Léran's new village library.

   One of the differences between France and North America is its sheer numbers of bookshops. Mirepoix (population around 4,000) has a good independently run one on the main square. Even the nearby SuperU has a commendable book selection. Pamiers--four times as large--has three bookshops that I know of. The departmental capital, Foix, a town of around 10,000, has the huge Majuscule store--one of a chain--and a couple more. And on it goes.... 

   And libraries are everywhere.

   (Drifting off-topic for a moment. You would think that librairie is French for "library." It's not. A librairie is a bookshop. A library, as we know it, is called a bibliothèque.)

   For the past several months, work has been underway on Léran's new library, which now occupies a brand-new space above the former mairie. 

   Some days ago, invitations were hand-delivered to all residents, with a request to respond if we were attending. 

   Official red-white-and-blue ribbon-cutting by our mayor, Henri Barrou, took place around 5:30 p.m., and the crowd and the queue outside all ascended the brand-new flight of stairs into the new, bright space. It's terrific with upbeat orange walls, lots of seating and books for little kids, and a collection of fiction and non-fiction that I can't wait to get my teeth into, metaphorically speaking.

   Our next-door neighbour, David Hilton (of www.davidhiltontableware.co.uk/) created the official signage.

   That's our mayor giving an official welcome. Local and regional representatives, who also spoke, consistently referred to his tenacité in getting this vastly improved library up and running. Yay, Henri!

       Over to the Salle des Tilleuls for cork-popping, a spread of charcuterie, and a story-telling performance.

Shakespeare et cetera

   A visit to Paris always includes several hours in  Shakespeare & Company just across from Notre Dame. Most nights, an author or poet reads from their latest work. Afterwords (typo but it seems so apt, I'll leave it) wine is poured, books are signed, and once again, in a world of big box bookstores and amazon.com,  I am so purely happy that a place like this still exists.

Isn't the side of a staircase a brilliant place to store books in otherwise unused space?

Too wet to sit down but not too wet to stand outside with a glass of wine.

   Here's what it felt like to be here on a recent cold, rainy November evening.

The Greengage Summer.

     It's time I reread The Greengage Summer, a novel that, for me, captures the feeling of summer in France more than any other: its small-town life, its hotels, its modest restaurants with their strings of coloured lights in the trees, its heat and lassitude. Written in 1958 by English author, Rumer Godden, this poignant coming-of-age story was made into a movie sometime in the 60s. Anyone see it?

    Of the fruit--here known as "reines claudes"-- Godden wrote: "The greengages had a pale-blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear-green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet."
     This afternoon, down at the café, it's 38 degrees in the shade. In the sun, it's so hot that windfall greengages have turned purple-black and literally cooked in their skins. They taste of compote, almost jammy. Some have already fermented, creating a pleasant boozy smell under the trees. I wonder if the birds and wasps that are feasting on them are getting a little tipsy?
    Friends had invited me to go and pick what I wanted from the branches that are almost bow to the ground with the weight of the fruit. Here's what I brought back. Some we'll eat fresh with our morning yogurt. Most will be frozen until the days get cooler. No jam-making when it's as hot as this.

     Our terrace faces north, so most of it is in the shade much of the day. You feel an abrupt temperature change when you step from the boiling hot garden into the shade. Lovely. The house is even cooler. As soon as the sun starts to sink, you feel the mercury falling. Mornings are cool, dew on the grass, and a great scented blast of honeysuckle greets me when I open the back door.
 

A Packed Day in Paris: Part 2

    Two years ago, when I talked to her at Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Whitman was in the middle of contacting authors to appear at the bookshop's biennial literary festival. When we picked dates to come to Paris, this was sort of at the back of my mind.

     The festival takes place over a weekend in the little park across from the shop, just across from Notre Dame. To be truthful, if you like books, you could settle into a seat under the white tent and stay there all day and some people obviously did. Even though we queued for half an hour, we still had to stand at the side of the tent to hear a discussion between Martin Amis and Will Self. And a crackling 45 minutes of conversation it was too. Well worth the standing, the wait, and the rushing back from the flea market (not via Montparnasse). 

      The crowds drifted away, or rather over to the shop to get their new books signed. We dove into the maze of narrow back streets for a quick lunch at one of the many gyro spots on the left bank, and then split up for the afternoon, Peter to draw, me to visit a couple of favourite stores. 

     No wonder Parisians are so enviably trim. They seem to spend all their time racing, gazelle-like, along the pavements from boutique to café to bistro. I managed to race too far north and found myself in the financial district, raced back to cookware store Dehillerin and found it crammed with Americans buying copper saucepans, raced a street or two over to La Droguerie which, if you're nuts about knitting or sewing, is this side of heaven---"hmm, shall I knit that sweater in linen or alpaca, and if it's alpaca, which of those 48 colours should it be?" But by now it was 6 p.m., and I was supposed to be on Ile St. Louis. Buying anything at La Droguerie takes at least 20 minutes so I took notes, and plan to go back. 

     Returning by metro, I discovered another station to avoid. The number of steps from platform level to ground level at Cité is 107--or 117. Either way, too many.  

Anyone Remember Angélique?

  Around the age of 14, I was spellbound, as were my friends, by a series of novels about a young Française called Angélique. We keenly followed her love life which got off to a rousing start when she was 16 with a forced marriage to a nobleman. I can't remember if it was before, or after, he was burned at the stake (probably after, Angélique tended to serial monogamy) that she cut a swathe through the court of Louis-the-Something. She next headed for the Middle East and a life in the harem. At some point, her thought-dead-but-wasn't comte reappeared and off they sailed for the New World and on and on she went. 

  I may have got some of the details wrong but what I did remember came flooding back at this morning's vide-grenier in Lavelanet where, at one stall, someone was ditching what looked like the entire Angélique series.

The Big Screen.

     Someone in this household has set his heart on a big flat-screen TV. We have not had a TV for 16 months and I haven't missed it. But winter is coming on and there are all those DVDs we've found at flea markets or ordered from Amazon...

    So the deal is: he can have the big screen and I'll make a big screen to hide it when it's not in use. Scouting around on-line, I've seen numerous "scrap" screens from the Victorian era decoupaged with kittens, faces, roses and all the other images beloved of the era. 

    I want to make something similar and, in recent months, had been hunting around for a source of pictures...postcards, giftwrap...I wasn't quite sure what.

    Then the answer fell into my hands. Bear with me if my prose gets a little purple further along in this post. It's the result of spending time with Volume 2 of Les Batailles de la Vie--The Battles of Life--a thick, heavy tome that, as luck would have it, I came upon lying forlornly on a heap of Readers Digest Condensed Books at today's vide grenier in Chalabre. My heart thumped and my cheeks paled as I asked the price. "Two euros." I swooned.  

    The first few pages are missing but I'm guessing from the fashions and the prose style that it's late 19th century. There's also a telling reference to a certain comtesse Régine who is described as "still charming" at 37 (!!) with shoulders of an ampleur superbe. That era was hot for big lusty shoulders as you can see in the 100 or so engravings punctuating the 1000 somewhat stained pages of mayhem, lurve and betrayal. 

Paris--Day 4: Where did the day go?

In walking around, basically. I worked on a story this morning taking time out to stroll up to Rue de Rivoli for ham and a baguette for lunch, to the Opera for tickets--except the box office was closed, it being June 1, a public holiday we'd forgotten about. In the afternoon, more walking...to the Pompidou Centre where we decided the crowds were really too large to make seeing the Kandinsky exhibit fun. Then to the Picasso Museum, arriving there on the dot of 5:15 to find a sign saying that 5:15 was exactly when ticket sales stopped. Tant pis. 

   Over to the rive gauche for a very welcome beer and then into Shakespeare and Company, my favourite Paris bookstore--in fact, my favourite bookstore anywhere. Tonight's reading was by Australian writer Marele Day, author of Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain's Wife and her soon-to-be-published Sea Bed, a novel about a Buddhist monk and a group of abalone fisherwomen in Japan. 

   We listened upstairs, surrounded by more books than you could read in a lifetime, then went off for supper at La Fourmi Ailée, a little place we ate at last year which was conveniently just across a park and around the corner. Fittingly, its decor is mostly books.

Lost French Words

Browsing at Shakespeare and Company, the iconic English bookstore on the left bank, I picked up a copy of The Discovery of France by English author, Graham Robb. It's a book that's hard to describe but basically it recounts how numerous mini-civilizations, all with their own cultures, came together as "France."

The book is packed with engaging bits of information. For instance, Robb describes how: "The shepherds of the Landes spent whole days on stilts, using a stick to form a tripod when they wanted to rest. Perched 10 feet in the air, they knitted woolen garments and scanned the horizon for stray sheep."

Among the many, many other facts that will have you nudging the person next to you and saying "did you know..." Robb explores how numerous dialects were eventually replaced by "official" French. 

Unfortunately that meant the loss of some truly useful words:

Affender: "to share a meal with an unexpected visitor" (and haven't we all done that at one time or another).

Aranteler: "to sweep away spiders' webs"

Carquet: "a secret place between breast and corset".

I can't wait to say: "Je dois aranteler mon carquet."

Thoroughly recommended. 

I read it in one sitting. Five sittings, to be strictly honest:

1. On the TGV from Paris to Toulouse.

2. At Toulouse station while I waited for the train to Tarbes. Trains to Pamiers were cancelled because, I later found out, an electricity line had come down so, very much on the ball, SNCF rerouted us.

3. On the brief rail trip from Toulouse to Portet sur Garonne

4. On the bus that met us there and  took a circuitous route to drop off passengers who normally disembarked at stations between Toulouse and Auterive.

5. On the train between Auterive and Pamiers.