Choisir son camp...

Just as I have spent long enough in France that I am on the verge of declaring it to be the greatest country on earth, along comes this anniversary which suggests otherwise:

Her Majesty has kept her vows.  God Save the Queen, and Long may she Reign!

Notre pain de ce jour

Warning: a long essay on bread ahead

Breakfast, according to the French.

I have recently discovered Meudon’s sixth artisan boulanger.  Hidden away though it may be in the rue des Marais, and small though be its size, the baguettes I bought there were better than any bread sold anywhere in Britain.  By their piping heat, I judged that they had still been in the oven when I left the house, where, on my return, I subjected them immediately to an appropriately rigorous examination which largely took the form of lunch.  With jubilation I found the quality of this new boulanger’s handiwork entirely consistent with that of the other five’s: the radiance with warm earthy gold, the dying glowings of the oven, the perfection of the patterns sculpted by the craftsman’s hand, the structural poise of the whole, the pale underbelly below, the copper-crowned ridge above, and the crust, delicate enough to crumble exquisitely under pressure, but robust enough to protect the rich mellifluous dough (la mie) within!  And the smell (the smell, dear reader!), the scent of the French field!  The scope of the written word is transcended, almost even in French.  And this is only a baguette – I have not even mentioned the other loaves, nor the croissant, nor indeed the pâtisseries, stacked on high shelves and glittering along luminous counters.

Another gratuitous croissant photo.

Kneading my bread in my bakehouse...

If you feel, as you read this, that I have become a ‘bread snob’ (well-picked words used to describe me recently!), or alternatively very hungry all of a sudden, you do either with good reason.  The purple prose above is only slightly hyperbolic (see the view from Reims here), and bread-wise I shall be at a loss on my return to G.B.  On the other hand, it must be realised that such an attitude towards bread is entirely natural by French standards.  The Englishman becomes like a child in a sweet-shop (in a bakery), but the Frenchman expects nothing less than what I have just described.  He expects several panary establishments in a single town; he expects to find them (in Paris at least) with the official website (whose existence I have discovered far too late); he expects it even to be subsidised by the state.  One of the boulangeries has recently had its entrance refurbished jointly by the town council and by the FISAC, (the Fonds d’intervention pour les services, l’artisanat et les commerces), that is, a body which offers grants to maintain the institution of the artisan.  Now of course, he must pay for this in his taxes, but the situation reflects an element of government which is peculiarly French.

Never enough gratuitous croissant photos!.

And also a gratuitous photo of a pépito

'The front of this shop has been modernised thanks to the financial support of Meudon's Town Council and the FISAC, the Service, Artisan and Business Fund.'

 St Honorius, not perhaps at his saintliest

 Those of us in Britain who eat impatiently and without thought, who deliberately pare the meal down to its essential function, who discard anything lacking immediate material reward, and who seldom eat as families, have much to learn from the French, in this and in other things, who (far from being snobbish) express their appreciation of their daily bread by making of it an art, and by merging it with culture (The poet Francis Ponge disagrees, or does he?).  The paper bags which cradle the commonplace manna prove this: they draw the client’s attention to the baker’s adherence to tradition and to craftsmanship: ‘je pétris mon pain dans mon fournil’ (‘kneading my bread in the bakehouse’), assure him that  ‘le pain, c’est la santé!’ (Bread is health!), or regale him with the tale of St Honoré’s announcement, as a boy, of his vocation to the priesthood, of the scoffing of his nurse and of her assertion that her dough-spatula would be just as likely to burst into leaf – which of course it duly did.  Sometimes they instruct him simply, ‘À déguster sans modération!’ to enjoy without moderation, an entirely superfluous suggestion.  It is all beauty, thriving miraculously even in this age, and springing not from snobbery, but from the recognition that, once given our daily bread, we are to treat it with respect.

'Did you know?  St Honorius (Honoré) is the patron saint of bakers.  When the unruly young fellow announced to his nurse that he wanted to become a priest, she was in the middle of baking her bread.  The good woman scoffed.  "You'll be a bishop when my spatula grows leaves!"  Before her astonished eyes, the spatula began to bud with greenery.'

Se déplacer dans Paris: l'autobus

Further to my post a while ago about the métro, I thought I would write about the best way to displace oneself in Paris, apart from on foot: on the hundreds of smart green single-decker buses which ply the streets.  The bus is certainly slower than the métro, but (as might be expected) allows more to be seen of the city.  The buses are also run by the R.A.T.P., but the network is denser still. The routes wend their winding way from arrondissement to arrondissement;  often they pass through unexpected places, and spark the surprise of recognition when they emerge at a familiar corner or before a mighty land-mark.

It has become clear to me that the R.A.T.P. sees the bus routes as the continuation of the métro, since the sequence of underground lines, 1-14, is taken up again by bus number 20 (providing for the possible creation of six new underground lines).  The digits of the bus route numbers also corresponded generally to their starting points and destinations. Routes 91, 92, 94, 95 and 96 all start at Montparnasse, for instance; routes 30, 31, 35, 38 and 39 from the Gare du Nord.  Ingeniously, every route has its own colour.  Dark yellow means that I need to run!

The R.A.T.P. does its bit to help with the traffic problem

Pleasant though the passengers' journey might be, the bus driver's job is not easy - harder, I imagine, than the métro driver's.  On every journey I take along route 91, the driver's deftness, even in a bendy-bus, is called into action.  Indeed, in a competition called the Bus d'Or (the 'Golden Bus'), which sifts out the crème de la crème of France's conducteurs de bus, driving route 94 counts as a phase in itself; as does passing through a mock-up of the 'guichet du Louvre' (the Louvre gatehouse, with fifteen centimetres of space on each side of the wing-mirrors!).  You can see a video about the competition here.

The 'Montmartrobus' - small enough to navigate the hill.

That said, the drivers provide another element, generally absent from the métro, and that is the good treatment of their passengers.  Always they give a courteous 'Bonjour'.  They offer good-humoured advice when stuck in hopeless traffic.  At Christmastide, at least one driver on route 47 decks his cab with yards of tinsel.  The entire journey is more life-affirming, since Parisian civilisation can be observed at leisure: pipe-smoking behatted elderly gents, calm ambling nuns, the young queing for the cinema, care-free cyclists in the bus-lane, Peugeots and Renaults inextricably entangled in embouteillages, immaculate restaurants and brasseries...  The rue assourdissant is a better view, surely, than  a tunnel wall!

Some bus routes of note:

Bus 91.

  91   Ligne 91 carries me daily to the university.  There is no direct métro line between Gare Montparnasse and Gare de Lyon, so the bendy-buses carry out this intense job instead, every five minutes, mostly along bus lanes ('couloirs de bus').  This journey is no faster by métro.

  83    Number 83 wriggles along south-east to north-west and is a good route to see inconspicuous corners fairly rapidly.

   58     Ditto, except that this bus goes north-east, from Montparnasse to Châtelet.

  67    Ligne 67 will be well-known to anybody who has encountered Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7, that puzzling film.  The journey in this film from Parc Montsouris to the Hôpital Salpetrière can still be undertaken today, on the same route, although not on the same vehicle!

Route 72 (only on special occasions!)

  72    Ligne 72 runs neatly along the Right Bank of the Seine from the Hôtel de Ville, downstream to the Eiffel Tower and thence to the Porte de Saint-Cloud.

  39   Number 39 is good for the tourist: starting at the Gare du Nord, it strikes straight out for the Louvre, and thence over the river to Saint-Germain-des Prés.

  29   Ligne 29 has recently been the subject of a collection of poems by Jacques Roubaud (like Raymond Queneau, a member of Oulipo) - 'Ode à la ligne 29 des autobus parisiens'.  This proves it all about Paris!  You can hear an extract, along with some of the sounds of the buses (including the ticket stampers!), here.  It is not terribly easy to read, still less to listen to, because Roubaud is playing with the language and throwing in many literary references, but is worth hearing just for the beauty of the intricate French and internal rhyme.

On route 89 - near Jussieu.

  89   Ligne 89 is my favourite, starting off as it does from the Bibliothèque François Mittérand, and plunging into the fifth arrondissement which I now know best, passing the Jardin des Plantes, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, the most beautiful church in Paris, the Jardin du Luxembourg, Saint-Sulpice, the second most beautiful church in Paris, Montparnasse and the Gare de Vanves-Malakoff.  From library to railway station via a succession of churches... I might have drawn it up myself!

Route 84, place du Panthéon, in the rain, awaiting departure.

Joyeuses Pâques...

 À toutes et à tous and to one and all!

 

Boris

Saints preserve us: he has been let loose in France.  When did a politician last compare himself to Louis XIV (by referring to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to describe his mayorship)? 

Good for him for using his French.

Boris Johnson, maire de Londres, invité de la... by franceinter

Les neuf nouvelles cloches de Notre-Dame de Paris...

which have been cast to commemorate the cathedral's eight hundred and fiftieth birthday, and to restore the peal's 'landscape of sound' to the eighteenth century, are, in ascending order of tonnage and largitude,

JEAN-MARIE, after Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris and Cardinal Vingt-Trois's predecessor,

"...made worthy..."

MAURICE, after Maurice de Sully who laid the first stone of the present cathedral,

(Floor-print of the cathedral)

BENOIT-JOSEPH, after Pope (Emeritus from today onwards, alas) Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger,

ETIENNE, after St Stephen, the first martyr, to whom the present cathedral's predecessor was consecrated,

MARCEL, after St Marcel, the ninth Bishop of Paris,

 

DENIS, after Dennis le Menace, no, St Denis, the first Bishop of Paris, who, having been beheaded on Montmartre, picked up his head and walked to where now stands the Basilique de Saint-Denis, delivering a sermon as he walked.

ANNE-GENEVIEVE, after Saints Anne (Mary's mother) and Geneviève (patron of Paris),

 

GABRIEL, after the Angel Gabriel,

and MARIE, the buttery-biscuit-bourdon (founded at Asten in the Netherlands).

What a magnificent sight and a fitting tribute to the tremendous cathedral!  They will be rung for the first time on the 23rd of March, the eve of Palm Sunday.

All of the bells but Marie were cast at the Cornille-Havard foundry in a Norman town called Villedieu-les-Poêles. Its curious name translates literally as "City-of-God-the-pots-and-pans", and by coincidence I visited it two years ago.  It has had copper-work as its main industry for centuries and as well as its bell-foundry still makes and sells metalware.  It is delightful and well worth a trip.