Sunday Papers: Napolean Bonaparte

"History is a set of lies agreed upon."


On the turntable:  Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

Sunday Paper: Honore de Balzac

"This is why the Orient boasts so few writers. One lives too much in oneself to have anything left of the self to hand out to others. What is the point of thought, there, where all is feeling?"

On the turntable:  Bob Dylan, "Going Going Guam"

Sunday Papers: Marcel Pagnol

"No history textbook in the world has ever been anything but a propaganda pamphlet in the service of governments."

On the turntable:  The Continental Op, "Stitch Music"
On the nighttable: Alistair Horne, "Seven Ages of Paris"

In the Protective Arms of the Father

It was still early when I climbed out of the Metro, but I knew that there would be at least one open cafe, and there was.  I sat and nursed two orders of croissant and cafe creme. The cemetery wouldn't open until 8 am, and I suppose it isn't tactful to wake the dead. 

I'd wanted to come to Père Lachaise since I first read Danny Sugarman's "No One Here Gets Out Alive," which detailed the madcap fan devotion around Jim Morrison's grave.  I'd made the long hike out here during a previous visit in 2005, but two days of snow had iced up the cemetery's hilly slopes and I had found it closed. 

The cemetery's distance from town had always been a problem, but a necessary one.  Until 1785, many of the town's residents had been buried in the near-open grave beneath today's Fontaine des Innocents near Les Halles. After the rains, the area became a mire of decomposing body parts.  Napoleon had those bodies moved to the city's famous catacombs, and when these began to fill people were buried out at Père Lachaise.  At first, residents were turned off by the cemetery's distance from the city center, so some of Paris' bigger names were moved here, in order to improve its cachet.  Writers La Fontaine and Molière were brought here first, then the tragic and celebrated lovers Abelard and Héloïse.   Steadily, the dead of Paris began to undertake this one-way trip, and Père Lachaise eventually grew into the city's largest necropolis.

Relieved to find them open, I entered the front gates and found a bench midway up the hill.  Nowhere else in Paris can there be found such a concentration of her history.  There were so many names here, and the grounds so expansive, that I needed to plot a route.  As I sat in the shade, listening to the birds, it dawned on me that I had finally escaped the incessant horns and sirens of the hectic streets of Paris.  A man with a cane hobbled by at that moment and said to me, "It’s beautiful isn't it?"  I had to agree. 

I continued up the hill in front of me.   This was the original section of the cemetery, and certainly the most beautiful.  Gothic and sometimes macabre sculptures decorated the graves of what must have been some of Paris' most noble families.  Each sculpture was a masterpiece, rivaling anything in the sterile museums of the city.  Here, surrounded by trees and dappled with morning light, the stone figures came alive.

I topped the first hill and looked to the west, catching sight of the Eiffel Tower and the domed Pantheon, itself a repository of renowned dead.  I saw too the man with the cane, ducking down one of the small cobbled trails that extended the wider "boulevards."  As he disappeared once more from view, I wondered if he was here due to grief or mere curiosity.  Through the morning, I'd repeatedly wonder this any time I encountered any other strollers, offering a subdued smile rather than a boisterous "Bonjour."

I found Colette's grave first, then sought out Chopin.  As I was looking, I took a photo of a life-sized figure of a man into whose hands someone had placed a rose.  I liked how the red of the rose contrasted so strongly against the grey stone.  Just then someone shouted out at me, and I turned to see a man with wild hair approaching, holding a thick notebook to his chest.  He repeated what he had shouted, then asked me, "Speak English?"  As I nodded, he told me that I was looking at one of the men who had designed the Louvre.  He then launched into a frenetic spiel, throwing out names of the famed dead in between answering questions.
"Do you know Chopin?" Gesturing behind him.
"Yes."
 "Balzac?
"Yes"
"Proust."
"Of course."
"Thierry Le Roi?"  I paused and apparently made a puzzled face.  Then he held out his hand to shake.  "And you?"
"Ted Taylor."
"Ah, English!  There are (X) English people buried here."
"My name is English but my family is Irish."
"Ah, Oscar Wilde!  There are (X) Irish people buried here.  The first person buried here is Irish.  A young girl.  Do you have time for a tour?"
I regret that I said no, that I didn't have time.  I liked the idea of wandering around the cemetery in the company of this eccentric, slightly mad person.  But as I made the universal gesture of tapping my left wrist he simply smiled, said "Enjoy Monsieur," and sped off again.

I continued my own perambulation, to pay tribute to Balzac, Yves Montand, Sarah Berhardt, Proust. The latter's grave was littered with Metro tickets, so I added my own.  I was amazed how simple some of the graves were, and how difficult to find were others.  The most elusive grave was Edith Piaf, with whom I played peek-a-boo awhile.  I admired the prone figure of Victor Noir, whose crotch had been polished to a fine sheen by the hands of women who rubbed it as fertility talisman.  Oscar Wilde had been encased in plexiglass, yet the cherub upon his grave had been emasculated, a fate that poor Abelard had suffered in actual life.  The glass didn't stop people from kissing the cherub's face.  And of course I found the grave of Jim Morrison, though it had been barricaded, and a group of workmen had chosen that area for a smoke break, which prevented a longer visit.

I visited too a few of the names in the crematorium, including Maria Callas and Isadora Duncan.  There were a number of people standing in front, and others continued to arrive.  Some were in black, and all looked to be in their 30s.  A friend had died I suppose, someone far too young.  It was a reminder that not all of us here had come for sightseeing.  Moments like this always bring to mind one of my favorite song titles, "Strangers Die Everyday."

I continued on to the back wall of the cemetery, its strip of lawn dedicated to mass graves, to air disasters, to the members of the French resistance, to Jews killed during the Nazi occupation.  Around and to the left a stretch of wall sat beneath an apartment building. Covered now with ivy, very few bullet holes were visible from the day in May when 147 Communards were shot.  There was no information on where they had been buried.

I allowed myself some time to wander free, coming accidentally to a few interesting graves (such as the Camera installed in the tomb of the very much living cemetery ethnographer André Chabot), and missed a few that I'd have liked to see.  But the hollow grumbling in my belly told me that it was time to get back to the world of the living.   LYL had chosen to opt out of this morning excursion, not wanting to risk polluting herself with the ultimate impurity of death. As it was, I later made her anoint me with salt as a means of purification, before we went out to celebrate the rest of the day.

On the turntable:   Billy Joel, "Songs from the Attic"

La Rive Gauche

Where yesterday's walk north of the Seine had been a stroll amidst the classics of Parisian monuments, today we would take in the other side of the river, where the heroes and giants of the time hadn't been afraid to get a little dirt beneath their fingernails.

But first breakfast was in order, and what better than bread and chocolate and a cup of frothy caffeine taken upon the sidewalk?  The nearest cafe was the oddly named Cafe Winston, after Churchill of course, but I couldn't help think of 1984, as Orwell too had spent time in this city, and had penned one of my favorite books about it.  It was we who did the watching however, not Big Brother, as the passersby on their way to work offered endless entertainment.   

Closer to the river, we forewent for a moment the sound and sights of the city by ducking into the Paroisse Saint-Pierre de Caillot, a hulk of a building that was as monolithic as the Arc de Triomphe just up the street.  This was church as fortress, a square squat edifice originally built in the 11th Century, but redesigned in the 1930's.  It quickly became my favorite church in Paris as it was completely without pretense, free from spikes and towers and gargoyles, though those too have their charm.  I suppose I liked it because its minimalism could almost be Buddhist.

A short walk away was the river, and La Flamme de la Liberté, modeled upon the Statue of Liberty's torch. At its base lay a number of flowers to Lady Diana, killed as she was in the tunnel beneath nineteen years before.

Crossing the river now, Eiffel's creation rising sharply to our right.  The left bank of the Seine was as noisy, as hurried as the right.  We tried to ignore it, hugging the shore of the river as we went, but like yesterday, we never seemed free of the roar of cars, and what seemed the near incessant scream of sirens.  The latter was a constant for the three days we were there.  Despite its reputation as the apotheosis of Western culture, Paris is almost Asian in its chaos. The hordes of people with their hard closed faces, throwing accusative glares your way as if deciding what part you play in the whole melee of aggressively pushing along the crowded streets, constantly on their mobile phones, constantly arguing.  Motorbikes raced through and around the stand-still traffic, and on the sidewalks, very large men patrolled with very large weapons. 

The traffic was horrendous, the flow of the streets poorly planned. It was with great relief that we escaped into the Musee d'Orsay.  I loved how it maintained its look of old railway station, albeit one quite short.  How pleasant it was to walk where the rails had once been, overlooked by the statues of marble and bronze.  I liked too how it picked up where the Louvre left off chronologically (and the Pompidou Center likewise picks up the story from there).  Unlike that more visited museum across the river, the d'Orsay had a steady even tone to her collection, rather than wing after wing of overlooked works, followed by the sudden crescendo of a Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo.  More friendly too was the scale, which lessened the possibility of burnout.  (My trip to the Louvre a decade ago made more understandable Godard's famous scene shot there, and I found myself constantly looking out the tall and plentiful windows, wishing to just get on with it and return to the snow-covered streets outside.)

Ironically, it was nature brought indoors that I appreciated most today.  The big names of Impressionism wowed me, as I knew they would, but what I took away from the museum was a newfound appreciation for Sisley and his landscapes.  As a writer I've always envied painters their ability to capture light, as it is something that can't be done well with words. And Sisley presented light perfectly. Scanning my eyes across the far wall, I found myself surprised that there were so many shades of blue.   

Sadly that blue wasn't with us outdoors as well.  Clouds and rain had been a persistent travel companion from prehistoric UK, down the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basel, and now again in Paris.  I was beginning to learn it was quite a wet city, a fact I recalled from films and paintings where the light glared off the city's slick streets.

After a quick visit to the Beat Hotel and its old photos and ghosts of tobacco past we decided to reward our other senses with a meal.  Hemingway took his initial immoveable feast at a good cafe on the Place Saint-Michel and we did the same, though I've already forgotten its name.  We left the bustle of the plaza for the uphill climb past the old Roman baths, past the more Greek looking Pantheon and Clovis' ancient Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.  Here began the Sorbonne, and further on, the quiet, somewhat run down neighborhood where Hemingway had cut his teeth as a writer.

It was a shift downhill from here, then a quick diversion across the islands to Notre Dame.  I'd been of course, and the long queue turned me off, so I carried on back across the Seine over its oldest bridge, Henri IV's ironically named "Pont Neuf."  Not far from here was the famed Shakespeare & Co. bookstore (or at least an homage to Sylvia Beach's original), which I had made a priority on this visit.   Unfortunately I had made an appointment which I now needed to rush to keep.  What I remembered from 2005 as a slow pleasant meander through snowy streets was now a dash in the steady rain.

I arrived at Cafe Deux Magots a bit late.  Richard Dindo, a well-know Swiss documentary filmmaker, was waiting at what had been Hemingway's favorite table.  A fifty year resident of the Left Bank, he told me a number of tales about his life and history here.  It was a easy relaxed conversation, where we discussed French filmmakers and Japanese poets.

The day was growing late so we did what the economically-minded Hemingway rarely did: catch a taxi.  It was a mad ride, the stresses of which dissipated with the magic-hour views from the rooftop of our Hotel Raphael.

There was one more stop for the day.  During my last visit to France in March I read Colette's classic, "Gigi," and upon returning to Japan, had watched the film with my musical-crazed daughter.  The most memorable scenes had taken place in Maxim's.  Pleasantly surprised that it still existed, we decided that we needed to visit.  Walking through the door was very literally a time-warp to the Belle Epoque, where waiters in long coats offered a level of service rarely seen anymore.  Amidst a very red interior of mirror and velvet, we sat beside what later in the night would become a dance floor, and from somewhere behind the darkness of the stage a woman began a chanson croon.


There was yet another day, with drinks at the Buddha Bar (in the darkened basement of Hemingway's Crillion Hotel), a side trip to a tourist infested Versailles, and an oasis of quiet found within the Rodin Museum and garden. But by then we were growing  a little tired of Paris and its roar.  (Though we agreed that we'd like to come back a spend at least a week next time, to mop up the final sites as it were, to take in the lesser visited crumbs.)  For now we would set the plate aside.  Going beyond the metaphor, we were in fact quite looking forward to time spent in the south, to the quiet meals we'd have there.  Though Paris does deserve its food reputation and its constellation of Michelin stars, the feasts were always a little too bombastic (a criticism that could equally be leveled at Saint-Tropez).  Even with my limited time here, I was quickly beginning to realize that the best meals in France could be found in its villages, of a renown that went little further than its confines.  To quote LYL, why go out for a meal that is inferior to one that you can make yourself?  And there would be plenty of those too.

So we left Paris with a simple breakfast of croissant and cafe, taken at Gare de Lyon's Le Train Bleu, where we awaited our own.  It took us south, over hills rolling long and green, eventually beginning to shorten into a softer, cafe au lait brown populated with short trees and sheep. These shortened ever still into higher rocky spires, then fell away completely with the sea.


On the turntable:  Bill Withers, "Best of Bill Withers"
  

La Rive Droite

It took us less than an hour to get from rail to rue.  In between we taxied from Gare de Lyon to our hotel, the Hotel Raphael (which had been used by Wes Anderson for his short film, "Hotel Chevalier," and which I found out too late had been set dressed with furniture from his own apartment a few blocks away), then into the Metro for a short ride back across the city.  

Our premiere destination was the Place de Vosges, which LYL was quite excited to share with me.  Developed by Henri IV in 1605, it is the oldest planned square in Paris, and was today decorated with Parisians sprawled on the grass, enjoying a cool summer afternoon within its splendidly walled confines.  Moreso than the lawn, we were tempted by the Victor Hugo house tucked beneath the arches in one corner, but a special exhibition had resulted in a queue. We settled instead for crepes and cafe creme at a sidewalk table and watched the bustle of the trendy Marais.  

Thus fueled, we passed the large stele marking the Bastille, then followed the Seine, trying to ignore the race of traffic above.  We reentered the city where the Hotel de Ville rose up, and tried in vain to get inside.  The front plaza too proved popular with those looking for sun, as was the nearby Fontaine de Innocents.   

It was here I began to follow a course laid out in the book, A Walkable Feast, which was a companion volume to the Walks in Gertrude Stein's Paris that I had used on my last visit over a decade ago.  (The current volume was dedicated strictly to Hemingway, and as such it compared more poorly, since the Stein book dealt with all of her circle, making for longer strolls and richer variety.)  With the innards of the Pompidou Center spilling out behind us, we passed through The Halles, seemingly under perpetual construction.  The Louvre and its environs weren't any less busy, as the Jardin des Tuileries was hosting a large fun fair that seemed to harken back to the chaotic days of the Commune, with its wild rides and screaming teens.  

Things were a little calmer in the side street canyons leading to the old Opera House.  LYL made a quick detour to Chanel (picked clean this day by a cluster of Hong Kong tourists), but our intended stop at the Ritz Hotel bar (which Hemingway "liberated" in 1944) had to be tabled due to ongoing construction there.   We did find a surprising bit of solitude in the open Place Vendome, where the tall statue of a Caesaresque Napolean towers above both the room where Chopin died and the now scaffolded Ritz from where Lady Diana began her final ride.   

Along a narrow side street we took a rest at Harry's New York Bar, an idea shared with many foreigners finished with the day's work in the nearby financial district.  Spoken English filled the place, finding parallel with the decor: the crests of the public schools of England hanging above the pennants of America's better known universities.  Above a photo of Hemingway himself I found the pennant of my own alma mater of Arizona, in whose renowned creative writing program I discovered Hemingway and first devoured his Moveable Feast.  It was there I began a flirtation with Paris, or at least with his Paris, so it was there that it began.  And here, in Harry's bar, it came full circle.  A rather elliptical circle at that.  

Our next stop was Hemingway related as well, a pleasant simple meal at Gourmand Prunier, where he would dine if he had done well at the races. We considered this warranted as our own legs had by now carried us much father than his winning horses had.  

But those legs weren't finished just yet.  Up the steps of Église de la Madeleine for photos of the fading sunlight.  From here we carried on toward the lengthening shadow of the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde.  Just around the corner, the Champs-Élysées was coming into her nighttime finery.  

Up toward the famous Arch, the Avenue was closed to traffic, in some sort of rehearsal for Bastille Day. Thus unchallenged by traffic, we stepped out into the middle of the grand road and snapped away at the last traces of daylight.   
 

On the turntable:  Buffalo Springfield, "Buffalo Springfield Again"
On the nighttable:  Peter Mayle, "Toujours Provence"

Sunday Papers: Charles de Gaulle

"How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?"




On the turntable:  Palace Music, "Arise, Therefore"
On the nighttable:  Marcel Pagnol, "My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle

Pastis and Petanque

Another of my goals this summer was to sit at the edge of a dusty town square somewhere and sip pastis while watching the locals play boules.  Late Saturday afternoon we chose Cogolin, since it was short drive away.  

Despite the lingering heat of the day we found a number of games in progress, side by side across three makeshift courts.  They stood out in the open sun, the square having been renovated and the stubby plane trees still a few years away from giving shade.  The men playing were younger and had more of the look of bowlers or billiard players, with their T-shirts, sneakers, and disappointing absence of good mustaches.  Worst of all was that my vantage point was blocked by people standing out along the front of a similarly renovated cafe, with glassed-in sides and nary an outdoor table.   

It was all a far cry from what I had envisioned from watching  films based on the novels of Pagnol.  LYL assured me that the old ways do exist, but more so further up in the hills, though it is doubtful anyone wears suspenders and fedora as well as Yves Montand.  So I soothed myself with my first taste of pastis, heavy and thick like licorice.  I'm not a spirits person, and the high alcohol content quickly brought a heat into my body that could rival that of out in the square.  I could see that it was drink only for a dry climate, for the liquor itself is like humidity in a glass.  The thought of sipping it on a sticky August Kyoto afternoon brought a feeling of claustrophobia.  

Glass empty, we needed to run a few quick errands in town, one of which was the pharmacy.  As we stood in the queue, a woman came in leading her dog on a leash, one of those bull terriers with their weird shark-like head.  As we all waited, the dog plonked itself onto the cool tile floor with a great burst of a sign, its belly flattened like a yogi to completely maximize the cooling effect.  The woman took little time with her prescription, and as she left, the dog seemed unwilling to go, ignoring the first couple of tugs on the leash.  Instead the woman dug her heels in, and walking backward, turned the still supine dog completely around and began dragging it toward the door, its legs still splayed behind, and in between,  a pair of its own boules glided steadily across the floor. 


On the turntable:  Blossom Dearie, "For Cafe Apres-Midi" 
On the nighttable:  "Paris Was Ours"  (Various)

(untitled)

Footsteps absorbed by stone.

Searching for

What lies behind silence

On the turntable:  Bay City Rollers,  "Bay City Rollers"

Sunday Papers: Ernest Hemingway

“In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.”


On the turntable:  Conor Oberst, "Here's to Special Treatment"

A Meal in the Maures

The silence at Chartreuse de la Verne had emptied all, including even our bellies.  We found respite a dozen twisted kilometers away, in the village of Collobrières.  There had been a settlement here at least since the bridge was laid in the 12th Century.  The town's current layout was like a bell jar, with long narrow streets leading away toward a central point from which they splayed away like the typical medieval town.  The base of this bell was the long Boulevard Lazare Carnol, shaded completely by tall plane trees.  We sat ourselves in front of the Bar Tabac de la Mairie, facing the village square, which was as quiet as the ruined church that had greeted us on our way into town.  The proprietress upon seeing us seemed surprised that we didn't prefer to eat overlooking the river.  The river?

Passing through to the back, we found a wide veranda had been built across the narrow Réal Collobrier, a number of its tables filled with food and conversation.  We settled into a bowl of linguine and a nice piece of beef, along with the obligatory glass of rosé.  This is a dangerous sort of wine, as unlike a fuller-bodied white (or red, though in the summer, forget it), it is barely felt and goes down like water, and before you know it, a half bottle is gone.  Being midday, and needing to drive those sinuous roads home, I chose the smallest volume. 

We had started late, and not long after our plates arrived, so did the staff, tucking into a tall plate of mussels now that the kitchen was closed.  A jolly, full-bellied man stepped out into the doorway, who we presumed was the cook. He called greetings over to a man at an adjoining veranda, one filled with diners looking more buttoned down and touristic.  LYL and I complimented ourselves on choosing the one that was more authentic, where the other guests looked like locals.  When our proprietress came to drop our check we complimented the food, and asked her to pass on these sentiments to the chef.  She looked at us and laughed and said, "But that's me!"  The full-bellied 'cook' smiled at us from behind her, still playing the charade that it was he rather, who was in charge.  

After such a good meal, the level of satisfaction is usually so complete that there is really little point in trying to surpass it.  Aside from the drive home, there was little else to do.  We had a token peek at the Chapelle Notre Dame de Pitié, as bright and colorfully painted as the shutters in the windows of the houses lining the long lanes.  Next door at Confiserie Azuréenne we took as dessert some samples of the chestnuts that gives this village its renown. (Though their ice cream seemed a bigger seller on a day as hot as this.)   Followed up by a cafe au lait on the village square, in a bistro whose platters were as big as the rims on our car. Little moved here, least of all the air, so we initiated a bit of motion ourselves, and walked across the dappling shadows of the plane trees, in the direction of a nap.  


On the turntable: Bill Evans, "Live at the Village Vanguard"
  

Ce qui se Trouve Derrière le Silence

It is a scene encountered a hundred times in Asia, of a woman sitting on her haunches on the floor, feet spayed out sideways to the left, her body contours hidden by flowing cloth.  She is sitting directly before the idols lined up on the other side of the room, sitting in complete stillness, the perfect manifestation of the message written on the sign on the door, a single word: Silence.  
 
The woman looks a part of this room, as if she has grown out of this stone which was laid here 900 years before.  The chairs that flank her were a later addition of course, as was the custom of sitting in them.  And the idol that those chairs face is far from the crowded riot of colors found in the bustling temples of Asia. Rather, it is a single simple figure of Christ on the cross, carved from a single piece of wood and of very subdued colors, a Christ gaunt and be-ribbed.

The angularity of the Christ matches that of the trees of the hills outside.  The woman at prayer would have passed thousands of them on her way here, a journey of some effort, along a road that sinuated its way through the oak and chestnut of the Maures, a road that clung miraculously to the hillsides, a road transformed with the coming of feet, of hoof, of tire.  After that long winding almost metaphoric road, this woman would have had to undertake the final part of her journey alone, on foot, over the dust of sunburned trail.  And finally, the silence would welcome her, as would the cool.     

We leave her be and step outside into the light.  The paths are lined with lavender bushes humming with the throb of bees, and every step brings us deeper into their scent.  More arched doorways await at their end, leading us into another stone chamber, then another, and another.  Chartreuse de la Verne is a labyrinth, with all passages leading eventually to the chapel.  It is the largest chamber of all, bare but for simple wooden pews, a container built for silence. For silence is the real work here, not the baking of bread, nor the grinding of olives for oil, nor the chanting of female voices high sweet.  In the beginning may have been the Word, but words have all but transcended this place.       

Some words do remain of course, as this is an abbey founded on the law of God.  But as I walk around I feel that that law is a mutually agreed upon vision of a shared existence, one based on faith rather than externally-imposed precepts.  Faith can take many forms, and like snowflakes, each is unique and personal.  I lie the idea of that.  And though I am far from the Catholicism of my childhood, I feel that faith resonate within, in the form of silence.  And despite the cliché, silence doesn't fill; it empties.


On the turntable:  (---------)

And My Time Went so Quickly

I've mentioned before that the best meals in France are usually found in its smaller villages, a theory that I've tested against the templates of Paris and San-Tropez.  But one meal that I've returned to can be found just outside the latter, off the beach road that climbs toward Ramatuelle.  Because a  Club 55 is a place where the experience outweighs the food.  

Plus it seemed the best place to enjoy a birthday lunch to celebrate LYL's 55th.  The drive out was more of an adventure than we'd planned, as a missed turned led us higher and higher into the hills until the pavement fell away.  Luckily we had chosen to take the Jeep Wrangler, which bounced and hopped over the rocks and deeper ruts. Light fell upon us between openings in the trees, and finally after one last hairpin, the shiny sea appeared and our tires once against kissed the tarmac somewhere above La Croix Valmer.

Arriving just inside the noon cutoff for a rented paillote at the beach, we were able to spread out our things and settle in beneath the shade of its fronds.  Pamplona Beach was pleasantly quiet here in the back row, but there was a bit of action up beneath the umbrellas at the water's edge.  It was still reasonably early in the season, a time when English remains the lingua franca, until the first of August when Paris empties out and heads south.       

Our lunch booking came up quite quickly.  LYL had made two reservations, one in her name and one in mine, unwilling to lose a table to a party of itinerant Russians as she had last year.  We were led to a nice table beneath the spread of a low pine, a small forest of which helps to shade the beachfront terrace.  (Cracks and fissures in the boughs also make for convenient cubbyholes for the waitstaff.) Neither of us were hungry so we chose a simple lunch of mussels, salade nicoise, and a platter of stuffed vegetables, and I had my token lunchtime glass of rosé.  I'd had the mussels on a previous visit (as a starter for an under-cooked horse meat burger), and again found myself facing the familiar black mountain of astounding height, which I began then to scale, using as climbing equipment a single empty shell with which to extract the others. (For those more OCD, perhaps you could remove each new mussel with the shell of the previous.)  As we ate, more and more diners came to fill the tables decorated with a simple beachside motif of white and pale blue.  Our Parisian server was still in good spirits, though for how long remained to be seen, as he told us that Club 55 had 1000 reservations that day.  Surely not all to celebrate the birthday of LYL?

We settled back under our paillote and read awhile, me refreshing myself with an espresso that the waiter brought.  The beach was full now, revelers moving from bar to shade.  It was funny to watch the younger people trying not to show the obvious pain from walking across hot sand, while others began to gradually pick up their pace the further on they went.  I cheated a little by pouring water over my soles, then walking cool and slow like Lawrence of Arabia. 

LYL had marveled at the deep blue of the Mediterranean as seen from the beach, but from within, the waters were a clear emerald green.  I dove and bobbed then floated awhile, quite effortless due to the high salt content.  Further out was the obligatory flotilla of pleasure boats, some as massive as naval vessels.  Their owners would be shuttled by rubber dingy to the dock jutting just off shore in time for lunch.  On their way back, a number of them would weave giggling, if they could stand at all after four too many glasses of Cristal.  

We watched these, and eavesdropped discretely on others.  Then three pm arrived, and we walked toward the jeep, moving back past the dining area now at the height of its frenzy.  We had been wise to choose the early seating.    

Wisdom too was with us in choosing the paved road home, though again we favored the high-road through Ramatuelle and Gassin.  Top down, wind in the hair, we didn't need a birthday to appreciate another of the Riviera's long traditions:  the siesta.


On the turntable: Bill Evans, "Undercurrent"
On the nighttable:  Paul Webster, "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Life and Death of the Little Prince"

Three nights at the "Hotel Chevalier"

On the turntable:  B.B. King, "The Vintage Years"
On the nighttable:  Marcel Pagnol, "My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle"
 

(untitled)

Monuments in
Iron and stone.
Let them eat eye-candy.

On the turntable:  Bill Haley and His Comets, "Bill Haley and His Comets"
On the nighttable:  M.F.K. Fisher, "Long Ago in France"

Dawn of the Dead...

On the turntable:  Banda Bassotti, "Asa Es Mi Vida"

(untitled)

With the sudden rain,
We seek regeneration in
Left Bank coffee and art.

On the turntable:  The Beatles, "Anthology Outtakes 3"
On the nighttable:  Edmund White, "The Flaneur"