An apartment in Paris - sublime!

On our recent trip to Paris, Carl and I rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment from Louise, a charming 29-year-old comedienne, through Airbnb. It was located in Batignolles, the 17th arrondissement, which is near the métro stop Villiers. Our apartment was off a narrow one-way street, on an inside courtyard and up one flight of winding stairs. It was very quiet, and we settled right in to the neighborhood, finding a favorite café just three blocks away, and exploring the patisseries, cheese shops and vegetable stands in Rue deLévis,the pedestrian shopping street nearby. We bought croissants one day, delicious slices of quiche Lorraine another day, at La Maie des Anges, our neighborhood patisserie, and made coffee in Louise's French press for breakfast.

Our Paris apartment

Two books published in 2014 - A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable and Paris Time Capsule by Ella Carey are based on the 2010 discovery, in Paris, of an apartment that no one had entered since the residents fled the Nazi occupation in World War II. Filled with paintings and furnishings that dated back to 19th century France, the apartment had originally belonged to Marthe de Florian, an actress and courtesan linked romantically with two Presidents and two Prime Ministers of France, among others. And this is not even the fictional part! The apartment was discovered when Marthe's mysterious granddaughter, who had paid the bills on the apartment all those years but never returned there, died at age 91.

News stories when the apartment was discovered included photographs of the apartment, revealing an opulent lifestyle that came to a sudden end for reasons that remain a mystery. An elaborate dressing table with an oval gilt-encrusted mirror, laden with bottles of perfume,a hand mirror with matching hairbrushes and toiletry items and cloaked in dust; an ostrich, preserved by taxidermy; delicately carved upholstered chairs; and paintings. Most notably, a stunningly romantic painting of Marthe de Florian in a rose-colored evening gown painted by Italian portraitist Giovanni Boldini; and love letters establishing their personal relationship.

With all of this material, the mystery remained - what happened to the apartment's occupants? Why did they never return? And why did the mysterious granddaughter continue to pay for an apartment she never visited for 70 years?

Each of the two novels spins its own fanciful and fascinating story about these mysteries. 
Paris Time Capsule is the story of an American photographer who suddenly inherits the estate of a Frenchwoman she doesn't know, including this extraordinary apartment. The premise is a little far-fetched, but Carey succeeds in using her premise to build a mystery around the woman's identity and her connection to the heroine, Cat Jordan.

A Paris Apartment features April Vogt, a Sotheby's furniture appraiser sent over to inventory and evaluate the apartment's contents. She discovers a trove of love letters that leads her to solve the mystery of the apartment, its occupants' mysterious disappearance, and why it stood vacant for so long.

Both books' heroines have left bad relationships behind in the States, and both (of course) meet intriguing Frenchmen who complicate their lives. Suffice to say that this is light romance, not literature - but highly entertaining, nonetheless.

Circling back to our own Paris apartment, I can enthusiastically recommend Airbnb. Open up to a map of Paris, and you'll see literally dozens of possibilities, in every price range and every arrondissement. Browsing through them, looking at photos you can imagine yourself there - with a view of the Eiffel Tower, a short walk to Notre Dame, or a stone's throw from the Moulin Rouge - whatever your heart desires. 










 

I've asked the reading group members what they think about me mentioning them here; while I wait to hear from them, I'm going to write about a trip we took this fall, which was brimful of books and food. 

The trip's purpose was twofold; first, of course, fun and adventure -- Carl had never been to Paris; I studied there as a college student. There was much I wanted to share with him, and many other things I hadn't done that I wanted us to experience together. The other purpose was to do research for my own book, which is (possibly over-ambitiously) set in Iron Age Scotland (43 C.E. - more on that later)

Over the year before the trip, before we even imagined we would go, I developed a hunger for books about Paris. It was almost like the kind of cravings you get when you're pregnant; you can't quite explain why you suddenly have an unquenchable thirst for cranberry juice, or craving for crunchy peanut butter; you just do. In this case, my hunger was far-ranging: fiction, nonfiction, set in present day, historical, food books, memoirs, I read them all. 

Because there were so many, this will be the first of several posts.

Literary Paris: A Guide by Jessica Powell is an absolute delight. Arranged chronologically, beginning in the 17th century with Moliere, it covers all of the usual suspects; Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Powell also includes American expatriates who found refuge or inspiration or both, in Paris over the last six centuries. Some will elicit an "of course," when flipping through: Gertrude Stein, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom were immortalized in Hemingway's Paris memoir A Moveable Feast. Others are not as well known for their French connections: Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin and Richard Wright.  

But Powell's book is much more than a list of literary luminaries: it offers portraits of each, rich with anecdotes and details about their personality quirks, culinary preferences and sex lives. On top of all this, it is generously illustrated with etchings, paintings, and photographs. 

Each entry also includes sites where they ate, drank, shopped, slept and sought inspiration; and a map to help plan your pilgrimage.  Some can be visited - you can order un expresso or un chocolat chaud at Cafe de  Flore, a favorite of Stein and Camus. Others, like Stein's            

former residence on the Rue de Fleurus, are still standing but can only be seen from outside.          

Even if you're not planning a trip to Paris, this book will take you there.

It all started in 2005 with "The Time Traveler's Wife." That was my pick, and we hosted the group at our house, adding leaves to the old oak table in the spacious dining room of our 1870s Victorian house.

Had I known this would grow into a decade-long (and still going) culinary and literary feast, I would have begun logging the menus and contributions immediately. But I didn't. Nonetheless, by June 2006, it had become clear that delicious food was an integral part of our group's gatherings. By then we had read "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell; and "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" by Jeannette Winterston
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If you've read, or heard about these books, you will realize immediately what an eclectic group this is. Our first selection featured the fantastical story of a naked man traveling back and forth in time; the third one was a coming-of-age story of a young girl raised by a religious zealot, discovering her own truths, among which was her love for another woman. "Blink," by sometime pundit and New Yorker staff writer Gladwell, presents a psychological theory about first impressions. All generated lively discussion, including objections to the way Henry, the time-traveling librarian, somehow loses all his clothes when he is spirited from one decade to another; horror at the abuse young Jeannette suffers, admiration for her courage; and discussion of the tensions between faith and tolerance the novel addresses.

If "Blink" is right, you've long since decided whether this blog is for you; I hope it is. In my next post, I'll introduce the members of our group, and some of the food that has fed us.

Greetings!

If you love books and food, and enjoy sharing them with friends, you've come to the right place.

Ten years ago, I found myself reading and cooking, and wanting to find a way to share these great joys. Book group? Too limited. But a book-and-dinner group with couples - that would be great! My husband and I thought of a few couples whose company we enjoy. Everyone was receptive to the idea of dinner, but some were skeptical about having "assigned" books. So we decided that fun was the most important thing, and there would be no penalty for not reading the book. Ten years later, some of the skeptics enthusiastically choose books for the group to read, and we all agree we've read a lot of things we wouldn't have chosen otherwise. Dinners rotate around the houses, the hosts choose the book, and somewhere along the line, we started tying the food in to the books' locations, so it's become an international adventure.

Friends, food and books - the best sort of feast!