Trying Yet Again to Post Bernard's Photo

Thanksgiving

In Paris, every day is Thanksgiving. The Parisians don't necessarily know this, or experience it, but that's my own prevailing state of mind. In fact, I carry with me at all times a little notebook in which I list each day's items for which I'm particularly grateful. This is how I do my post-trip reports -- sent to friends who humor me to a touching extent -- with such acute recall!

When I return to New York, I copy them more legibly to attach to the pages of the calendar that's devoted to each day's gratitude list. The main difference between the daily Paris lists and the daily New York lists is that there are more numbered items in Paris.

The photo I just tried == four times! -- to upload failed to appear: of the gentleman for whom I'm most thankful! This was taken on my birthday at the I-Love-You Wall in Montmartre, behind the Abbesses Metro: "I love you" appears in over 300 languages. Enough of that torment. I'll try, in a separate post, another photo, taken previously, with the other camera that had had a greater success rate in the uploading department.

Book: DESSINEZ-MOI UN PARISIEN by Olivier Magny

While dawdling in the St. Germain bookstore La Hune (next door to Cafe Flore) until it was time to keep an appointment, I happened upon the above-titled book which began with a blog, Stuff Parisians Love. Turns out they love New York-- images of which they get from the movies You've Got Mail and Sex and the City -- and speaking Englsh. This is a great consolation! Now I know that when a French person switches to English with me, it's because they want practice speaking English, not because my French is lousy (although it may well be!).
A bientot!

Movie: "The Age of Reason"

On the flight to Paris last night I saw "The Age of Reason," an obvious choice since it's about a woman's birthday, and I'm here to celebrate Bernard's (November 8th) and my own (the 6th) birthdays. On her 40th birthday, Margaret (Sophie Marceau), is visited by a now-retired provincial notary who has come to deliver to her a series of letters written to her by her 7-year-old self. It's seven that's "the age of reason." Forty, "your age, dear Me," is "very silly." Little Marguerite, as she was then called, offered the then-young notary who'd just started his practice, her life savings --which amounted to slightly more than 1 Euro-- to deliver her mail on her 40th birthday in 2010. She wrote about the various paths she might have pursued and about other important things in life such as "all-chocolate meals" and finding buried treasure. One thing that stuck with me was the notary's quoting of Picasso: "Become who you are." This is the kind of thing that can make you wish (a) that you had received letters from your kid-self, and (b) that your mature self could have written to your kid-self to benefit from hard-won experience, and spare said kid-self some of the grief encountered along the way.
Whether I'll get to post again before we leave Paris on the 11th remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the fun on Day 1 involved a visit to Bon Marche (where I got some gorgeous, silky-soft multi-colored yarn for a scarf), and the search for La Ruche, a house where free lodging was given to such artists as Amadeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine. It was a very long search, there was no access to the building (I was hoping there'd at least be exhibit rooms we could see), and the even longer search for a Metro, but we were still thrilled to be in Paris.
Dinner was at the ever-wonderful Le Bosquet. Sorry Jean-Francois wasn't there tonight.
A bientot

Incroyable -- We're Leaving Tomorrow

You've heard of a red-letter day? Well, this is a red-picture day! The picture is of the Palais Royal, snapped through a colored filter in a fence.

I doubt I'll get to post from the hotel computer, as there's so much competition for time there. Will I ever catch up when I get back!

Au revoir pour maintenant.

It's Sarah Bernhardt's Birthday!

10/23/1844 - 3/26/1923
More amazing than this incredible woman's genius on the stage, or her continuing to tread the boards after a leg was amputated, or her ability to faint dead away when bored (I wish I could do that!), was her humanitarian creation of a hospital.
During the Prussian War's Siege of Paris (1870-1871), inspired by the Comedie Francaise's turning the theater into a hospital for war casualties, Sarah Bernhardt turned the Theatre de l'Odeon into a hospital. Getting a permit, and his fur-lined overcoat, from the Prefect de Police (who may have been her first lover), the twenty-six-year-old actress was completely focused on tending the wounded herself, assisted by two volunteers and instructed by a Dr. Duchesne, whose services she commandeered. Sarah Bernhardt, "the creature of fragile health, worked with the vigor of ten peasants."* Her richer friends were cajoled into supporting the hospital, donating money and supplies. One example: the chocolate magnate M. Meunier, who donated five hundred pounds of his nourishing product.
The raids at night made it necessary for the staff to move their patients to the cellar, where flooding and rats prevailed. Forced to close the hospital, Bernhardt moved the more serious cases to the military hospital at Val-de-Grace. For the twenty remaining convalescents, she rented at her own expense an empty flat in the rue de Provence, where she and her two stalwart volunteers (including a Madame Lambquin, an older Odeon actress) nursed them to recovery. All told, more than one hundred fifty solldiers and two civilians were cared for at the Odeon hospital.
*Recommended reading: MADAME SARAH by Cornelia Otis Skinner, particularly Chapter 4, "Sarah's Field Hospital."

Jean-Pierre Duprey (1/1/30 - 10/2/59)

In the course of researching a book, I was cruising around the ever-wonderful Wikipedia today and came across the name of this poet and sculptor. This was the first I'd heard of him. Wikipedia didn't describe his poetry or sculptures but did mention that he'd been arrested for having urinated on the grave of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. It didn't say what year that happened -- how close chronologically was it to his suicide?
Three days before he hanged himself, he said to a friend, "I am allergic to this planet."
This has been a Cultural History Moment.