“It was a music video that asked, what if Quasimodo was an over-the-top bombastic 70s rock star and also sang like the Phantom of the Opera? What if a floor-length white dress could also show your whole underwear? What if you followed a fugitive hunchback through the dark woods and then bathed in your clothes by the light of a thousand burning tapers? What if backup singers? What if lightning? What if chandeliers?”
Read More“While arranging his baguettes and loaves in the window, the baker, Monsieur Fauchenx, might have looked out onto the quiet street to see two of his more noteworthy neighbors coming and going under the waning lamplight…”
Read More“Many women were struck by the familiarity of this scenario: Despite no overt threat of violence, the young woman in the story did not feel that she had the right or even the ability to say no.”
Read MoreWhen Saturday evening mass let out at the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, a gaggle of attractive young women loitered in the shade of its eaves. …They were hoping to catch the eye of some pious young gentleman, who, having just confessed his sins, was ready to commit some new ones.
Read MoreToday the air smelled of linden blossoms and hot pavement. I went to have a citron pressé down by the river, and saw that two of the big quay trees, poplars that were downed in the recent storms, had been chopped up and stacked, ready for removal.
Read MoreRushing into the courtyard to see if he could help with the fire, he saw the infamous courtesan Cora Pearl leaning out of her window in her chemise and shouting at her stable hands: “I’ll sack the first person who takes a bucket of water to that cow upstairs!”
Read MoreEvery day there is only the lukewarm daylight, and the work, and the dishes. Every day there is only what the river brings.
Read More“…there was nevertheless something of the Dionysian satyr about him, and he spoke with a voice as self-assured as a president.”
Read MoreI bought the pink ranunculus to soften the blow of some bad news I thought I saw coming on the horizon. Bad news is always a little easier to weather when the laundry is done, and there are fresh flowers on the nightstand, and your life doesn’t already smell of despair.
Read MoreOn Netflix’s ‘The Dig:’ The past is not a foreign country after all. It is here, pressed close against us, its breath warm on the back of our neck. Everything that has ever happened, happened yesterday, and it happened right here. In reaching back, we meet the echo of ourselves.
Read MoreRevolutionaries sacked the Tuileries Palace and raided the royal wine cellars. One man located a ball gown belonging to the Duchess de Berry, put it on, and with feathers and flowers in his hair, screamed out of the palace window into the gardens below “Je reçois! Je reçois!” (“I receive! I receive!”).
Read MoreYesterday bright sunlight was spilling down through cracks in sooty clouds moving fast on high winds over the streets and the park. Leaving the Luxembourg Gardens, I saw a woman in a blue wool coat.
Read MoreAll my drawings have the bad habit of looking like I have done them, and the watercolors rarely listen and behave in the ways that I want. But the finished result is not the point. All sketchbooks, when every page has been filled in, are beautiful as artifacts of dedication and persistence.
Read MoreOne day while searching through the big boxes of 19th century photo archives at the Richelieu branch of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, I found something.
Read MoreI’ve used it like a little bell that some part of me tries to remember to ring when another dish gets broken, or a person insults me on social media or simply scrawls something I hate onto the bathroom wall of the void we’re all shouting into. Composure. The bell brings me back.
Read MoreTo see the lindens come into honeyed bloom at the eastern edge of the Tuileries gardens, and how they dropped their golden pollen in the pale dust as their leaves turned a deeper green.
Read MoreI came across an amazing document in the Paris police archives. It was from the secret files of the 19th century vice squad. Inside this enormous leather-bound volume were the criminal records of an incredible array of women who had found themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Read More“We walked down to the Jardin du Palais-Royal and sat on a bench to eat the cookies. The sun broke through the grey clouds, throwing gold down onto the bare trees and the green shoots of the early daffodils coming up already from the winter earth.”
Read MoreIn Granta this week: “It was in this spirit of panicked messages from lamenting author friends that I returned to Émile Zola’s L’Oeuvre of 1886…Were it published today, it might have been called Art Monster, or Les Workaholics.”
Read MoreI went back outside and the women were still there, standing in intervals, unmoved as palace guards. I felt I had to know what the deal was. What could they be doing, standing there like that on a Thursday afternoon?
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