Vide grenier season again....

     Call me "Second-hand Rose". Very few items in our home came to us via the normal retail route. Almost everything here has a story behind it and, more often than not, that story began in a depot-vente (secondhand store) or vide-grenier (car boot sale, yard sale...).
    Recently, we drove to Dun to take in an art and crafts exhibition and, er, a vide-grenier. Slim pickings this time, as sometimes happens. Loads of kids' clothes, Barbie dolls, plastic whatevers, which is great for parents of little ones and, even if you're not, good to know that dear ole Barbie isn't going to end up, plastic legs akimbo, on the town dump. But on to objets that I do want:
    I've got the technique down by now. If I see something interesting, I never grab it with great shouts of joy. Better to sidle around it, looking at other objects, even asking the price of an elderly ash-tray that I have no interest in whatsoever. Then, almost offhandedly, I pick up object of my desire and see what the owner wants for it.
    She wanted eight euros for this little art nouveau jug. Hmmm. Don't need another jug (although "need" rarely has anything to do with what we buy at vide greniers) and eight euros is sort of at the tipping point. I walked back to the car, thinking about the jug, and picturing it holding pink roses. When I got to the car, I thought some more, and walked back to the stall. The stallholder immediately knew why I was there.
   "Eight euros," she said, "but you can have it for seven". Score.

Silent Movies in Chalabre.

    French departments have very clear-cut identities. Here, in the Ariège, our official number--09-- shows up on our license plates, in our postal code and is the name of our weekly free newspaper. In the Aude, our neighbouring department, the magic number is 11 (departments are organized in alphabetical order). Each department has its own edition of La Dépêche, the regional newspaper which is the go-to source for info on local fêtes and so on.    

    This explains why, because we live right on the border of the Ariège and the Aude, we often don't hear about what's happening five, let alone 50, kilometres, from where we live. It was pure dumb luck that we saw posters advertising silent movies in Chalabre, starting at 8:30 p.m.

     Being late didn't bother any of us as we all suspected that, this being France, events wouldn't get underway exactly on time--and that there would probably be speeches. When we arrived, a man on a ladder was straightening the screen and the speeches--or rather speech--hadn't even started. 

      Speech over, and a minor technical glitch solved by a member of the audience, the show got underway.

      The films were all by Georges Méliès, whose grandfather had a connection with Chalabre, the films dated back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. This wasn't exactly the era of computer-generated images so, given the primitive equipment then available, the special effects were outstanding. 

      You can watch several on YouTube. Each frame in the Loie Fuller film I've linked to was coloured by hand. (Historical side-note: Fuller was the dancer whose work inspired numerous art nouveau figurines.)

    This version has background music, which was probably how audiences would have viewed it over a century ago. We watched in silence. Then, at the end of the evening, we all carried our metal chairs to the end of the covered market and went home.

Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Architectural Details

The Parisiennes still aren't quite as careful about cleaning up after their dogs as they could be. Still, despite the risks inherent in not keeping our eyes constantly on the pavement, we do seem to spend a lot of time stopping to look up at the buildings of Paris. 

I'm not talking about the "if there's a horizontal surface, let's stick a statue on it" school of architecture but the ordinary (well, in Paris, ordinary) carvings that anywhere else would have a postcard all to themselves.

The elegant carved lettering of the Syndicat de l'Épicerie Française caught my eye. This handsome building, art nouveau, in style dates back to around 1900. 

The third photo here is the absolute pinnacle of the Opéra (as in Phantom of the...) Technically it's called the Palais Garnier. According to the Internet, there's still a small lake underneath it.

Last but not least, a genial stone face.