Matthew and the Chapeau

Today we finally feel that we're on Paris time. We both woke up this morning around 8 and felt well-rested, though we had slept a little less than we had most nights since we've been here. The weather remains cool and pleasant--partly cloudy with some threat of showers, but nothing that gets in the way of our plans. We had an abbreviated tourist schedule today because Martha wanted to attend some of the conference, but we did go to the Musee Maillol on the rue Grenelle to see an eclectic collection of Maillot's sculptures and other works and an amazing selection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken shortly before her death in 1962. The photos were taken by celebrity photographer Bert Stern and are shockingly intimate, not just because Monroe is nude in many of them but because she seems so close, so available to the camera, and so profoundly vulnerable. I suppose that's probably a case of hindsight being 20/20 vision, but in several of the photos you'd think you were seeing staged tableau-morts. They're very stylized and incredibly creepy. The body is splayed out across the bed. Booze bottles and glasses scattered here and there. The neck is displayed as if inviting the viewer to slash it. The eyes are closed. Even smiling, she looks already dead. And achingly beautiful, of course.

Martha went to a session in the afternoon, so I took off on my own in the Latin Quarter. I grabbed a ham and cheese crepe from the crepe stand associated with le Comptoir because I was determined to eat there one way or the other this trip. Then I headed up to the Place de la Sorbonne for an hour and a half of reading and people-watching and searching for glimpses of myself at 17 haunting the same spot. I'm reading Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet, which is a perfect summer vacation read--fun but not trivial, potentially teachable at some future point, and full of the kind of youthful libido that was starting to drive me nuts thirty years ago this summer when a French teacher named Gisele made my heart skip a beat before I even had words for the feelings I had. Long story. . . .Never mind.

After her session, we spent an hour or so relaxing in the jardins de Luxembourg and walked home by way of 27 rue de Fleurus so we could get digital versions of the photos we took six years ago.

For dinner tonight we hooked up with Maryland pal and colleague Matt Kirschenbaum, intending to hit a place fairly close to the apartment that has been recommended to us by several folks. It was full for the evening, but a sweet waiter directed us to another spot in the quartier St. Germain, la Cigale Recamier. We couldn't get in there until 9:30, and Martha and Matt were both starving, but it turned out to be more than worth the wait. We had fabulous food and a feast for the eyes as well. The crowd was a great mix of up-scale tourists and pretty snazzy looking Parisians, including an amazing older woman seated right next to Matt who had on the most extraordinary hat any of us had ever seen. It was enormous and perched at an angle on the left side of her head, totally obscuring the side of her face that was next to Matt. Martha and I were across the table from Matt and so saw mostly the hat but also got a few tantalizing glimpses of the face as well. When we sat down, she and her companion were just finishing their dinners, but they lingered until just before we left some time later.

It is impossible to describe this hat, which was an electric blue and had what seemed to be a sheaf of wheat that had to be three feet wide attached to the top. One could not help but stare and stare and wonder what kind of fabulous creature would adorn herself in such a hat. She was of course impossibly thin and did not avail herself of any of the many souffles on the menu (unlike the three of us, of course--Martha manged to have a souffle for both appetizer and dessert, while Matt and I both opted for an amazing caramel souffle for dessert). She had a sensible grilled fish and split a bottle of water with her younger female friend, who protested when she moved to pick up the check but let her pay it anyway. When she finally got up and sashayed out of the place, someone stopped her to chat, and we immediately assumed she was famous as someone, at least in the quartier. (I had read an article just this morning that informed me that Catherine Deneuve lives in St. Germaine, so I was primed for a major celebrity spotting, though I did not for one second suppose that Miss Deneuve would hide her fabulousness beneath such an ungainly chapeau. Please.) Because our waiter was funny and playful and inclined to chat, I asked him about her after they were gone. "La femme au chapeau," I managed to say, "was she someone famous?" He laughed hysterically. "Ah, no," he said, "I have never seen her before in my life!" I felt immense relief in that laughter, even if it was at a skinny old woman's expense, because it made me feel less crude, less hideously vulgar, un peu less Indiana Frusk (to cite the crudest of Edith Wharton's barbarous American women characters) to think that a woman in such an astonishing hat was no less astonishing in St. Germain than she would be in Washington--or Apex or Kokomo or any other "hideous" American place.

I suspect it will be a long while before I forget the sight of our smart, polite friend Matt carefully cutting his steak while keeping his left shoulder down to avoid an untimely collision with one of the largest hats the quartier had ever seen.