Paris in Love (18 page)

In Versailles, I bought a wonderful cookbook:
100 Recipes from the Time of Louis XIV
. Apparently, the court adored oysters and ate them along with both duck and leg of lamb. I am going to try chicken with champagne and the truly unusual cucumber fricassee. Almost every recipe calls for lard—and I can’t imagine where one buys that in the United States.

This weekend we happened on a
brocante
, a string of small booths selling odds and ends, everything from chipped lamps to Elvis LPs. Our favorite table was selling twenty-two different kinds of homemade sausages. We bought five kinds, among which were wild boar and pepper-cured duck. Unfortunately I have no idea which is which, but last night I made a fabulous pasta sauce using wild boar or perhaps duck or, as Alessandro suggested, indigenous Parisian rat.

The homeless man has asked us to adopt his puppy as he wants to return to Bucharest and cannot take him. It’s impossible, alas.
We travel too much to own a dog that will soon be the size of an ottoman. Anna is devastated, and won’t speak to either of us. Alessandro just found a friend who knows Romanian and got him to translate “Would you like us to make sure your dog is safe in a pet shelter?” This is not a popular option at home.

We just took Luca’s computer away for a month, after a very painful, blunt discussion with his Latin teacher (following painful, blunt discussions with his French and history teachers). They all said he was remarkably polite, which I’m proud about. But also remarkably indolent. Signed, Cruelest Parents in Paris.

We are now ensconced in the heart of a deeply conservative Catholic church—all “smells and bells,” my mother would have described it. My favorite moment of the Mass is the final hymn, which is often a hymn to Mary, called “Couronnée d’Étoiles,” or “Crowned with Stars.” I love its wild purple prose. Every Sunday we less-than-tunefully carol that Mary “drapes” the sun, outshines the moon, and salutes the dawn.

Coming out of school, Anna told me that her gymnastics teacher has been asking “for a long time” that she bring a sweat suit, but “I kept forgetting.” So we elbowed our way into a crowded department store, and she picked out a pink sweat suit with sequins spelling
FREE LOVE
. “What’s that mean?” she asked. I had no idea what to say, so I offered, “Love for lots of people, puppies and kittens, too.” She nodded wisely.

My mother placed white sugar right next to crack cocaine in the catalog of the most dangerous substances known to man. To this day, my idea of heaven is a handful of small marshmallows: pure, undiluted, bad-for-you sugar in a form that could never be mistaken as healthy. I have found a supplier here in Paris, which is akin to a junkie discovering a private poppy field.

This morning as I watched Anna select pink undies, pink socks, and a pink shirt to go with her pink sweat suit, I grew suspicious and pried out the reason for this flare-up of conspicuous femininity: apparently she had been confronted in the bathroom by two malicious young ladies who said she looked like a boy and should use
their
bathroom. Because most people say Anna looks exactly like me, I find this particularly insulting (and absurd). But I sent her off to school looking like a sporty princess, armored in pink against her sharp-tongued foes, and then spent the morning brooding over it. Why are girls so mean to each other?

Fridays are our date nights, which back in New Jersey meant movies, but here means food. Last night we wandered into one of the little covered passageways near us, the Passage des Panoramas. Inside, we found a bistro that could serve fifteen at most. The menu, on a chalkboard, offered a choice of precisely two entrées. I had smoky vegetable soup in a little tureen and then deep, delicious
boeuf bourguignon
, followed by warm chocolate cake. The cost was about fifteen euros. Joy!

“Our” homeless man is gone. Alessandro and Anna set off, our daily donation clutched in Anna’s hand, only to find that he had vanished, presumably to Bucharest. Alessandro is berating himself for not trying out his phrase about dog shelters in time. I told a weeping Anna that the man couldn’t bear to part from his puppy, so now that dog is learning Romanian. I hope this is the truth.