Paris Journal 2014 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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The light on the Champ de Mars at the beginning of a sunny summer day is a photographer’s delight. Even before many of the shops were open on the rue du Commerce, I walked along, peering into shop windows, and made my way up to the Champ. Parisian men don’t wear shorts anywhere near as often as American men do, but yesterday, shorts were standard apparel for all men on the Champs – well, almost all men. A man riding the mower around the lawn near the Peace Pavilion stopped his machine, dismounted, and offered to take a photo of three young women who were trying to do so themselves, using the timer feature on the camera which they carefully balanced atop the fence around the Pavilion lawn. With my camera, I captured the moment just after he’d taken the photo, and the delighted young women were thanking him as they retrieved their camera. C’est gentil. The night before (Thursday), we didn’t want to go out again after our trek home from the museum through the hot streets. I retrieved the nicely packaged leftover pork roast and red cabbage (from Restaurant Stephane Martin) and proceeded to make pulled pork with it. I added freshly ground peppers and sea salt, and a little more honey. (The cabbage had been cooked in honey, and the roast was served with a sauce containing some honey.) The result was absolutely delicious. We did not need to go out. One problem with eating out in Paris when it is this hot is that you get “trapped” in a restaurant that is not air conditioned, or not air conditioned enough, for quite a while. Eating at home allows you to wear less clothing while dining, aim the fan right on yourselves, and get up and move when you want to. Last night, we dined at Le Café du Commerce, right behind our building, because we could see that the glass ceiling was closed, the air conditioning turned on. I’m glad we went early, because as more and more people entered the dining rooms and were being served hot food, the resto heated up. It became stifling hot. But it was not as hot as the outdoors, where the temps reached 95 F an hour or so before dinner, but were still around 93 during the dinner hour. We’re fortunate that the apartment received new windows last year, and retractable awnings on the two biggest windows a year or two before that. Those two improvements help tremendously during hot spells. And we’re fortunate that this hot spell will end today, with rain showers once again. I’m hoping they’re actually thunderstorms. I do love a good thunderstorm! I can feel the temperature dropping as I write this. Cooler air is flowing through the apartment, from the open French doors on the double sejour balcony, to the kitchen and bathroom windows on the other side. The room in which I sit now was once the dining room, according to an old floorplan that is posted in the hallway of the apartment. There was a double glass-paned door separating it from the living room, or sejour. But the double door is long gone and the dining room is now used as the living room, and the living room is the dining-room-plus, and so the French real estate term double sejour seems to fit perfectly. The room in which I sit now also has beautiful, decorative plaster crown moldings. They’re similar to, but not the same as the moldings in the other sejour. Here, cherubs gaze down upon me. In the other room, it is some nice pseudo-Greek dentil work that frames the ceiling. Old, old wallpaper covers the ceilings and the walls. But you can’t see much of the walls, due to all the books and bookshelves. The sturdy wallpaper has a background the color of weak tea. The floral pattern on it is in muted shades of green and rose, and the pattern is raised, or embossed. The wallpaper is not something that we’d ever select, nor would our friends who own the apartment. It pre-dates their ownership. We all respect the wallpaper for surviving for so many decades. I’m thinking that it dates back to the 1940s or 1950s, or whenever embossed wallpaper came about. The wallpaper is not offensive, like the stuff in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gillman (1892). In that tale, a person is driven mad by the wallpaper. Well, no, that’s not right. A psychotic person is driven even crazier by her obsession with the wallpaper in the room where she has been confined. I think she was actually driven crazy by her husband, who refused to allow her to work and from whom she had to hide her journal. Fortunately for Tom, he encourages me to write this journal, instead of discouraging me. And fortunately for Tom, he does not attempt to confine me. I rewarded him by bringing quiche back with me at the end of my morning walk yesterday. There will be no cooking in this apartment on hot days! The quiche came from the bakery where Tom likes to buy baguettes, at the near end of the avenue Emile Zola. I’d also stopped into Monoprix very briefly, to check out the final remains on the sales racks in the women’s clothing corner, which is right in the front of the store. I found some wonderful blue jeans that fit perfectly for just 20 euros. I take back everything I said about Monoprix being overpriced. At least, the clothes can be reasonably priced. Because there is almost no room in the closet, and the closet is at the dark end of the hallway, we hang many of our clothes on the hall tree at the mid point of the hallway. The hallway is like another room unto itself. It has its own crown molding pattern, an egg-and-dart style. There’s no wallpaper in the hall, but there are moldings creating a paneled wainscoating effect. Unfortunately, there are also exposed plumbing, wire moldings, and utility meters. The floors throughout the apartment, except for the bathroom, WC, and kitchen, are wood – dark old waxed wood that makes lots of creaking noise when we walk around on it. No one can sneak up on anyone here! My favorite floor here is in the kitchen, where the original two-tone ceramic tiles lie solidly in place. The finish on the tile is not shiny; it is old. The apartment building dates back only to the early 20th century, but it is clearly in the Haussmann tradition. The floorplans are classic, for Paris. So as you enter the apartment, the hallway stretches out before you. On the right side of the hallway are the doors to the kitchen, then the WC (toilet room), then the bathroom. On the left is a bookcase covering a door that went from the hallway directly into the dining room, which is now living room. After that, is a double glass-paneled doorway into the dining room, which used to be the living room. I’m sure the exact same kind of doors used to fill opening between the living and dining rooms. A bit farther down the hall, just after the bathroom and dining room doors, is a door that was added to the apartment somewhere approximately halfway through its lifetime. It is a plain white door with a peephole in it. Someone installed this door to make it possible to shut the bedroom end of the apartment off from the rest of it. I sure hope this was not done to confine a psychotic woman . . . . Beyond it, there is a door on the left, leading to a book-lined bedroom, and a doorway to the right, leading to a book-stuffed study which used to be a bedroom. And as I said, the door at the end of the hall goes to a closet that also has a door on the side, going into the bedroom on the left. There might also be a door on the right, going to the other bedroom, but that is impossible to see now, because of the bookshelves. If you love books, as we do, this is an absolutely charming, wonderful apartment. When the apartment was new, the Café du Commerce restaurant was not a restaurant; it was a big fabric store, on three levels, with the atrium in the middle, providing plenty of light for examining the fabric colors and weave. I wish I could have seen that! But now it is a restaurant, and a beautiful one at that. We started our dinner by sharing a crumble d’aubergines, a dish we’d had before, but this time it came with more onions and garlic mixed with the eggplant in a hot little ramekin topped with a crunchy, crumbly crust. Yumm. For the first time this summer, I ordered aile de raie (skate, or ray), with butter and capers. It was really nice. I still wonder why Florida restaurants don’t serve this fish regularly. Tom ordered steak, which was a bit chewy, but tasty. He loved the Roquefort sauce, and the fries. And we shared another baba au rhum. Service there was terrific. Going there is fun, even on a hot evening.
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Saturday, July 19, 2014
The
Champ de Mars in the morning.
Friends
meet on the Champ.
Man
stopped mowing the grass to take a photo for three young women on the Champ
de Mars.
A
rose in the morning light on the Champ de Mars.
Produce
market next to the Café du Commerce on the rue du Commerce.
A
gate on the garden at the Musée du Quai Branly. We’d like
to have a gate like this, but only 4 feet tall, at Cooley Hammock. Below, more gate and fence photos from this
lovely wetland garden designed by Gilles Clement.
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