The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg - 2019 - Translated from French by Fred Wynne - 2020 - 60 pages

 The Most Precious of Cargoes by Jean-Claude Grumberg - 2019 - Translated from French by Fred Wynne - 2020 - 60 pages

Told in the manner of a fairy tale, Jean-Claude Grumberg's The Most Precious of Cargoes tells the story of a woman who wanted a child, and a child who needed a home. It is a tale that teaches us that even in the darkest, most violent times, there is reason to believe in people's capacity for kindness.

Once upon a time in an enormous forest lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child.

A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and throws her into the forest.

While foraging for food, the woodcutter’s wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl. Although she knows harbouring this baby could lead to her death, she takes the child home.

Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told with a fairy tale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes is a fable about family and redemption which reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places.

I found work deeply captivating. The epilogue is just so wonderful.

"Jean-Claude Grumberg was born in 1939. He started out as an actor before writing his first play in 1968. Since then he has written more than forty scripts for the stage and film. He currently lives and works in his native France. He was inspired by the loss of his own father in a Nazi concentration camps to write The Most Precious of Cargoes. He lives in France." From Harper Row

Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages

 

Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages 

Very  soon after  France surrendered to the Nazis, in May of 1940, the Germans made it their goal to appropriate France's  wine.  Wine was a  important part of daily French life and the vast vineyards supported much of the population.  Top Nazis officials fancied themselves experts on wine.

 As the war went on the Germans soon required all wine to sold to Germans, served in restaurants only open to Germans.  Vineyard workers were conscripted to work in Germany.  Vital horses were taken.

Vineyard owners began to seek ways to hide their products. 

They hid their most prized wines immediately, knowing that the Germans would take them and, more importantly, not appreciate them. They built walls in their cellars, closing in the wines behind them, and had their children collect spiders so they'd spin webs to make the wall look older. Dust from old carpets were collected to put on cheap bottles to make them appear rare.

These are the true stories of vignerons who sheltered Jewish refugees in their cellars and of winemakers who risked their lives to aid the resistance. They made chemicals in secret laboratories to fuel the resistance and fled from the Gestapo when arrests became imminent.

There were treacheries too, as some of the nation's winemakers supported the Vichy regime, or the Germans themselves, and collaborated.

Don and Petie Kladstrup are former journalists who have written extensively about wine and France for numerous publications. Don, a winner of three Emmys and numerous other awards, was a foreign correspondent for ABC and CBS television news. Petie, an Overseas Press Club winner, was a newspaper journalist and more recently protocol officer for the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO. The Kladstrups divide their time between Paris and Normandy

The End of Cheri by Colette- 1929 introduced by Judith Thurman and translated by Paul Eprile - 2022 - A Paris in July 2024 Novel

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The End of Cheri by Colette- 1929 introduced by Judith Thurman and translated by Paul Eprile - 2022 - A Paris in July 2024 Novel

If Paris is the city of love, then Colette (Sidione-Gabreelle Colette 1873 to 1954) is the high priestess. For many their image of Paris derives from memories of the movie, Gigi, made from her probably most famous work. Living to almost eighty, she produced eighty volumes of writings of all sorts. When she passed in 1954 she was given the first ever state funeral for a French woman. She is an LGTGQ icon and she loved cats.

Early in the month I posted on Chéri, The End of Cheri is the sequel.

The End of Cheri takes place ten years after Cheri. Both Paris and Cheri have been very impacted by World War One. He is married now. He has been out of touch with Lea. 

"Most of Colette’s sequels (the Claudine franchise and others) were inferior in power and artistry to their originals. The End of Chéri is an exception: a bleak and ambitious social history disguised as the debacle of an antihero. The men in Colette’s work tend to be shallow, yet however terribly they behave, she pities them as the weaker sex. “Feminine delicacy in literature,” she wrote to a friend, is “one of those clichés that make me furious. Except for three or four female writers, their [women’s] vulgarity, their sentimental brutality, has all that it takes to make any man whatsoever feel wounded and embarrassed.” That is Chéri’s predicament as the hostage of a gynocracy. A decade has passed since he parted from Léa, and through his eyes, Colette captures the sea change in manners, the shift in sex roles, the breakdown of hierarchies, the speeding up of time, and the alternating currents of greed, euphoria, and despair that defined postwar Paris. He has returned from the front as one of those casualties whose fatal wounds are invisible. The meek sylph whom he married, a rich cocotte’s daughter, now manages their household and fortune with an immodest competence that disgusts him. Despite Edmée’s beauty, which he admires (“It’s not fair.”), their conjugal relations are fraternal. She tolerates his disdain partly because her affections are engaged elsewhere —with the maimed soldiers in the hospital she has endowed and the doctor who runs it. “What would you like Chéri to do in life?” Colette asked a journalist. “He wasn’t going to become an industrialist!” The gigolos and kept women of her fiction belong to an ancient nobility whose code of honor is vested in hedonism, and the subtlest among them practice it as an art. But Cheri’s muse has deserted him. He can’t find relief from his sensual and moral shell shock in any of his old vices, including malice." From the introduction by Judith Thurman 

I highly recommend Secrets of the Flesh: A Biography of Colette by Judith Thurman 

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain - 2015. Translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitkin - 242 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Novel

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain - 2015. Translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitkin - 242 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Novel

The Red Notebook is my introduction to Antoine Laurain.  I admit I never heard of him until I saw another of his novels as one of the gift books on the Paris in July 2024 homepage.   I loved this book. It really made me feel I was in Paris.

The Red Notebook opens with a terrible scene of the mugging of a woman, Lauren 

The Red Notebook is about Laurent, a bookseller you can’t help but like as you learn things about him, and Lauren, a woman whose mystery you’d want to know about as much as does Laurent, but she sadly is in a coma. On the way to the bookstore one morning, Laurent sees a beautiful bag thrown aside. After a bit of tinkering around with the bag, he thinks it was probably stolen and takes it to the police, but when the police do not help much, he decides to hand the bag to its owner.

However, in Paris, a city where millions of people live, of course, he cannot predict how he will find the owner of this bag, which has no identity. As we glance over the contents of the bag and especially read the contents of the red notebook, one cannot help but think that the bag’s owner is a fine person.

 This is the magic of The Red Notebook. The beautiful mystery combined with the charm of Paris and the beautiful world Laurain creates.

The Red Notebook is a full of fascinating literary references, Patrick Modiano even appears as a character, there is a suitably charming cat named Putin, lots of interesting  secondary characters, time in the bookstore.  The ending is emotionally gratifying.

"Antoine Laurain is a novelist, screenwriter, journalist, director and collector of antique keys. A truly born and bred Parisian, after studying film, he began his career directing short films and writing screenplays. His passion for art led him to take a job assisting an antiques dealer in Paris. The experience provided the inspiration for his first novel, The Portrait, winner of the Prix Drouot.

Antoine’s novels have been translated into over twenty languages, including Arabic and Korean. Sales of his books across all formats in English have surpassed 180,000 copies, and The Red Notebook (2015) has become one of Gallic Books’ bestsellers both in the UK and the USA, and has been selected for HRH the Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room.

Also published: French Rhapsody (2016), The Portrait (2017), Smoking Kills (2018) and Vintage 1954 (2019)." from Gallic Books 

I have already begun his latest novel An Astronomer in Love and hope to post upon it this month 

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life

Clara Reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier - 2022 Translated from the French by Polly MacIntosh - 155 Pages- Paris in July 2024 Novel

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

Clara Reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier - 2022 Translated from French by Polly MacIntosh - 155 Pages- A Paris in July 2024 Novel

(This book is one of the prizes available to participants.)

Clara Reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier was a total delight. If you love Proust, Reading, Paris then you cannot go wrong with this marvelous novel. Plus there is a reallllly. neat cat, an inside look at a Parisian hair salon, and lots of fun stuff.

"Clara is a hairdresser at Cindy Coiffure, a sleepy French salon with an identity crisis. Her relationship is fizzling out. Her tanoholic boss Madame Habib worships Jacques Chirac and talks longingly of her days in Paris. The highlight of the week was when the dishy technician came to repair the display cabinet. And now Madame Lévy-Leroyer wants to go blonde. Clara can’t help but wonder if there’s more to life . . .

Everything changes when a customer leaves behind the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. As Clara reads, she discovers a whole new world, leading her to strike up an unexpected friendship. And slowly but surely, she will work out who she wants to be." From the Publisher 

90 percent of the novel has has Clara in her middle 20s.  An epilogue takes her decades forward where we see how Reading Proust completely transformed her life.

Stéphane Carlier grew up around Paris in the 1970s. He worked for the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs for several years, with whom he spent a decade in the United States. He has also lived in India and Portugal. Clara Reads Proust is his eighth novel and the first to be translated into English. Polly mackintosh is an editor and a translator from French. She has translated the work of Alain Ducasse, Antoine Laurain, Serge Joncour and early French feminist Marie-Louise Gagneur. She currently lives in London.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert ; edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert / by Gustave Flaubert; edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Gustave Flaubert 

Born 12 - 12 - 1821

Madame Bovary - 1857

Salammbó 1862

Sentimental Education 1869

The Temptation of Saint Anthony 1874

Dies 5- 8 - 1882

 Madame Bovary is without dispute among the greatest of all novels. Sentimental Education is masterpiece. His other two novels are "strange".  

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert -edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages is an extraordinarly valuable work for all seriously into Flaubert but lacking fluency in French.

--“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.

Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.

Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.-- From The New York Review of Books

 

Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to The Revolution by Caroline Weber - 2007 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024 

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to The Revolution by Caroline Weber - 2007 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Marie Antoinette 

Queen of France 1755-1793

Born - October 16,1730 - Vienna

Marries (at age 14) May 16,1770

the heir to the throne of France in an arrangement meant to build an alliance between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons

May 10, 1774 - her husband succeeds to the throne as Louis XVI

Bastille Day - July 14, 1789

Executed- September 3, 1792

"When her carriage first crossed over from her native Austria into France, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was taken out, stripped naked before an entourage, and dressed in French attire to please the court of her new king. For a short while, the young girl played the part.

But by the time she took the throne, everything had changed. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber tells of the radical restyling that transformed the young queen into an icon and shaped the future of the nation. With her riding gear, her white furs, her pouf hairstyles, and her intricate ballroom disguises, Marie Antoinette came to embody--gloriously and tragically--all the extravagance of the monarchy." From Publisher 

As Weber vividly details as the wife of a future king, every aspect of the life of Marie Antoinette was prescribed by rigid etiquette.  At the huge Palace in Versailles there were  nobles whose only function might be giving Marie water, putting on her shoes. Arriving shy from a sheltered less rigid life in the Hapsburgs court, Marie was at first overwhelmed. Slowly she became a favourite of her husband's grandfather. This brought her into conflict with his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Many at the court did not want an alliance with the Hapsburgs.

Her only purpose as Weber explains was to produce an heir to the throne.  However her husband was either too shy or simply not interested in having sex with her.  In the intense gossip of the court this was portrayed as her fault. (They would eventually have four children.)

Weber's focus in on the clothing worn by Marie, her make up, and the incredibly elaborate hairstyles worn at court.  Tradition demanded she have the most expensive outfits.  

Weber also provides a detailed very informative social and political account of the period.  

Caroline Weber (Barnard) is a Professor of French specialized in the literature and history of the 17th- and 18th-century royal court, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. At Columbia, she has offered seminars on Rousseau, modern literary theory, May 1968, and Images of the French Revolution, team-taught with Professor Elisabeth Ladenson. A graduate of Harvard (A.B., summa cum laude) and Yale (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.), she was a junior faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Barnard and Columbia in 2005; she has also been a visiting professor at Princeton. Focused on the intersections between literary, political, and visual culture (including fashion), she has contributed articles to such scholarly journals as PMLA, Philosophy and Literature, Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and to such mainstream publications as the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, W magazine, Town & Country, and Vogue. Professor Weber has published the following books: Fragments of Revolution (Yale UP 2002), an anthology of essays coedited with H.G. Lay; Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (U of Minnesota P 2003); Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (Holt 2006/Picador 2007), a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year; and Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Knopf 2018), a finalist for the American Library of Paris Book Prize and the winner of the French Heritage Society Literary Award. 

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

Chanel’s Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930–1944 by Anne de Courcy.- 2021' A Paris in July 2024 Work

Chanel’s Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930–1944 by Anne de Courcy.- 2021  - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024

 Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very 

Coco Chanel 

Born August 19, 1893 Saumur, France

Died January 10, 1971 Paris 

Events During 1940 

12 June: The 51st Highland Division surrendered to German forces due to being surrounded.

13 June: Paris was declared an open city by the French government as the government fled to Bordeaux.

14 June: German troops entered the French capital of Paris.

16 June: French Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain became the prime minister of France, replacing Paul Reynaud. Operation Aerial and Operation Cycle took place by evacuating around 150,000 Allied soldiers from French ports of Cherbourg, St. Malo, Brest, St. Nazaire, La Pallice, Nantes, and Le Havre.

17 June: Petain asked Germany for armistice terms. Finishing off some Allied resistance, the Germans crossed the river Loire and reached the Swiss frontier.

18 June: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Munich Germany. General de Gaulle told the people of France on a broadcast from London on the BBC to resist the Germans.

22 June: France signed an armistice with Germany.

23 June: Adolf Hitler toured captured Paris.

24 June: The French officially surrendered at Compiegne, the site of the German World War I surrender

Chanel’s Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930–1944 by Anne de Courcy is primarily set in the French Riviera.  The Riviera was during the years of the book a playground and a retreat for the rich of Paris and England.

" In this captivating narrative, Chanel’s Riviera explores the fascinating world of the Cote d’Azur during a period that saw the deepest extremes of luxury and terror in the twentieth century.

The Cote d’Azur in 1938 was a world of wealth, luxury, and extravagance, inhabited by a sparkling cast of characters including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Joseph P. Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, Colette, the Mitfords, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, and Somerset Maugham. The elite flocked to the Riviera each year to swim, gamble, and escape from the turbulence plaguing the rest of Europe. At the glittering center of it all was Coco Chanel, whose very presence at her magnificently appointed villa, La Pausa, made it the ultimate place to be. Born an orphan, her beauty and formidable intelligence allured many men, but it was her incredible talent, relentless work ethic, and exquisite taste that made her an icon.

But this wildly seductive world was poised on the edge of destruction. In a matter of months, France surrendered to the Germans and the glamour of the pre-war parties and casinos gave way to the horrors of evacuation and the displacement of thousands of families during World War II. From the bitter struggle to survive emerged powerful stories of tragedy, sacrifice, and heroism.

Enriched by original research and de Courcy’s signature skill, Chanel’s Riviera brings the experiences of both rich and poor, protected and persecuted, to vivid life." From the Publisher Macmillan

The book focuses on the rich and famous.  Edward VIII and his wife Walace Simpson, Somerset Maugham and the various romantic partners of Coco Chanel are the most featured persons.  Included are details of Coco's involvement with a Nazi major and her life in the Ritz. There is historical data on Vichey France and the Germans in the Riviera.  When advised to leave by their government some wealthy British residents drove their Rolls limousines into the sea rather than let Germans or Italians get them. For those who stayed, getting food could be a challenge except for the rich.

We also learn of both the massive retreat from Paris as well as those who accepted German victory and used it as an excuse to steal the property of French Jews.  In this book Coco comes across as an oportunist at times and at times genuinely kind.

"Anne de Courcy is a well-known writer, journalist and book reviewer. In the 1970s she was Woman’s Editor on the London Evening News until its demise in 1980, when she joined the Evening Standard as a columnist and feature-writer. In 1982 she joined the Daily Mail as a feature writer, with a special interest in historical subjects, leaving in 2003 to concentrate on books, on which she has talked widely both here and in the United States.

A critically-acclaimed and best-selling author, she believes that as well as telling the story of its subject’s life, a biography should depict the social history of the period, since so much of action and behaviour is governed not simply by obvious financial, social and physical conditions but also by underlying, often unspoken, contemporary attitudes, assumptions, standards and moral codes.

Anne is the Chairman of the Biographers’ Club; and a past judge of their annual Prize. Her recent biographies, all of which have been serialised, include THE VICEROY’S DAUGHTERS, DIANA MOSLEY and DEBS AT WAR and SNOWDON; THE BIOGRAPHY, written with the agreement and co-operation of the Earl of Snowdon. Based on Anne’s book, a Channel 4 documentary “Snowdon and Margaret: Inside a Royal Marriage”, was broadcast on Wednesday 25th June 2008 at 9pm.

THE FISHING FLEET: HUSBAND-HUNTING IN THE RAJ, was published in July 2012. Her most recent book, MARGOT AT WAR: LOVE AND BETRAYAL IN DOWNING STREET, 1912-1916, published in November 2014, was shortlisted for the Paddy Power Political Book of the Year award." From the author’s website

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (2000) - A Paris in July Biography

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (2000) - A Paris in July Biography

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies and recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

If Paris is the city of love, then Colette (Sidione-Gabreelle Colette 1873 to 1954) is the high priestess.  For many their image of Paris derives from memories of the movie, Gigi, made from her probably most famous work.  Living to almost eighty, she produced eighty volumes of writings of all sorts.  When she passed in 1954 she was given the first ever state funeral for a French 

I do not wish to sketch out much of Colette's life.  I will just talk about a few aspects of her life that I learned about from the biography, things that struck me.

Of course I goggled her and I saw all the images from her days dancing semi-nude on the stage, working to support herself, performing as a mime.  Physically Colette embodied the erotic ideal of the era.  As Thurman shows us,she  loved the world of the theater.  Colette married three times.  She was actively involved with a group of aristocratic Parisian lesbians know as "The Amazons".  

Thurman goes into great detail concerning the various marriages of Colette, her relationship with her parents and her own daughter.  She had many friends and lovers and her life was full of drama.  We see her develop as a writer and we marvel at her incredible productivity.  

Colette the as not and ideologically driven intellectual like other French writers of the period.  She wrote about sex, relationships, food, the theater, the people of Paris.  As she grew older she gained a lot of weight but she carried it without shame and attracted long term lovers of both sexes much younger than she was.   Colette moved a lot and we get to visit with her all over France.

During the German occupation of Paris she did publish her work in journals and papers that carried virulent anti-Semetic articles. One of her stories was published in a magazine that had an ad for one of Hitler's books.  To me and as depicted by Thurman, though not all agree, her actions do not appear to be collaboration, just a largely apolitical woman of the world accepting what seemed like the reality of the times.  Her husband in this period was Jewish and he was detained for a while by the Gestapo and she worked very hard on achieving his release, which did happen.  

Judith Thurman intersperses literary exegesis with the details of Colette's life in a very skillful and interesting fashion.  The book is also a rich source of cultural data of the period, especially the world of lesbian and gay Paris, among the upper classes.  

The book shows Colette grow old and sick but still powerful. 

With Marcel Proust as the greatest French writer of the 20th century, Colette was second.  It seems without much   dispute she is the greatest female writer in French history, with apologies to George Sand.  

This is a first rate biography of a great writer from whom we can all still learn much.

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

The Only Street in Paris - Life on the Rue des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino- 2015- A Paris in July 2024 Work - Memoir

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The Only Street in Paris - Life on the Rue des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino- 2015-

Combining Parisian history, a detailed account an off the tourist track street with her memoirs as a New Yorker settling into Paris, Elaine Sciolino

has given us a delightful work.

On this street, the patron saint of France was beheaded and the Jesuits took their first vows. It was here that Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted circus acrobats, Emile Zola situated a lesbian dinner club in his novel Nana, and François Truffaut filmed scenes from The 400 Blows. Sciolino reveals the charms and idiosyncrasies of this street and its longtime residents—the Tunisian greengrocer, the husband-and-wife cheesemongers, the showman who’s been running a transvestite cabaret for more than half a century, the owner of a 100-year-old bookstore, the woman who repairs eighteenth-century mercury barometers—bringing Paris alive in all of its unique majesty. 

I found The Only Street in Paris - Life on the Rue des Martyrs by Elaine Sciolino to be a charming work. I hope to include her The Seine: The River That Made Paris among my reads for this month.

"Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, based in France since 2002. 

Her latest book, The Seine: The River That Made Paris, published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2019, was named by Barnes & Noble as its nonfiction choice for October 2020. In a review in The New York Times, Edmund White, the National Book Award winner, called Sciolino “a graceful, companionable writer, someone who speaks about France in the most enjoyably American way.... [She] has laid one more beautiful and amusing wreath on the altar of the City of Light.” The Times Literary Supplement called The Seine a book of “touching storytelling” and “an engaging and informative exploration of the city.” David A. Bell, Professor of History at Princeton University, said, “Sciolino writes with the authority of a historian, the sleuthing skills of a journalist, and the voice of a storyteller eager to recount the tales of those who have been touched by the Seine.”  

Her previous book, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs, published in 2015, was a New York Times best seller. The New York Times wrote that “she has Paris at her feet;” the Chicago Tribune called her “a storyteller at heart.” 

Sciolino was decorated chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state, in 2010 for her “special contribution” to the friendship between France and the United States. 

In 2019, Sciolino became a member of the Executive Committee of Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international advocacy organization promoting freedom of information and freedom of the press. In 2018, she received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of London." From the author’s website

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

 

In the Cafe of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano ;2007 - translated by Chris Clarke.2016 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024

 Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Paris history and more are very welcome

In the Cafe of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano ;2007 - translated by Chris Clarke.2016 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature and an internationally beloved novelist, has been honored with an array of prizes, including the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France for lifetime achievement and the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He lives in Paris. 

In the Cafe of Lost Youth is the sixth work by Patrick Modiano I have featured during a Paris in July event.

The Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, inspired in part by the circle (depicted in the photographs of Ed van der Elsken) of the notorious and charismatic Guy Debord, centers on the enigmatic, waiflike figure of Louki, who catches everyone’s attention even as she eludes possession or comprehension. Through the eyes of four very different narrators, including Louki herself, we contemplate her character and her fate, while Modiano explores the themes of identity, memory, time, and forgetting that are at the heart of his spellbinding and deeply moving art. 

For those new to Modiano I suggest you start with his Occupation Trilogy set in Nazi controlled Paris.

In the Cafe of Lost Youth is a powerful account of being young and not so young in parts of Paris out of the affluent areas.  It features a book store as a central setting and has numerous wonderful literary references 

Mel Ulm

And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi Occupied Paris by Alan Riding - 2010 - 433 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

 Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art and more are very welcome.  

Works I have so far featured for Paris in July 2024

1. The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles

2. A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisholm -2022- 

3. And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi Occupied Paris by Alan Riding - 2010

And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi Occupied Paris by Alan Riding is a very comprehensive account of how all aspects of the arts and those involved in them were impacted by German domination of Paris during World War II.  Parisians had a wide range of responses.  Some were active supporters of fasicism, others figured Nazi domination was permanent and just thought it prudent to go along while others actively resisted, sacrificing their lives to oppose the Nazis,

"The book shows that there was no black and white when it came to resisting and collaborating. Riding is not unsympathetic to collabos. Instead, he traces how they came to be by painting an elaborate picture of the terror of the German invasion, the collapse of French morale following the first world war, the immense humiliation and fear of a defeated population. There are sections, too, on the rise of fascist writers like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (who called for a pure-blooded France, free of Jews, liberals and gypsies) and the background of Charles Maurras, founder of the rightwing Action Française, which became especially virulent when the Jewish liberal Léon Blum became prime minister in 1936.

And what of the artists themselves, the ones who simply wanted to get on with their work, and not be bothered with politics? After the war Sartre said that writers and artists had a duty to tell their countrymen "not to be ruled by Germans". But there were still plenty who boarded trains to Munich and Berlin with bright smiles for solidarity tours of Germany. We all say we would never have done it. No one wanted to be a Maurice Chevalier or Sacha Guitry singing their hearts out or writing plays for Germans, but Riding points out that even these scorned men were not exactly collabos. They also helped Jewish friends while hanging out with the high-ranking Germans in charge of the cultural world. After all, Riding writes, the Germans had champagne and food and wonderful parties while many Parisians were living on onions and freezing from lack of coal.

Some artists, such as Édith Piaf, also went to Germany or consorted with Germans as a means to an end – to get French prisoners of wars freed in exchange for their presence on German soil. Others did so out of fear, or plain survival: most were sure that there would be a German victory and they wanted to ensure that they would be able to carry on their life's work.

And the Show Went On is a much larger history than its title suggests. It is about cultural life in Paris, but it is also a book about society and politics in the years leading up to the war. Riding takes on an immense topic and succeeds in demonstrating that even through war and sorrow and misery, art was created, books were written and, in the worse moments of destruction, there was also creation." From The Guardian 

I cannot imagine there being a better book on the topic than that of Alan Riding.

For 12 years, Alan Riding was the European cultural correspondent for the New York Times. He was previously bureau chief for the Times in Paris, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. Riding is the author of And the Show Went On and Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans. He lives in Paris with his wife, Marlise Simons, a writer for the Times.

A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisholm -2022- 382 Pages - A Paris in July 2024

• Paris in July 2024 

 Works I have so far featured for Paris in July 2024

1. The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles

2. A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisholm -2022- 

A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisholm is kind of a contemporary remake of Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933,  by George Orwell.  One of my never to be realised dreams was to take my wife to a five starred restaurant in Paris.  Sometimes you are better off  not knowing too much of what hidden from the public, as Edward Chisholm from London does in his account of working in Parisian restaurants.

"An evocative portrait of the underbelly of contemporary Paris as seen through the eyes of a young waiter scraping out a living in the City of Light.

A waiter's job is to deceive you. They want you to believe in a luxurious calm because on the other side of that door . . . is hell.

Edward Chisholm's spellbinding memoir of his time as a Parisian waiter takes you beneath the surface of one of the most iconic cities in the world—and right into its glorious underbelly.

He inhabits a world of inhuman hours, snatched sleep and dive bars; scraping by on coffee, bread and cigarettes, often under sadistic managers, with a wage so low you're fighting your colleagues for tips. Your colleagues—including thieves, narcissists, ex-soldiers, immigrants, wannabe actors, and drug dealers—are the closest thing to family that you've got.

It's physically demanding, frequently humiliating and incredibly competitive. But it doesn't matter because you're in Paris, the center of the universe, and there's nowhere else you'd rather be in the world." -from The Publisher Simon and Schuster 

Edward Chisholm was born in England and moved to Paris after graduating from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. A resident in the City of Lights for seven years, Chisholm spent the first four of them working all manner of low-paid restaurant jobs, from waiting and bartending, while trying to build a career as a writer. Now Chisholm makes a living as a freelance writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Financial Times magazine. He lives in England.

Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History by Rhonda K. Garelick- 2014- 732 Pages - A Paris in July Work

Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History by Rhonda K. Garelick- 2014- 732 Pages - A Paris in July Work

Paris in July 2024

 Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art and more are very welcome.

Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel

Born August 19, 1893 Saumur, France

Died January 10, 1971 Paris 

On July First our youngest daughter graduated from medical school,. After the ceremony the family had an observational luncheon at an elegant Manila restaurant.  The graduate was wearing  a little black dress and a string of pearls.  I know Mademoiselle Chanel would have approved.

Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History by Rhonda K. Garelick- 2014- 732 Pages - is a brilliant account of the life of Chanel and the era in which she lived and reigned.

Coco Chanel transformed forever the way women dressed. Her influence remains so pervasive that to this day we can see her afterimage a dozen times while just walking down a single street: in all the little black dresses, flat shoes, costume jewelry, cardigan sweaters, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses on women of every age and background. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume is sold every three seconds. Arguably, no other individual has had a deeper impact on the visual aesthetic of the world. But how did a poor orphan become a global icon of both luxury and everyday style while achieving incredible wealth? How did she develop such vast, undying influence? And what does our ongoing love of all things Chanel tell us about ourselves? These are the mysteries that Rhonda Garelick unravels.

Chanel was born into poverty in rural France, abandoned to an orphanage with her sisters by her father, at 19 she attracted the attention of a wealthy man who sponsored her as a milliner. She gave her hats to high fashion wealthy Parisian ladies, soon her sponsor set her up in a shop. 

At age 23 Chanel met a young French ex-cavalry officer and textile heir, Étienne Balsan. At the age of twenty-three, Chanel became Balsan's mistress, supplanting the courtesan Émilienne d'Alençon as his new favourite. For the next three years, she lived with him in his château Royallieu near Compiègne, an area known for its wooded equestrian paths and the hunting life.It was a lifestyle of self-indulgence. Balsan's wealth allowed the cultivation of a social set that reveled in partying and the gratification of human appetites, with all the implied accompanying decadence. Balsan showered Chanel with the baubles of "the rich life"—diamonds, dresses, and pearls. Balsan needed a heir and his family would never have accepted Chanel as a wife.  He married an appropriate woman and continued his relationship with Chanel.  This began a pattern of relationships with extremely wealthy men.

Chanel had begun designing hats while living with Balsan, initially as a diversion that evolved into a commercial enterprise. She became a licensed milliner in 1910 and opened a boutique at 21 rue Cambon, Paris, named Chanel Modes.[29] As this location already housed an established clothing business, Chanel sold only her millinery creations at this address. Chanel's millinery career bloomed once theatre actress Gabrielle Dorziat wore her hats in Fernand Nozière's play Bel Ami in 1912. Subsequently, Dorziat modelled Chanel's hats again in photographs published in Les Modes.

In Biarritz Chanel met an expatriate aristocrat, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia. They had a romantic interlude, and maintained a close association for many years afterward. By 1919, Chanel was registered as a couturière and established her maison de couture at 31 rue Cambon, Paris.

In 1918, Chanel purchased the building at 31 rue Cambon, in one of the most fashionable districts of Paris. In 1921, she opened an early incarnation of a fashion boutique, featuring clothing, hats, and accessories, later expanded to offer jewellery and fragrances. By 1927, Chanel owned five properties on the rue Cambon, 

In the spring of 1920, Chanel was introduced to the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky by Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes. During the summer, Chanel discovered that the Stravinsky family sought a place to live, having left the Russian Soviet Republic after the war. She invited them to her new home, Bel Respiro, in the Paris suburb of Garches, until they could find a suitable residence.They arrived at Bel Respiro during the second week of September 1919  and remained until May 1921.She developed a romantic relationship with Igor Stravinsky during this time, but the affair was brie Chanel also guaranteed the new (1920) Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ('The Rite of Spring') against financial loss with an anonymous gift to Diaghilev.  In addition to turning out her couture collections, Chanel threw herself into designing dance costumes for the Ballets Russes. In the years 1923–1937, she collaborated on productions choreographed by Diaghilev and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, notably Le Train bleu, a dance-opera; Orphée and Oedipe Roi.

1922, at the Longchamps races, Théophile Bader, founder of the Paris Galeries Lafayette, introduced Chanel to businessman Pierre Wertheimer. Bader was interested in selling Chanel No. 5 in his department store In 1924, Chanel made an agreement with the Wertheimer brothers, Pierre and Paul, directors since 1917 of the eminent perfume and cosmetics house Bourjois. They created a corporate entity, Parfums Chanel, and the Wertheimers agreed to provide full financing for the production, marketing, and distribution of Chanel No. 5. The Wertheimers would receive seventy percent of the profits, and Théophile Bader twenty percent. For ten percent of the stock, Chanel licensed her name to Parfums Chanel and withdrew from involvement in business operations. Later, unhappy with the arrangement, Chanel worked for more than twenty years to gain full control of Parfums Chanel. She said that Pierre Wertheimer was "the bandit who screwed me".

After devopiing a relationship with the Duke of Westminster, the wealthiest man in England she began to favor right wing political views.

Garelick unravels the controversies surrounding Chanel's relationship during W.W. Two when she lived in the Ritz Hotel surrounded by high ranking Nazis while having a romance with a German major, a Baron.  

There is much more in this marvelous book.

Rhonda Garelick is dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory, at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York. She’s the author of three books, and writes on fashion and cultural politics for New York Magazine, The New York Times and many other publications. Garelick received her B.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature and French from Yale.

DOCTORS AT WAR:THE CLANDESTINE BATTLE AGAINST THE NAZI OCCUPATION OF FRANCE:by Ellen Hampton-2023 - From Louisiana State University Press

 This is part of my Participation in Paris in July 2023 - Hosted by Words and Peace

https://wordsandpeace.com/

The German military administration in France ended with the Liberation of France after the Normandy and Provence landings. It formally existed from May 1940 to December 1944, though most of its territory had been liberated by the Allies by the end of summer 1944.

When anti-Jewish measures intensified under the Nazi Occupation of France, a group of doctors formed a clandestine group to treat and shelter resistants, to deter deportation and to protect victims of terror. Led by the grandson of the great Louis Pasteur, the Resistance Health Service included the son of a rabbi, the son of a Protestant pastor, and the first woman to direct a French hospital department. They joined forces in Paris to outwit the Nazis, despite terrible danger. The physician founders of another resistance group, Vengeance, were among hundreds of French doctors deported to concentration camps. They went to work in camp clinics, treating and healing ill and starving prisoners with little more than their hands and their knowledge. In the final phase of the war, doctors joined the hidden forest camps of maquisards in combat, operating under parachute tents with car headlights, patching up injuries incurred in guerrilla attacks on German troops. Throughout the dark night of Nazi domination, doctors risked their lives to save others and ease the suffering of their nation. Sworn to aid and assist, most of them felt they could not have acted otherwise.           

"  History tells us where we’re going and literature tells us where we’ve been. In between lies the journey, the transitory space between experience and hope, the stories I love most. I am a PhD historian, author, editor, former professor and occasional journalist. After two non-fiction books on World War II, both born of absolute awe for those who found their way through that dark night, I am reaching back in time to the drama and romance of a historical fiction series based in medieval France, Castle and the Cross." From the author's website 

The book provides lots of data on the individual Doctors, many lost their lives.  

This is a valuable addition to the history of WW Two in France.

I was given a review copy of this book

Mel Ulm 

Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness From French Literature by Viv Groskup -2020- 249 pages

Last month I read a marvelous book Viv Groskop, The Anna Karenina Fix: Lessons in Happiness From Russian Literature. 

I was delighted to find her book on French literature, Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature, for sale for $2.95. 

The twelve works featured are 

Bonjour Tristesse by Francois Sagan -1954 

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust -1913 to 1917 

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo -1862 

The Lover (La Amant) by Marguerite Duras -1984-latest work featured 

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - 1856 

Cryano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand -1897 

Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant -1885 

The Red and The Black by Stendhal 1830 

Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac - 1846 

The Stranger by Albert Camus 1942 

Gigi by Colette - 1944 

Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos.  1782  The only epistolary novel featured by Groskup.  

At least five of these works are without a doubt among the best  100 novels, the works of Proust and Flaubert in the top ten. 

Like her book on Russian authors, this book is a mixture of memoirs of her life from childhood to her forties,married with three children, capsuled biographies of the authors tying their work into the works she features and an her views on the Lessons concerning happinrss in them. 

Groskup tells us that she picked for her work books she first encountered studying French at Cambridge. Books that she could relate to her own life.  Growing up in a small English town, she became infatuated with all things French. She formed the idea that the French were happier, sexier, better dressed,far better fed, and did not worry very much about what others think of them.  Groskup details her efforts to immerse her self in French while studying in Paris. She wanted a French boyfriend. 

In each chapter she tells us what the Lessons about happiness the authors provided her.  Hugo,Maupassant and Flaubert were very frequent customers of prostitutes. Camus and Balzac also but not to the point of obsession.Syphilis killed Maupassant at 42.The three women she features,Colette, Sagan, and Dumas all had complicated tumultuous lives. 

Groskup knows other readers of French literature would make different picks. I was surprised there was no chapter on Zola.  I would have loved to read her thoughts on Iréne Nêmirovsky who she says she considered. 

Groskup includes a very informative and interesting suggested reading list. 

I have read nine of the works.  I hope to read Dangerous Liaisons this year and reread Madame Bovary soon keeping in mind Groskop's analysis. 

I am so glad I read this delightful book.

“Viv Groskop is a writer, comedian, TV and radio presenter and is the host of the chart-topping podcasts How to Own the Room on women, power and performance; and We Can Rebuild Her, a series of powerful interviews on reinvention, change and resilience, specially designed for the post-pandemic era. She is the author of five books including the best-selling How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking (Transworld). In March 2020 Viv launched Lift as You Climb: Women and the Art of Ambition (Transworld), a companion volume to How to Own the Room. And in June Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature (Abrams) came out, a follow-up to The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature (Penguin). Her first book was a memoir about stand-up comedy: I Laughed, I Cried: How One Woman Took On Stand-Up and Almost Ruined Her Life.” From the author’s website 

Mel Ulm

Mastering the Art of French Eating:Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris by Ann Mah. 2015 - 273 Pages

Mastering the Art  of French Eating:Lessons in Food and Love from a Year  in Paris by Ann Mah. 2015 - 273 Pages 

A dream has come true for a very passionate foodie, Ann Mah and her American Diplomatic Corp husband Calvin, he has been given a three year assignment in Paris.  Sadly, soon after they arrive he is sent to Irag for a year. No families are allowed there.  Mah is initially crushed by her loneliness. She fears for Calvin’s safety.

Calvin encourages her to employ her passion for French  cooking by  travels through country.  She seeks out the Regional sprcialities of the regions she visits.  For each of The ten regions she provides a brief history, introduces local chefs.  She visits three Star Michelin restaurants and simple cafes known only to locals.  At the close of each chapter there is an elegant recipe of a famous French dish.  You Will leave this book hungry!

Mah shares her aclimation to living in Paris as an American of Chinese ancestory, slowly learning French and getting a job at The American Library.

She talks about Julia Child, another diplomatic wife in Love with Paris and French Food. Diplomats have no real fixed home.  

Mastering the Art  of French Eating:Lessons in Food and Love from a Year  in Paris is s very good book.  To me it brought on deep feelings of regret.  I had planned to travel to Paris in 2022 with my wife. She passed away on January 19.

I have a copy of Mah’s debut novel Kitchen Chinese and hope to read it soon.

“Ann Mah is an American food and travel writer and the bestselling author of The Lost Vintage and three other books. A frequent contributor to the New York Times’ Travel section, she lives in Paris and Washington, DC.”  

https://www.annmah.net/

Mel Ulm