traveled thousands of miles on the North Atlantic in February, retching all the way, to celebrate our first anniversary in this renowned citadel of love. For this? In 1952, my feminism had yet fully to emerge. Tired and disappointed, I had only one recourse. I burst into tears.

Luckily, my husband, who was also let down at his first view of Paris, had been trained for bravery in World War II. In his if-we-have-to-be-in-Paris-for-our-first-anniversary-let’s-make-the-best-of-it voice, he said, ”Let’s go out to dinner.”

We did, and even before we had our first sip of French champagne and realized it wasn’t imported, the joy of being together, wherever, prevailed. In the remaining three or four days of that first stay, although the dreary weather didn’t lift, our spirits did, and despite the gloom we started to feel some of the magnetism Ernest Hemingway or Gertrude Stein must have felt.

Notwithstanding the gloomy weather, it was heartbreakingly apparent France had still not gotten her act together. In 1952, six and a half years after the end of World War II, the grime of war coated even the most beautiful buildings, causing them to appear proud but worn. The Louvre, Notre Dame and Sacré Coeur were like elderly actors who hadn’t worked for a long time. The Champs-Elysées was only beginning to wake up with a few fashionable shops occupying some of the large storefronts that had been shuttered for many years during and after the war.

Even if I had not been wearing a bright yellow topcoat (from my trousseaux) when all the Parisian women were still in black, we would have been very conspicuous driving our 1950 Pontiac. Few Frenchmen had cars at the time, and we had ours only because the Air Force, which wouldn’t pay my way over to join my husband, was willing to pay his car’s way over. So much for family values in 1952.

Because there were so few automobiles in Paris and so little traffic, diagonal parking was allowed on the sidewalks along the Champs. Wherever we parked, we would come out to find our car surrounded with curious onlookers. The French were fascinated with American cars. People would touch the doors, the hood or the windows as if to share ownership for a moment. These observers who had no idea how our car had gotten there must have seen us as a rich American couple. Little did they know that the car was owned mostly by the bank, and the exchange rate was so advantageous that a Second Lieutenant’s salary allowed us to, if not quite live it up, indulge in a few more ooh-la-lahs than we might have at the same time in the U.S..

We could afford to eat in restaurants then we could only dream of today: Lapérouse, La Tour D’Argent, Lasserre. We could walk right into any museum or the Eiffel Tower, no waiting. We bought fine leather gloves for $5 a pair and with the purchase got a handful of samples of the leading French perfumes: Chanel #5, Arpège, Shalimar.

On that first visit, VE Day was still a living memory, and we were the symbols of liberation. We were treated with respect and admiration; the general thinking of the day seemed to be: if we were American, we had to be good. Not too hard to take for a young soldier and his bride. Rain and all, Paris had begun to claim our hearts.

The next time I saw Paris was in May of that same year. We drove up from Bordeaux, where my husband was stationed, with a windshield that had been shattered by May Day demonstrators. The Communists were expressing their opposition to the American military presence in France. Spare parts for our car were only available in Paris. Tough assignment. We had to go back.

The sun shone for the four or five days we were there. The trees were in leaf, the flowers were in bloom, the Boulevards looked Grand: the buildings that had appeared grim and sad only two months before, although no cleaner, now seemed resplendent with their softly rounded corners, balconies and mansard roofs. Lovers walked along the Seine, kissing in public. We held hands. Book stalls dotted the quays, and the Bateau Mouche had begun regular trips back and forth on the river. We were smitten. We hated to leave.

Once my husband had been transferred to Laon and we lived in nearby Soissons, 62 miles northeast of Paris, we were only an hour by train or car to the capital. Weekends, we would pack a bag, toss it in the car, and drive into “town.” Since our living costs in the small hotel where we were staying in Soissons equaled my husband’s salary (married couples without children were not given living quarters by the Air Force, just an allowance for housing) we depended on the small commission checks forwarded by my husband’s previous employer, and the favorable rate of exchange, to finance our weekend excursions. Mindful of our limited resources, we would find a small hotel, nothing as grand as the Napoleon Bonaparte, ask to see a room, check it out for fleas by shaking the curtains and bedspread, and if it proved to be insect free, check in. From here we would get dressed in our stateside finery and go out on the town to the Follies Bergère, the Lido or a small club with walls draped in dark red velvet where Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow, sang in her sad waifish voice. Very often we would end up at Les Halles for onion soup at two o’clock in the morning before returning to our creepy but flea-less room.

By the time we were shipped back to the States, or rather my husband and his car were—I went on my own—Paris had become a part of us. Never mind the tourists who had come before. Forget those who would come after us. It was our town; our love.

The last time I saw Paris, her streets were cold and gray. It was April 2001. My husband and I had celebrated our fiftieth anniversary in March and decided to go back to the scene of our first anniversary. Remembering the weather on our first trip, we decided to wait until April. But the day we arrived was misty and overcast, and that was the best day of the week. On the drive in from De Gaulle Airport, we saw industrial plants, hotels, ordinary buildings. Except for the signs in French, we could have been entering any American city, until, all at once, in the distance the Eiffel Tower came into view, and then the street names became familiar: We were crossing the Rue St. Honoré, the Rue de Rivoli. We were at the Place de la Concorde, and suddenly we were driving over the Seine to the Left Bank. Our taxi driver took us to the Boulevard St. Germain where he turned onto a narrow street, Rue de Jacob. This is where our small Hôtel des Marronniers stood. This time I didn’t cry, but a few tears did gather as we entered the lobby and the tiny garden restaurant beyond. Because we were not alone. Having an early breakfast was our whole family: our two daughters and their husbands, and their children, our grandchildren. They had come to help us celebrate our fiftieth anniversary.

It rained off and on all week, even sleeted one day. The temperature hovered at 50; the lines were blocks long at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Eiffel Tower. Our umbrellas dripped as we entered the Café de Flore for an aperitif. The view from the top of Notre Dame was mostly of other tourists. The banks of the Seine were flooded because of the “unusual” rain. It didn’t matter. We were here surrounded by our family. Paris never looked lovelier.

© 2021, Lyla Blake Ward, for first publication on France Revisited, francerevisited.com.

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“It’s your prostate,” she says.

You tell her that you resent her recognition that you have un prostate.

“Une prostate,” she corrects. “Your prostate is feminine.”

It’s moments like this when you’re forced to confront the fact that your French will always play second fiddle to your English. You generally don’t mind being corrected for an erroneous conjugation of tenses, other than perhaps a slight embarrassment at the thought that you should have known better. But mistaking the gender of a noun as personal as your prostate is more than linguistic, it touches on your very sense of self. It reminds you of your tenuous grasp on the nature of things. Of course, reproductive anatomy wasn’t on your vocabulary lists in French class in high school, and you managed to live in France for this long without questioning the gender of your prostate. But that’s no consolation for now being informed, however matter-of-factly and by a close friend, that of late you’ve been awakened in the middle of the night by a feminine prostate.

Still, honesty from an old friend is to be accepted with grace. And more comes when, upon your return to the seat, she tells you about her uterus.

She’d been sent for an MRI, she explains, and has just gotten the results. “The doctor says that there’s nothing to worry about, just a few harmless polyps that no one will notice. What’s more disconcerting is that my husband and I aren’t having sex anymore. Not disconcerting for me, but for him, meaning for us, therefore for me, because now we have to talk whenever there’s a problem, but he’s never been good at that, which wasn’t a problem before because we would have sex instead, but now what do we do?, we sulk and imagine we don’t love each other anymore.”

Just then, thankfully, the lights of the theater start to dim and her monologue fizzles out. As the curtain rises you lean over and congratulate her on having une uterus saine (a healthy uterus).

“Un uterus sain,” she corrects, for it turns out that not only is your prostate feminine but her uterus is masculine—and not just hers but all uteri!

The play is a comédie de boulevard, meaning that it’s full of conventional sexism, mistaken identities and witty word play. Aside from some contemporary twists and political commentary, it follows the genre well as the husband, his young would-be mistress, the wife, her young lover the plumber, and several minor characters enter and exit in insatiable, farce-inducing desire and quid pro quo. Though predictable, it’s quite funny and well acted. However, while watching the circus of desire you find yourself stuck with the triply disturbing thought that your testosterone level been decreasing, that your old friend now shares stories about grandchildren and polyps instead of lovers and parties, and that your prostate as it exists in your adopted country is feminine. Admittedly, your testosterone level peaked at 20, your friend adores her grandchildren, and you’ve always lived with une prostate, but being faced with all three at once is disheartening.

You have trouble concentrating on the play, though not much concentration is required as the husband hides his mistress beneath the bed while the wife’s lover hides behind the curtain.

It’s one of those precious, ornate late-19th-century theaters whose red velour seating was installed when the average Parisian man was 5’6”. There’s basically only one way to sit in such a theater: with straight back, knees clamped together and forearms fighting for armrest dominance with the neighbor. Between the confining position and your new understanding of la prostate, you felt a certain pressure down below. While on stage the husband opens the curtain to reveal a shirtless handyman who now tries to explain that his shirt got wet from plumbing work, you need to pee again.

It isn’t urgent; it isn’t even truly a need; it can wait until intermission, but you’ll be thinking about it until then. You sneak a look at your phone to see what time it is. Well, sneak is the intent, but checking the time on your phone lights up the entire row. The actors on stage might well notice the light coming from your lap. The woman sitting to the opposite side of you from your friend certainly does. “Tsk,” she pronounces with a distinctly Parisian accent. This is soon followed by the sound of the vibration of your friend’s phone in her pocket as it presses against the armrest. She can’t resist having a look at the message that it signals, further lighting up the row and eliciting from the neighbor on her other side a Parisian “pff.”

As the curtain falls for intermission, your friend turns to you. “It’s a message from my husband,” she says, with the same eye-roll as the wife on stage.

“What does he want?”

“Reassurance.”

“Well, go reassure him,” I say. “I’ll take a little walk.”

“OK,” she says. “I’ll do what I have to do. You do what you have to do.”

And so, like the aging good friends that we are, we do, before the curtain goes up for more plumbing jokes.

© 2020, Gary Lee Kraut

The post You know you live in Paris when… you have une prostate appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

You now live at the center of a nameless territory with a radius of one kilometer, legally circumscribed by coronavirus confinement. If you were to give that territory a name, it would be your own, as noted on the form that the roaming border police may ask you to produce to explain your reason for not staying at home.

You might call where you live a neighborhood. But neighborhood implies that others share a similar sense of its borders. Under the circumstances, that would apply only those who live at your address, i.e. in your building, with the same legal radius of movement, along with the man who sleeps beneath the awning of the shuttered restaurant downstairs, were he to note that as his address, which he wouldn’t. Or, if neighborhood this is, then it’s a quiet neighborhood with lots of joggers, lots of pigeons, a few ducks, and a fine selection of bread, cheese, produce and meat products.

You might call where you live a community. But a community would have a common characteristic or shared interest that would differentiate yours from other communities. Or, if community this is, then what it shares is relative financial security and a belief that some other community will service its shops, remove its garbage and feed its homeless. It would be a community whose members acknowledge each other’s presence just two minutes per day, when applauding medical workers from their windows and balconies, before closing their curtains.

You might call where you live a village. But a village would have a place of worship, a square, a municipal building or a commercial street at its center, and boulevards, parks, mansions or monuments at its borders, and perhaps a canal or river as its edge. Or, if village this is, then it’s one with no history to celebrate, no idiot or sage, and if someone were to ask where you live in this village you would answer, as the other villagers do, that you live in the center.

You might call where you live a bubble. But a bubble sounds light, hollow, unhinged and unstable. Or, if bubble this is, then it’s one created by the second best forms of social distancing: seeking out useful information minimally, heeding current events frugally, and sucking on social media sparingly. And it would be like a bubble in a glass of champagne, one of more than a million, in a glass served in an international toast to good health.

If you still lived in Paris, you would say that you live in a time zone designated as GMT+2. But where you now live you’ve little use for a numerical notion of time. The baker does, the cheesemonger does, the pharmacist does, the stock broker does. But you now live on your own meridian, neither plus nor minus, with little reason to check the hour.

Where you now live, time is divided into two parts that ease one into the other: one part under a lighter sky, the other part under a darker sky. You’re equally at home in both the shifting brightness of the one and in the calming constancy of the other. You have no need to interpret them as the God of the Bible did when he “called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’” You don’t need a name for them any more than you need to call what you set out to do “project,” what you accomplish “productive,” what you exchange “conversation,” and what you now give to the man beneath the awning “charity.”

You don’t need a clock to know that it’s 8PM because that’s when the applause, that you may or may not take part in, starts. You don’t need a clock when, at sundown, a police car making drive-by rounds slows at the end of the street and a policeman inside draws down a window and tells the men who gather to drink wine and tall beers at the corner to break up the party and go home. Like teenagers, the gathering men complain a bit, but as the tone of the order rises they do as they’re told.

When you do check the digits of time, it’s to note them on your signed declaration indicating the who, why and when of an excursion into your namesake territory. An annoying reminder of constraint, yes. But, while you’ve been asked to produce your form under the lighter sky, you’ve never been stopped under the darker. As you put on your jacket and shoes for the latter, the outing feels venturesome, nearly clandestine. Then, once on well-lit streets, you feel curious and free. Here and there you pass a man with his dog, a jogger, a still or sleeping figure beneath a bus shelter, or a wanderer whom you recognize as neither friend nor foe but simply another.

You’re free of Paris, that place where you no longer live. Yet you’ll hear and read some people claiming that they still do. Grandstanding, they are, as they make declarations about “Paris” and “Parisians,” as if they’d been tasked with translating the philosophical or psychological or emotional state of the inhabitants of a zone designated on a map as Paris.

They will say that Paris is dormant or veiled or abandoned to nature. But Paris isn’t sleeping; Paris isn’t hidden; Paris isn’t empty. Paris does not exist. The birds you hear don’t live in Paris, they just live, with fewer other sounds to interrupt their questions. One grandstander wrote that the quiet of the monument-dotted Paris where he claims to live is reminiscent of the German Occupation. He must have been reminiscing about the life of a collaborationist, because for most others Paris also ceased to exist during the Occupation.

You wonder how journalists even manage to find Parisians to observe or interview because there are none where you now live. Parisians dress more fashionably than the people you see. Parisians smoke more and they jog less than these people who pant by you in stern prayer of good health. Parisians stand talking to each other in the middle of the sidewalk without moving until you ask them, not like these people who make room for you to pass. Parisians cut in line, unlike these people queuing a meter apart. Parisians take turns going outside with their children, not in couples like the people you see. Parisians enjoy going out after dark—they don’t turn off the lights at nightfall. Parisians flirt, Parisians are snobs, Parisians ride scooters into their 50s. These can’t be Parisians. How could they be when they don’t live in Paris any more than you do?—though many may wish they did.

Do you?

Well, you have many fond memories of Paris. Paris has taught you much: about language, culture, cuisine, wine, history, Catholics, Algerians, Muslims, Sephardim, atheists, intellectuals, Revolution, art, pigeons, cats, politics, friendship, sex, taxes, health care, love, age, death, and certainly more. You remember the way you moved from her periphery to her core.

But you no longer need Paris to reap the intellectual riches that you’ve sown, nor to enjoy the relationships that you’ve developed. You’re nearly relieved to no longer live there. What could be more satisfying than to live in this–your—place and time? What could be more fulfilling than being where you are, both connected and individual, collective and unique, part of a vast historical-cultural-eco-bio-system and alone with these thoughts?

Sometimes you miss Paris, though not for long—because this place where you now live is so true to who you are and you are so central to its life that if anything is now missing it would be something much larger or more intimate than Paris. And knowing that, you resolve to not return to Paris when quarantine ends, but to stay right where you are, centered.

Text and photos © 2020, Gary Lee Kraut

Gary Lee Kraut, editor of France Revisited, leads the Paris Vignettes Writing Workshop, an international workshop that meets weekly via Zoom. Workshop participants work on short texts, both fiction and nonfiction, not necessarily about Paris. Texts may be part of a longer work (memoir, short story, personal essay, novel). Current participants join from France, the United States, Canada, England and Israel. For details, contact Gary directly at gary [at] francerevisited.com .

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