Sue Chenette: Salon du Chocolat

“Lessons from Things” is the title of a chapter in Adam Gopnik’s charming and insightful memoir, Paris to the Moon. The phrase, he writes, “refers to a whole field of study, which you learn in class, or used to, that traces civilization’s progress from stuff to things...the passage of coffee from the bean to the porcelain coffeepot, or wine from the vine and soil to the bottle....”

I was thinking about this last Saturday, as we made our way up and down the crowded aisles of the Salon du Chocolat, held in one of the exhibition halls at Porte de Versailles. From cocoa bean to the most sumptuous truffle, from almond to the most delectable macaron, the most delicately flavoured calisson.

But the French don’t stop there. Given “stuff,” they set out to transform it, by dint of imagination, craft, patience and persistence, into fabulously elaborate “things.” A chocolate Arc de Triomphe embedded with 4000 Swarowski crystals. A chocolate Eiffel Tower with macaron cladding. A flower garden of calissons. Chocolate Oxfords.

These are the work of maîtres pâtissiers, the finest of whom, after demonstrating their skill under pressure in a competition held every four years, are privileged to wear the red, white and blue collar awarded to the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France. (Having seen The Kings of Pastry, the 2009 documentary film about the MOF competition, I had great respect for the Monsieur who was chopping up a chocolate accordion and handing out samples.)

Stuff to things. And not just in the realm of food. Think of French gardens, with their sculpted topiaries and geometrical parterres. An impulse to subdue and refine nature. It must trace back to ancient confrontation with a harsh landscape. And to rivalry among princes and kings: my artisan is more clever than yours.

Leaving us the bemused and delighted beneficiaries. Who but the French would conceive of chocolate dresses—a macaron-dotted tutu, a svelte ruched skirt, a bouffant mesh of roses?

Sue Chenette: Manif

We found out about last Tuesday’s manif—short for manifestation, the French word meaning demonstration—halfway home from our morning class at Alliance Française.

The bus driver was ordered to turn around and head back to the station because of congestion in the streets ahead. This happens often in Paris. Time to walk, or find the nearest métro.

The French don’t balk at expressing indignation. In my Alliance Française text, one lesson is devoted to appropriate expressions (C’est scandaleux! Mais il est fou!) along with the grammatically proper use of the past conditional tense pour protester.

On Tuesday the manifestants from unions and universities were out in full force with banners and balloons, protesting government austerity measures which would mean across-the-board job cuts. The march continued for the two hours that I lingered, with a book and a chocolat chaud, in the corner café where we emerged from the métro. It was festive: crowds and colour and chanting.

Both the marchers and the municipal crew, who follow with their hoses and brooms and leaf blowers for the pamphlets, know their parts well. There’s an established routine. You might almost call it a ritual. You could make the case that the French take to the streets to celebrate the idea of their solidarity, and that the demonstrations accomplish little beyond that. I asked the waiter who brought my check what the demonstration was about. “Je ne sais pas,” he said with a shrug.

On Saturday afternoon, les Indignés (the Indignants) filled the plaza in front of Hotel de Ville, joining in the global Indignant Citizens Movement. I wasn’t there, but I found a video online. I was struck by the absence of banners and balloons. It seemed different. More sober. And left me wondering, could this lead to change?

Sue Chenette: Shutters

Sometimes the evening will be chilly, a spatter of rain falling in the courtyard when you come home tired from an afternoon of errands, and you will want nothing more than to close the door behind you and settle in. You might turn on the radio—France Musique, a program devoted to Debussy, alternating Afternoon of a Faun and Claire de Lune with letters he wrote to Mallarmé, a flow of words you can almost, almost understand while you move instinctively to prepare comfort food, cutting and buttering and sugaring a stale baguette, adding raisins, milk, egg, for bread pudding. This is an evening for shutters. For being sheltered, cozied.

To close the shutters is a clear physical act. You must first open the window, then reach around and grasp the heavy wooden wing where it rests against the outside wall, and swing it toward you.

While you are doing this you look across the courtyard to a neighbour’s window, its lace curtains and the two iron cooking pots hung outside and her abandoned plant, and you say, in your mind, something like a friendly good-night to this neighbour whom you do not know. Then, having pulled the slatted boards together, you are enfolded. This feels quite different from pulling down a shade: you have reached out into the evening, and drawn your portion in.

Some of the wider night leaks between the peeling white-painted louvres, where after supper you lay your book and glasses, your cup of tea, on the window sill.

When you have read late and the sound of the rain has stopped, you may open the shutters again, to gaze at the moon.

Sue Chenette: Serpent, singer, trompette marine

“Le chant du serpent.” We found the listing in Pariscope, one of two weekly guides, along with l’Officiel des Spectacles, to concerts, movies, plays, circuses, art exhibitions, operas, puppet shows, dance, sound and light extravaganzas—and variétés, a catch-all for events that don’t quite fit anywhere else.

This concert, devoted to the large serpentine wind instrument from the sixteenth century that is an ancestor of the tuba, took place in the Salle Turenne of the Musée de l’Armée, at Les Invalides. A trompette marine—a one-string instrument taller than the woman who played it, dating from the middle ages and named for its trumpet-like sound—was featured along with the serpent.

Who would have expected the hall to be packed? Then again, in Paris, a concert of musical sounds that might easily be lost to memory, or a curated display of garden gnomes, a series of photographs from the new National Automobile Museum in Turin, or an exhibition of medieval beds—all find sponsors and an audience. Such richness!

The performers on this concert, Michel Godard on the serpent, and Linda Bsiri, who sang and played the trompette marine, carried the ancient sounds into the present—new musical wine in old bottles, jazz dialogues between serpent and soprano, some with the low accompanying drone of the medieval string instrument. And sometimes their sounds resonated as they might have centuries ago, in plainchant, the different times and musics mingled for all who had come to listen.

Sue Chenette: Séduisant

Séduire. A verb in our Alliance française lesson. My Robert & Collins dictionary translates it as “to charm.” If you have charm, if you are attractive, enticing, alluring, the appropriate adjective is “séduisant.”

All September, in the last of summer’s warmth and sun, Paris has been particularly séduisant.

Despite understanding that life here can be as difficult as anywhere, that misery and violence are present, too, in their usual forms, it has been impossible not to be seduced by the sight of couples lounging on the grass in Place des Vosges in the late afternoon light, or the little boy holding his mom’s hand, swinging his green and orange stuffed turtle as they walked up rue de Turenne.

In front of the Pompidou Centre a man dipped a string threaded between two rods into soapy water and drew out giant bubbles, while a nearby violinist performed the Meditation from Thais.

On the Pont des Arts, the padlocks that lovers fasten to the fence to symbolize their commitment shone in the sun, and a man displayed a radio powered by the reaction between sunlight and the silicone in a hoisted CD.

At the exhibition Photo Quai, along the river, a mom carrying her toddler contemplated pictures of veiled women while a couple embraced behind the display walls.

I like a phrase—casual beauty—that I found in A Photographer’s Guide to Paris, published on the web by Philip Greenspun. “Paris,” he writes, “is...a city whose casual beauty makes for rich material to anyone willing to walk around slowly and observe carefully.” But even when we walk quickly and are not especially observant, the beauty informs our senses, lifts our spirits—seduces us.

Today the gilded figures atop Opéra Garnier gleamed in the sun on the street where we caught a bus, and where we got off, a group of school children waited among a scatter of the first fallen leaves for the light to change.