I had a fabulous weekend and now it’s Monday night so I’d better write about it right now or it’s gone forever, erased and replaced by new stimuli.
Thursday night I was cold and tired and already in my sweats, ready for a night of Madame Bovary and crossword puzzles, when Theo knocked on my door and poked his head in. After twelve straight hours of class and an eight a.m. class awaiting him in the morning—the French educational system is INSANE and I will go on a tirade about it when I get home—he was raring to go out on the town. So I threw on my warmest sweater and my grandfather’s old hat over my pajama shirt and we went to a bar down the street where we drank pints of Stella and exchanged stories about our rebellious younger years (wow…what kind of future awaits me if I’m having nights like this at age 21?). We got home late and both convinced each other that it was entirely unnecessary to go to class the next morning.
Thus, I had a lovely nine-hour rest, and then lazily got ready and went to my afternoon class, the three-hour travaux dirigé, which was very not-fun.
Friday night I went out to fondue with Olivier and some of his friends. Fondue, I’ve learned is a traditional French meal—not Parisian, but country-France, the France of the mountains, the France that people tell me exist outside of the city. Well, there are three types of fondue—fondue Savoyard (the French kind), Chinese fondue, and a third kind that I couldn’t understand when Olivier told me, and after having him repeat it about four times I gave up. But it exists. Anyway, there are a lot of fondue restaurants throughout Paris, most in St. Michel and most pretty tourist-y, with warm, savory scents drifting out and people huddled over the pot of melted cheese, protected from the Parisian December outside, rechauffés and happy and full. Olivier took me to a fondue restaurant, Le refuge de la fondue ( ?), in Montmartre. It was a tiny room, like most establishments up on the butte, sunken down two steps from street level, with two long tables running the length of the room, such that the people who sit against the wall have to have a waiter help them climb over the table to get to the bench. The waiters were funny and the fondue was delicious and the baskets of bread were endless and we drank wine out of baby bottles and the toilet was decorated to look like a big piece of cheese. Then we walked up to Sacre Coeur in the nighttime mist, and tried to find a cheap bar (which, if you’re interested, do not exist in Montmartre).
Saturday I found a new place. It simultaneously thrills me and breaks my heart when I discover something new in the city. How much will I never discover? Anywayyy….I went to le parc de Bercy, which is big and open and beautiful, and filled with bridges and ponds and an orangerie and oriental stylings. It is a long, narrow park, and at the end it opens up into a vast network of playing fields where young boys played rugby and kids rode on the carrousel and dogs chased each other and one homeless woman organized her enormous sacks of mysterious contents. Arena-like staircases surround the park, and I climbed up one and there was the Seine and there was a pedestrian bridge, and I crossed and stood in the middle and leaned on the railing. Bercy is way in the southeast corner, so you can see almost the whole city from that point. I silently named all the monuments that I could, which I do every time I get a good view of Paris. There are a lot of places to get good views of Paris.
Saturday night we made crepes. I’ve given Theo the impression that I’m obsessed with crepes, which I probably am, so he wikipedia-ed a crepe recipe—much to the chagrin of Yolaine, who was shocked that he didn’t use the family recipe which she has been using all her life—and we made crepes. They were good and I even managed to flip one, and we emptied the refrigerator and put whatever we could find in them.
This entry is getting long and I’m getting antsy, so I’ll up the pace.
After crepes I went out with some girlfriends, dragged them to a new quartier because I got it in my head that I absolutely cannot repeat places at this point in the game. The quartier ended up being basically empty, and we were about ready to leave, when we stumbled upon the Café Litteraire, a tiny bar with bookshelves full of old books and board games, and a concert hall down below where a jazz band happened to be playing. We played French Jenga (which, believe it or not, is much like American Jenga) with two French guys that we met there, and drank Belgian beer, and I ended up talking about Russian literature with one of the Frenchies and speaking with much authority about things I know very little about. It was a fun night. And I’m good at Jenga.
Sunday it was rainy and cold and gray, and the Seine was angry and the wind was biting, but it was the first Sunday of the month, which meant that national monuments were free, so I had to go out. I have been trying to climb up the towers of Notre Dame the first Sunday of every month that I’ve been here, but for one reason or another I’ve always been thwarted. So I set my alarm early and bundled up and went straight to the towers. I waited in line in the rain for a long time—I was too cold to check my watch, but I probably stood there for close to 45 minutes—and finally climbed up. It was beautiful. But, I hesitate to say this because it feels sad, but I wasn’t super impressed. It’s just, I see that view almost every day and it’s never any less beautiful. The inside of the tower was really cool (I honestly can’t think of another word besides cool. Sorry.), and I loved being able to see all the gargoyles and buttresses up close, and the big bell. It made me want to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame—I think the French title is Notre Dame de Paris?
Then I walked through the rain, which was slowly turning from drizzle to fat, driving, relentless drops, to the Musee D’Orsay, where there was a 45-mile long line. I stopped short to regroup, looking for a sheltered place to look at my map and find somewhere else to go, when I realized that I was standing right next to another museum, eternally ignored in the shadow of its eminent neighbor. It was the Museum of the Legion of Honnor, and it wasn’t all that interesting but it was free and it was dry and warm, and I learned some things and got to see medals that Eisenhower wore and decrees that Napoleon wrote and swords that Charles de Gaulle used. I spent a lot of time at the windows watching the people in line for the Musee d’Orsay and wondering what on earth they were thinking.
Dried and warmed, I left the museum and walked toward St. Germain. The rain had relented but it felt colder than before. I wandered the winding streets and looking in windows of boutiques and bakeries, and ended up stumbling upon a museum down a tiny alleyway. It was the Musee Delacroix—apparently Delacroix’s old apartment/studio—and it was filled with his paintings and his sketches and letters he wrote to friends. It was very warm in that museum and it made me think fondly of Delacroix, who I had never been very attracted to before. It seems like he was a very nice man.
Then I went to Montparnasse and found one of the cafes that Hemingway was known to frequent—Le Select. I sat on the terrasse chauffée (heated terrasse) and drank a mug of hot wine with cinnamon and a thick orange slice floating, half-submerged, in the steaming liquid. I read A Moveable Feast while I drank, and read about streets that I had just been on or that I walk down everyday. Maybe it was the wine or the warmth, but at that moment, I agreed passionately with every word that Hemingway wrote and I wished that he was sitting next to me and I almost started talking to the man next to me, imagining that maybe he could be like Hemingway and we could have a conversation like the dialogues in Hemingway’s stories. I read with my map next to me, and every time he mentioned a street I didn’t know I looked it up and figured out whether I’d been there or not.
Then back out in the cold. I walked down the block to look at another restaurant that Hemingway had been known to frequent, La Cloiserie des Lilas, which I didn’t go to because it was too expensive, and where he wrote the entirety of The Sun Also Rises. The rain had stopped but a violent wind had replaced it and I walked the whole way with my hand on top of my hat. As I walked I narrated what I saw in my head, and tried to use the kind of simply, precise wording that Hemingway would use.
Then I bought a raspberry tart from a beautiful patisserie in St. Germain and the woman behind the counter wrapped it up in a lovely pink box and I carried it home with me and changed out of my rain-soaked clothes and curled up on my chair and ate the tart.
Yolaine is home now. She did all the laundry that has been sitting in my basket that she told Theo to do while she was gone and that he never touched.
Today was sunny and bright, but I had class all day at the Sorbonne. Still, I did manage to get to Parc Monceau for a bit and walk through the winding paths and watch the little kids on recess from a nearby school, all in matching uniforms, screaming and running in all directions and so feverishly consumed by what they’re doing—chasing a ball, trying to catch up with a friend, screaming and flailing aimlessly—that they don’t notice me walking through and crash into me.
In other news, my internet stopped working again. This will be posted tomorrow morning. Goodnight.
