"Paris in Love"

[fiefoe]

I barely remember reading Eloisa James' romance books. Her memoir about her sabbatical year is sweet, healing, and makes me want to live in a rainy city (at least for a while) again.

• The gargoyles discontentedly sluicing rainwater from the roofs had spat on everyone from Robespierre to Marie Curie. The weight of all that history encourages a quiet mind rather than extravagant emotion.
• For the most part, I have retained the short form, the small explosion of experience, as it best gives the flavor of my days.
• The French highway was lined with short, vertical pipes from which ferns sprouted. The frilly parts made it look as though the troll dolls from my childhood were hiding in the pipes—perhaps waiting for a chance to hitchhike, if the right family were to happen along.
• Archetypal French scene: two boys playing in the street with baguettes were pretending not that they were swords, as I first assumed, but giant penises.
• Eleven o’clock Sunday morning: a four-piece brass band took over our street corner and played tunes from My Fair Lady. We all crowded to the window, and they blew us kisses and requested money to be thrown. The children took great pleasure in doing precisely that.
• It started to pour while we were out for dinner, so hard that a white fog hovered above the pavement where the rain was bouncing. We ran all the way home, skittering past Parisians with umbrellas and unprepared tourists using newspapers as cocked hats, the water running down our necks, accompanied by an eight-block-long scream from Anna.
• The elegance of that Dior mannequin, her effortless insouciance, the turn of her plastic chin and the twist of her plastic wrist, made her haute couture seem just as tantalizingly unavailable.
• Far above the cosmetics counters on the grand main floor, a domed stained-glass ceiling shimmers like an enormous kaleidoscope. Instead of a counter, the skin-care company La Mer has a nine-foot-long sinuous aquarium. Dolce & Gabbana has its own little salon, with chandeliers made of black glass blown into elegant, slightly sinister, shapes.
• In the gift shop, Luca bought a shaggy hat with little sheep horns. He’s all hair these days. The saleslady said, “I was watching you decide.… He had to have this. It’s an extension of himself.”
• Anna reported today that Domitilla’s gerbil died, an event that should instinctively raise a spark of sympathy rather than raucous laughter … but no. The gerbil fell off the balcony, and then a flowerpot fell on it, after which its eye bulged out (a gory detail of particular interest).
• Rather than knit those leaves into words, he simply allows them to fall. It’s a cruel fate: to watch without recounting the fall of the leaf; to grieve without creating anew; to age without describing it.
• Let them leave language to their lonely betters Who count some days and long for certain letters; We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: Words are for those with promises to keep.
• As the subway stopped, I toppled her into my hands and we brought the ladybug up a flight of stairs, down a hallway, up two more smaller sets of stairs … finally into the chilly morning, where she flew into a cluster of glossy bushes.
• All the buildings lining rue du Conservatoire are constructed of cream marble or limestone. When I went outside today, the sky was pale and fierce, on the very cusp of rain. From the top of the church and the conservatory, the contrast was almost imperceptible, as if marble and air danced cheek to cheek.
• Now I zip past those stores, only to linger at chocolate shops displaying edible chess sets, or a model of Hogwarts in dark chocolate. It’s nice that life is long enough to give you desires of many kinds.
• We took a boat down the Seine today and saw a houseboat with a charming upper deck, which included a grape arbor and lovely potted plants.
• The effect is not beautiful close up, but from a distance, vermiculation gives the stone a kind of foggy beauty that eases its grandeur.
• sugar. Luca’s favorite looks like a tiny version of the Alps: small strawberries, each one sitting upright and capped in a drop of white chocolate. My personal favorite has sliced apricots arranged in overlapping patterns, like crop circles in an English field.
• When she writes of grief as a “splintery thing the size of a telephone pole” in your chest, her splinter endangers all the places of your heart.
• she stopped below the rose window. “Well, how many died making that? Don’t you even know how many died putting it up there?” I discover, once again, that growing up is synonymous with disillusionment with one’s parents.
• I was staggered by a mound of fresh mushrooms, big and ruffled like hats for elderly churchgoing fairies.
• furthermore, eggs come ornamented with tiny feathers. My children shriek: “Butt feathers!” Having grown up on a farm, I like remembering the sultry warmth of newly laid eggs.
• My favorite adaptation to the wet weather is babies in bright red backpacks that have four posts to hold little red canopies over their heads. They look like plump Indian rajas swaying along, atop paternal elephants.
• An important part of preserving memories is deliberately letting some go. Careful editing, if you will.
• The French government allows only two sale events a year, regulating markdowns in department stores as well as in, for example, the fashionable (and expensive) shops on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré... The huge lingerie department at Le Bon Marché was crowded with tables of markdowns, women ruffling through them as intently as if they were looking in a box of old photographs for their first love.
• Take gay, for example. It’s a shame it’s all but lost its original meaning; to me, it has a kind of tinsel joy
• The woman who lives in that attic painted her walls yellow, and reflected light bounces out like a spring crocus. If light were sound, her window would be playing a concerto.
• I’ve realized that having five-foot-tall windows through which to view the world changes everything. Watching snow fall on the other side of large panes of glass makes it feel as if the snow falls in the room itself; a normal window brackets off the snow, as if it fell on a Hollywood set, far away.
• High up, somewhere in the milky sky, the snow clings together before it pinwheels gently down in little clumps. Thousands of cotton bolls were trying to seed themselves on rue du Conservatoire.
• The train from Paris to Cologne took me through farmland where clusters of delicate white windmills stood like storks, chattering together on a hilltop.
• so now I have a glassful of little fairy bonnets in shy curls next to me, like a scrap of the deep forest on my desk. Apparently, in the language of flowers these lilies of the valley signal a return of happiness.