I’m looking for a new suit in a shop on rue de Turenne. I explain to the saleswoman that there’s a certain medium blue that I’m looking for, in a size 50.

She asks me where my accent is from.

“I’m American,” I say. “How about your accent?” I can hear it.

She glances to a man in the open back office who looks up from his desk.

“Not important,” she says.

I try on a jacket. She tells me that it’s a beautiful fit and that I’m very handsome in it. This is the fifth jacket I’d tried on today and that’s the fifth time that I’ve heard that. It does fit, but I’m not sure that it’s the blue I had in mind. I ask her the price.

“349,” she says.

“That’s more than I want to spend,” I say.

“I’ll throw in the tailoring,” she says. That’s also the fifth time that I’ve heard that today. She gives a reason: “I like Americans.”

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“It’s important for you?” she asks.

“If you’re offering me a price because you like Americans I might buy the suit if you like I like where you’re from.”

“Where do you think?”

“I’m guessing Greece.”

“Do you like Greeks?”

“Well enough.”

“I’m Greek.”

I wasn’t buying it.

***

Blue T-Shirts

I’m having a friend’s name printed on a t-shirt that I’d bought as a retirement gift. I planned on being in the area of the shop in the afternoon I’ve paid 3€ extra to have it printed by 2PM rather than the usual 6PM delivery time. The shop manager, who spent a half-hour with me the day before, doesn’t recognize me when I enter to pick up the shirt.

She says, “What’s your first name?”

“Gary.”

“Your first name.”

“Gary.”

“No, your FIRST name.”

“Gary.”

She looks through the packets of printed t-shirts and other objects on the shelves behind the counter.

“I don’t see anything, but the delivery man doesn’t come before 6.”

“I paid 3€ extra to have it here by 2.”

“Can’t be. Are you sure that’s your first name?”

“Gary. It’s a blue t-shirt with a cycling motif.”

“Oh, now I remember. But it was for 6 o’clock, right?”

“No. 2 o’clock… Gary.”

She calls the place where the printing is done to say that she’s missing something from the 2PM delivery. The person on the other end asks her a question that she then repeats to me: “What’s your first name?”

“Gary.”

“C’est bien votre prénom.”

“Oui. Gary.”

“He says ‘Gary,’” she tells the man on the phone.

A minute later she hangs up. She tells me that my t-shirt didn’t go into the rush pile so it’ll be here after 6. She says that they printed my t-shirt and mistakenly also put in a second order for a plain blue t-shirt and printed it as well.

She says, “The good news is that you’ll have two t-shirts after 6 rather than one t-shirt now – and for the same price.”

“That’s not good news to me,” I tell her. “I’d rather have the correct one now. And if it isn’t ready then you can reimburse me the 3€ for the rush order and keep the second t-shirt for yourself.”

“What would I do with a t-shirt with Schulman written on it?” she says.

“What would I do with it?” I say.

“We’ll it’s your last name,” she says, “not mine.”

***

Some Change

I’m on a bike, stopped at a light, my right foot on the curb, waiting for people to cross the street. A man teeters up to me, drunk.

He says, “I won’t ask you for a little change to buy something to drink.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re North African and you don’t drink.”

“And if I told you that I do drink?”

“Can you give me some change?”

© 2017, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Three Paris Vignettes: A Suit, Blue T-Shirts and Some Change appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

By Herbert H. Hoffman

In our younger years, long before we met, we had both been to Paris. We had seen the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Champs Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe and other sights, most of them on the right bank of the Seine. We were now a couple, American tourists revisiting a city we had separately loved the first time. Friends had suggested that we might like the left bank this time.

We took their advice. We rented an apartment on rue du Bac, a street we didn’t know. “Our” house was at no. 40. The third floor leaned a little and the floor boards creaked at every step, making us walk as if we were at sea. It was the romantic milieu we had sought.

Rue de Bac is an old street, a former cattle-driving path leading to the ferry (le bac) across the Seine to what is now the western end of the Louvre. There is a bridge now, the Pont Royale, completed in 1689.

On our first evening in Paris we had dinner near the bridge at Le Terminus at no. 5 rue du Bac. The name of the restaurant refers to the nearby railroad station that was eventually transformed into the Orsay Museum. About 400 years ago, Charles d’Artagnan, the dashing captain of the King’s Mousquetaires, once rented rooms at no. 1 rue du Bac. The fusion of dates in a single location let us know that that certain parts of Paris run on a time table that differs from what we are used to at home in Southern California. It was just the beginning of our realization that Parisians store the memories of their notables on streets throughout the city, including a good many on rue du Bac.

The following day we discovered that at no. 44 we had another illustrious neighbor, so to speak, a ghost of more modern times, André Malraux whom people of our age group remember as DeGaulle’s minister of cultural affairs. Some of us know him for his novel La Condition Humaine, Prix Goncourt, 1933. He finished that book in a room just one door south from where we were billeted. He was a difficult neighbor, it seems, and some wit once said that he was one third genius, one third hard to follow and one third totally incomprehensible. He died in 1976 and is buried in the crypt of the Pantheon.

Another of De Gaulle’s ministers also once resided at no. 44. He was Maurice Couve de Murville. His portrait appeared on the cover of Time for February 1964 because he had important dealings with the United States. As France’s foreign minister, he had the unpleasant task of informing President Lyndon Johnson that the French government, convinced that America’s policies would lead to failure, could not lend support to the Vietnam enterprise. Unfortunately he was right, and we now had a glimpse of the ghost of Vietnam to add to our list. The poet Charles Baudelaire had set the scene for us when he wrote about the cité pleine de rêves, où le spectre, en plein jour, raccroche le passant, where ghosts by daylight tug the passer’s sleeves.

Our sleeves were tugged again a day later. Branching off rue du Bac across the street from our building is the short rue Montalembert, named for a writer and publicist of the 1830s who, incidentally, also once resided at our own address, no. 40 rue du Bac. As we followed this little street we came to rue Jacob where we stopped at no. 56, in front of a most important monument for a visitor with an interest in American history. It was here that Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams negotiated and, in 1783, signed the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and officially recognized the United States of America as an independent country. The building itself is not the original one but the site—am I too sentimental to say this?—remains the birthplace of the USA.

No Frenchman has been more celebrated in America than the Marquis de Lafayette, friend and trusted ally of General George Washington. There are at least twelve cities in the United States called Fayetteville. There are also three Lafayette townships, two Lafayette counties and one Lafayette parish. One of the Marquis’ homes was at no. 183 rue de Bourbon, several blocks around the corner from rue Jacob. It is a lieu de memoires that invited us to speculate what might have become of the American Colonies had France not been on our side. The French-American admiration goes both ways. We were happy to learn, for example, that the Marquis named his eldest son George Washington de Lafayette.

Americans have many friends whose spirits still hover over or near rue du Bac. We promptly located another: the writer Romain Gary, who resided at no. 108. He won the Prix Goncourt, a prestigious literary prize, twice, for The Roots of Heaven and The Life Before Us, respectively. Apart from being an essayist, soldier, politician, diplomat, pilot and secretary of the French delegation to the United Nations, he was also a friend, almost an American himself, working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and later as consul of France in Los Angeles. He died in 1980. His ashes float in the Mediterranean.

The American artist James Whistler lived at no. 110 from 1892 to 1901. He died in London in 1903 and is buried across the channel, but his mother—at least her stern portrait officially titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” (1871)—remains in Paris and is now a stone’s throw from rue du Bac, in the Orsay Museum.

The writer François René de Chateaubriand was still a very young man in Franklin’s day. He was astute enough, however, to have observed that in the days before the French Revolution turned ugly the ordinary people of Paris were enthusiastic about the Americans’ struggle for independence (from the King of England, that is). In the street, if not in the royal palace, “le suprême bon ton était d’être américain“, the coolest thing was to be American, Chateaubriand wrote in his memoires. He traveled to America and met General Washington. He describes this visit in great detail, finishing his account by calling Washington “le soldat citoyen, libérateur d’un monde,” citizen soldier and liberator of a world. He confessed in his memoires how happy he was that the General received him and that he has felt a certain excitement about the encounter all his life: “je m’en suis senti échauffé le reste de ma vie“. Chateaubriand remained a lifelong friend of America and years later remarked with satisfaction that “la république de Washington subsiste; l’empire de Bonaparte est détruit,” Washington’s republic lives; Napoleon’s empire is dead. We were truly surprised to find such a good friend at no. 120 rue du Bac. Across the street in a little park there’s a sculpture, a bust really, of this remarkable man. His remains are not in the Pantheon. They are in St. Malo where this stubborn writer and diplomat from Brittany had wished to be buried.

As an aside it’s worth noting that Chateaubriand’s longtime friend Madame Récamier was with him when he died. That was in 1848. She died a year later. She is known to many of us because Jacques-Louis David portrayed her in a thin white something reclining on a two-headed couch. We now call that sort of sofa a Récamier. The picture hangs in the Louvre.

One of the cross streets of rue du Bac is rue de Varenne. There, at no. 50, stands the Hôtel Galliffet, where, in 1797, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand was installed as foreign minister during the Directoire period of the new French Republic. (It is now the Italian Cultural Institute.) It is no exaggeration to say that Talleyrand was the most ingenious politician and statesman of the French revolutionary period and beyond. It is said that First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was a guest here at one of his parties. By 1803 Talleyrand was Napoleon’s adviser, an appointment that had incalculable consequences for the new United States. Napoleon had plans to expand French possessions in the Americas. President Jefferson was aware of these plans and feared that the United States, then a small country, might lose docking privileges in the formerly Spanish, now French harbor of New Orleans. He sent envoys to negotiate lease terms. Napoleon’s plans had changed, however, and Talleyrand, his negotiator, suggested that the President just buy New Orleans outright, and the rest of Louisiana as well. All American school children know about the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the territory of the United States. It was news to us that we have to thank Monsieur de Talleyrand for that.

Another important person was at that party in 1797, Madame de Staël. She was a champion of liberty, freedom of speech and democracy, a prolific writer, critic and mover of ideas. She met or corresponded with everybody who was anybody, anywhere, from Auguste Comte, Lafayette and Lord Byron to Emerson, Goethe and Pushkin. Politically she was opposed to Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. He exiled her because the dislike was mutual. By 1815 Napoleon was out, however, but Madame was not. She had good judgement and saw the world clearly. Some wit suggested that with Napoleon now gone there were only three powers left to save Europe: England, Russia and Mme de Staël. Such was the woman who had her salon at no. 94 rue du Bac, an influential woman who had nothing but good to say about America. “You are the advanced guard of the human race,” she is reported to have said. “You have the fortune of the world.”

At the Seine end of rue du Bac the river road was once called quai des Théatines, now quai Voltaire. There, at no. 27, another illustrious man of letters, Jean Arouet, dit Voltaire, died in the home of his friend, the Marquis de Villette. He did not live to witness the signing of the Treaty of Paris, but he knew Franklin and apparently liked him enough because it is said that he referred to the struggling colonies as “Franklin’s New World.” Voltaire, incidentally, once suggested that it was the duty of all men to examine their hearts and ask if religion should not be charitable rather than barbaric. The question is still open.

Before the great renovation projects of Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s, rue du Bac was connected to rue St. Dominique. Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 at no. 77 rue St. Dominique, above what is now an Irish pub. In 1831 the United States was still somewhat of a mystery. The French government was eager to learn how things were done in this new republic. They sent a young de Tocqueville to find out. His two-volume report became a classic, known to us as “Democracy in America.”

The spirit of Charles Louis, Baron de Montesquieu caught up with us on rue St. Dominique, mainly because my book discussion group had recently studied his De l’esprit des lois. He is another important Frenchman for Americans because his ideas were widely read in the second half of the 18th century and were in part responsible for the way the Constitution of the United States was conceived. He did not live to see what he had helped create. He died in 1755 on a visit to Paris, probably at a friend’s house at no. 16 rue St. Dominique.

Antoine-Nicholas de Condorcet lived at no. 6 rue St. Dominique. He had much to say about the American Revolution. Shortly before his death in 1794 he wrote a treatise outlining how its development could ultimately benefit the world. His particular concern was an extensive bill of rights that would go farther than the Constitution did at that time. He foresaw the need to abolish slavery, for example. Our forefathers should have listened to him. Without his encouragement it took us another seventy years to accomplish that. Tragically, he did not survive the French Revolution.

America has still another friend whose memory lives on in Paris, the poet Charles Baudelaire. While it is difficult to say where in Paris Baudelaire lived—he lived in many different places—it appears certain that he once lived at no. 21 rue du Bac, in a house that is still there, a house with a huge stone portico spanning an extra wide wooden portal. “J’ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques...” he wrote in La Vie Anterieure, which increases the probability that it was this house.

A decade or so after de Tocqueville’s voyage, an American poet burst upon the Parisian scene, Edgar Allan Poe. Some say that there is a melancholic string in the French soul and that Poe’s somber moods made that string vibrate. Baudelaire and Poe never met but they were kindred spirits. Here is a stanza from Baudelaire’s poem Spleen, translated by Kenneth O. Hanson:

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon’s hid
By a black day sadder than any night…

“…un jour noir plus triste que les nuits” – a black day sadder than any night? Well then, how about “Once upon a midnight dreary”?

If the French understood Baudelaire, how could they not love Poe? It is not hard to see why Baudelaire felt compelled to translate The Raven, and everything else Poe wrote, into French. To this day, it is said, Poe is better known in France than in America. How comforting to know that we have cultural as well as political ties across the ocean. And the story does not end here. Messrs. Harper Brothers, Poe’s publishers, commissioned the well-known French painter Gustave Doré to illustrate The Raven, the original English language edition, with twenty-five engravings. Over the years these illustrations have become almost as important and as gripping as Poe’s words. And the work has endured. Doré, it turned out, is another spirit floating over the neighborhood. The house where he lived with his mother was no. 73 rue St.Dominique, across the street from the Tocquevilles’.

Who would have thought that America has so many friends among the ghosts of this old neighborhood?

© 2016

Herb Hoffman and Joan Preston visit France from their home in Southern California as often as possible. They enjoy walking the streets and stumbling upon places that hint at a story which Herb then puts into words.

The post Street Talk: The Ghosts of Rue du Bac appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Last November I was designing an issue of France Revisited by gathering together an assortment articles and stories about Jews, Jewish sights and Jewish history, particularly in Paris. I thought I’d call it the Hanukkah Issue. That was to be followed by a Christmas/New Year Issue before I would head off on my East Coast lecture tour in January and February.

But then the parties started—the cocktail events, the tapas evenings, the teatime happenings, the association dinners, the afternoon interludes, the “I’m only in town for a couple of days” pleas, the holiday celebrations—and before I knew it Christmas trees littered the sidewalks of Paris, New Year wishes came and went, and then I was on the road in the U.S..

There, I plotted my return, considering material that arrived from contributors and other texts that I might write. Should I transform the planned Hanukkah issue into an Semitic Food Issue, a WWII Issue, an If I Were A Rich Man Issue, an Evolution of the Marais Issue? – for I had articles on all those subjects and more.

But our first ideas are often the best, and a look at the articles I had on hand led me back to the Hanukkah Issue – except that the candles have long disappeared. So let’s get down to basics and call this issue by its rightful name: The Jewish Issue.

Here are the 9 articles, interviews and stories that comprise France Revisited’s March Jewish Issue

1. Love and Latkes. Canadian humorist Melinda Mayor, the Menschette of Montmartre, sent this piece about the trials of being a latke-lover in Paris. Melinda has previous contributed a piece about the trials of motherhood in Paris.

2. Passover and the 11th plague. New York writer and filmmaker Max Kutner tells of his first Passover in Paris and an encounter with the 11th plague.

Two articles about wealthy Jewish banking families that have left their mark on Paris:
3. The Rothschilds of the 19th century: A Riches to Riches Story.

4.  The Nissim de Camondo Museum: A Glory and the Tragedy

Views, one personal, one collective, of WWII deportations and the Holocaust
5. An exclusive interview with Paul Niedermann, a Holocaust survivor, currently living just outside of Paris. His extraordinary story is told though a text and interview by Janet Hulstrand. Janet, you may recall, previously introduced readers to American poet James Emanuel.

6. The Deportation Memorial and The Shoah Memorial. A look at two memorials that merit a place on the list of every traveler, whether Jewish or not.

7. In search of a Jewish Quarter: Rue des Rosiers, the Marais and the Jewish Food Court of Paris.

8. Noshing in Nice: Bread and the Bagel. The ever-perceptive Daniele Thomas Easton went looking bread in Nice and came home with bagels. Readers may recall Daniele’s review of the movie Sarah’s Key.

You might also want to return to an older editorial about anti-Semitism and the traveler.

Read them all, learn, discover, travel, comment, enjoy!

Gary

The post France Revisited’s Jewish Issue appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

Adidas, Kookai, Minelli, Annick Goutal, Fred Perry, The Kooples, Kusmi Tea. Does that sound like the making of “the Jewish Quarter” to you? It doesn’t to me either, but those are among the signs—along with “falafel, 5€50”—that one now finds on rue des Rosiers, the 1000-foot long street in the Marais that was once a main artery of Yiddishkeit in Paris.

Even well into the 1970s a visitor, few as they were, might have peered into storefront or observed local residents gathering in the street or returning from work and sensed a neighborhood, a community, whose lifestyle and traditions were visible, alive and collective, whether Ashkenazic, Sephardic or Parisian.

Now, however, the tradition most followed on rue des Rosiers is that of a shopping mall, with a Jewish-theme food court to one end and familiar international clothing brands to the other. It can be hard to see the history for the falafels.

Jews were known to have lived on the City Island in the 6th century and later on the Left Bank, and records indicate their presence in the Marais by the 13th century. Nevertheless, due to successive expulsions and limitations on the activities of Jews, notably in the 14th century, there were in fact relatively few Jews in Paris at all between the 15th century and 18th century, when Jews began trickling back. Nevertheless, due to successive expulsions and limitations on the activities of Jews, notably in the 14th century, there were in fact relatively few Jews in Paris at all between the 15th century and 18th century, when Jews began trickling back. Still, it’s unlikely that there were any Jews in the Marais when, in 1791, during the Revolution, France became the first European country to grand Jews full rights of citizenship. By the early 1800s Jewish presence in the Marais was well established. Jewish arrivals in the quarter, and throughout Paris, took on greater amplitude in the second half of the 19th century, with large movement of Jews from Alsace and Lorraine, where more than half of the Jews of France had lived. Others arrived from Eastern Europe (Romania, Austria-Hungary, Russia), particularly between 1881 and 1914, in the same pogrom-fleeing waves that reached American shores, and Jews continued to arrive in the Paris region into the 1930s.

The Marais thus became home to a grouping of diverse Jewish communities that included Alsatian, Russian, Polish and other Ashkenazic traditions, along with Portuguese and Spanish Sephardic traditions, then in the minority here. In the initial decades of the 20th century one could therefore easily believe that the center of the Marais, comprising large swaths of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, was Paris’s “Jewish quarter,” though there were in fact mostly non-Jews living throughout this working-class area, much of it very run down.

During the German Occupation of 1940 to 1944 the French police certainly knew how to distinguish a Jewish address from a non-Jewish address; they had identity files, now visible at by the Shoah Memorial, indicating with a large J (for juif) which were Jews. The massive round-up of Jews throughout the Paris region in July 1942, followed by mass deportations to the death camps, removed the “Jewish” from any sense that this was “a Jewish quarter.”

After the war some of those who had managed to flee in time and some of the few who survived the camps returned to the Marais, where, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were joined by Sephardic Jews arriving from North Africa as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco gained independence from France. Though the Jewish presence in the Marais was dramatically reduced compared with the pre-war years (most Jews arriving from North Africa settled in other quarters or in the suburbs), rue des Rosiers and surroundings still visibly formed a Jewish neighborhood.

And now? Are travelers correct in thinking when coming to rue des Rosiers today that they are actually visiting “the Jewish quarter”? Is the presence of Semitic fast food and a few Judaica shops a reflection of a vibrant local community or of successful ethnic marketing or of a combination of the two?

Let’s take a look at what’s here.

Clearly there are Parisian Jews around—clearly, that is, if you walk by one of the active synagogues and religious schools just off rue des Rosiers or look into a kosher butcher shop or one of the less tourist-directed bakeries or visit on a Jewish holiday. A Jewish vocational school still operates at 4 bis rue des Rosiers. On Sundays cliques of Jewish adolescents from throughout Paris gather on the street, though they can be lost in crowd of other visitors, for every Sunday is a non-religious holiday in the Marais and the occasion for all comers to celebrate the pleasures of a stroll in the city.

Otherwise one is more likely to catch a glimpse not of neighborhood life today but of the neighborhood that is no longer here: The façade of the old  baths (closed in 1989); a plaque indicating that an attack was carried out against Jewish targets by a Palestinian terror cell on August 9, 1982 at the restaurant Jo Goldenberg , killing 6 and wounding 22 (the space is now occupied by a clothing shop); a sign in the middle of the street stating that this was the Pletzl or little square, the crossroads of the old urban Jewish village (in 1900), and signs here and on neighboring streets (rue des Ecouffes, rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais) telling of deportations to death camps.

Synagogues of the Marais

Attesting to the centuries-old presence of Jews in the Marais, specifically the former parish of Saint Gervais, rue Ferdinand-Duval came to be called rue des Juifs (Street of the Jews) in the late Middle Ages. It was briefly a closed street, though not a ghetto per se since Jews also lived elsewhere in the city. An unsuspecting visitor is unlikely to walk up that little street today thinking that it might ever have been “a Jewish street,” until arriving at its northern end, where it spills into rue des Rosiers. You’ll find more by going one parallel street over in either direction, to rue Pavée or to rue des Ecouffes, where the neighborhood’s Jewish religiosity is more readily visible.

For security reasons, you’ll have to settle for an outer view of the Art Nouveau synagogue at 10 rue Pavée and the religious school across the street. The Pavée Synagogue (the synagogues in Paris are generally referred to by the street on which they’re located) was built in 1913 for the Union of Communities (Agoudas Hakehilos), largely comprised of Orthodox Jews of Russian origin. This high, narrow synagogue was designed by Hector Guimard, the architect famous for designing the entrances to the first Paris metro stations. The Pavée Synagogue, the only religious building to his credit, is less exuberantly Art Nouveau than the metro work, but the rising curves are undeniably his. It was dynamited on the eve of Yom Kippur 1941 by French Nazi sympathizers at the same time as several other synagogues in Paris. Guimard wasn’t Jewish but was married to a Jew—an American at that. Already in 1938 Guimard and his wife had fled Paris at the specter of war and moved to New York City, where he died in 1942. The Pavee Synagogue was restored after the war and is now listed as a Historical Monument. The building also houses aid services for the Orthodox community.

With a kind word and perhaps a small donation, visitors may be able to enter one of the smaller synagogues just off rue des Rosiers on rue des Ecouffes.

The largest synagogue in the Marais is at the district’s eastern edge, on rue des Tournelles, between Place de la Bastille and Place des Vosges. The Tournelles Synagogue, also listed as a Historical Monument, isn’t open for impromptu visits. Those interested in visiting this beautiful structure, built 1867-1876 with Gustave Eiffel’s company involved in the creation of its metallic skeleton, can contact the synagogue in advance to request permission (Synagogue de la rue des Tournelles, 21 bis rue des Tournelles, 75004 Paris). The Tournelles Synagogue backs up to the Vosges Synagogue whose entrance is at 14 place des Vosges. During the Jewish harvest-time holiday of Sukkot passersby will see a hut or sukkah installed on the balcony above the arcade on the square. There’s another handsome synagogue, built in the 1850s, in the northern part of the Marais, at 5 Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth. Taken together, these synagogues attest to the diverse community of Jews had spread throughout the Marais by the end of the 19th century, a century that saw the number of Jews in Paris increase six- or seven-fold. Many more would arrive in the following decades

Neither Rue des Rosiers nor any other area of the Marais was a closed ghetto, though portions might be considered a ghetto in the sense of being extremely run down. Jews were clearly a sizable presence in the Marais by the end of the 19th century, their numbers continuing to climb, however Jews lived throughout Paris in varying density. Rue de la Roquette (past the Bastille just east of the Marais) and Belleville were also had noticeably dense Jewish populations. While some who had distinguished themselves on the social ladder remained in the Marais, others preferred to live in the city’s upscale quarters, such as near the boulevards and quarters being modernized by Haussmann’s transformations of Paris. (Read about the Rothchild family here and the de Camondo family here.)

Wealth in the Marais

Even when Jews returned to the Marais after the war the strong Jewish presence had existed on the southern side of rue de Rivoli and rue Saint-Antoine was, by the late 1940s, largely absent; the homes of French and foreign Jews and non-Jews had been expropriated for the purposes of rehabilitating an “insalubrious” zone. Little by little the Marais lost its craftsmen and its peddlers as it became home to the middle class and to government projects. Yiddish, so frequently heard and read in the Marais prior to the war, had largely disappeared by the end of the 1950s. Another accent arose, that of Sephardic Jews arriving in numbers from North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Sephardic rituals replace Ashkenasic rituals in certain synagogues, notably the synagogue on rue des Tournelles that was split in two to accommodate the distinct ritual interests of the Marais. On rue des Rosiers and nearby streets the neighborhood’s Jewish presence remained clear in the cafés and restaurants, local grocers and shops, with some now preferring couscous and bricks over herring and latkes. But the Marais as a whole was on the way upscale. “The Marais” wasn’t yet a call to stroll and shop, to see and be seen, but by the 1980s public funding was pouring into the area to restore its noble historical buildings—the 17th-century mansions and the town houses on Place des Vosges—and poverty, the hallmark of pre-war Jews in the Marais, no longer had a place here; the working class had been pushed to the edge of the city and into the suburbs. The Picasso Museum opened in one of those mansions in 1985, a turning point in terms of the neighborhoods visibility to visitors to Paris. The decade witnessed an acceleration of a transformation of the district’s local population, in the use of its storefronts and in the way in which the Marais was viewed from outside the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. Visitors from elsewhere in Paris and from abroad began to arrive. Gay bars and businesses opened just west of rue des Rosiers and within a few block of rue des Archives.

With rising real estate prices and an increasing number of visitors through the 1990s, shops began catering to clients from beyond the neighborhood. Rue des Rosiers, the remaining portion of the Marais to stake a claim to being the Pletzl—the ever shifting center of “the Jewish Quarter—, once again began to lose its local Jewish identity, though this time without anyone being murdered. Briefly Paris had the distinction of having side by side a Jewish village by day and a gay village by night. That held for about a decade, but as the Marais gained in desirability for increasingly upscale residents and visitors, any sense of neighborhood anywhere in the district largely evaporated.

Of course, Addidas, Kookai and Fred Perry shops on rue des Rosiers can be Jewish operated, as can the real estate on rue des Rosiers, but only foreign Jewish visitors and native anti-Semites consider this a Jewish quarter anymore. Similarly, only visiting LGBTQ individuals and French homophobes consider the area around rue des Archives a gay quarter. Otherwise, visitors are unlikely to have any idea who actually lives in these areas.

The 2000s saw the arrival of something new on rue des Rosiers and perpendicular streets, a new kind of Diaspora. This time it wasn’t a wave of Jewish immigrants arriving but of Jewish recipes, from New York—deli fare, pastrami sandwiches and the like. Oh, there had been pastrami sold here before, but the new deli restaurants marked the transformation of this small portion of the Marais into a Jewish-theme food court.

Though regrettable for those expecting to be visiting a Jewish enclave and a local community, this is simply part of the evolution of the city, just one of many formerly distinct neighborhoods that have been transformed by market forces in recent decades. The neighborhoods of Paris can still be distinguished by architecture, monuments, museums and history, but they are increasingly homogenous with regards to populations living and visiting there.

Wealth is the historical feature that the central Marais most recalls. After all, nobility and financiers began buying up lots here in the second half of the 16th century, and during the 17th century this became the most fashionable quarter of Paris thanks to the construction of Place des Vosges and of dozens of noble mansions. That was before there was a significant Jewish population here. It was the downfall of French nobility during the Revolution that gave Jews the freedom and elbow room to increase in numbers in the Marais. It was persecution elsewhere, hope for a better life and a need for community that caused the number of Jews in the Marais to swell in the late 19th century. It was also sense of security, hope and community (along with fun) that led to the opening of gay bars and businesses nearby in the late 20th century. The Marais was less desirable for business ventures then. Now, 400 years after the royal inauguration of Places des Vosges, the re-establishment of the Marais as a prized destination and residential area is a sign not such much that it has lost its Jewishness as that it has regained its lettres de noblesse—at least de bourgeoisie.

The Jewish Food Court

French and foreign visitors from beyond the quarter now frequent rue des Rosiers primarily for the shopping and the falafels—falafels, enjoyable as they may be, aren’t a reflection of local community or agriculture or known-how but of what visitors are happy to purchase. Hungry visitors will line up at the falafel window at L’As du Falafel as though the several other similar stands on the street had all failed their latest health test or lost the recipe for frying chickpea balls and slicing cabbage. The devotion to queuing there, particularly on Sunday, is partially due to the perverse lingering effect of an old article in the New York Times, partially due to the hawkers out front (once you’ve paid you’re stuck waiting), partially due to the fact that it’s kosher, whatever the latter may mean to the vast majority of those in line. As to quality, if you’re a serious student of fried chickpea balls and sliced cabbage in Paris then you should try them all. But if you simply want to eat a falafel pita sandwich any stand will suffice.

The street’s other hotspot is Chez Marianne, which takes its French republicanism seriously enough to present itself as French first, Jewish second. Chez Marianne, at the corner of rue des Rosiers and rue de l’Hospitalières Saint-Gervais, serves all kinds of delicious Mediterranean mush (eggplant, hummus, tzatziki, tarama, tapenade, etc.) as well as falafel, so there’s something for everyone. It isn’t kosher and so is open daily noon to 11pm. There are other choices in the area for a decent pastrami sandwich and well-oiled latkes, as well as some fine Ashkenazic bakeries. And there’s one remaining café that on weekdays still maintains a neighborhood feel, Les Rosiers, at #2 on the rue. Meanwhile, while fast foodies are now able to enjoy pastrami sandwiches and other New York imports in other quarters of Paris as well (e.g. meaty Freddies Deli in the 11th or vegan MOB in the 13th), while falafels are more common than crepes on some streets.

But I digress. The purpose of this article is not to recommend specific eateries in the Jewish food court or to speak of recent influences to the Paris fast food scene but rather to encourage those interested in Jewish history to look beyond the 20 years of Marais history represented by the Mediterrean-meets-NY-deli food offerings on rue des Rosiers. Enjoy them, enjoy that lingering scent and that occasional glimpse of the Pletzl and an old Jewish quarter—and why not enjoy them insightfully after working up an appetite at more instructive sights? The Deportation Memorial, the Shoah Memorial and the Holocaust Center would be fine places to start. You can begin by reading about them in this next article.

© 2014, Gary Lee Kraut

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* * *

It’s hard to imagine that a district as well-trodden as the 6th arrondissement would still have anything resembling a backstreet, but if a backstreet in Paris can be defined as a street with neither thru-traffic nor croissants—selling croissants requires sufficient morning traffic or an elementary school nearby—then rue de l’Abbé Grégoire fits the bill.

Ferrandi, the French School of Gastronomy

Actually, there are croissants on rue de l’Abbé Grégoire, but they aren’t for public sale. They’re made as a practical exercise during baking class at the Ferrandi School.

Ferrandi is well known in Paris’s gastronomic circles for its secondary school curricula covering all aspects of the culinary arts and the restaurant business, from chef to manager. The school also offers short and long programs for amateur or professional chefs, and foreigners may apply for any of the school’s programs.

The culinary school also houses one of the best kept gastronomic secrets in Paris. Anyone, upon reservation, can become the well-fed guinea pig for the cuisine and services of the school’s young and budding chefs and restaurant staff at Ferrandi’s two dining rooms, les restaurants d’application.

A 3-course lunch menu is served Tues.-Fri. for 25€ or 30€, depending on the dining room. A 3-course dinner menu is served Mon. and Tues. (45€) and the occasional Thurs. (40€). Prices exclude beverages; there’s a decent wine list here. The students in the kitchen and in the dining room are being trained in French gastronomy, so whether achieved or not in every dish and every gesture, each meal has gastronomic leanings in its preparation and service.

Each table is requested to select a variety of dishes so as to give the chefs practice in the full range of the day’s menu. Come as a couple if you like, but as a restaurant experience a meal chez Ferrandi is especially endearing for a party of four or more. You’ll find the wait staff more willing to speak with diners than other waiters about town (students are expected to attain a certain proficiency in English) and you may even have the occasion to meet the young chefs before they head to their next class, or out for a smoke.

Ferrandi Paris, 28 rue de l’Abbé Grégoire, 6th arr. Tel. 01 49 54 28 00. Saint-Placide (line 4) is the closest metro station to Ferrandi and to the shops below, while the Rennes station (line 12) is just a bit further.

Backstreet doesn’t mean that Abbé Grégoire is difficult to find (the liberal, revolutionary abbot himself is entombed in the Pantheon) but that the neighboring streets are more commonly shopped and strolled and transited: rue du Cherche-Midi, rue de Vaugirard, rue Saint-Placide, rue de Rennes.

Colorova, Pastry Shop and Tea/Lunch Room

Guillaume Gil, the chef and owner of Colorova, a shop across the street from Ferrandi, is a 2004 graduate of the school, pastry section. Though he speaks highly of education at Ferrandi, it isn’t an attachment to the school that brought him to rue de l’Abbé Grégoire but the possibility in 2012, at the age of 31, to deploy his dream of operating his own business after honing his skills as an apprentice at the Plaza-Athenée, as commis chef at La Maison Blanche and as second and then chef at the Terrass Hotel.

At first glance, Colorova could be taken for an architect’s office, a frame shop, a design shop or a decorator’s showroom. You’ll likely first notice the light jade Smeg fridge to one side of the window and the Florentine nest of tables and woven-fabric-covered footstools to the other before catching sight of the presentation counters. And even then you might notice the slats that decorate the side of the counters before the array of pastries on top. But there they are: Guillaume Gil’s beautiful and delicious creations, and behind one of the counters, the man himself, working away with an assistant or two in the open kitchen.

About ten different pastries appear on the counter on a given day. Since the pastry presentation isn’t the focus of the room, the offerings of about 10 different pastries can appear rather sparse, but that illusion disappears as soon as you take on the challenge of trying to select one.

Gil’s luscious modern pastries stray noticeably if slightly from the canons of classic fine pastry-making without being avant-garde, e.g. a commendable caramel mousse tarte with a ring of speculoos and peanuts; a candied raspberry and chocolate tart; a café mousse with amaretto mascarpone. Gil eschews traditional pastries such as éclairs and basic fruit tarts. Viennoiserie (croissants, pains au chocolat and other morning pastries) are also absent, other than on weekends and holidays, when Colorova serves what has become a very popular brunch (26€ or 35€, reservations required). Weekday lunch, also prepared by Gil and his assistance, is also available. Pastries remain his true expertise.

The large minimalist boutique area and additional seating area, both enlivened with splashes of color, have an air of refinement but neither snobbery nor exclusivity. Anyone will feel comfortable here. In the morning and during afternoon tea, Colorova is a fairly quiet place that makes for a sweet, perhaps romantic linger.

Since Gil’s aren’t pastries that one can easily eat while walking, it’s best to choose one and have a seat. Pastries cost 4€50-5€50, so you might as well take a seat and savor the pleasure along with a Lov Organic tea or Nespresso coffee or a thick hot chocolate for overkill. A nice breakfast is also available at 12€ consisting of a slice of soft, delicate French toast (from a brioche made here); a whipped vanilla cream, caramel and apple compote; a hot drink and orange juice; bread (not made here), and homemade jams, a chocolate spread and a caramel spread.

Colorova, 47 rue de l’Abbé Grégoire, 6th arr. Tel. 01 45 44 67 56. Open Tues. 10am-5pm, Wed.-Fri. 7:30am-7pm, Sat.Sun. 9am-7pm. Weekend brunch is served at three seatings: beginning at 11/11:30am, 1/1:30pm and 3:30/4pm.

Le Vin en Bouche, Wine Shop

While Colorova, at first glance, looks like a design shop, Le Vin en Bouche, when I first walked by, looked as though someone had left the door open to the back pantry. I say that fondly because this quirky little wine shop and tasting room has an inviting spirit that comes from the knowledge and personalities of its two dissimilar owners, Vincent Martin, 41, and Jonathan Jean, 24, either of which would make a fine drinking companion.

Vincent Martin is a Ferrandi graduate, where he studied the culinary arts from 1993 to 1995 after three years in hotel school and where he discovered an aptitude for and an interest in the subtleties of wine. He was head sommelier at La Truffière, where he worked from 2000 to 2010 and helped develop the gastronomic restaurant’s tremendous wine cellar. He and Jean met when the latter, then in his teens, was hired as his apprentice.

Combining Martin’s great experience and Jean’s knowledgeable and engaging enthusiasm, they opened their little shop as peers in 2012. Whether you come upon one or the other you’ll get expert advice on an eclectic selection of wines and spirits and can pursue the conversation with them or with your travel companions over a glass and some well-selected charcuterie or fromage at the narrow table by the brick wall. They also offer wine tasting workshops and events, and Martin continues to advise restaurants and individuals on constituting wine lists and wine cellars.

Martin has personally visited each of the vineyards represented in the shop. But that’s not the end of his purchase policy. More than a dozen bottles are open at the shop at any time. The purpose of the open bottles isn’t simply to give clients a taste or larger pour, but also because Martin believes that for a wine to be worthy it must, among other qualities, be able to stand up to having been opened for a week or so. He continues to test open bottles for up to ten days to understand how they evolve. They’re simply recorked after each taste, without any air pump device, and either left on the table or placed in the wine fridge. “It’s a little extreme,” he acknowledges, “but I don’t like to leave things to chance.”

Martin and Jean’s small selection echoes their “passion for the wines of small winegrowers that truly represent their place of origin [terroir],” as Martin says. That’s a formula, at once trendy and old-fashion, that the traveler is well-advised to take as his own motto while getting to know French wines.  In wine tastings with those unaccustomed to French and European appellations, Martin joins many small-shop owners in saying that one of his tasks with New World consumers it to get them to loosen their focus on expecting a particular taste from a particular grape varietal.

These aren’t necessarily pricey wines. Most are in the 15-35€ range, along with a splash of more expensive wines from notable low-yield vineyards. There’s no Bordeaux in the shop, as Martin explains, because he finds that too many vintners and traders of the Bordeaux region have generally opted to sell through large distribution channels, meaning that any retail price that he might have for such wines would far exceed their price in chain shops, which would in term make him and Jean look like a price gougers. Actually, Martin does have some well-aging Bordeaux along with along with other “vins de garde” and old vintages in a private cellar in the 5th arrondissement. Those wines are also available for sale, so knowledgeable wine-lovers might wish to inquire about wines beyond those found in this wonderful little wine pantry.

Le Vin en Bouche, 27 rue de l’Abbé Grégoire, 6th arr. Tél. 01 42 22 02 97. Open Mon.-Sat. 10am-8pm.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Paris Street Talk: Gastronomy, Pastries and Wine on Rue de l’Abbé Grégoire, 6th Arr. appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

There’s a certain kind of cyclist who thinks of himself as such an independent urbanite that he doesn’t have to pay attention to traffic regulations. He breezes through red lights with a ting-ting of his bell to let pedestrians know that he’s too free, too green and too self-sufficient to have to have to stop for them.

And the haphazard way in which he locks up his two-wheels to posts and fences is reminiscent of how car owners parked on the sidewalk before the crackdown (and posts) circa 1990. Except that the car owners would eventually move their rusting vehicles, whereas cyclists will leave their bikes agonizing on the street for all to see. Admittedly, some of those bikes have been vandalized—their seat or a wheel stolen, their wheel run over by a car or twisted by intentional fate, etc.—and are then abandoned by their owners.

Still, fed up with the sight of bicycles that no longer roam, that agonize before our eyes, that clutter the sidewalks, Va-nu-pieds says: “Ras le bol de ces vélos qui ne roulent pas, qui expirent sous nos yeux, qui encombrent tout….” as he lifts his camera and his foot to rant.

All photos © 2013, Va-nu-pieds

Also see The Cranky Parent, The Cranky Host, The Cranky Urbanist and The Cranky Foreign Resident.

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We are high above the cobbled streets of Montmartre in Jaspert’s garret. The cobblestone he’s holding is the medium for his latest work of art. On it he is painting in high precision a reproduction of the screen of an iPad. He calls it his “iPav,” pavé being French for cobblestone or paving stone.

An artist working in a garret in Montmartre sounds like a cliché—one sold by hilltop street artists drawing portraits and selling colorful Paris scenes. But here and there men and women still toil away seriously at their art in garrets and larger studios. Looking toward the upper floors as you walk around you’ll see their tall northern windows letting in a light that has attracted artists to Montmartre for now 200 years.

Painting with gouache (tempera) that is finally fixed with an oil varnish spray, Jaspert reproduces more or less well-known images of enormous variety: paintings, sculptures, monuments, logos, icons, personalities, objects, packaging and products.

An affection for any one of these pieces—each is unique—invariably depends in part on the viewer’s personal connection with the image reproduced. Nevertheless, at its best, Mr. Jaspert’s work creates its own, new reality as it recontextualizes those well-known images onto a medium with its own resonance: an authentic cobblestone from a Paris street.

His more successful pieces, from this viewer’s point of view, play with the contrast between the original or natural medium/texture of the thing or image represented and the medium on which Jaspert has represented it. In those cases the cobblestone becomes imbued with the image while the image espouses the cobblestone.

Among his more straightforward pieces, this die

and this encyclopedia

show the precision of his work. Jaspert works from photographs carefully selected to best reveal the colors of the images he’s reproducing. He studied industrial design and his first jobs in the early 1980s were in advertising and computer graphics, both of which have an echo in his cobblestone art.

There’s a good bit of irony in the use of some of the logos and trade dress that he reproduces. Some of them are amusing enough but failed to draw me into the conversation between the corporate intent for the image and the artist’s reuse of those images and trade dress. But in many cases the rendering makes such effective use of the medium’s surface and weight that I willingly lingered, as with this exquisite, 2-kilogram (4.4-pound) Hermes gift box.

Unlike the examples shown above, most of his work focuses on a single face of the stone, the face that’s been smoothed by years or decades, even more, of life on the street. Even when working with a single face, he uses the contours and texture and dimensions of the stone to full advantage. The mediums give heft in terms of both weight and substance, turning largely two-dimensional work into sculpture, as with the iPav, a fine piece of Flintstonian humor, that he was working on when I arrived, and this slab of ham,

and this chunk of Swiss cheese.

Meanwhile, other pieces carry far more historical or cultural baggage, as in this reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica.”

and the wonderful perspective and echo of cobblestones of Caillebotte’s “Paris Street, Rainy Day.”

Jaspert uses the two main types of Paris cobblestones (pavés), which he obtains through contacts in the public works department: a 10x10x10 cm (about 4x4x4 in.) stone called a mosaïque and a 20x15x15 cm (about 8x6x6 in.) stone called an échantillon. A third dimension of cobblestone, a cube measuring 20x20x20 cm (about 8x8x8 in.), called a Napleon, is found in the city far less frequently but nevertheless appears in countless tourist photos since they pave the square in front of Notre-Dame. Most of the stones used in the streets of Paris are granite, along with some sandstone and porphyry. Older paving stones come from Brittany and Normandy but most now come from Portugal.

Because of their relationship with the streets below, Jaspert says, “These stones come loaded with history.”

As does Stephane Jaspert himself. Born in 1961 in Stuttgart to a German father and a French mother, Stephane Jaspert is truly a European post-war product. His French (maternal) grandfather was sent as a prison laborer to work on German farms, where he worked for the German (paternal) grandfather, among others. During the long march of prisoners as the Allies approached, the French grandfather was hidden by the German grandfather. The two men stayed in touch after the war and eventually got together again along with their respective families. The German had a son; the Frenchman had a daughter. Mr. Jaspert is the product of the relationship between that son and that daughter. He grew up in a bilingual household and is also fluent in English.

His reproduction of 17,000 year-old cave paintings from the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux reaches much further back in the mist of continental history. It’s a wonderful work that connects Mr. Jaspert’s interpretation of the icons and images that mark his world with the work of those Paleolithic artists.

He reaches far and wide in considering iconic images to translate into his work, as in these two échantillons.

As an artist Jaspert worked on various media in the 1990s—canvas, paper, wood, metal and glass—before hitting upon cobblestones in 1999. He now feels that his work is fully rooted in these stones. “I’m going to do this until my death,” he says, “I’m not going to change anymore.”

Having seen the variety of his work, I don’t believe him.

***

Photos of about 200 of Stephane Jaspert’s cobblestone art painted since 1999 can be found see on the artist’s website. Those interested in purchasing his work may contact Mr. Jaspert through the site to learn about any current exhibitions and gallery representation or for a private showing.

© 2012 Gary Lee Kraut

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It was early August. I rode to the Beaubourg quarter on a public bike and parked at the Velib station on rue Saint Merri. As I turned to walk up the street I was surprised to see that the entire wall of a 5-story building was covered with the image of a face of a man with a finger to its lips.

The man was calling for quiet: Shhhhh. He had Dali eyes.

I’d passed this way, by the Stravinksy Fountain and Saint Merri Church, hundreds of times since first lunching by the fountain over 20 years ago, but never noticed the mural before.

This disturbed me. As much as I enjoy coming upon a good surprise in this increasingly conventional city—an elephant walking down the street, say, or a boy playing Frisbee with a homeless man—I’m disturbed to discover something so clearly a part of the landscape that I’d never noticed before, such as the time that I realized that the trees on my street weren’t lindens after all.

I was headed in the direction of the mural to meet (or not) with Fred, and as I approached I saw that there was writing on the wall, which may or may not have been graffiti.

It wasn’t. It read:

Fresque réalisée / en juin 2011 /par Jef Aérosol [Mural created /in June 2011 / by Jef Aérosol]

So the mural was recent, painted earlier this summer, no reason to be disturbed, simply surprised.

Eh-oh, I heard a voice.

I didn’t see anyone around.

Tu peux me laisser tranquille là? [Would you mind leaving me alone?]

Strange, I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from.

I continued reading the writing on the wall.

Assisté de [With help from] / Ender, Asfalt,/ Joseph Loughborough / David Amar / Fradelrico, Sevan Ahsan

Eh-oh. Tu peux me laisser tranquille là? The voice, an angry whisper, asked again to be left alone, but still I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

Merci à l’ircam [With thanks to IRCAM, the Institute for Acoustic/Music Research and Coordination] / Et au Centre Pompidou [And to the Pompidou Center]

Eh-oh, tu peux pas me laisser pisser tranquillement là? It was a woman’s voice, now less of a whisper, more of a hiss.

The voice seemed close, but I still couldn’t see anyone.

I was standing by a rail to read the words on the mural and I now had the reflex to look over it. On the other side a woman was squatting down in the corner in a small dip in the pavement. She was right below me, looking up. Her jeans down to her knees and she was peeing. I could now hear the sound of her stream against the pavement.

Oh, I said.

Arrête de me matter. Je pisse. Dégage. [Stop checking me out. I’m peeing. Go away.]

Je suis venu regarder la fresque de près. Je ne t’ai même pas vu là. [I came for a look at the mural. I didn’t even see you were there.]

Arrête de me regarder alors. Matteur. Merde. Dégage. [Well stop looking at me then. Voyeur. Fuck. Go away.]

She finished peeing and stood up and awkwardly pulled her jeans over her hips. She was clearly drunk.

Ca t’a plu alors? she spat. [Like what you saw?]

Pas très beau, I said.  [Not very nice actually.]

La prochaine fois tu ne regarderas pas. [Then don’t look next time.]

Je voulais voir la fresque de près. C’est tout. Comment savoir qu’il y avait une pisseuse dans le coin.  [I just came to see the mural up close. How was I supposed to know there was a woman pissing over here.]

T’aurais préféré un pisseur? she laughed. [Would you rather it had been a man pissing?]

Peut-être qu’un mec serait plus gracieux. [Maybe a guy would have done it more gracefully.]

PD. [Fag.]

She started to leave her dip in the pavement then stopped to look up at the mural, which destabilized her, so she held onto the railing and looked up.

Pffff, she said. C’est d’la merde. [Bunch of shit.]

She pushed off from the rail and walked away in the direction of the Pompidou Center.

I sat by the fountain to write a draft of this story. I entitled the page “Merry” since I was facing Saint Merri Church, also written Merry. I thought of that as the girl’s name, though the saint was a man. His remains are in the crypt of the church.

I went to meet Fred at the bar. It was 11:45 when I arrived, maybe closer to midnight. He wasn’t there. Or I didn’t see him. Maybe he was in the john. I didn’t go looking.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Paris Street Talk: Merry, the Mural and the Pisser (Merry, la fresque et la pisseuse) appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

This year celebrates the 30th anniversary of sanisettes, the fully enclosed individual street toilettes. Until 2006 they were entered for a fee but are since free. This is a photo of the latest generation, whose installation began in 2009.

A list of where the 400 sanisettes of Paris are found along with other toilet-related information is found here, in case you find yourself walking around with a hand-held. There’s probably also a Where to Piss in Paris app out there somewhere.

Boys, however, will still be boys, so we can all applaud the comeback of the pissoir this summer, more shameless than ever.

Here’s one on the cobblestone banks for Canal Saint Martin in the 10th arrondissement.

They are clearly not designed for girls, who are better at ducking into a crowded café with a quick smile and an eye for the WC.

The post Street Talk: Boys Will Be Boys, the Pissoirs of Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

It’s just a small detail, a spiny husk fallen from the tree, for example, but when you bend down for a closer look you realize that you never knew the tree in your street bore fruit.

You pick it up—or rather I did—and discover that for the past ten years you—or rather I—haven’t been living on a street bordered by linden trees but by something else. Linden trees don’t bear fruit like this, and certainly not in late summer, and certainly not with a spiny husk that contains what turns out to be some kind of nut.

Ten years! How could I not have noticed? I thought something was strange when I stood on my balcony this afternoon and watched the Asian family who occasionally, at about 5:30, just before the garbage truck arrives, go through the garbage cans along the sidewalk. They weren’t going through the garbage today but rather were gathering something beneath the trees. I had quickly forgotten (I took this photo a few days later), however something must have stuck. Later this afternoon, returning home from buying bread at the bakery, I noticed husks on the ground. There were lots of them, beneath all the trees.

How could I have missed them? And for ten years!

One moment you’re walking beneath your lindens—yes, your lindens—on your way to buy bread, and five minutes later, demi baguette in hand, you discover that you live on a street not with lindens but with some kind of nut-bearing trees.

Your life then feels like a fraud. Mine did, at least the part that is supposedly aware of its surroundings, the part that feels at home on a street with linden trees. Lindens are frequent in Paris, including most famously in Place des Vosges and the garden of Palais Royal.

But those aren’t lindens after all. The leaves, I saw upon looking up, though heart-shaped like a linden’s, were serrated, like a scary version of linden leaves. And those spiny husks (photo left) look like something from a horror movie! How could I never have noticed them before?

Earlier in the summer I was doing research on the internet—that free-floating kind of research that I associated with the World Book encyclopedia when I was a kid, during which you forget what you were looking for but find along the way lots of details wish you could hold onto—and came across a man I have come to know as Monsieur Nature.

Mr. Nature knows all about the birds and the bees and the crops and the trees. I wrote to him and eventually enlisted him to lead me on some naturalist wanderings on the edge of the Paris region, particularly in a zone known as the Vexin Français, a regional natural park of villages and farmland north of the Seine on the edge of the Paris region, just before entering Normandy.

In my disturbed state at discovering nuts falling from what I had previously thought to be lindens, I took a close-up photo of a prickly husks, a nut and a leaf and an image of a full tree and sent them to Mr. Nature asking him to help me identify it.

“Salut Gary!,” he responded. “You’re to be excused as an urbanite! Other than the flowering of the catkins that comes at a different season from that of lindens (and that should have set you on a different path héhé…)…”

I’ve translated the above line since his message was in French. For catkins he’d written chatons, which I had to look up in my French-English dictionary. After that I had to look up catkins in my Webster’s. It means “a spicate inflorescence,” which was no help at all.

Mr. Nature went on to tell me that my linden was in fact a noisetier de Byzance, corylus colurna, known in English as a Turkish filbert. He tried to reassure me that my ignorance was excusable by telling me that the leaves of the noisetier de Byzance resemble the linden’s and that both trees often have a pyramidal shape. He added that the Turkish filbert tolerates drought and chalky, alkaline soils, as well as pollution and wind, which made them good city plants. And he informed me that the nuts are edible, which explains the family harvesting them the other day. They are, in fact, hazelnuts.

Mr. Nature sent me to the following website: www.lesarbres.fr/fiche-byzance.php
Here’s one in English: plantfacts.osu.edu/descriptions/0246-332.html

Various websites, I’ve since found, note how the Turkish filbert “resembles a linden from a distance.” (Compare the linden to the right with the filbert at the top of this blog.) But I’ve been walking walk by the trees on my street every day, 2, 4, 6 times a day! And for ten years now!

Not knowing doesn’t bother me so much as not noticing. I had never noticed how serrated the leaves are. I had never even registered that spiky husks fall in late August or early September, let alone that there are hazelnuts inside.

From my window I thought for ten years that I’ve been watching linden leaves bud in April, that I’ve been watching linden leaves’ pale green turn a deep green, that I’ve been watching linden leaves blown by the wind, that I’ve been watching linden leaves turn yellow then brown and then fall. But I haven’t been watching that all, I’ve been watching filbert leaves!

Linden flowers put off a more or less powerful scent when in tiny bloom in early summer and the fact that I had always reasoned that I didn’t smell the scent on my street because mine were of the lesser scented citified kind. It would have been much simpler to reason that they didn’t smell like lindens in early summer because they weren’t lindens at all, but that had never crossed my mind.

Several times now I’ve gone out to the Vexin Français and other greenery with Mr. Nature and have been trying to remember the names of trees, particularly that in French birch is bouleau and beech is hêtre. But it won’t stick. It isn’t a vocabulary problem it’s a natural problem. Botanical names just don’t stay with me.

I’ve repeated those names a dozen times—birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… etc. I’ve stared at a single birch for a full three minutes thinking of nothing but bouleau. But still, show me a birch and I’m likely not even to remember that it is a birch, let alone un bouleau.

I know where the ambulatory/déambulatoire is in Notre-Dame, I remember that Henri IV was assassinated in 1610, and I’m pretty good at distinguishing a Pissarro from a Sisley, things that interest me only when I’m in a particularly cultured mood but that truly don’t matter to me.

But I am very attached to trees. In an uninformed way I’m drawn to them. I’m fascinated by the ways in which they, too, live and change and suffer and survive and adapt and blossom and stay serene. I recognize that one of the wonderful things about Paris compared with, say, New York or Rome, is that wherever you go you’ll see a variety of trees: plane trees and horse chestnuts and lindens and, I now know, Turkish filberts—hazelnuts, if you like.

But I’m unlikely to remember their names. They just won’t stick in my non-botanical brain. Still, some kind of awareness remains, some kind of discovery, for having digested the disturbing fact that I no longer live on a street with lindens, I feel, as summer ends, a sense of renewal, as though I’ve moved to a new neighborhood, a new street, where hazelnuts grow, and where filbert leaves will soon be falling.

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