“Would you be sad,” I said to the boy, “if I blogged this photo?” and he came over to look over my shoulder. “Mon sublime torse,” he said, considering. “Mon beau caleçon, chuis en train de lire mon bouquin de Romain Gary.” “Vas-y,” he said, “blog it.”

Boys. They know things, some of them, and some of the things they know are how to jump thin-sliced potatoes and string beans in a pan with bits of onions burnt like sugar.

We are trying, these days – and really there is only today left – to eat all the food in the house before we leave.



The giant chèvre went towards a goat cheese and tomato tart. We thought there would be leftovers, but we ate the whole thing while France scored three goals against Italy in the football Wednesday.

We unearthed, in the freezer, (Olive’s stepmother has a penchant for frozen foods), (few of them ice cream), turkey fillets for a mustard–crème fraîche stir-fry and cauliflower florets for sauté-ing in butter. We haven’t done too badly, altogether, with the surprises in the deep-freeze, but I think the frozen blocks of cream-flavoured spinach are going to have to go in the bin.

What I want to know, though, is how many cans of tuna a kitchen cupboard can hide. We had a tuna salad one afternoon, and then another. We are having penne in a tuna-tinged sauce tonight. There are – remember the salad! Remember the salamo! – tuna leftovers still for the train tomorrow.

This just in! – and oh, is this, this sweet, instant gratification, what it’s like to live on a twenty-four-hour news channel – This just in!: The boy has just cleaned us out of chorizo.

Upstairs there’s Suzon, whom everyone calls Mamoun; and Annie, who invited us for a drink; and Johnny, who’s a cat. Annie upstairs invited us for a drink on their cool-tiled terrace, so we took the stone steps up with a plate of cake.

Suzon is ninety-nine this year. Her hair is white and wispy all over. She remembers being in Northampton in 1965.

Annie – (she is a daughter. There are other daughters, even daughters of daughters – it gets that way when one is ninety-nine.) –

Annie punctuates her sentences with drags on thin brown cigarettes that smell like cigars. “Je me suis mariée tôt,” she says. Drag. “Trop tôt.” Grin. When she got married – the first time, anway – she told her father she wasn’t having the wedding in church. “Your husband,” he said, a staunch Catholic, “will always be to me your concubine; your children bastards.” She laughed, Annie did. Her father went to her civil ceremony. He went on to love her husband. He loved her children.

They found an old family photo album recently. “Dans la famille,” Annie said, “il y avait de jolies femmes.” She smoked. “Pas toutes.” “Il y avait aussi,” she said, “de jolis hommes.” Smile. Drag. Grin. “Pas tous.”

She has a laugh like someone who has long smoked thin brown cigarettes that smell like cigars. Her terrace looks out over ours, over the sea.

We went for a walk in the gardens at the Domaine du Rayol. I packed two coconut macaroons for just-in-case.



Someone lived here, once upon a time, several someones, in the big house, where they had dinners, probably, silverware and candles, and white dresses. There’s a beach house, too, with steps down to the sand, and a gardener’s house with vines growing over the doors. They have a hunting house, where once upon a time there were rifles, probably, and leather stained a deep brown from use.



They’ve organised the grounds now for a walk-about among the gardens of the world. There are cacti now – I don’t know if there were cacti then – and banana trees and palms like home. Surprisingly, there were very few bugs that bit.



We strolled in the shade of the great, sweet-smelling eucalypti. We took the dirt and stone path all the way to the edge of the world, where the trees leaned over the shimmering sea. Water like this on a day like this, you want to float on your back all the way till the never-end.

I’d wondered if, after a week and some of the parents – adults, you know – around all the time, if we would turn, in our sudden solitude, savage; if we would fight each other for the last Coco Pops cereal bar left in the pantry; if, in stinking rags, we would burn the house down and dance around the bonfire.

Turns out the house is still standing, we do the laundry and hang it out to dry under the low fig tree, and we make tarts, sweet and savoury. There is ratatouille tasty one night and tastier the next. On Mondays or Wednesdays, there may be pizza from the big red van, down in the village, next to the petanque players. The pizza is made, in his big red van, by the ex-village postman. He has a wife, a belly and a wood-burning fire in his van, this last of which sounds like just about time for the lights and sirens to start flashing “Danger, Will Robinson!” but maybe living by the sea plays down such incendiary imaginings. I suppose the man could just drive straight into the water, should things go awry.

The tarts, the ratatouille, the thin-crust pizza – and I have just found lamb steaks in the freezer! – plus, there are yoghurt and fresh peaches at breakfast, or figs and Fjords after dinner. I don’t know what a Fjord is, exactly – it is a cousin of yoghurt, clearly, but other than that, well. The little Fjord pot reads “spécialité laitière” – “dairy product”, essentially, or, if accompanied by spirit fingers, “dairy specialty” – which is not so much help, and the only other hint is the picture, on the peel-off top, of two men dressed as penguins. What?, French people, what? I have the special yoghurt-like tendencies, I have the penguins, but I cannot tell you more. Olive’s father and stepmother left the fridge full of Fjords before they parted for the big city sometime last week. While they were still here, though, the stepmother would say, after dinner: “Quelqu’un veut un dessert ?” Her hands were usually clasped, at this point. She was calm, always, and I realise now what I couldn’t quite put my finger on then – the strange something in the air – it was that she was without the excitement dessert usually brings. “Quelqu’un veut un dessert ?”, she would say, then she would pause before saying: “Moi, je voudrais un Fjord.”

I tell you what, I’m not denigrating the Fjord – the Fjord is nice and all, it goes very well with fig jam or a slice of banana tart – but the Fjord, he is no Tropézienne.



The Tropézienne you get from Filigheddu the boulangerie-pâtisserie. You stop on the way down to the beach, you tell the nice lady to reserve you one for the way back up, you pick it up in a pink box on the way back up. Later, up the hill, after post-beach showers, you eat it cold from the fridge. The Tropézienne is pastry and cream, see, so you eat it cold from the fridge. You eat it sitting down, for if you were standing up you would FALL OVER from the WONDROUSNESS your mouth is experiencing.

It is like a giant chouquette – do you know the chouquette ? – the chouquette is a small ball of pastry with bits of sugar embedded in the top. It is just light enough – for otherwise it would float off into the wind with fairy wildflowers in the summer – and just sweet enough. You cannot have just one chouquette, and they don’t sell them singly, anyway. You buy a paper bag of chouquettes from the nice baker man, you wait in line and hope they don’t sell out by the time you get to the head of the queue –

the Tropézienne, hence, is like a giant chouquette, sliced in half horizontally, and then filled with cream. Cream like clouds, cream like a blanket of clouds. So, okay: a cream sandwich, basically. I know it doesn’t sound like something special, but it is, friends, it is. And it’s not rocket science, but it sure can send a girl to the moon.

We swam out to the float today. There is a float, see, floating, bobbing, all inviting-like. We swam out to the float and clambered on top to sun ourselves. We looked over the edge to watch the fish swim by.



Shit. I mean, COME ON. There’s no fancying it up: the beach is great. It is a little one, but it is all we need. The umbrellas are stripey. The bar sells ice creams. The rocky cliff turns into steps. If we are lucky, (we are lucky), we have remembered to stop at the boulangerie for a raspberry beignet and a raisin snail.

A less lucky day, there were jellyfish instead of jam doughnuts.

Today was not that day: today we swam out to the float and watched the fish swim by. The water is calm and clear these days, clear enough that you can see to the bottom, where it looks like someone – the lobster-in-charge, I assume: he would have a moustache, like someone in charge – has raked the ground clean. The fish were silvery, or maybe it was just the light.

There is always sun, you wake and there is sun. There is sun through the branches of the fig tree, there is sun on the terracotta roofs descending toward the beach, there is sun on the terrace, on the mustard-yellow railing with its metalwork like waves. You watch the sun make its way left to right across the sky, you learn to tell the time of day based on how much sun is left on the wide wooden planks.



Monday we took the train from Paris to the coast. “En direction d’Hyères,” the conductor said at every stop, and I kept thinking he was saying “En direction d’hier” – towards yesterday. Truly we are timeless here, in these hills that are populated only halfway up, the rest of the space rocky and wild. The plants are tenacious, the trees scratchy-barked. Butter-yellow flowers with pointy petals grow straight out of stone. “C’est là où on a vu un sanglier, une fois,” Olive said, pointing to the curve in the road, and I peered up the scrubby slopes for a boar pawing the ground, snorting fire.

I never know what time it is, what day. “On est vendredi aujourd’hui ?” I ask, and the response is a general “Oui, euh, ben, je sais pas, oui.” We wake late, we make a small coffee, we make another small coffee, we stretch. We are summer inside and out, the sun is in us and around us, and there is the water, the sea, the big blue; there is the Mediterranean, deep blue, cobalt, azure, marine – of course – on and on till it turns into sky.



Down at the beach – and it is curious: you have to go uphill to go downhill – but it is worth it, because the walk downhill takes you through the village, with its one restaurant, its one newsagent, its one little boulangerie-pâtisserie, its one littler butcher – and downhill through the village means stopping, on the way, at Filigheddu the boulangerie-pâtisserie for an eggplant fougasse or an almond croissant, or a small paper sack of Smurf-flavoured Haribo –

– and this reminds me that I was talking to Mowmy this morning and she said, “Oh! So it is a really small village.” “Yah,” I said, “small.” “So every morning you go down to the beach and buy fish from the fishermen?” she said, because she is curious in so many ways. “Mmm,” I said, and I liked her very much, “no.” “There is a supermarket,” I said, “a small one.” “Cheh,” she said, “so boring.” –

down, I was saying, at the beach, one of us has a blue towel and the other a red one, we scream and laugh in the waves, and the sea, for all its rich, rippling blueness from up in the hills, drips off our skin, glistening, transparent. There is a painter in Alessandro Baricco’s Océan Mer who paints with sea water. His paintbrush sweeps across the canvas, the wind dries the surface, nothing remains that can be seen.

Rain today. We took the curve at the house with the tree, we drove straight past the Plage de Rohanic with the sailboats lined up by the road. We are taking the highway for Toutes Directions. Paris this afternoon, and then the three o’clock train heading south. I have a spider bite on my finger, and sand in my shoes.

There is a thing they say here when there is a chance of blue, and it is “Regardez, la culotte de gendarme.” Look, they say, pointing at the patch of blue in the sky, a policeman’s underpants. The other day Claire, who keeps an eye out for a promise of gorgeousness, tried to convince us the clouds would clear. “Y’a la culotte de gendarme, là,” she said, and, following the line of her finger, we squinted into the sky. “Là,” Olive said, “c’est plutôt le string de gendarme.”

This weekend, however, the weather has been bliss for city visitors. There were jams and ciders and piggy bits to be had at the Saturday market in Penvénan, and then, back home, lunch at the blue table in the garden. We had a full house this weekend, sisters, cousins, all; Marie in a striped shirt, Laurence with her blond hair held in place with a pencil, Christophe who carried the baby on his shoulders, Samia laughing and pretty, Maïa reaching for the dandelions.



We took rue des Dunes down to the beach, we lounged on great flat rocks, we were sea lions in roses and stripes, the sun seeped into our skin and made us lazy. Claire had brought chocolate. Olive found a prawn, and then a one-armed crab. I lay till a cramp settled in my arm, and then I went to the water’s edge. The rocks there are raggier, craggier. The tide was coming in.

Sunday the picnic on the beach, by the bay of pebbles. We climbed the slippery slope to the top of the cordon of smooth stones. From the wrong side of the wall, the cordon looks like a cordon. From the top of the cordon, the stones slope down again on the other side to a white beach, to water blue and calm and clear. “Oh,” I said, and I said: “Wow.”

The picnic unfurled, from an old Picard surgelés bag: rillettes d’oie, pâté au poivre vert, oeufs dur et mayonnaise, machin de légumes, on and on, the baguettes, the pots of crème au chocolat, the yoghurts, the selection of Lindt. We cast no shadows; the sun was on our heads.



I was peering into a rock pool later, while Georges pointed out the shrimp, the skittering crabs, the shy fish. Georges knows things, he wears his glasses halfway down his nose, he fixes model boats on a rainy afternoon. He pried berniques off the rocks with a Swiss army knife to show me the gloopy, sucking beings inside. He overturned a large rock to find a delicate, many-armed anemone, green with purple points on the end. With a small stone, he gently cracked open the shell of a hermit crab (le bernard ermite, they call them, imagine!, Hermit Bernard) and then presented Bernard with a new home. “Regarde,” he said, and I squatted to watch the crab move in. One pincer, two, and the creature popped his head in, tight. He was probably already preparing afternoon tea for a hearty housewarming.

Nights, the stars are suspended in a champagne jelly sky. Yesterday, coming home from rowdy, crowdy dinner at Le Hangar, the swish neon sign at L’Albatros fizzed and spluttered into midnight. “Sept voitures à L’Albatros !” Olive said, marvelling. It was, after all, Friday night on the sea.

In fact at lunch there were sardines grilled on the grill outside, while the rain fell and fell and fell today. Mowmy rang this afternoon, I took the phone into the study so I could lie on the covered bench, and she said, “What have you been doing?” “Eating,” I said, and I could smell they were making coffee in the kitchen. I don’t remember now if I also told her there is dessert at every meal. Sometimes dessert is a square of Lindt, but sometimes dessert is a big blue bowl of sweet red fruits served with fresh cream from the Tuesday market at Tréguier. The other day, after dinner, there was the Breton delicacy called a kouign amann, which was layers of sweet crunchy business. “This is butter cooked in butter,” Georges said, “and then dusted with sugar.” I believe I said: “On y va.”

The butter, OH.

It is salty and somehow sweet at the same time. You put it on a bit of crusty baguette and you find you’ve forgotten the jam but it doesn’t matter. Claire, the other day, serving up a bowl of cauliflower and sliced potatoes, was telling us about cooking cauliflower in the microwave oven. Put the cauliflower in a plastic bag, she said, and poke holes in the bag. La la la, (I forget what exactly she said, because I have a mind like a sieve, a mind like a plastic bag with holes poked in it, anyway the point is), she said, and the cauliflower’s done. “And then you toss it in a pan with butter,” Georges said. “Well,” she said, “et puis je le rechauffe avec du beurre.”

So:

“Eating,” I said to Momwy, and she seemed to expect more. “Sometimes we walk,” I said, magnanimously, and she said, “You go jogging?” Clearly something wrong with the line. “It is raining anyway, Mowmy,” I said, reasonably, “we are not going to go walking anytime today.” “You are telling me it is going to rain all afternoon?” she said, and I said, “Yup.” “Eh,” she said, “it is just like London.”



Truly, it is just like London here, except not at all, and I don’t wake at half-past seven, alarm or no. It is quiet at night here, and dark so that the first night I opened my eyes to the nothing, and thought I had gone blind. There are no clocks anywhere. That first morning I slept till Claire put the music on, very loud, downstairs. We stumbled down to coffees, to juices, to fresh crêpes from the local boulangerie. It was just after one in the afternoon.



Just like not in London, we take the boat out onto the open blue on a nice day. Days like that, when the blue stretches out and out to kiss the horizon, you wonder how the raindrops fell all day from the leaves in the garden, nonstop, the day before. We sat, me and Claire, half-in, half-out of the sun on the flat rocks, there, through the pine trees, while the boys cut through the water with haughty sails.



Meanwhile, I’d brought all these books, of course, these heavy tomes I figured I’d otherwise fall asleep reading on the Tube, but instead I am working my way through the collection of Tintins at the house. Tonnerre ! I am learning to say, when something dastardly happens, or, if the something is more dastardly than normal, Tonnerre de tonnerre ! I have learned Sapristi ! From Le Lotus Bleu I have learned Mille milliards de samouraïs !

One afternoon it rained, in drizzles and in sheets, it rained all day as if we were fishermen’s wives with naught to do but sit at home and wait. We drove out to Paimpol, where the rain fell on the little port, on the local hotel looking out onto boats white and green and yellow. La vareuse, a hardy overshirt for seafaring folk.



We walk along the coastline, alternatively blue or grey or seaweed green. We balance on the craggy tips of black rocks, we slip on mossy stones. We discover clear, quiet rock pools of transparent shrimp. La vase, the sludgy, sandy mud that squelches beneath our feet. Le gué, a narrow, uneven path, a secret lane between two coasts, that reveals itself when the tide goes out.



Yesterday we walked back halfway from Plougrescant.

– funny, these small-town names: Gonver, where a muppet is mayor; Finistère, where everyone stealths along in trench coats and dark glasses; Buguélès, as if your every entrance is announced by scouts in shorts, in a small brass band –

I was saying.



Yesterday we walked back halfway from Plougrescant. We had just had coffees and crêpes of salted butter caramel on the terrace at Le Gouermel – oh, these crêpes, sweet and salty and crunchy and soft all at the same time, then Claire turned her back and licked her plate – we finished off our lunch, then we watched the tide slowly creeping in. Heading back towards Port Blanc, Georges dropped us off just after the little house and its bushes bursting with hydrangeas, and we ran down the hill till laughter threatened to make me lose my step. La hortensia, the great thick blooms on every street, in every house, it seems, in deep pink or lilac, in magenta, in blue.

We found a field growing artichokes, the sturdy stalks ending in an explosion of purple-green flower. The cows meandered up to us. They were white and curious. Me too, I am curious, but look where it gets me, for, trying to scale a grassy bank to reach the massive bales of hay, I planted my foot firmly in a prickly gathering of nettles. “Attention aux orties !” Olive said, but it was too late. “Ils piquent,” he said, just as my foot started to sting. “Mother!” I said. “Fucker!” I said, and I would have said more, and in French, had I remembered, at that moment, how. “Bordel de merde de... pute... de...,” I say, because I forget the order of things, even though I remember it ends, triumphantly: “A queue !”

But, so.

The artichokes, the cows, the nettles. We walked westwards till we came to the soft sand the colour of sand-coloured fish.



We eat like kings, like fisherman kings, like fisherkings. Le rouget, drizzled with olive oil and baked for seventeen minutes. Le maquereau, marinated overnight in muscadet, and popped in the oven with tomatoes and melting onions. Le lieu jaune, baked with pats of salty local butter. One night we had great fire-orange crabs, bigger than my head. Right now, I know, there are sardines in a brown casserole in the fridge. They have been marinating in lemon juice and salt since yesterday. The fisherwoman at the Port Blanc market has sad eyes and rubber boots. She is lean up and down, with a big laugh. Her hair, cropped close, is white-blond from the sun and the sea.



So the holidays are upon us. The house is stirring now. Hopes are high for a pot of Malo yoghurt and a grand dollop of confiture de fraises de Plougastel.

We arrived in Roscoff early Monday morning. We came off the boat and had my passport checked by a tubby man in a denim Tex Avery button-down. Just after seven in the morning on a Monday, Roscoff was still but for the seagulls calling in the wind. The harbourfront hotels were quiet; everyone at the Écume des Jours, it seemed, was asleep. The signs were still up from the weekend fête de l’oignon rosé, but there were no lone farmers wiping away stray tears, nary a papery onion skin being blown along in the breeze.

Olive found a boulangerie, and we sat, apple juice, water, two croissants and a weathered wooden bench, facing the water while his fever died down again. We found an open café later, one of two, by the small streets of the old town, just in time for morning coffees and a morning drizzle. “Il pleut,” I said, but the locals just smiled at each other and said, “C’est la Bretagne.”

Olive’s mum and stepfather came to get us shortly, by the roundabout and the friterie. There was fish soup and rouille for lunch in Locquirec, that first afternoon, and then I fell asleep in the car, as I do. When I woke up we were turning left, and left, and left again for home.

It’s not so hard getting used to running on Paris time, so that where once upon a time I couldn’t help but arrive five minutes early, I now turn up eight after the hour for a one-p.m.-ish brunch date. We sat in the Saturday sun, Maud and me, and there were the pigeons flying about ’round Place Saint-Sulpice, and the woman and her quilted Chanel handbag on the rattan café chair next to me. My Orangina winked, catching the light.

Saturday night we turned left into a secret, the streets were shining from rain and the city, we turned left, me and the boy, and I was wearing a magenta dress, we turned left for rue de la Main d’or, dark but for the glow at the Petits Joueurs. Inside, drawings on the walls, and a fillette de vin on our small square of table. Olivier is the chef with the belly and the ponytail, the dark eyes. With delicate fingers he garnishes the greens at the bar just before he calls out, “En sortie !” If you are lucky, it will be your dinner en sortie de la cuisine, a salad with grilled chorizo, or a duck confit hot and salty with golden potatoes crispy just so.

In Paris, I stretched and blinked into the softness of Saturday afternoon. The rain’d stopped by then, and Julia Sarr was singing, low, in the still air. It was that kind of stillness, you know?, that floating bliss?, and for a second I wasn’t sure if I was still dreaming.

There were pizzas and Prosecco later, a train and a train away, and then the winged boy in the Bastille, golden in the night.

Sunday morning, I was reading comics in bed while the boy in the kitchen called out to ask if I wanted a Nutella tartine or a raspberry one. “Tous les deux,” I said, and then he brought out a pot of tea as well.

Seems like spring has sprung, finally, so it is warm enough for a girl to walk about bare-legged in metallic purple pumps. Sunday, the 21 bus took us to the Jardin de Luxembourg, where little boys and little girls floated littler sailboats in the fountain. À pied means we followed our feet to Gérard Mulot, where the boy pointed towards the macarons and said: “Et prends un passion-basilic, ou ptetre deux.” He turned his back, then—so innocent, he is! So trusting!—and suddenly we were walking out of the shop with two passion-basilic, an orange-gingembre, a rose-groseille, an electric citron, and a dreamy purple mûre in a little pink box. The other pink box—because you know there was another pink box—held an amaryllis, because of the name, and because the amaryllis is fresh raspberries on a macaroon floor propping up a macaroon ceiling.

Right before we left, the boy gestured at a white-haired gent and said, in my ear: “C’est lui.” “Monsieur Mulot?” I said. “Oh my god,” I said, because sometimes you get so excited you can’t speak French, “this is so huge! Mais qu’est-ce qu’on doit faire avec ces renseignements??” “We should take a photo!” I said, and the boy laughed, and then gently but firmly steered me outside.

This reminds me that a couple of weeks ago in London, the boy leaned across the table at Carluccio’s and very quietly said, “There is a pop star sitting right behind you.” So calm, he is. It turned out it was M.I.A. “Oh my god!” I said. “This is so huge! What should I do with this information?” He said I could turn around and look, but I knew if I did, she would immediately look up and make eye contact right then, I have that sort of luck. And then I would only have had the wits about me to say: “Galang galang galang.”

Sunday in Paris, with M.I.A. nowhere in sight and M. Mulot hard at work in his atelier, there was time for a late-afternoon picnic by the sea. We sat on the mossy stone by the Square du Vert-Galant on the Ile de la Cité, opposite the sapeurs-pompiers barge, while the wind blew on the water and the tourist boats sailed by. I had my shoes off, because I had nowheres else to be.

We danced; we danced and it was the new year, and there was Champagne, and Champagne, and dancing. “Tu peux m’inviter chez toi,” I said, so he did, and in the new year we walked hand-in-hand.

In the new year, phone calls were made all around town, and everyone decided to stay in bed. There was Nutella in bed, after all, and tea, and lemon yoghurt. Later, a nap later, two naps later, there were the fairy lights of rue Mouffetard, and Paris Paris Paris from the upstairs balcony. Slate roofs stretched left to right while a fine rain started to fall.



Still just a whisper into the new year, the sky was blue, and we were a good-looking group in black and red, Maud and me and Jeanne and Vio and Tom and Gregory, looking for a lunch by the Canal Saint-Martin.

Tom drove us around the city’s traffic jams, even through the Louvre a little, before we settled into Café Marly for fresh mint teas. We found a galette des rois in some boulangerie on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and—I don’t know how—managed to carry it home whole, the puff pastry and the almond and the sugared crust, without leaning in and taking a bite out of the crisp sweetness. Later, after the sun had set, up the curling staircase at Tom’s, a bed under a slanting skylight, while outside rue de la Huchette continued in non-stop lights and bustle.



The mornings and the afternoons and the nights seemed like one long beautiful day; we slept so little, and each moment melted one into the other. In that last hour before the train, Gab knew something was wrong, and Maud knew what it was. For someone who travels as much as I do, I sure haven’t gotten used to leaving.

“It is snowing!” he’d texted, an hour before I got on the train. “Du chocolat chaud alors pour le dîner,” I’d texted back. Some three hours later, we were grinning at each other through the crush at Gare du Nord, then the scooter ride, stockinged knees exposed to the winter night, and home to a bowl of Nesquik, saveur choco noisettes.



Maybe there are no words to talk about Paris. I could tell you about the Saturday snow, and I could tell you about the roast chickens and the cheese displays at the market. I could tell you about Adrien coming over to play backgammon. About Hector and the Petit Robert. About Marc, and kirs cassis, and the utter charm of the Librarie Forgeot.



I could tell about the Portuguese brandy, and black coffees out of yoghurt pots. About the fig éclair at Fauchon, about fancy sandwiches and a religieuse à la rose at Ladurée. About the crêpes, maybe—une salée et une sucrée; or about the chocolate tasting at Pierre Marcolini. I will tell about this last one, actually—only that I thought we were going to get one of each, but Gab said, because he is wise, to get four of each.



Oh, I could tell about Gab and Olive and Yaya and Gigi and Fab. About Benjamine and Nadja. About Elaine and Bob and Sascha. About Boris and Christel and Fabienne, and the fury in the night. I will tell about this last one, actually—only that I was offered cocaine, and that this had never happened to me before. It was at the moment that the music stopped, of course, also the moment that everyone happened to stop talking. “Uh. Did you just ask me if I wanted some cocaine?” I said, into the sudden silence. “Yes.” “Um. No? Thank you?” “Okay.”



I could tell, I guess, about the fashion photographer who wanted to take my picture, or about the baker down the street who invited me to Tunisia to ride a camel, and to meet his mother. “La prochaine année vous venez,” he said, and handed over a sweet chouquette.



I could tell about hours spent reading in the hammock; about Milo curling up against my back, at five in the morning, like comfort and safety. Ronronner, to purr. I could tell about the party, late night in the Nineteenth. And actually, I will tell about this last one. Paul knew someone who knew someone, and somewhere behind the big iron doors there were running steps and screaming, and no one could hear us banging to gain entry. Inside, finally, there was a ping-pong table in the shape of a country, and three girls dancing to “Hey Ya”. There was paint spilled on the concrete floors, and a large, filthy tarpaulin hanging from the ceiling. The deejay kept crashing his iBook. La traquenard, a trap.



There are all these things I could tell about, but I don’t know that any of them could really tell the story of Paris. Because how to talk about the spicy, burnt smokesmell that infuses everything; or about the sharp, waking wind as we scooter through the streets; or about all the words that remain unsaid between us?

I was quite miserable, in quite an unexpected way, coming back to London Wednesday night, even with everything I know is good here. The rain was starting on the skylight sometime ’round midnight, and I was on the phone with CC, and she said: “Maybe you could go to Paris once a month.” And the rain was still coming down ’round one in the morning, and the room was spinning, I was so fatigued, and still I was on the phone with Maud, and she said: “There is a Eurostar ticket on the SNCF Web site for seventy-five euros.”

Here. I will tell you this. The only way to come back from Paris is to get a return ticket illico presto. December thirty-first, party of the year, and we’re gonna be dancing, in Paris.

The sun was out in time for Saturday morning. We piled into the convertible, three girls and a shopping list, direction Pleaux. The bourriol stand was up and at ’em in Place Georges Pompidou, three hot plates with buckwheat crêpes in the making. I ordered six to go, and the nice man gave me one for the spot, slip slap strawberry jam and wrapped in a paper napkin.

Post-lunch, a lie-down on the lawn. At the level of the green, grasshoppers grasshop and butterflies butterfly. I fell asleep in the sun, summer under my skin, and when I woke the breeze sounded like Jill Scott. I got up, finally, and stretched, and Maud was reading on the stone steps. “Yup,” I said. “Yup,” she said.



We were invited to tea after, with the grandpère and the grandmère and the tante Malou. Down the road with the black-and-white cows, Tante Malou’s house is a yellow room and an orange room, a bird room and, upstairs, a forest room. In the garden, the pink rose bushes smelled like pink rose bushes. Like baby bears, we combed her redcurrant plants. The berries stained my fingers deep pink, no complaints here.

In a copper pot back home, redcurrant jam in the making was fuschia like my skirt.

I’m sure some people live like this all the time, but this is all very Fresh Air Fund for me. Thumbs up all around for country living: a bowl of Fruit n’ Fibre topped with Mamie Nova lychee yoghurt while the roosters mosey across the lawn in the dewy morning. Shelling walnuts at the kitchen table and then, not two hours later, espresso and a slice of walnut cake warm from the oven, with Stevie Wonder playing in the big room. Thin slices of pain bis slathered with demi-sel butter, and then dipped into a bowl of day-old vegetable soup, still good, and sweet from the leeks.

Late this afternoon, Maud came in with sweetpeas from her grandmother’s garden. I shelled them at the marble table on the porch out back, and they are being steamed, with lettuce and shallots and carrots, for dinner tonight. There is a gigot of lamb in a thick cast-iron pot on the stove, and all around me the light, delicious smell of mint just picked.

For later—because there is always a later—India and I have made a chocolate-apricot tart, which, as chocolate-apricot tarts do best, is sitting pretty.

Quelqu’un veut du café?

These days around the house we are moaning “Cindy, what have you done to me?” because Maud and I have taken to doing the 1993 Cindy Crawford “Le Grand challenge” video in the afternoons. It is Cindy Crawford in a two-piece leotard and chunky white sport shoes, jumping, lifting, lunging, and dubbed into French. Stretching, l’étirement. Weights, les haltères. When Cindy calls for a twenty-five-second break, we swig, like the toppest top-models, great mouthfuls of water from 1.5-litre bottles of Volvic.

The sun is out today, though, so in lieu of sweatin’ to Cindy, I thought it would be appropriate to take a gander in the countryside. Pink on pink and a straw hat from the side table.



Left out of the big gates brought red tractors and an old farmer, wildflowers in purple and yellow, a woman climbing down from a cherry tree. In the bushes, sometimes, a something scurried. There was the smell of freshly mown fields, and a wood fire somewhere in the distance, and cows on a dirt road.



The way back was everything in reverse, of course, the smell of cows on a dirt road, and a wood fire somewhere in the distance, and freshly mown fields. Then through the large iron gates and into the big room for tea.

In the country we leave the doors open, the big one out front and the big one out back, and sometimes it’s the chimneysweep who stops by, and sometimes it’s Maud’s grandmother with a bag of cherries, impossibly red and unstoppably sweet, and sometimes it’s cousin Benoît come to cook us a truffade. Chimneysweep, le ramoneur.

The last so many days in France, I’ve been trying to keep all the genders straight; truly, gendered nouns are the bane of my French-speaking life. Maud says I get them wrong une fois sur deux, which is probably about right, but goddamn it, there’s no bloody logic to explain why a forest is feminine and a choice is masculine. Our lunch today near undone me, what with the endive-walnut-bleu d’Auvergne salad, and the tomato-tomme salad, and the spinach stirfried with garlic and lemon, and the herring and shallots and dill, and the bowl of bitey radishes. Shallot, une echalote. Endive, une endive. Zucchini, la courgette. All these nouns, and there’s only so far you can go trying to stifle the gender in a muffled cough: mrfradis, hrmendive.

My gut feeling said the radish—in a deep pink dress and a flouncy green sunhat—would be feminine, but no. Radish, le radis. In the great vegetable village in my head, the radish is now a dandy in a sharp pink suit and a green fedora, cane optional. It’s clear that the endive is feminine, because the endive is the village wetnurse. Similarly, it is clear that asparagus is feminine, because the asparagus are the gossipy aunts at tea. Asparagus, une asperge. Maud wanted to know what spinach is, but spinach is nothing, because spinach is what the other vegetables grow in their vegetable gardens.

But where I was going with this is, it is good when all sorts of people stop by, as long as none of those people is the lettuce come to kill us. The lettuce story is, there is a stone fountain in the big garden which holds not a fountain but several massive gorgeous heads of lettuce. A couple of nights ago we were clearing out the fridge for a snacky dinner of leftovers thrown together, and what is nice to go with a snacky leftovers dinner of cheeses and saucissons and jambons both blanc and de pays is a fresh salad, which is what started the madness.

I asked if it was too late to go out and get a head of lettuce, because it was after eight, when, clearly, the lettuces are already asleep. “No,” Maud said, “they are already sleeping.” And I was all warm and fuzzy inside with how French people and Chinese people have a shared mythology, when it became quite clear that in fact French people were mocking Chinese people, because then Maud handed me a knife and said: “Go get a lettuce.” And then there was all sorts of nervous giggling and knife-gesturing, and then Maud said: “Go get a lettuce,” for she is single-minded, this one. Bloodthirsty and single-minded.

We stood in the doorway, finally, while India marched out into the dusky garden, dagger in hand. And her figure got smaller and smaller as she walked away from us and toward the dry fountain. And it was very quiet, except for my cloth shoes on the stone steps as I fidgeted from one foot to the other. India bent over into the lettuce bed and somewhere inside me there was a very little scream, because I could see the big green leaves reaching up and out to envelop her and swallow her. I could see the big green leaves like big green leafy hands, and I could see her tumble in, and I could see her legs kicking desperately in the air as her muffled shouts echoed into the night.

At the kitchen table minutes later, the lettuce was cold and crisp, sweet, barely dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette. Lettuce, la laitue.

We like the country when it is sunny, but we like the country when it is rainy, too, because then it is time for Maud to start the fire in the big room, and then we sit around all day.

It was raining when I woke this morning, and it continued to rain as we breakfasted on coffees and teas, on chocolate muesli and spoonfuls of yoghurt and apricot jam. The rain came straight down in white lines, and we watched through the kitchen window, me and Dartagnan, and he miaowed and it was hard to tell if it was because he wanted out or because it was also breakfasttime for black cats.



Monday morning we woke early to go to the market in town. Maud was one with the country roads, and we whipped round the green fields in her jaunty, junky Samba before pulling up the narrow stone paths in Pleaux. “I am going to be calm,” I said, but then, holy crap!, there were the wooden cages of chickens and rabbits and little yellow ducklings, and all restraint was lost.



At the fortnightly market:

there are sausages and round zucchini and rattan chairs and French-housewife aprons and a pink T-shirt that says Horse Fashion;

the fruit women have lips red like the summer cherries they sell;

the fish lady catches glistening trout from a tank on her truck bed, and slaps them over the head with a short wooden stick. I’d been warned, but I said “Oh!” all the same when the smack came;

we bought honey from Madame Rivière, the honey maker. One pot of miel toutes fleurs, because it has a pretty name, and one pot of treacly dark miel de chataignier, because it is hands-down my favorite honey, honey.



The triumph of the market means that back home, there is baked trout for now, a cherry clafouti for later, and homemade apricot jam for days on end. It’s not as if all we do in the country is sit about and eat—

well—

okay—

fine.

But when it is not tartines à volonté, there is piano-playing, and card tricks, and horoscopes in the free Shopi magazine, and some of us knit, and some of us do the quizzes in old issues of French Elle. And I am learning all sorts of useful things, like what to do with baked trout two days after, and the answer is, trout and spinach pie, easy-peasy, with eggs and cream and milk and curry powder mixed together in a big aluminium bowl.

What to do after trout and spinach pie is easy-peasy, too, and it is this: espressos and squares of Poulain dark chocolate, and Virginia Rodriguez on the stereo, and falling asleep in the low corduroy chairs next to the crackling fire.

It’s sometime in the morning, I suppose, I don’t know. I haven’t looked at a clock in days, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because I don’t have anywhere to be but right here right now. We’re in the large, open kitchen at Maud’s house in Prades—I’m at the solid, knotty table, and Maud is up and about making a clafouti with cherries we picked up yesterday from the market in Pleaux. We have Jorge Ben Jor on, because I love this album, but also to drown out the feeble buzzing of a dying fly. The fly is one of eleven fat, black spots on a roll of flypaper that has been unraveled along the wire of a pendant lamp as a warning to other flies. Our tribal warning is ineffective; the flies fear nothing, and buzz and land where they will.

Our train pulled into Laroquebrou late Sunday. We were three to descend toward the small station light glowing yellow in the deep black night. A taxi ride round the winding country roads, and then we tumbled into the house, Maud and India and me, and we breathed in the house smell. “Tea?” Maud said. “Water and sleep,” I said, so of course in minutes we were sitting down to a pot of tea, a baking tin of Angéla’s chocolate cake, and a good slab of Cantal. “On a trouvé le fromage,” I said, “ou bien le fromage nous a trouvé,” because this, if you will remember from such episodes as last summer, is le fromage qui bouge tout seul. “Some bread maybe?” Maud said, and I went toward the bread drawer. “I like that you remember where things are,” Maud said, but of course I remember where things are, c’est dans la boîte quoi.



I was talking to CC on the phone yesterday, and she said, “You’re going to use your UK visa to spend all your time in Paris.” Well...yeah. Because, hot damn, Paris.

A week ago I packed up the Brooklyn house and said good-bye with little sadness, because sometimes it is just time to pack up and go, and, anyway, it is hard to wallow in grey nostalgia when a girl has a one-way ticket to Paris.



Paris is la fête de la musique the day I arrive, a bal musette in the courtyard of the Mairie du deuxième arrondissement, a woman in a giraffe dress and mascara’d eyes. We are all dancing, the tango, the rhumba, the farandolle, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the steps, because under the stars and the blimp in the sky and the strings of multicolored lights, the dance is the dance is the dance.

Paris is the drums at la Place Sainte-Marthe after midnight, deep and thumping and unstoppable up the street, and a couple kissing under a streetlamp, and a stumbling drunk, and Chinese families hanging out of their windows, in pyjamas or half-dressed, above rue Sainte-Marthe, watching the hullabaloo from overhead.

Paris is Moots and Panda and Magdalena and Fab. Manel, Sophie, Tania. Flojo and Chris and Philippe and Karen. Rebekah, Simon, Olive, Rémi. Gigi, Lili, Benjamine, Jeanne. Louis qui est Lui, Bastien qui est Spider, Paul qui est Pol qui est Tige. Of course Paris is Maud and Hector and Klem and Gabriel.

Paris is an afternoon siesta after an overnight flight, drifting in and out of sweet sleep while Gab plays a languid Spanish something that floats on the blue sky above Belleville. “C’est un peu le bonheur ici,” I said, because it was true. Later, we were lounging about, and the sky outside was white like the apartment walls, almost-white on off-white and the sunlight streaming in white-white, like starting anew.



Paris is hanging on tight on the back of Gab’s scooter as we scoot around the city, if this is not Paris I don’t know what is. The scooter is called Shadow, and Shadow needs a little tune-up, because at the moment he goes somewhat faster than a bicycle and groans uphill. “Faut pas être trop pressé,” Gab says, which is fine by me, because it is summer in Paris and I am in no hurry to get anywhere. We weave in between cars and putt along the Seine, we lean around corners and rattle about on cobblestone streets. Sometimes we stop for a crêpe jambon-fromage and sometimes we carry a bag of pastries from the swank Aoki Sadaharu on Boulevard Port Royal. Sometimes we are reflected in shop windows as we zip past, a silver helmet and a rose-print skirt and a big cheesy grin but I can’t help it. And the scooter ride around Paris is something, but the scooter ride around Paris at night after the dance, when the air is cool and quiet, when you turn your head to see the deep yellow city lights pulling away behind you, well there is a feeling somewhere inside you, and that feeling may well be l-o-v-e.

Paris is a picnic in the Jardin de Tuileries with Maud and Hector, after a stop into Ladurée for fancy-pants sandwiches and macarons de luxe. I tried to tell the story about the wide-mouthed frog, and—who knew?—the story exists in French. Hector saw me one histoire de la grenouille à grande bouche and upped me le clown qui s’est réveillé et qui se sentait tout drôle.

Paris is trying to bake a cheesecake and a chocolate tart, converting all measurements from American to French, and I am afraid I am turning into a two-trick pony with these baked goods, but what can you do when your fan club puts in a request. Where condensed milk as I have known it comes in a little can, in Paris the condensed milk comes in a tube that you can suck on. I am not making this up, this is a true story. I tried to squeeze out a little taste onto my fingertip, delicate-like, you know, like a jeune fille bien élevée, but Hector said the right way was to put the whole thing to my mouth and suck. When in Paris....



Paris is knowing where I’m going, rue de l’Atlas to rue du Buisson Saint-Louis, hang a left on rue Saint Maur, hang a right on rue du Faubourg du Temple, et le Monoprix nous y voilà for wine and yoghurt. This is what else I know: In Belleville, the corner in front of Wing Seng smells like durian. No one will share the durian with you, so it is best to leave it alone, but rambutans are innocuous and just five euros a kilo to satiate a craving. On rue Saint Maur, stop for a pain suisse and a bar of chocolate at the first boulangerie, not the second. In the Marais, the Muji shop is just down the street from the falafel joint; the falafel joint is just down the street from the park in which to eat a falafel sandwich in the shade; the park is just down the street from Le Palais des thés; and in Le Palais des thés, they have tea for the sampling, cold and light on a hot day.



Paris is out and out and out, and then hot and tired but out some more, but then Paris is also coming back in, and being quiet with a book, sometimes, or a movie, sometimes. If you are lucky, Paris is walking about in the cool after an afternoon storm, and then coming home at night to find a surprise companion for a mousse au chocolat and a DVD rental.

Chez Gab on ne dort pas avant trois heures, and mostly Paris is going to bed around four, or staying up talking till the sky starts to lighten again and the birds chirp hello. We rested one on top of the other, and the moon made her way from left to right in the sky, low and round and bright. Paris, then, is waking at half past noon, because why not.



Paris is the Friday market in Belleville, people pushing, trolleys and bags and baskets, melons and tomatoes and beans, cheeses and meats and fish, dresses, shoes, things. Gab walked me to the métro after, and he said, “So maybe some cherries? And maybe some figs?” and when I got back he’d gotten both, we like Gab a lot. Sunday morning some of us had a bowl of fresh figs and honey yoghurt, and a teacup of strong coffee, with La vie devant soi propped on our knees, we like Sunday mornings a lot.



Paris is picking out all kinds of treats at Gérard Mulot—a pear tart, a pistachio-grapefruit tart, a good generous helping of peach tart—and then Paris is a thé de pétasses downstairs at the Buisson. We talk about girls, Maud and Gigi and me, but we also talk about boys. And we talk about London, and we talk about Paris, and there will be visits here and visits there, we like Gigi a lot. We also like the Buisson a lot, for when there is not a thé de pétasses, there may be an apéro de connards, or chouquettes and croissants for breakfast, or a late-night petit suisse with pear jam, or a sandwich and fries from the Tunisian place round the corner on a rainy afternoon.

Paris is my own personal amazement that I speak French, and Paris is the triumph of hanging up the phone after a Whole French Conversation, without the aid of gestures or pantomimes or any kind of nonverbal cue, a Whole French Phone Conversation in which I understand everything, even a boy locking his shirt in the attic, which seems like something got lost in the translation, but which in fact is exactly what he said.



Paris is chez Gab, chez Maud, chez Benjamine, chez Philippe. Friday night, boulevard de Choisy smells of roast pork. Up seven flights at Philippe’s, sourires et fous rires, we noshed while the saffron curtains billowed in the wind. The storm came down, then, and the sky far in the distance was purple with thick rain.

Leaving Paris Sunday afternoon made us stomachaches and bad moods, even if we were heading for the country, and even if the country is brown butterflies and giant heads of lettuce in the sprawling garden, and maybe sixteen teapots in the kitchen cupboard, and volcano stones in the big room. There is more to say about the country, of course, but it is hours now since I started this post, and I have been in my pyjamas all day, mais enfin ce sont les vacances quoi.

The sky was blue all day today like fortune smiling on our heads. We are lucky kids, me and Tom and Maud, being out of school and out of work.



Tom called this morning with an invitation to MoMA. “And I have a car,” he said. “So we don’t want to go to MoMA,” I said, “we want to go to California.” But to MoMA we headed, running a red light, speeding across the Manhattan Bridge, idling in traffic, muttering at other drivers, watching the pedestrians at the stoplights.



The new MoMA is cool, people. Really, really cool. Everybody run, don’t walk. Um, also, best to take the subway so you don’t have to pay forty-three dollars to park in a midtown garage. Yowtch. No, but, the space is incredible, what with the cut-out walls and open areas everywhere and the green helicopter hanging out. We furrowed our brows at the Pollocks, we scoffed at a goofy Dalí, we admired Ruscha’s Standard Oil Station series. In front of Leger’s “Three Women,” Tom said, “That’s sexy.” He said, “It’s like a naked tea party.”

Then we were hungry, so we drove down to Chinatown. Viola Wills’s “If You Could Read My Mind” came on the radio, which we like because of the rousing disco chorus. Maud shook her head at me and said, accusingly, “Pop junkie.” “You say it like it’s a bad thing,” I said, then leaned back and sang along: “I don’t know where we went wrong / but the feelin’s gone / and I just can’t get it back. . .”

Waiting for a table at Great N.Y. Noodletown, we looked into the kitchen in the back, where two whole pigs hung from the ceiling. They were being prepared for roasting, I think. A man was brushing them down with glistening. In my mind, I could taste the salty, crispy skin. Our waiter was a round, smiling man like a char siew bao. And the thing is, we are fond of char siew baos as is, but we like char siew baos a lot when they bring us seafood porridge, and sauteed dou miao, and stirfried eggplant with garlic, and beef in black pepper sauce.

We dropped Maud off at the Christmas tree in Washington Square Park after, and then Tom dropped me off in SoHo, where I made a quick stop in Dean and Deluca for a small loaf of cranberry bread and some fancy honey, ’cause a girl likes breakfast. Down Broadway, the evening sky was striped shades of pink like Paul Smith was in charge.

Home, showered, clean, smelling of flowers and white tea.

I’m kind of beat. This is the first quiet moment I’ve had since I got back from Paris Tuesday night. You’d think I’d be used to traveling by now, all these aller-retours in my life, but it is still a lovely surprise to me that I can wake up in one city and go to bed in quite another.

Oh, Paris. They know what they’re doing over there. And a girl sure can get up to a lot in a little more than four days, even with waking up around noon most mornings. In Paris, there was a Sunday walk along the Canal Saint Martin, with its curved wooden bridges round like pumpkins. Round one corner, the Antoine et Lili storefronts winked in pink and green and yellow. On rue du Faubourg du Temple, there was the gorgeous Sixties futuristic silver storefront of Robert et René, butchers, in which the day’s prices are announced in white plastic press-in letters on a black board: bifteacks bavette 11.40; aiguillette 11.40; divers 11.40; hache 7.13. There was a sit-down and a café crème in Les têtes brûlées, poring over some Belgian murder scandal in Paris Match. There was chancing upon the new Satrapi, which is funny and sad and good reading all around. There was staying up till three chatting with Gen, because we are girls, and we like to do so. There was picking out eight small, sweet-smelling clementines at a fruit stand and putting them in a crisp brown paper bag, feeling the comfortable heft in my hand. There was a jaunt through the parc des Buttes Chaumont, watching the ducks like white flecks on the pond. The graffitti on one pavilion read, in Chinese, “She is the luckiest one.” There was the Tunisian patisserie, where it was hard to choose. There was ice skating at the Hôtel de Ville, where Britney was blasting on the loudspeakers, and where there was a lot of falling. “J’aurai des gros bleus demain,” I said to Gab, but the bruises showed up within hours, and, man, it’s been a while since I’ve banged up my knees like this. These are some kind of souvenirs de Paris, all purple and magenta and blue, wholly frightening. There was a surprise visit from Clem, which necessitated delighted screaming down an echoing hallway, and big hugs. There was a Panda. Tuesday morning, there was a last petit suisse with some of Gab’s mum’s mirabelle jam in a blue-and-white porcelain bowl.

Nearing New York, there was the sunset from the plane, the sun orange blazing disappearing. Then there was the city, blurry spots of light through the mist and condensation. My head was pressed against the window, and I realized I was smiling, I was so happy to be home. At one point there was only a pure, smooth blackness, and I couldn’t tell what was sky and what was sea. It looked like we were descending toward water, toward nothing, really, but I didn’t feel too bad about it.

Roissy. Airport café. 11:52 a.m. Perched on a bar stool at a high round table. The leftover crusts of a prepackaged sandwich, the last cold sip of a mediocre café au lait in a paper cup. Gold tinsel garlands taped to the glass wall, the barest minimum of holiday cheer. Disembodied, unemotional, the soundtrack is a wave of flight announcements in alternating languages. I am not broken, but I am a little dented.

Early this afternoon I headed down rue du Faubourg du Temple with its Vietnamese take-out joints and and its African bric-a-brac stores and its signs for Turkish kebab sandwiches and fries. All around, a comfortable bustling neighborhoody cacophony. Through the Tenth and the Third, I skirted the Eleventh, flirted with the Fourth. In a boulangerie in the Marais, the radio was tuned to Nostalgie, week-end de Seventies Non-Stop.

I found a flea market on rue Perrée, the tables laden with delight and loveliness: a red rotary phone, a handheld mirror in a gold frame, a little green lamp on a metal stand, a old tin that used to contain black cherry pastilles, a porcelain salt dish with a squirrel attached. So this is where the buyers at Anthropologie come when they say that they just happened to come across such-and-such over a weekend in Paris—this, before they send the thing off for mass reproduction at a workshop in India. Around the corner, a man appraised the offerings at one stand: “Oh là là! Oh là là! Oh là là là là!”

Along the Seine, joy is poking through the bouquiniste stands. I thumbed through one guy’s brilliant collection of 1950s and ’60s children's literature—several Martines, a stack of Super Boy magazines, tales of horses and goats and a duck with a red ribbon round his neck, some Enid Blyton translations—before finally coming away with Le Dimanche de la vie, bound in coarse yellow linen with the title and author name stamped on the front in dignity and gold. It became clear I’d spent too long poring over books when I realized my feet were so cold I could barely feel them. Uh, is that frostbite? Unlike many an unlucky mountain climber, I found myself right then in front of la Samaritaine. It was warm in there, and I hear there's a Mariage Frères upstairs, but I didn’t make it past the women’s department on the first floor. I tried on a pink corduroy skirt from the sale rack at Agnès B, but the gathers that were adorable while the skirt was on the hanger were foolishness on me.

And then I was late to meet Gab, but I figured, Eh, French time. I booked it West along the Seine, speeding by two old dudes passing me in the opposite direction, who glanced at me wonderingly, probably thinking I had to have been a bit touched to be flurrying along instead of promenading on a Saturday afternoon.

We hopped one of Gab’s bateaux parisiens as the lights came on around the city. What is nice is: Every bridge illuminated in the evening mist. Fancy living rooms lit up in houses along the river. Fairy lights dancing in the trees. The Eiffel Tower having lost its head in the fog. Door number 13, tucked under a bridge like cuteness. Spaces for summer sambas. The shaa-shaa-shaa of the water outside. House boats, little and big, and especially the one with the car parked on deck.

Later, on rue des Bons Enfants, a black plastic bag fell out of the sky. Gab picked it up, reached in, and took out a star-shaped key, Paris is incredible that way. We let ourselves in the door on the corner. Upstairs, Manel gave me a peach-cassis tisane and a pink Ladurée macaron. “The O.C.” in French was on TV, and then some game show that necessitated the boys yelling at the box: “Oeil! C’est oeil, pédé!!” At one point Sophie couldn't find her Gauloises. I imagined her cat was sitting in the other room lighting up a fag, narrowing its eyes at us through the smoke. Perched on the sofa next to the radiator, cradling my mug of tea, I felt the fatigue creeping up on me. I had such a desire to close my eyes.

Back in Belleville, I craved English reading material. A magazine. A women’s magazine. With lots of pictures. Gimme a break, sometimes a girl just feels like her head’s been working overtime. It occured to me that maybe what I needed was a big bowl of pho. And some nems. And jasmine tea. I popped out to the Vietnamese joint at the end of the street with my new Queneau. Mmmm. Aahhh.

All day the sky has been greywhite like a goosedown comforter. I can't wait to be in bed tonight, snuggled down deep under real covers.

He was late coming to get me at the airport, but when he got there he traded me my weekend bag for a bag containing a croissant and a croissant and a giant raisin swirly thing. The thing is, we like a boy who cares about baked goods.

The RER ticket machines taunted us for a good many minutes while we debated if it’d just be easier to go to Marseille instead of Paris. In the city, heading toward the stairs leading out of the métro, I looked at him out of the corners of my eyes. “Go,” he said. I bounded up the steps, two at a time, into the day.

Home on rue de l’Atlas, there was yoghurt and homemade quince jam, and black coffee out of clay yoghurt cups. There was a very small fashion show highlighting corduroy pants with very fashion pockets. There was chilling out wrapped up in a Brazilian hammock.

Later, up several flights on a curving wooden staircase on rue du Buisson Saint Louis, we broke into Gab’s mum’s confiture cabinet. Squat jars, faceted jars, curved jars, fat jars, the jammy reds and thick oranges and deep yellows were labeled with blue ballpoint on small white labels. The shelves sagged, seemed to sigh contentedly. Or maybe that was me. . .

We picked Gen up from the Alliance Française and then headed to lunch at Hector’s crêpe place. We laughed at the Trapèze galette—ham, emmenthal, pineapple—and then I ordered it. Hector poured us ciders, then brought us Nutella crepes with hearts painted on them in Nutella brush strokes.

Hanging out in Paris with Gab means back streets like the sweet discovery of a secret book. There are twists, there are turns. Everything seems new and old at the same time. Unexpectedly, the gloriousness of Gérard Mulot loomed in front of us—and just too bad ’cause there we were, our little bellies full with crêpes. Later, we headed up the narrow, curving rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. At Crocojazz, Gilles was pleased to see us. He opened the glass cabinets with a key tied on a cord around his neck. Gab got to go behind the counter to turn up the volume on the hi-fi. A thick glass ashtray balanced on a shelf of records. The small shop was blues and smoke.

Hector came to pick us up after, then there were coffees and a mauresque under toasty heat lamps. Gab said he was going to be late to work. He leaned back in his chair and took another drag on his cigarette.

Well, so, sometimes a girl gets it in her head to do a thing, and then she does it.

So we’re at Maud’s place on rue du Buisson St. Louis in the Tenth, and somehow there’s a durian in the kitchen, and suddenly I’m alone at the table singing Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” and everyone else is on the other side of the room debating if it’s more like rotten leeks or onions or papaya or tuna salad left in the sun, and now India’s crying.

Okay, back up. So Maud and I are walking down the street, coming from our émission spéciale on Gab’s radio station, and we’re hungry, and there’re all these Chinese Vietnamese epicieries, and so clearly we need to buy a durian, ’cause Maud’s never tried one, and okay, sure, why not. Why not turns out to be because it costs twenty euros, but we hand over the cash anyway and lug the mutha home. I think Maud may have a sense of je regrette right after we plunge a big knife through the spiky armor and split the fruit open—“It looks like brains, it looks like aliens, it looks like snort” she moans through strokeface—but she tries it anyway, face scrunched up, and then quickly washes her mouth out. India takes more persuading, but eventually takes some of the yellow flesh in her mouth, and then quickly moves on to a bowl of mint tea. I forget to warn the girls about durian burp, but they discover the phenomenon on their own. Surprise!

I leave Paris tomorrow, c’est chiant, j’suis grincheuse, c’est pas du tout cool, tu vois? A week ago this time we were driving to Maud’s country house in Prades, and when we arrived there was hot soup on the table, and salad from the garden, and cheese, and the best rhubarb tart ever. The week of paradise, the drives at mad speed curving through the hills, les cows!, le swimming in the lake, singing into the wind, falling asleep in the sun, louche comme louche, the secret florentins, le WC dehors, les sorties grand-mères, Louis Prima and Bobby La Pointe and Supertramp and, always, les Strokes. Maud’s house, with its white iron gates and its driveway through the trees; the worn curving staircase right when you come in; the kitchen, always warm and smelling tasty—of chocolate cake or lamb couscous or steamed fish or gratin aux choufleurs or lemon tart—and dinners crowded around the long wooden table, cheeses always at the ready. In the mornings, the big room still smells of fire from the night before.



Like the dwarfs, we were seven. Clem—Timide—cute and sweet and the younger brother, master of the fire, master of the coffee, when we parted he said, “Putain, cette petite meuf.” Mais j’adore. After each meal, his clarion call: “Un petit café?” “Ouaaiis.” Maud, oh, but, Maud. C’est Prof, c’est clair. India—Grincheux—knitting by the fire. There was the night after dinner, in a chorus, we sang of her baking skillery. The next day, there was a lemon tart on the table, crowned with a ring of crushed pistachios. Schmio était Dormeur, who slept in later and later each day, and then went outside to sun. Part two of les amoureux, Mauro, l’espagnol, l’espaniard, lovely and smiling, c’est lui Simplet, who made a raw egg lemon-flavoured fake ice cream that could have killed us all, and one day at Shopi returned to the shopping cart, inexplicably, triumphant with a cauliflower. Gabriel, Atchoom, allergic to every bit of nature around us, the fat peonies, the sweet roses, the trees years old, the thick grass dotted with daisies and yellow dandelions. Gab with the langourous eyes, the messy curls, the smile like you share a secret. Le foot under a deep blue blanket, a Kinder egg broken into two at Shrek en français in Aurillac, chords on the grand piano before being called to dinner.

I think I have to go now, there is a couscous dinner in the plans. Good-bye France, ç’a été trop bon, mais trop too much. À toute. . .

The thing about blogging in Paris is that then you are blogging in Paris instead of, I dunno, doing anything else out and about in Paris. Inside: hot, with bespectacled thirteen-year-old boys playing games on linked computers and yelling, at various intervals, “À la style Matrix!” and “Merde!!” and “Je meurs dans le Matrix!” and, I swear this is true, “Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-caramba!!” Outside: blue skies and sunny sun and Berthillon ice creams and sorbets everyday—blackberry today, pear yesterday, Gianduja chocolate with orange peel the day before; a succulent sandwich grec-frites-salade in the back of some greasy hole-in-the-wall in the Bastille; a crêpe Nutella-banane, before a fat slice of hot banana covered in Nutella fell on my nice blue dress; afternoon tea at Fauchon as if we are Japanese ladies; a panino jambon-fromage-tomate with the birds in a shady spot at the Jardin de Luxembourg; the unexpected treat of a petit macaron cassis-violette from Ladurée, a sweet, cool round of heaven on a hot day; so many cafés crèmes at so many cafés.

Also outside is: hanging out in the Marais looking at the cute boys and their cute sneakers; shopping for groceries at Monoprix like I live here; being hit on by French boys while buying sweet red cherries at the market. All good things. Abrupt, sorry, have to go, out of internet café money.