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I wasn’t going to go near a Starbucks for my two months in Paris. I was working on the principle that I’d avoid all American franchises. Especially a franchise that sells coffee in a city that makes great coffee. Actually I was pretty surprised to see Starbucks here. I would have thought France would try to keep Starbucks out. You see KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Subway here. That seems plenty.

    

The first Parisian Starbucks opened in January 2004. But there were lots of skeptics. Thick, dark espresso is coffee to the French. “American coffee, it’s only water,” said Bertrand Abadie. “We call it jus des chaussette (sock juice).”

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Que la force soit avec eux–may the force be with them–is on the cover of Paris Match magazine this week. France’s national rugby team les bleus (the blues) plays England’s team on Saturday night in the semi-finals. I don’t know if England’s players are “the whites” or what. Rugby teams seem to be called by the main color of their uniforms.

Simon Turnbull wrote about the celebration last week when les bleus beat favored New Zealand’s All Blacks. “As the champagne corks popped all over the French capital last Saturday night and World Cup fever spilled on to the Champs Elysees, it was impossible to move for partying Parisians. Some were hanging naked from lamp-posts waving tricolores, in celebration of France’s unlikely quarter-final victory against New Zealand in Cardiff.

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I’m a western American, a Californian. I don’t do Nutella. My son’s girlfriend is an eastern American, a Floridian. She does Nutella. And at many of the sidewalk creperies here in Paris there are huge jars of the stuff with spreading knives ready for duty stabbed into the gooey stuff. Parisians definitely do Nutella.          

                                                 

Nutella looks like chocolate-colored peanut butter, spreads like frosting, and has enough sugar to send your A1C (blood sugar average) to Mars. I watched a man at a crepe stand plop a big brown glob of Nutella onto a flat golden pancake, fold it over twice into a fat triangle, insert it into a paper cone, and hand it to a teenage boy.

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Five drunken people broke into the Musee d’Orsay early last Sunday morning, October 7. How the police knew they were drunk from the surveillance video, I don’t know exactly. Authorities don’t think the thieves–more properly “vandals”–were there to steal paintings. It wasn’t like they hated Claude Monet, the Impressionist painter best known for his studies of water lilies at his gardens in Giverny. But why molest one of his paintings? Whether this was an art heist gone awry, a statement against Monet, or just plain alchohol-fueled stupidity, the wayward five punched a 4-inch hole in the 1874 painting “Le Pont d’Argenteuil” (the bridge of Argenteuil, pictured above) before fleeing. A detail of the tear is shown below.

 

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Two men with leafblowers, another two men following along vacuuming up leaves from long, snaky rows. Four gardeners digging up plants with wide, heavy pitchforks, one man shoving plant waste into a large green canvas bag.

Trees dropping chestnuts, copper-colored leaves. Smaller trees wrapped in one-inch-weave burlap. Ten-foot-tall trees standing in wooden planter boxes painted gray. A man pushing a broom in a large circle, clearing the area around a stationary carousel. A row of eight palm trees. A bronze sculpture of a fallen tree by Giuseppe Penone.

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Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. — Ernest Hemingway in The Moveable Feast

Sometimes when you’re in Paris you want an away-from-Paris experience. You’d like to curl up and dig into something in your familiar language. Take a break from the walking, the map reading, the sounding like an idiot in French. I also bought Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay and Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley. In my luggage, I had packed Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. If I could have managed to bring less clothes, I would have brought more reading material. When I close my apartment door, I just love the simple act of sitting down and opening a book. Away from the Big Experience.

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It was a sunny morning as I crunched through leaves walking along the Seine from my home bridge, Pont Neuf, to the Pont d’Alma, a bridge close to the Eiffel Tower.  Below the d’Alma on the downriver side is the statue of “Le Zouave” (pictured below, far left), an image of an Algerian infantryman in the French army. These infantrymen’s uniforms were unique: a fez, a tight fitting short jacket, a ten-foot-long sash, baggy trousers, and white tights. The statue is famous for measuring the level of the Seine. Our tour guide last week mentioned that the Seine rose up to his neck one scary year.

           

The d’Alma bridge is also famous because it is next to the underpass (sometimes called the “tunnel”) where Princess Diana’s car crashed into a piling on August 31, 1997 (photo above, far right). After dining at the nearby Ritz Hotel, Dodi Fayed and Diana rode in a speeding car back to Dodi’s apartment, racing ahead of paparazzi. Dodi and the driver Henri Paul died immediately in the crash. Diana died later at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital. I chose not to walk along the underpass, though there is a narrow sidewalk on either side of the car lanes.

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Claude Monet (that’s “MOE-nay,” 1840-1926) started creating his waterlily paintings in 1914, as the Great War was beginning. The fighting was mostly to the north and to the east of Giverny, so Monet’s property and studios were not damaged. Pre-invasion bombings by the World War II allies in 1944, however, wrecked some towns around Giverny.

At the small museum in Paris’s Tuileries Garden, L’Orangerie, there are two large curved rooms, Salle I and Salle II, where eight of Monet’s huge waterlily oil paintings are displayed. Four paintings fill the walls in each room. (Orangerie means a plant nursery or greenhouse used to grow orange trees.)

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“What never wearies me is to sit on chairs which belong to nobody (or, if you like, to everybody), in front of tables which belong to nobody; that’s why I go and work in cafes–I achieve a kind of solitude and abstraction.   –Jean-Paul Sartre

I don’t get it. When I sit in a cafe, open my notebook, and get out my pen, the waiter comes to ask what I’d like. It’s a cafe creme (milk and coffee) and a croissant most mornings. Sometimes I get the tartine au beurre (sliced baguette with butter–more carbs for your euro buck). Then I write for a bit. The cafe creme and croissant arrive., I sip, write, bit, chew, write, sip, stir, bite, write, chew, and sip till the whole breakfast is consumed. The check comes curled up in a shot glass or flat in a basket.

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Jack Kerouac visited Paris 40 years ago. He drank wine, sat in cafes, made notes, talked with barkeeps and coffee-drinking table-sharers, keeping his sharp eye on the locals. He never wrote a cliche, never wasted words, always kept his ear out for the language that would sound bebop cool and descriptive.

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