Paris in Love (49 page)

Last night the air was so warm and beautiful that Alessandro and I walked much farther than usual—all the way past would-be aristocrats enjoying champagne on the lawns of the Louvre, down through the Tuileries, toward the Opéra … at last collapsing into Café de la Paix, with its gaudy, gilded (but quite lovely) ceiling. My hot chocolate came in two silver pitchers. One held melted chocolate, as dark and thick as lava, the second steaming hot milk. Heaven!

On a Minnesota prairie, the night sky is lightened only by a bowl of stars. Sometimes, when I was growing up, we even caught a shimmer of the northern lights. Paris, on the other hand, is
never
dark. In our bedroom, peacock blue taffeta curtains start at the ceiling and puddle on the floor. But at night, light from the street creeps above the rod and bathes the room; it reminds me that I’m in a city, surrounded by people. And I love it.

The first of May is the French Labor Day, which at home brings a parade. Here, it means a huge protest. People flooded into Paris, thousands of them. Each unit has its own music; I was proud that many labor groups were represented by American hip-hop. There were also live bands playing traditional French music, and some singing verses that seemed mostly to consist of rhymes such as “Sarkozy—
oui!
”

As well as protesting, on May Day Parisians buy lilies of the valley in twists of paper and give them to each other. Alessandro bought me a posy, and then an extraordinarily nice Frenchman gave me another on the street (a surprising and delightful moment), 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. I feel happier than I would if they were diamonds.

After extensive research, I have a blueprint for the perfect tart. It should be very small, hardly more than a bite, and have a buttery, flaky crust, a bit of pastry cream, and a miniature tower of raspberries. One or two berries should be topped with edible gold leaf, in order to create the illusion that the eater is Marie Antoinette herself, wearing a spun-sugar wig, nibbling cakes, and handing out dining advice.

Only after months of walking under gleaming gold statues of Pegasus, each paired with a different nymph waving a sword—that is, the four statues on Pont Alexandre III—have I noticed something very interesting. The horses have ferocious erections. I’m just saying.

I took Nicole and Anna to the Italian ice cream shop Amorino after school. A big placard outside lists the various sizes of servings offered. I wasn’t paying attention and somehow allowed the girls to talk me into ordering two “grandissimo” cups. First of all, this was exorbitantly expensive. Second, it turned out to be more ice cream than I’d ever seen in a cup before. Rather cross with myself—and not pleased with them either—I told the girls that they had to eat it
all
. As they neared the end, I added the proviso that no one was allowed to vomit. Anna finished, but Nicole reluctantly admitted that the second provision outweighed the first, and handed over her grandissimo cup with a spoonful or two of ice cream left inside.

For the third time, I walked through Musée Nissim de Camondo and listened to the audiotape (I could be a guide, by this point).
This time I lingered in the dining room, looking at a bronze
Bust of a Negress
, from the early nineteenth century. Apparently it came from a grouping designed for a fountain in which a black servant woman, cast in dark bronze, poured water over her white mistress, carved from marble. There’s a lot to think about there, and none of it very good.

In the afternoon I walked through a little park by place de la Concorde that is full of flowering horse chestnut trees, each prim white petal with a cherry-colored heart. There had been a windstorm. I kicked my way through drifts of blossoms, heaped and piled as if they were sawdust.

Here is an Anna refrain: “I hate fish, unless it’s bass.” This is because once upon a time, in a long-ago, halcyon summer, her brother caught a bass in a Minnesota lake, and she still remembers eating that fish with pleasure. Put it up to a mother’s ingenuity:
every
fish I cook is a bass (no matter what the French fishmonger might care to call them).