Rue Rude

Lovers' locks on the bridge, Notre-Dame de Paris

I was crossing the Pont de l'Archevêché (bridge of the archbishopric), where I hadn't walked in a long time, and saw that the fencing on the entire west side of the bridge was covered with padlocks and ribbons. A closer look:

It was kind of touching. Lovers and honeymooners from as far back as 2004, from all over the world. I thought it was nice that the Paris police and cleanup crews had not removed them.

Not everyone was sentimental, though. 

 

Season of brocantes and vide-greniers

It's been hot, dry weather in Paris for what feels like weeks now. This weekend there were brocantes all over the city. I was in the 3rd arrondissement for lunch and came across a huge one that started at the rue Vieille-du-Temple and wound around the Mairie of the Third, where a lot of children were selling their toys in the courtyard.

It was a vide-grenier as well as a brocante. In France, tag sales or garage sales are generally illegal (and as a result charity sales are really fun), but once a year every town or arrondissement is allowed a vide-grenier, literally empty-attic, where anyone at all from that place can sell their possessions. You can find great bargains at these and I much prefer them to the fancy flea market up at Saint-Ouen, where some objects cost in the hundreds of thousands of euros!

This brocante was an especially pleasant one as it was a brilliant blue Sunday and cafes full of cheerful-looking Parisians and foreign tourists lined the street and the Marché des Enfants Rouges. I have rarely seen as many beautiful girls in one place as at this brocante, which featured an unusual number of clothing and fashion stands. I bought a huge red hat and a vase and a few things I really didn't need....

A jovial man leaving his vide-grenier stall on the rue de Saintonge to get lunch for his family said to his wife, "Do your best to attract the customers! I don't want to go home with this stuff!"

"How should I 'attract customers'?" she said. "What should I do, then?"

"I don't know, take off your clothes, get naked!" he said, then noticed I had heard.

"That wouldn't attract me!" I said, and all three of us laughed.

DSK again: the plots thicken

More than a week after DSK's arrest for rape in New York, the French man-in-the-street still seems to think that plots against DSK are the most likely explanation for his arrest, rather than the reasons stated by the complainant. Over and over you hear, "In the U.S.A., they don't believe in the presumption of innocence!"

Here are some I have seen suggested in comments and news reports of public opinion:

--The maid walked in on DSK masturbating and decided to profit from the occasion to blackmail him, so deliberately got close to him for DNA proof

--The maid specifically asked to go to the 28th floor to work where the important man was so she could entrap him

--Everyone in the hotel knew he was important so how could she say that she didn't know who he was?

--She wasn't even pretty, and DSK likes blonds. So it would never have been his idea. She must have seduced him. 

--If she wasn't hired by Sarkozy, she was a nymphomaniac.

--She could have easily found the matériel in a used condom to smear over herself and act like a victim

--In any case, it doesn't prove the contact was unwanted. She just said that afterwards to get money

--The maid deliberately walked in on him naked so that she could scream rape

--She agreed, thinking she would be paid, and cried rape after he said he wouldn't pay her

--How could a maid accidentally walk in on a guest? They always knock first and work in teams of two, so she is obviously lying

--How can someone be forced to commit fellatio? Why didn't she scream and run away? She is obviously lying

--If it was true, why did it take her so long to report it?

--It it was true, why would DSK have called the hotel to ask for his telephone?

--An impostor wearing a DSK mask could have attacked the maid so that she would get DSK in trouble (however, I think this one is a troll... I hope)

--It's Al Qaida's fault! Everyone knows a practicing Jew like DSK would never touch a Muslim woman. They want to bring down the world financial system (sarcastic woman commenter after some of the more far-fetched scenarios)

Le Monde published a reporter's chat with two Guinean women in Harlem (the complainant lives in the Bronx) who admit they do not know the complainant, but assure the reporter that "most people" think she is lying. This is not the kind of thing that improves my low opinion of Le Monde's editorial team. 

Bigwigs in Paris

One of the fun things about living in Paris, as opposed to, say, a small town in the Rocky Mountains, is that every once in a while, some big event happens here and you get a chance to see the greats of this world. At Roland Garros, known to Americans as the French Open, you can get close to the world's top tennis players. At the Stade de France or the Parc des Princes, you can occasionally see the world's top football/soccer and rugby players. At the Olympia or La Villette, some of the world's most famous entertainers.

But the bigwigs you see the most are politicians of various stripes and nationalities, accompanied by large police escorts. Usually when someone like the American president comes through, nothing is announced in advance, but there is a flurry of activity on the routes leading into the central city from the airport. Policemen with cordons rouges around their sleeves stand around on street corners chatting to each other while they wait for something to happen. Then a sudden burst of sirens, or lots of loud fast-moving whistles, blown by policemen on the motorcycle escort of the zippy little black French cars that form an official French motorcade. We happen to live not far from one of those routes. 

One family member arrived home late tonight after being held up in traffic by such a hubbub. "I wonder if it's Obama!" 

[Later: It wasn't the U.S. President. He was actually entertaining the Queen in London then.]

Beautiful day in Paris, on the terrasse, with smoke in your face

Yesterday was such a beautiful day, with a blue sky and the kind of warm dry weather you expect in Los Angeles, not Paris, in May. As I went about my errands near the boulevard Sébastopol, I cast an envious eye on all the people lolling in the cafes along the side streets. Finally the métro ejected me into a lovely place where a shady cafe beckoned. I sat down at an empty table surrounded by empty tables, and ordered a glass of cool rosé.

And then the smoke started. The people next to me pulled out their cigarette packs and laid them on the table. The people behind me blew smoke into my hair. The people to my right, Swedes, looked around crossly at them, paid, and got up to leave. Two pretty young women sat down at their table and immediately started fumbling around in their purses for their cigarettes. All the pretty young women in Paris seem to smoke. That's the real secret of why French women are thin!

Smoking is now illegal in French restaurants, except outside-- so all the smokers sit there, and the terrasses are even smokier than they used to be. I try not to care, but my lungs care, and I start to cough. Maybe I have bad lungs. All four of my non-smoking grandparents died of lung cancer.

I stick it out. I live in France, I just have to tolerate the smoke. When I get home, my clothes and hair stink. I'm no longer used to this. Why do the French have to smoke?

British wedding, French wedding

It's wedding season, and finally those big hats I love are coming down from the high shelves where they live most of the year. 

At one o'clock in the morning, the Brit sitting next to me at a French one leaned over, waved at the sage teenagers dancing and singing to the music, and said, "If this were a British wedding, half the guests would already be roaring drunk." 

A good thing? or a bad thing? Couldn't tell what he thought...

Dominique-nique-nique

This song, written and sung by a Belgian nun nicknamed Soeur Sourire (Sister Smile, or The Singing Nun as she was known in the U.S.) about Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans, was a huge hit worldwide around 1963. Since Saturday I have heard it several times-- because certain interpretations of it seem to apply so well to the current scandal around extremely rich Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Dominique, nique, nique                     [Dominique niques, niques
S'en allait tout simplement,                simply let himself go
Routier, pauvre et chantant                on the road, poor, and singing,
En tous chemins, en tous lieux,          on all the paths, in every place,
Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu,               he talked only about the Good Lord,
Il ne parle que du Bon Dieu...             he talked only about the Good Lord.

Ni chameau, ni diligence,                   No camel, no coach,
Il parcourt l'Europe à pied                 he crossed Europe on foot
Scandinavie ou Provence,                   Scandinavia, Provence,
Dans la sainte pauvreté...                    in holy poverty....]

Cheating under the prof's eye

The French do not have the same attitude toward cheating on tests that Americans do. I remember my shock years ago when an older, respectable friend of mind told me how she was blatantly cheating on an English test she took at the Sorbonne. But I understand it better now that I know how much sheer rote memorization of irrelevant nonsense is required in France. Which explains a conversation I witnessed today among three university students.

"How did that %^&*$ test go?" said one.

"Really badly. I think I flunked," said another.

"Why didn't you just cheat? Everyone else did," said a third.

"I didn't think of it!" said the second person.

"Why do you always sit in the front! Didn't you notice that everyone was sitting in the back in a cluster? Even Monsieur  G [the monitor of the test, apparently not the teacher] was encouraging us to cheat. He practically told us to."

Berber ≠ Barbarian

Today I went to a local small grocery store (épicerie or literally "spicery") that I've started using more  recently, just because they're always pleasant and the store is always open. Today I wasn't in a rush and chatted a bit. I asked the owner if he was Tunisian, just because I have been to Tunisia.

"No, Moroccan," he said. "Most of the épiciers in Paris are Moroccan."

"And are you a Berber?" I said. 

"Yes.  99% of the population in Morocco is Berber."

"Do you speak Berber?"

"Oh, yes. It's my mother tongue. We are very proud of it. But in school we used Arabic."

I told him I was interested in the language, and he offered to teach me a little bit of Berber each time I come in. We started with hello and goodbye. "Hello is azel," he said.  "But au revoir is hard to translate. There are many different ways to say it. But to say 'see you later' is akiran."

The Alhambra in Granada, seat of the Moorish kings of Andalusia and the last place conquered by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1498

When Americans (mostly people who have never been to Europe) rant to me about "Eurabia," a concept that is more and more in style in the States, I think of people like these Berbers. I can't be afraid of them. They are no fundamentalists.

Their ancestors were Roman citizens 2000 years ago, pagans, then Christians; Vandals, then Muslim Arabs conquered them, and they have never forgotten it was a bitterly fought  conquest. They are the people who created tolerant, intellectually brilliant Moorish Andalusia, who built the Alhambra and saved Greek learning in the west. They were also the Barbary Coast pirates.

In the anonymous poem Abenámar (1431), the Spanish king asks the Moor Abenámar (whose mother was a Christian slave):

"What castles are those?
High they are and shining!”

“The Alhambra, my lord,
and the other the mosque;
the others, the Alixares,
wrought so marvelously."

Then the king says to the city,

“If you were willing, Granada,
I would marry you;
and I would give you for dowry
Córdoba and Seville.”

but Granada proudly answers,

“I am married, King Don Juan,
I am married, and no widow;
the Moor to whom I belong
loves me very well.”

Ancestral ruins

    Their ancestral ruins

I went to a beautiful wedding over the weekend, very Catholic, with no fewer than three priests from the families of the bride and groom. It was also one of the friendliest weddings I've been to, and one of the happiest.

In France and Germany, religious Catholics are often very aristocratic or even noble -- which I have learned here is not quite the same thing, at least not to the nobles. This was a noble wedding, but not a snobbish one. I met a bunch of counts and countesses (they seem to be a dime a dozen in France!) and even a couple of princes, although they would never introduce themselves like that-- I just saw the names on the place cards.

Still I was surprised that the priest who gave the final homily began by saying, "All of us here, as children, have climbed around on our ancestral ruins...." We Americans looked around at each other, smiling.

   Our ancestral ruins