Paris Journal 2013 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Email was a
major distraction yesterday evening.
Not only was it apparent that I was going to the the winning bid on another
set of six Laguiole steak knives, but also we received an intriguing notice
from the city about a neighbor’s plans for an expanded boat dock and lift
near some property that we recently purchased. So Tom and I
were engaged in conversation, particularly about the dock notice and what it
meant to us, and we forgot about the fact that we didn’t have a dinner
reservation. We’d walked all
the way around and through the Luxembourg Gardens and the parks to the south
of it, and we were on the rue de Médicis checking out the photographic
exhibition on the outside of the Luxembourg’s tall iron fence, when we
decided we had to take some kind of action about dinner. We looked at a
new place called Chill Out, and decided that
it wasn’t right for us for that evening. So I whipped out the smartphone and logged
onto TheFork.com My smartphone
is so smart that it knows my first language is English, and so it had not
allowed me to install the app for LaFourchette.com. It would only allow me to install the
English language version, TheFork.com.
That app uses so many British idioms that I’m actually more
comfortable using LaFourchette. Oh well. The great thing about the app on the
smartphone is that you can tell it to find a table near you that is available
right now. I used that feature,
and we scrolled through the list. The
closest places didn’t appeal for one reason or another, but there on the list
was La Boussole, with the usual 30 percent discount. It was 7:20PM. I reserved a table for 7:30PM. Off we went. The restaurant was several long blocks
away. We arrived
right on time and were given the same nice table we had before. Service was superb. Our appetizer, salmon carpaccio, was
delightful and refreshing. My main
course, duck breast slices in light pastry with mashed/herbed potatoes and a foie gras and Tonka sauce was very
good. Tom, however, ordered the steak
that was the special of the day, and it was a truly French steak: chewy, and tough. The chocolate
cake for dessert was really nice.
Small, and good, with a little pool of crème anglaise and a scoop of ice cream. The wall I was
looking toward as I sat in the resto had some drawings and scribblings that
romanticized about Sir Francis Drake. Tom
and I both seemed to remember that there is something French in this Brit’s
history. So I looked it up today. The French
connection is that when Queen Elizabeth decided to knight Francis Drake in
1581, she had a French diplomat do the dubbing. This diplomat, named Marchaumont, had been
trying to get Elizabeth to marry the French king’s brother, the Duke of
Anjou. What Elizabeth was after was
trying to make it look as though the French supported Francis Drake’s
somewhat controversial actions, especially in regard to the Spanish. Throughout most
of Drake’s career, he was fairly hostile toward the Spanish. This attitude began when Drake and his
second cousin, John Hawkins, were
captured by the Spanish in Mexico in 1568.
They managed to escape, but the experience seemed to make an
impression on Drake. Drake also hated
Roman Catholics generally, and that’s what most of the Spanish were. Drake is most
noted for his circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580. The French mythologizing about Drake that
is all over the wall in La Boussole is mostly about this circumnavigation. But we should
also remember Drake for a couple of pretty awful things: his conduct as a slave trader, and his part
in the massacre of Rathlin Island, in Northern Ireland, in 1575. He did some other bad deeds, too, but these
two top the list. Drake and
Hawkins made fortunes on the slave trade.
Drake’s first such venture was on one of Hawkins’ ships in 1563, when
they abducted people from West Africa.
Even though abducting people was illegal under English law at that
time, that law did not cover non-Protestants, slaves, or criminals. I’d say “non-Protestants” alone covers a
lot of territory. Hawkins wrote
that they obtained their cargo by attacking African towns, and by attacking
Portuguese ships that were carrying slaves. In 1575, Drake
took part in the Rathlin Island Massacre.
Somewhere between 400 and 700 civilians were slaughtered by the
English in that massacre, including many women and children. The Spanish
called Drake “El Dragon.” (Draeck, a
word on the Drake wall in La Boussole, is a Dutch word for dragon, and
Drake’s Latin name, Franciscus Draco, means “François le Dragon,” according
to French Wikipedia.) Sir Francis
Drake was a great explorer, and a great monster. So what finally
slayed The Dragon? Dysentery, when he
was only 55. |
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Scenes from the Luxembourg Gardens.
Dessert at La Boussole. |
