* * *

I was headed to meet my friend L. at the Shangri-La, a high-luxury hotel that had recently opened in Paris. I had an appointment to interview the head bartender and a reservation at one of the hotel’s restaurants L. is my favorite research partner. She loves being treated like a princess, and like a princess she’s quick to point out flaw and enchantment.

When all goes well I’m on time. When all goes well for L. she’s 10 minutes late. So even though I was going to arrive at the Shangri-La Hotel a bit past our planned 8:15 p.m. rendez-vous, I had a small window of lateness when I left my apartment across the city at 7:45.

Before I’d gone a hundred yards I found a wallet on the cobblestones along the canal.

I picked it up. I looked around to see if anyone noticed. There were people outside a bar across the street but no one seemed to be paying attention.

Various studies, not highly scientific, have been performed in which wallets containing some money and contact information and photographs were intentionally strewn through a city or in a public space such as a bus station in order to find out how many wallets will be turned in or returned to the owner and with what contents.

I don’t recall the conclusion of those studies, but I didn’t like the thought of being watched for someone’s experiment as I tried to decide what to do with the wallet.

It was a thin brown leather wallet. There wasn’t much inside: a few plastic and paper cards, several receipts, 50€.

I looked at the receipts. The first was from La Madonnina, an Italian pasta restaurant on rue Marie et Louise, one street over. The receipt was dated the previous day shortly after 9 o’clock, 21:01:17 to be exact. The man, I assumed he was a man because he’d dined alone, had eaten a burrata con pomodorini, a glass of wine and a paccheri con pomorini for a total of 23.50€. My friend Henri once got sick after eating a pasta with seafood dish at La Madonnina—it was a silly thing to order in such a restaurant in the first place—but I’ve had several palatable pasta dishes there.

I thought of taking the wallet to the restaurant. But what would they do with it? That’s what they would likely say to me.

A second receipt in the wallet had today’s date and the time 19:32:34, so about 15 minutes ago. It came from the McDonald’s a few hundred yards from where I stood. The man had apparently dropped his wallet coming from McDonald’s and walking north along the canal, perhaps with a bag containing 1 Mx ch. Mythic Bac, 1 Nugget 6 and 1 frite Maxi Best of, as indicated on the receipt, totaling 11€35.

I looked around for someone eating from a McDonald’s bag on the edge of the canal. No one fit that description. Perhaps he had lost the wallet while eating fries out of the  bag as he walked north along the canal.

The man was Italian. Not that Italians alone in Paris necessarily eat pasta one evening then McDonald’s the next, though I suppose many do, but because there were two credit cards from Italian banks and a business card from a government ministry, all in the name of Italians. I say Italians, plural, because the credit cards had two different names on them, though one of the plastic cards and the business card had the same name, so I figured that to be his real name. On a dog-eared piece of paper bearing the name of one of the banks, the one with his “real” name, there was a message that I figured, without knowing Italian, to mean that in case this was found a certain phone number in Italy should be called.

I studied the contents of the wallet for a few minutes. I looked around for someone who might be in search of a wallet and/or who would be carrying a bag from McDonald’s. I didn’t know what to do with the wallet, but I knew that I didn’t want to spend the evening at the police station turning in a found wallet.

So I walked slowly across the bridge with the wallet in my hands, looking back to see if someone had his nose down on the paving stones along the canal looking for a lost article. Once I was out of sight from where I originally found the wallet I put it in my front pants pocket and walked on quickly to the metro.

I once lost my passport the day before an international flight. It must have fallen out of the folder I was carrying when I’d gone to make a photocopy, and by the time I got home I had a message from someone telling me that he’d found it. When I asked how he found my phone number he said that he’d called information, which surprised me because I’d thought that my number was unlisted. Apparently it wasn’t. He gave me his address and I went to pick it up immediately. I brought along a nice bottle of wine as a thank you gift.

My hero opened the door and I thanked him effusively. He assured me that he’d done nothing special. He initially refused the bottle of wine, saying it was unnecessary. But I insisted. He slurred when he spoke and he smelled of alcohol. He was drunk. He wasn’t the least bit interested in hearing how appreciative I was. He just wanted to get on with whatever he’d been doing, so he took the bottle and immediately closed the door.

Now, with a stranger’s wallet in my pocket, I crossed Boulevard Magenta at the corner of Place de la République on the way to the metro station. Three people stood on the opposite side of the street, two men and a woman. I had noticed them as I was crossing the street and had inadvertently caught the eye of one of them. As I walked by one of the men said something in my direction that I didn’t understand. I kept walking, but four or five quick steps further on I turned back because one of them had called out after me what sounded like a curse, and I don’t like being cursed at by beggars.

I looked back with a glare. The three of them had their eyes on me. They looked angry.

Or was it hopeful? Something now told me that they hadn’t actually cursed at me but had asked me for help. Perhaps it was simply for money, but they had indeed asked for something. There were two men and a woman. One of the men was my height, muscular and balding. The other man and the woman were tall, thin, dark-haired. They were probably in their mid-30s. The men wore jeans and dark t-shirts. The woman wore jeans and an ivory blouse.

“You can help?” the taller of the two men said in French in a heavy foreign accent.

“Please?” said the woman.

It was a busy intersection, I didn’t see any reason to be worried, but I was aware that I had my own wallet in my jacket’s breast pocket and a stranger’s wallet in my front pants pocket. Since I was going to interview the head bartender at Shangri-La and test one of its restaurant I also had my camera in a jacket pocket and my notebook in one hand.

I approached the three strangers cautiously, one hand against the breast pocket of my jacket and the other, holding the notebook, on the front pocket of my pants, as though trying to protect my virtue.

I tried to keep a safe distance but they came in close.

The man who had asked for help said, “Someone take our car.”

“Someone stole your car?” We were at a busy intersection where there seemed no place to even park a car other than two delivery spots by the bus lane.

“Yes, steal our car. It was here”—the three of them pointed further along the boulevard—“and when we return it’s not here.”

The woman also spoke some French and would repeat or add to what the first man said, “Yes, steal our car… It was here and now not here.”

The other man nodded when she spoke but otherwise said nothing. He seemed to be sizing me up.

Romanian? Bulgarian? I guessed.

“You call the police for us?” said the first man.

The subject-verb question sounds like a command in English but it was softened here by three pairs of brown-eyed hope. They were serious.

“You call the police?” said the woman. She was quite pretty, tall with thin shoulders, curly black hair, sweet eyes, a kind, chiseled chin. She could have been an Eastern European rock star.

What kind of thief asks you to call the police?, I thought. Still, I discreetly had a hand on each wallet and knew that I would have to shift my defenses in order to take out my phone.

The woman must have sensed my unwillingness to do so because she took out her own phone and handed it to me. The man who spoke some French said something to the man who spoke none and the latter took out a document and held it in front of me. I didn’t take either the phone or the document in my hand.

The document he held in front of me was the ID paper for the car. It was a Renault, 2002. He pointed to the license plate number.

“Blue,” I understood him say in some language, perhaps mine.

The man who spoke French said something else to him—it was apparently the latter’s car and he then showed me his driver license. He was from Kazakhstan. I don’t think I’d ever met Kazakhstanis.

“You call police?” said the woman. “Say someone steal our car.”

I can never remember if the number for the police in France is 17 or 18, the other being the fire department.

“Eighteen,” I told her. “One, eight.”

She dialed. I then took the phone in the hand that had been protecting my jacket pocket. It’s hard not to trust someone who’s asking you to call the police with her own cell phone. Still, they were crowding awfully close. One of them emitted a leathery lavender scent with a hint of vanilla. Or perhaps it was their collective scent that I smelled. I tried not to look awkward by pressing my wrist to my breast pocket and the phone to my ear.

Eighteen, it turns out, is the fire department. The fire department operator transferred me to the police, 17, one seven.

When the police department answered I told the male voice that I was with some foreigners who didn’t speak French who had just had their car stolen on Boulevard Magenta.

“It’s been towed,” he said wearily. “It’s at the pound.”

“How’s that?” I said. What I meant was how could he know which car I was talking about and where exactly it was now?

“It’s been impounded,” he repeated, apparently understanding the situation without me having to describe it.

“They say it was stolen.”

“Illegally parked,” he said. “I’ll give you the number of the Pantin pound.”

“Just a second.”

I signaled to my friends that I needed to write something down. I released my hand from the Italian’s wallet in my front pocket, handed my open notebook to the woman while taking out my pen to write down the number.

When I hung up I told the three Kazakhstanis that their car had been towed because illegally parked.

“Not stolen?” said the woman.

“Apparently.”

She translated for the man with the muscles who didn’t speak French. He pointed endearingly to the phone for me to call the pound.

I let the woman dial the number on her phone and asked her to hold it to my ear since I’d have to write down some information. I could have freed both hands by holding the phone against my shoulder but I felt still felt a need to protect some of my virtue.

The guy at the pound sounded as weary as the policeman. I told him that I was looking for a blue 2002 Renault and gave him the license plate number. He confirmed that it was at the Pantin pound and gave me the address, 15 rue de la Marseillaise in the 19th. He told me that the closest metro stop was Porte de Pantin. He also told me that they closed at 8:30.

I gave the Kazakhstanis the information and told them they would have to hurry.

I told them there was a direct line by metro from where we were and that they’d have to ask for directions when they got out. I tore out the page on which I’d written down the information.

“If we give address to taxi he will take us,” the woman said without bothering with the question mark.

“Yes,” I said. “About 15 minutes.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” said the other one who spoke French.

“Thank you,” said the one who’d had his car towed.

“No problem,” I said, cautiously feeling myself up so check that both of my wallets were there and that my camera was in my pocket and that I had my notebook and my pen.

“Thank you,” they all said.

I pointed in the direction they had to go.

I was sorry to see them go. I liked them. One of them – of the three of them collectively – smelled good. They had such hopeful eyes. I watched them cross the street. They seemed happy to be trying to get their car from the pound.

I felt a bit lonely. I thought, “Now there’s someone I’d like to get drunk and stupid and have an adventure with.” And then I remembered that I was going to do just that going to just that, with L., through a long evening of food and drink at the Shangri-La. I was looking forward to telling her about my adventures as the good Samaritan, even though in one of those adventures I could be considered a thief for having a stranger’s wallet in my pocket.

I ran down to the metro station. It was 8:15 by the time the next metro came, the time I was supposed to meet with L. at the Shangri-La, still about 25 minutes away. I could have sent a text message to say I was running late but chances are she was going to be at least 15 minutes late herself.

I found a corner seat in the subway car with no one beside me and took out the Italian’s wallet to examine the contents piece by piece. I saw again what he’d had for dinner last night and what he’d had at McDonald’s less than an hour ago. I saw the different names on the two credit cards. I looked at the card from the Italian government ministry and the dog-eared card from a bank saying to call a certain number if the accompanying credit card has been found.

I figured that the thing to do was to find someone at the hotel who spoke Italian to call the number on the card to say that I’d found the wallet, even though by then I would be across the city from where it was lost.

A text messages from L. arrive: “Ur late,” meaning that she’d just arrived, 15 minutes late herself. Three minutes later I received a second text message saying, “I feel like a whore standing outside of a luxury hotel wearing high heels.”

I responded to the second message: “5 min. Negotiate for 2.”

L. shook her head when she saw me coming, which drew attention to her décolleté.

“You look beautiful,” I told her.

“I only look beautiful when you’re late.”

“That’s because you have a certain glow when you’re upset.”

She offered me her check with pretend reluctance.

“I have a good excuse,” I told her, “I’ve been helping strangers in distress.”

“That doesn’t help me,” she said.

Inside the hotel I asked the concierge for his help with the Italian. He confirmed that the card in the wallet said to call that number if the accompanying credit card was found.

He was nice enough to dial the number, to ask in Frenchified Italian if the person on the other end spoke French. But then handed me the phone.

It was quickly apparent that the man on the other end didn’t speak French. I tried English but that didn’t help. He said, “What can do?”

I said, “Yes, I want to know what you can.”

He repeated, “What can do?” perhaps an Italian version of C’est la vie.

My route to Shangri-La had been paved with good intentions, but now L. was looking at me with an air of “I got dressed in my décolleté best so that you could wander what to do with an Italian’s wallet?”

I hung up and decided to end the matter there for the evening. I would take the wallet to the polic station in the morning.

L. told me that I owed her a drink. Fifty euros would about cover it. I resisted having an Italian pay for it.

© 2011, Gary Lee Kraut

A review of the bar and restaurant La Bauhinia at the Shangri-La tested that evening can be found here.
A review of the Shangri-La Hotel can be found here.
More “In Transit” vignettes can be found here and here.

Comments may be left below.

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We would be in Paris in about six, actually, because we stopped to visit the town of Dinan, a 20-minute drive from Dinard inland along the Rance River.

Due to their proximity and the similarity of their names, no one who lives outside of Brittany can ever remember which is Dinard and which is Dinan. Dinard is the resort town along the coast; Dinan is the medieval town that’s inland. An easier way to remember is that Dinard is the place you go because your rich friends tell you to while Dinan is the place you go because your guidebook tells you to.

Henri and I had really been looking forward to going to Dinan, he because the ramparts of Dinan speak volumes about the efforts of the Duchy of Brittany to remain independent of the French Crown, I because I thought I could get an interesting article out of it.

The Blue Guide I had brought along calls it “one of the most beautiful towns in Brittany.” The dark stone towns of Brittany do indeed have a brutal beauty and a medieval timeliness. And Dinan’s old town is so well preserved, along with intact ramparts and a view of the Rance River, that it’s easy to understand why the guidebooks speak so highly of it. But Henri and I were both disappointed.

Henri wouldn’t say he was disappointed since failing to appreciate a town that was graced by a duke is bad for his self-esteem as it calls into question the very essence of his aspirations to live like one. But I could tell he wasn’t into the place because he only asked me once to take his picture, and in that picture, standing on a rampart overlooking the Rance (the view in this photo), his expression is as hard and cold as the very stone of those ramparts.

Perhaps it was the change of weather—after 48 hours of luxuriously clear skies the clouds of northwest France suddenly arrived. (Note the difference between the top photo and the others.) But it may actually have been the town itself at 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in September.

The old streets themselves felt like a weekend winding down, with stale kouign-amans (carmelized milkbread cakes) and fars bretons (pudding cakes) in the bakery windows, the sidestreets empty, and people milling about the main streets in the hopes that the old stones would tell them something about their past or perhaps about the direction of their lives, but the stones had nothing to say but “go home.”

It’s times like this when you realize that your guidebook can only take you so far and that the rest is up to you.

Forty-eight hours may not sound like a lot of travel, but it was indeed time to go home. We had a four-hour drive ahead of us. Before leaving we stopped for a drink a café on a grand old square that’s now mostly a vast parking lot. Our table was near an equestrian statue of Bertrand du Guesclin, a 14th-century warrior and nobleman from Brittany. Henri tried to tell me about the man but either his heart wasn’t in it or he really didn’t know himself why the guy deserved a statue in Dinan.

In any case I took the wheel and steered us onto the highway and didn’t let go, except to get gas, until I dropped myself off in front of my door. Henri made a feeble attempt to have me drive him home and return the car myself in the morning, but it was too late for negotiations.

Post Script
Six weeks after we returned from our trip to Brittany Henri called to say that a speeding ticket had arrived in the mail. One of us had been driving 57 km (35 mi.) per hour in a 50 km (31 mi) per hour zone—that one of us being me. It had happened on our way to Brittany, near Fougères. I’d suspected at the time if I’d been flashed by the radar post but I hadn’t said anything because Henri was sleeping at the time, and rather than disturb his peace, as well as my own, while driving through one of those plane-tree bordered routes that make driving in the French countryside so pleasant and dangerous, I’d continued on.

I naturally told him that I would pay the ticket—90 euros, about $135, argh!—but Henri would have none of that. He insisted on paying half. He’d received the ticket as the one whose credit card and address we’d used in renting the car, which also meant that the was the one to get the points deduced from his license. I offered to plead guilty to the authorities so as to restore his points, but Henri declined, saying that ever since he got rid of his car last year he doesn’t drive much anyway.

Gotta hand it to Henri, the man knows proper etiquette.

(c) Gary Lee Kraut

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Just before the party on Saturday evening another guest arrived at the neighbor’s house where Henri and I were staying. He was a young actor from Paris and he, too, knocked at the door empty-handed except for his overnight bag. Our host was gracious enough to ignore the absence of preliminaries, as she had with us, but we were surprised to find that within five minutes the two of them were tutoying each other whereas after nearly 24 hours as guests—quite good guests, I might add—Henri and I were still addressing her with a noble vous.

The actor was young, relatively speaking, and also relatively cute, so it was expected that with one look at him she would readily switch to the more playful tu. Still, it made me and Henri feel that we had approached our host wrong from the start. But it was too late to do much about that now. For Henri it was inconceivable to tutoie a host, particularly without bringing a gift. My own hesitation was somewhat different.

There isn’t actually much difference between tu and vous during a weekend at the coast these days unless you live in the world of Proust, or, as in Henri’s case, Madame de Pompadour, but once I’ve been vouvoying for any length of time, say two minutes, I have trouble initiating the switch to the less formal tu.

As an English-speaker I naturally prefer tu because its conjugations are easier to pronounce in the more academic tenses, but I have trouble saying, “On peut se tutoyer, n’est ce pas?”/ “We can tutoyer each other, n’est ce pas?” One hears that all the time at dinner parties, but something about asking someone’s permission to be friendly disturbs me for it makes the contact seem very intimate, as though you’re asking for a kiss, whereas you just want the person to pass the bread. So I either start off with tu at the risk of shocking with my informality the person I’ve just met or, sometime during the conversation, I late slip in a tu as though by a mistake and hope that the person responds in kind. In the end, asking someone’s permission to tutoie them is like asking someone you don’t know to be your friend on Facebook: It’s harmless enough and doesn’t really signify anything, until the person says no.

Anyway, tu or vous, the fact remained that none of us had brought a house gift for our host, so the morning after the party Henri and the actor immediately went out to find one. There are two reasons why I wasn’t asked to go along: First, because Henri was looking for some informality with the actor himself and second because I wasn’t around, having already gone out for a walk.

Early in the morning the path above the coast of Dinard is a great place for a jog, if you don’t mind running on concrete, but by 10:30/11 a.m. when people are out on their morning promenade, the joggers ruin the leisurely atmosphere of the walkway. Sweating profusely and wearing their mean, jiggling jogger’s face, aggravated in its intensity by the fact that they feel the strollers are in their way, it takes some restraint to keep from pushing them onto the rocks below. Dinard has a magnificent seaside walk that it’s impossible to stroll it without feeling that jogging should be outlawed in certain places… and that no more than four people should allowed even to walk together at the same time. In short, it’s the kind of place that makes you feel like a soulful elitist, even when you’re only a weekend guest at the home of someone you vousvoie and didn’t even bring a gift.

Dinard developed across the estuary from Saint Malo as a resort destination for British visitors. The British began arriving in 1836 and by the end of the 19th century had greatly assisted in funding the main resort town of northern Brittany. Ferries to Saint Malo from Portsmouth and Weymouth continue to ensure a heavy English presence along the coast. It is to northern Brittany what Deauville is to Normandy, though Deauville, being easier to reach from Paris or from England, is far more popular for a weekending outside of summer.

The photos in this post (other than the satellite image) are  from that seaside promenade. You see in them the craggy cost, the choppy seascape, the luxury villas on the cliff, the band of the town’s main beach (the casino is nearby), the seawater pool that fills with high tide, and Saint Malo across the estuary. I had a beautiful walk.

I returned to my host’s house just before noon so as to get ready for brunch. There was now a tall bouquet in the living room. Upstairs, Henri told me that I owed him 27 euros.

– GLK

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My brother Jon would have loved Dinard. He liked anything with the word resort in it: beach resort, ski resort, island resort, tennis resort. Wearing “smart casual” or “resort casual” came natural to him. After he died in a plane accident in 2006 my three other brothers and I inherited his clothes. They either didn’t fit the others or they weren’t interested, so I brought some back to Paris.

I rarely wear any of them but when I received the invitation to the party in Dinard I immediately remembered they were in my closet.

In this photo I am dressed in Jon’s clothes in Dinard, the sweater studiously thrown over my shoulder as it should be in such places. The photo doesn’t show my (brother’s) blue loafers.

The invitation called for blue and white not only because those are the colors of seafarers but because those are also the colors of the Virgin in the grotto along the Promenade du Clair de Lune at Dinard, which is where I am posing. This Virgin echoes the highly celebrated one in Lourdes, which is where one of the hosts of the party is from.

To me, the strangest thing about this photo is that I find that I’m not only wearing Jon’s clothes but also his smile. He would have loved having his picture taken on his way to a party in Dinard.

The couple hosting the party held a brunch beginning at noon the following day, which required another set of smart blue and white clothes. The invitation was actually unclear as to whether blue and white was de rigueur for the entire weekend or just for Saturday evening, so while some guests treated the Sunday brunch as an afterthought others kept up appearances.

I don’t often shop with “smart casual – blue and white of course!” in mind, and to be honest I don’t often shop at all, so for Sunday brunch I looked for my mother for inspiration.

At my age you might think it would be embarrassing to admit that my mother sometimes dresses me, but in my family we’re never too old to be given clothes by our mother. For nearly 55 years—for 9 children, then 28 grandchildren, and now 2 great-grandchildren—she has had an uncanny ability to spot a shirt or hat or a pair of pants from yards away and know exactly who it will fit and who might wear it. And if she gets it wrong she simply gives it to someone else.

Before going to the Sunday brunch, I had Henri take this photo so as show my mother that I finally found the occasion to wear that shirt and that hat she gave me last time I visited. You need to imagine the white short and the sandals—I’m sure my mother can.

Travel, as I like to say, isn’t just about where you’re going, it’s also about where you come from. I now add that it’s also about where your clothes come from.

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On our way from Paris to Brittany Henri and I had talked a lot about what we should bring as a gift for the women who as putting us up for the weekend. We’d never met her. She was the neighbor of the friends who was having the party on Saturday and she had told them that she had extra room if any of the guests were reluctant to spring for a hotel. She didn’t actually say that last part but our friends immediately thought of me and Henri. We’d considered bringing chocolates, Champagne, or flowers as a house gift, finally deciding on flowers, but we arrived too late to buy them so we greeted her empty handed.

That wasn’t such a problem for me since I immediately complemented our host on her tchotchkes and her red Louis Vuitton handbag so as to reassure her that she was hosting a man of good taste. But for Henri, who is the kind of Frenchman for whom etiquette, grammar, and knowing all about Madame de Pompadour are all that is left to distinguish those you would accept in your home from those you would only accept in your bed, arriving empty handed was akin to slap in the face—his own, that is, for he immediately turned red. Our hostess then further displayed excellent etiquette by opening a bottle of Champagne to welcome us.

If there was one thing I’d learned about Henri after 24 hours on the road it was that you can tell him to pose anywhere and he’ll do it. So here is Henri on his bed in the cheery room we’d been given.

Henri and I had never spent the night in the same room, so I took the bed by the door in case it turned out that Henri snores or has other uncontrollable and unpleasant nighttime habits that would require me shifting to the couch in the living room. Turns out he refrained from doing any such thing that night. We both slept well.

Brittany is famous for its ever-changing weather, whereby you’re told to run outside as soon as the sun shines because it may not last long. So immediately upon waking up and eating the breakfast that our hostess had prepared for us (further embarrassing Henri for not having a brought a gift) we got in the car and drove off, planning to find a gift along the way.

Our good fortune with the weather is also the reason that we bypassed Saint-Malo. It was far too nice out to spend our time on and within the granite ramparts of that famous rebuilt town that was once made wealthy from the workings of privateers and merchant ship owners and once made rubble in August 1944 by the workings of war.

So we leap-frogged Saint-Malo proper and headed to its suburban the coast by way of the Lemoëlou Manor, which once belonged to Jacques Cartier (1491-1557).

Cartier, you may remember from history class (particularly if you’re Canadian), left from Saint-Malo in 1534 to find a northern route to Asia and instead discovered Canada, which he claimed in the name of King Francis I. I’m writing this on Columbus Day and am aware that it is politically incorrect to say that Europeans discovered the Americas since there were already people here, but all traveling, I think, can be considered as discovery—or rediscovery—no matter how many people have been there before, so let’s all take a break with the anti-discovery crusade.

Not that that thought made me particularly anxious to visit Jacques Cartier’s house, now a museum that reveals manor life in these parts in the 16th century. We couldn’t have visited even if we wanted to because they were closing for lunch shortly after 11am even though the sign out front says that they close for lunch at 11:30. Still, an employee let us enter into the courtyard to take the above picture before she closed the gate and drove off for a 3-hour lunch.

The manor is located less than a mile inland from Rothéneuf. We followed the signs to Rochers Sculptés to see rocks along the cliff that had been sculpted into 300 characters by a priest named Abbé Adolphe Fouré (1839-1910). At age 55 he had a stroke, which left him deaf and mute yet able to wield a pick and hammer. He then withdrew to this windy corner of Brittany (actually, all corners of Brittany are windy) and set about sculpting the rock over an area of 5000 square feet into characters inspired by local legend.

Henri and I nearly turned back when we discovered that we had to pay 3€ each to climb on the rocks when nearly the entire coast of Brittany is full of rocks to climb on for free. But I felt a sense of investigative duty to see it since we were right there, so I sported up the 6€ and off we traipsed on the rocks. And I’m glad we did because now I can tell you that it isn’t worth driving out of your way to visit the Rochers Sculptés, however, if you ever do come this way and there aren’t more than a few other cars in the lot you might was well fork over the few euros and behold the monk’s work and have a climb on the rocks—at your own risk of breaking an ankle or being blown off the cliff in the wind, I might add.

Afterwards we continued along the coast and stopped to admire some beautiful seascapes after that. Such as this:

and this

and this, where you’ll see why this is called the Emerald Coast.

We then drove to the Point de Grouin, which is the northeastern most point of the peninsula and in fact of all of Brittany considering that when you look out you see Normandy.

After parking our car, we couldn’t agree on which path to take out to the point. Henri wanted to take the high road out and I wanted to take the low road, which pretty much sums up the difference between us, and unwilling to fathom a compromise in which one of us would have to give in and the other one smirk, we separated, which was just as well because after a couple of hours with Henri a little break is always welcome.

I eventually found Henri back near the car (I had the keys). I could tell by the way he asked what had taken me so long that he had either missed me or had taken the less interesting path. When I asked him if he’d seen Le Mont Saint Michel in the distance he nodded “Mm” in such a way that I knew he was lying. Here’s Le Mont Saint Michel beyond the rocks:

We then stopped at Cancale. I’d been here briefly on a weekday in early June this year when there wasn’t a tourist in sight and found it a wonderfully charming little port town where I wish I’d been able to spend more than an hour. Now, on a sunny September weekend it was quite crowded, and even though I didn’t feel the need to stay for long I was very glad that I did have another hour here.

Cancale, which faces the bay of Le Mont Saint Michel and finally afforded Henri a distant glimpse of the Mount, is famous for its oysters, which enjoy the refreshing current of some of the strongest tides in the world. The Cancale is a firm, salty everyman’s oyster that makes its way onto tables throughout France, especially during the Christmas-New Year season.

To best appreciate Cancale oysters in Cancale you should go directly to the oystermongers at the northern end of the port and ask them to open up a dozen that you can then down (with a spritz of lemon) on the ledge with a view out to the oyster farms and, on a bright day, Le Mont Saint Michel in the distance.

Henri and I would have done just that if we’d known the stands were there before we took a seat in a creperie. No regrets, though. We enjoyed the crepes, which are also very much a part of Brittany. Henri was feeling particularly Breton by the time we left.

We were so happy with our little excursion that it wasn’t until we got back to the house in Dinard that we realized that we’d yet to get a thank-you gift for our hostess. We didn’t have time go back out though as we had a party to dress for.

(c) 2009, Gary Lee Kraut.

The post Destination Brittany, part 2 of 5: Exploring the Coast appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

But we’d both been invited to a party in Dinard, in Brittany, so we decided to rent a car in Paris and do some visiting along the way.

Between car rental, gas, and tolls, a Paris/Brittany round-trip can cost about the same as a week in a 5-star hotel in Tunisia, flight included, but Henri and I found a comparatively decent price with an agency called Rent-a-Car-with-One-Taillight-Missing. The car came with a quarter tank of gas, which may or may not have been what the guy meant when he told us that we were getting an upgrade.

Anyway, the car moved and Henri managed to avoid getting us crunched by a bus (i.e. he almost got us crunched by a bus), so by the time we made it out of Paris I wasn’t worried about compatibility so much as survival.

Dinard is just past Saint Malo, which is just past Le Mont Saint Michel, so we had a choice between the north route going through Normandy or the southern route going past Chartres and Le Mans. Henri didn’t care as long as there was a palace to visit along the way—all Henri wants to do is visit palaces—so I decided that we would take the southern route and told him to pull off the toll road at La Ferté Bernard.

La Ferté Bernard doesn’t have a palace. It doesn’t have much of anything, to tell the truth, but part of the interest of a road trip is to stop where there isn’t much of anything, otherwise it isn’t a road trip but an itinerary. Henri only agreed to stop at La Ferté Bernard because I told him that something really important had happened there in the 15th century. Being French he couldn’t stand the idea that I might know something about his country that he doesn’t.

La Ferté Bernard is a very nice town as far as towns with nothing to see go. Its main attraction is the church Notre-Dame-des-Marais that’s a mix of flamboyant Gothic and let’s just finish the damn thing. I took the picture of the scribe (above) there.

There’s also a late-15th-century entrance gate to the old town, below left, where Henri stopped complaining about the lack of a palace at La Ferté Bernard long enough to pose. Henri’s face is not normally as blurred as in these photos but you really don’t want to see his expression here. I also got him to pose on the other side of the gate, below right, without him seeing that I’d placed by a sign that says “I’m waiting for my master.”

One of the nicest things about La Ferté Bernard is that at lunchtime, when the streets are deserted, you can have a pee by a plane tree without worrying about passersby.

La Ferté Bernard is only a few miles off the A11 toll road, so it was well worth the 30-minutes stop, though we didn’t realize at the time that in addition to paying something like 200 euros to get off the toll road we had to pay another 200 to get back on.

By now we were getting hungry so we took a vote as to where we should stop for lunch. Henri voted for a quick lunch at a rest stop so that we would have plenty of time in the afternoon to visit palaces. I voted for Laval, which is an actual town where I told him there was lots to see. We went to Laval, not because my argument was so convincing but because I was driving.

Laval, as far as we could tell, is famous for having parking unimeters so far from most of the parking spaces that you risk getting a ticket during the 10 minutes it takes you to find it.

We had lunch on the terrace of a brasserie by the River Mayenne facing the ramparts and fortress castle that define the old town. I don’t care much for omelets but I ordered one anyway because road trips are for eating things you don’t normally eat (I’ll tell you sometime about my meal at Shoney’s when driving through South Carolina last April.) I regretted the omelet as soon as it arrived, but the view was indeed quite nice from where we sat, the sun was out, and Henri tends to complain less when he’s eating.

We then headed into Brittany through less traveled roads so as to visit Fougères, which actually does have a palace. Well, sort of. It’s actually a fortress-castle, half in ruins, but Henri bounded from the car as though we’d just entered an oasis after three days in a cultural desert.

Like other fortress-castles on the former border between the Duchy of Brittany and the Kingdom of France, the castle was built, rebuilt, and refortified from the 12th through 14th centuries at a time when Brittany when trying to stave off advances by the French kings with the Normans lurking nearby. Between the castle and the under-visited town nearby, Fougères is a great introduction to the growth and medieval history of France and to the slate and schist that defines Brittany’s architecture as well as a great example of the pleasures of traveling in off the main tourist paths, even with Henri for company.

Actually, Henri’s mood had changed by the time we cross the drawbridge into the castle complex. He was now in full, Euro-cultured glory. It’s quite amazing to see how connected Europeans feel at times to the full length of their national and continental history. At most, even well-educated Americans will connect to only a portion of their history—for example, the “In God We Trust” part or the free market part or the pioneering part or the immigrant part or the I-can-eat-pray-etc-anyway-I-want part—but Europeans, particularly when they have a diploma or two on their CV, have a way of embracing their entire past no matter how obscure it may appear.

We were lucky enough to have arrived shortly before a guided tour was setting out. The guide gathered together the entire crowd of visitors that afternoon. There were three of us: me, Henri, and a woman who looked like she was trying to escape a bad marriage only to realize that the ruins of an old fortress were not the answer. But for Henri this was the answer. He was now in ecstasy.

Here is a glimpse of Henri’s smile against a backdrop of the Château de Fougères.

The post Destination Brittany, part 1 of 5: Travels with Henri appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

I used to leave my chartreux Moumoon with Isabelle, but whenever I returned to Paris her daughter would cry that I was stealing her cat. Carine would be willing, but she doesn’t care for cats; once or twice she did keep Moumoon, but waking up to his steely stare from the head of the bed creeped her out. Jean-François would be willing, too, but he creeps Moumoon out since Moumoon associates Jean-François, who also happens to be his vet, with needles and pain. Henri is allergic, so is Pascale’s son. Jean-Pierre travels on business for weeks at a time. Mahinde would gladly help out as long I don’t go away too long—but I do.

So for several years I entrusted Moumoon with Olivier. Olivier is one of the most reliable people I know. Furthermore, he loves Moumoon. He loves him so much that he often tells me that I’m a bad pet owner for abandoning him as often as I do, that I don’t feed him the right nibbles, and that I should go a different vet.

Olivier is also one of the most negative people I know. As friends, Olivier’s rigid pessimism and my casual cheer led me to play Lippy the Lion to his Hardy Har-Har; I would come up with ideas for jump-starting our respective careers (he is a graphic artist and designer) and he would come up with a hundred reasons why not to bother. For a while, actually for two whiles, Olivier was unemployed, having worked for a small company that went belly-up and then for a second one that did the same, which only encouraged his natural negativity.

He used to live in my neighborhood, so we would often get together for coffee or for dinner or to go biking. Then he moved into the 19th arrondissement, which is just a few metro stops away but is far enough for us to meet less often. During the second while of his unemployment Olivier’s grousing became more embittered and I got increasingly tired of listening to it. It was always the same people—those with money or with power, their children, their friends, and assorted liars and cheats—who got what they wanted. His complaints were tough enough to endure when they involved his own life, but intolerable when they involved mine. My slipshod approach to freelance work and to finances disturbed him to no end. I saw him less and less.

Then one day I thought I would do us both a favor by hiring him to help with the design of my website. He was actually excited by the idea. So we met for lunch, and there, in the midst of my Lippy the Lion presentation of the project, his critical nature got the best of him. Little by little he tore every idea apart before concluding that my work was worthless and my graphic sense was worse. I said that I would deal with the work part and that I had no pretensions about my graphic sense, which is why I was soliciting his help. But he insisted. With his underpaid help, he said, the graphics of the site would be good, but the rest of it would still be rubbish, so maybe it wasn’t worth the effort.

I told him to go to hell.

I wanted nothing to do with him after that. Remembering his qualities didn’t seem worth the effort. I wrote him off as the classically depressed Frenchman who blame his woes on government and religious or ethnic communities, believing that complaint is man’s most honorable intellectual exercise.

***

Two months later I got the Call. Not the awkward call from a former friend asking how you’ve been but THE Call, the one from a family member telling you that there’s been an accident and that you need to get on the next plane home.

Henri came right over, followed by Jean-François. Corrine brought comfort and food, Mahinde brought more. Pascale called from India, Jean-Pierre from Lourdes.

Then I called Olivier.

“What do you want?” he said.
“My brother and his entire family just died in an accident. I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Will you take Moumoon for a while?”
“Alright, bring him over.”
“Can you come get him, I don’t have time.”
There was a pause.
I said, “Can you take him or not?”
He did.

In the following year I made frequent trips to the U.S. to deal with estate matters and to be with family, always for a month or more. Each time I called Olivier to ask if he’ll take Moumoon. The first two times I called him several days before I was planning to leave and our conversation went something like this:

“I’m leaving again on Thursday, can you take Moumoon?”
“You’re using me.”
“It’ll do you good to have company.”
“Why don’t you ask Jean-François or Carine or Henri? They’re your good friends.”
“Yes or no?”
“For how long?”
“Five weeks.”
“Five weeks!? Poor cat.”
“Yes or no?”
“I’m only doing this for Moumoon.”

Like divorced parents who manage to get along for no more than three minutes every other weekend, we would then meet to make the exchange.

My view of Olivier has softened since then, partly because I’m aware that I’m using him, partly because he began speaking less like a victim. He was going into business for himself. After 18 months of unemployment, he planned to open a flower-and-deco shop in the fall.

We even called each other a couple of times before my last trip. I asked how his plans for the shop were coming along, he asked about my family, about estate matters, and about Moumoon, and I told him when I’d be leaving again. He still reminded me that I was taking advantage of him, to which I snidely remarked that he could use the company. But now I also said that I was looking forward to seeing the shop. And since the shop was near my apartment, he was also offering to water my plants. (Unlike Moumoon, my plants actually seem to have a masochistic appreciation for drought.)

I intended to stay in New Jersey for four weeks the following winter but didn’t return for six. I went to Olivier’s apartment the day after I got back. He was in an unusually upbeat mood. He didn’t even accuse me of being a poor pet owner for staying away so long. All he reproached me for was not putting the word out to my friends that he’d opened a shop. He gave me the receipts for cat litter and food, I paid him, stuffed Moumoon into his cage, and told him that I would stop by the shop soon.

***

Two blocks from home I came across the woman who, with her husband, cleans the common areas of the small apartment building where I live. They also clean two neighboring buildings. Monsieur and Madame—I don’t know their names—are from Portugal. In the seven years I’ve lived in this apartment I’d never seen Madame so far from my building. In fact, we’d never exchanged more than chirpy bonjours in the stairwell, with the occasional comment about the weather and the wet floor.

Meanwhile, Monsieur and I have become sidewalk buddies over the past few years. We tend to meet at about 6:15pm when I’m coming or going and he’s waiting by the curb for the garbage truck to pass to empty out garbage bins. We speak about recent events in the building or in the neighborhood: about the time a chunk of the cornice fell off the building, bounced from the awning of the restaurant downstairs, and smashed the windshield of a parked car; about the time they took away the old neighbor on the second floor who’d lost his mind; about who might have tagged our hallway; about why I’ve had to change the inner tube of my front bicycle wheel three times in the past year; about the homeless men camping at the end of the street. Monsieur is a short, gentle, talkative man. He looks both ways down the street then takes hold of my sleeve when he wants to tell me something important, such as the price the apartment was sold for on the fifth floor. He is my most constant friendly contact in the neighborhood since Olivier moved away. He actually notices when I’ve been gone for a few weeks, and I’m nearly jealous when I find him speaking on the street with one of my neighbors, who will look at me not as though I’ve been away but as though I never lived here.

Monsieur’s accent in French is thick, the words often mumbled, and the conjugations approximate. I wasn’t aware of how much smoother Madame’s French is than his and of her cheerful twang until I came across her that recent morning as I returned from Olivier’s with Moumoon.

We passed each other and exchanged a Bonjour Madame-Bonjour Monsieur, but one step later she stopped and said, “You have a cat.”

I turned to her, held up the cage, and said, “Yes.”
She peered inside. “He’s beautiful, is he a Persian?”
“No,” I said, “a Chartreux.”
“Oh, they’re wonderful cats,” she said. “I never knew you had a cat! We used to have a cat—not as beautiful as yours, un chat de gouttière–just an alley cat–mais avec les chats on s’attache, vous ne trouvez pas?–but it’s easy to get attached to a cat, don’t you find?”
“C’est sûr,” I said, one does indeed get attached to one’s cat.
“How old is he—she?”
“He. Seven.”
“How old was he when you got him? Ours was five. We adopted him from the street.”

Before I could tell her that Moumoon was one when I got him she launched into the story of her alley cat. It was a long urban tale involving a homeless male, doorstep feeding, cautious invitations inside, definitive adoption and family life.

I listened, but I wanted to tell her about Moumoon, how initially I hadn’t wanted a cat. I wanted to tell her that prior to having Moumoon I’d thought of cats and dogs as outdoor pets, as none of the animals we’d had when I was a kid lived in the house with us. Sharing my apartment with a cat once seemed as absurd an idea as sharing the house with one of our goats. Furthermore, whenever I’d been offered a cat I’d thought that having one would be bad for my image and, worse, for my self-image. I didn’t want to be a cat man. In graduate school I’d rented a room in the big, scantily furnished house of a cat man. He raised free-range show cats: long, thin, constantly whining Blue Point Siamese and evil, hyper Cornish Rexes who occasionally got closed into an empty spare bedroom with a hired lover. From my bedroom in the attic I would hear the growls and complaints of refusal, seduction, coupling and withdrawal. When the cat man, who also worked as a buyer for a major department store, went out of town for work or for a show, I would feed the cats. Once, going away for a week, he asked me to give daily medications to several of the kittens, which meant chasing the hairless creatures around the house and into my landlord’s bedroom, dragging them out from among the porn magazines under his bed, and getting bitten and clawed as I tried to shove a pill down their otherwise stranglable little throats.

I had no intention of becoming a cat man myself when my friend Didier asked me six years ago if I would take his cat Moumoon, a name given by Didier’s autistic 11-year-old son Jeremie. But something had to give in the menagerie of their apartment crowded with another cat, a dog, guinea pigs, parakeets, and several tanks of tropical fish. I don’t want your cat, I told him, but the next day Didier showed up at the door with Moumoon in his hands, not even in a cage. I agreed to keep him for a few days until one of us could find another solution. So I ran out to buy a litter box, litter and food while Moumoon went into hiding. When he finally emerged two days later, I realized that I was caring for the most beautiful, intelligent, responsive and affectionate cat that had ever lived. Furthermore, seeing him perched by my computer with a paw over the mouse, I understood that as a writer having a cat wasn’t so bad for my image, self or otherwise, after all.

But I couldn’t tell Madame any of this because she was still recounting her own cat story. Occasionally she would stop to crane her neck toward Moumoon’s cage, then say, “Where’s his vet? Ours was on boulevard de Magenta” or “Oh look, he’s sticking his paw out, he wants to shake hands!” or twice “That’s funny, I didn’t know you had a cat!” And then we were off again on the trail of her adopted tom with scratched armchairs, dead mice on the doormat, near misses alongside speeding cars, frightening gutter walks, illness, aging, and expensive visits to the vet (mais quand on aime on ne compte pas). When finally she told me that they had had to put the cat to sleep it wasn’t with sadness or even nostalgia but with communion, for her cat tale didn’t end with the death of a pet but with her comment, once again, “I never knew you had a cat!”

She repeated it, I think, not only as an expression of her discovery that I, too, like cats but that by consequence I must be a decent, caring human being, the kind of person one would be pleased to know.

“It must be difficult having a cat since you travel a lot,” she said.

“A friend of mine takes care of him while I’m gone.”

“He must be a very good friend,” she said.

“He is.”

© 2007, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Of Cats and Friends appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

“So why wouldn’t you give him a second chance?” I ask. “He may be a little selfish but he’s clearly smitten by you. It isn’t as though he was cheating on you.”

“Things haven’t been going well for a while,” she says, “not bad, he’s a nice person, but after vacation last summer—”

Just then the lights on the Eiffel Tower start blinking. We both look out the window then smile at each other. Reflexively, I check my watch to see that it’s 8 o’clock.

“We have time,” she says, then continues her explanation.

A family of tourists sits at the window table behind Monique, a couple and their 15 or 16-year-old daughter. They were speaking German before but now they’re silent, eating. I find it strange, funny, that they’re so focused on their food that they haven’t noticed the blinking tower. The daughter looks up, having sensed me staring at her. Our eyes catch, and to avert my gaze she turns to the window, where she notices the blinking tower. A smile opens on her face, which she now shows to me. I smile back. She looks to her father across the table, then to her mother beside her, both with their faces in their dishes, then at me while she holds back a laugh. She looks down at her plate, then out the window, where she stops to take in the blinking lights.

I watch them too, until I realize that I haven’t been listening to Monique. All I catch is her conclusion, as she lifts the glass of wine to her lips: “I’m not responsible for another’s happiness, n’est ce pas?”

I can only agree.

© 2006, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Still Life with Eiffel Tower appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

There I took a picture of the sand:

I then walked along the dune:

The sky changed as I then drove inland. When I think of Vendée, at least southern Vendée where my friends live, I think of this flat, damp landscape.

Near the end of the afternoon I was driving back to my friends’ village when I stopped to admire this path:

By the time I returned, the 2-year-old was awake and tearing apart the dress of the doll I’d given her, the 4-year-old was sucking two fingers while watching “Les Simpson,” and the 6-year-old wanted to show me something she’d written. It went something like this: ANDndeMmleNdrEaAeasssdNrea.

Her name is Andréa.

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A young woman with the tragicomic role of “young woman who tells people to cross street so that they won’t interfere with take” asked me to cross the street. As I was doing so I saw a man walking up the trafficless street.

“Alexandre,” I said. I stopped and smiled. Alexandre is the friend of a friend of mine.
“Alexandre,” I said as he came closer.
“Alexandre,” I called as he walked past.

He turned. He said, “Who are you?”
I said, “Alexandre, it’s me.” I took off my cap just thinking that would help.
He said, “I’m not Alexandre.”
He turned and walked away.
I could have sworn it was Alexandre.

The address I was going to was across the street from Le Smoke and two doors down. When I arrived I told the host what had happened: that I was asked to cross the street because they’re filming in front of Le Smoke and came across someone I thought I knew who turned out to be not to be that person at all.

“They’re filming in front of Smoke?” she said. “I haven’t been there in years.”

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