...wherever you go, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
------Hemingway
Paris stayed with me for 13 years of roaming, as I lived with and without my Frenchman on the other side of the Atlantic. Our first night visiting Paris together we wandered beneath the shadow of Notre Dame and then watched her formidable towers from the Esmerelda, in those days spare rooms decorated like theatrical sets with doors that didn't lock. In the morning we burst out into the Parisian April, a blur of medieval stone soothing my jetlag, as Jacques attended meetings and I waited in cafés of the stone-walled city.
And now I have lived here more than four years, have battled the reality of Paris as an outsider, and long for the rough and sodden days of Hemingway's Paris, when fishing in the Seine brought a good meal and men never sobered up at the Café des Amateurs on rue Mouffetard near where I, too, dwelt 3 years ago.
This blog is dedicated to the real Paris, that is to say, the Paris of the imagination, and the Paris of mutable time, that arcs from the ancient mountain of Ste. Genevieve (blocks away), the ruins of Roman baths (down the street), the asphalt by the nearby Sorbonne that had been ripped up in '68, the ancient center of a French Republic that struggled for existence (500 meters from here, the Parvis de Notre Dame), and the haunts of Hemingway like nearby Shakespeare & Co. It is also dedicated to our travels--to escape the cold spinster Paris--which have taken us all over the world. And it is dedicated to those of us who have tales to tell.
------Hemingway
Paris stayed with me for 13 years of roaming, as I lived with and without my Frenchman on the other side of the Atlantic. Our first night visiting Paris together we wandered beneath the shadow of Notre Dame and then watched her formidable towers from the Esmerelda, in those days spare rooms decorated like theatrical sets with doors that didn't lock. In the morning we burst out into the Parisian April, a blur of medieval stone soothing my jetlag, as Jacques attended meetings and I waited in cafés of the stone-walled city.
And now I have lived here more than four years, have battled the reality of Paris as an outsider, and long for the rough and sodden days of Hemingway's Paris, when fishing in the Seine brought a good meal and men never sobered up at the Café des Amateurs on rue Mouffetard near where I, too, dwelt 3 years ago.
This blog is dedicated to the real Paris, that is to say, the Paris of the imagination, and the Paris of mutable time, that arcs from the ancient mountain of Ste. Genevieve (blocks away), the ruins of Roman baths (down the street), the asphalt by the nearby Sorbonne that had been ripped up in '68, the ancient center of a French Republic that struggled for existence (500 meters from here, the Parvis de Notre Dame), and the haunts of Hemingway like nearby Shakespeare & Co. It is also dedicated to our travels--to escape the cold spinster Paris--which have taken us all over the world. And it is dedicated to those of us who have tales to tell.
Ravishing!
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Fantastic Mallika! So glad to have found your blog and LOVE the moveable feast reference. One of the few books that really swept me away. Looking forward to reading more!
RépondreSupprimerHi Joe! Just figured out how to respond---thank you so much for your comment!
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