Badaude

See you at the Rentrée!

Did I mistype that?

OK, I meant, Paris Palge. If you don't already know about it, it's a beach-based installation that occurs along the banks of the Seine every July and August. Sometimes, as I walk along the Right Bank, I look down from the traffic-choked Quais onto the top of people's heads. There are crowds of them down there at all times of day. What are they doing? So far this year, I haven't gone down there to find out.

But, late one August night, I have to get back from Rivoli to somewhere near Bastille. I could take the steaming, sweating metro, or I could walk along the lamplit Quai de Voltaire, dodging the cars that stream by in a neon blur. Or I could go down to Paris Plage and walk.

On a night like this, with outdoors as hot as a room with closed windows, and the city's heat trapped under its greenhouse-gas roof, shutting out the stars, there's no competition.

So I make my way down one of the staircases that lead down to the Quais of the Seine.

People are still dressed for day although it's 10.30pm, in short sleeved shirts and shorts. In the centre of the city, they really are dressed for the beach. But their faces are greenish in the lamplight, eerily underlit by reflections from the river. The effect is kind of, Tour-group of the Living Dead.

They are milling backwards and forwards in both directions. Which stream should I follow? I join the thick flow of the constant foule* wandering toward the the Ile Saint-Louis. I wonder whether I'm going to come across a happening of some sort: some music, a reading or an art installation. I don't. Maybe I've chosen the wrong time of night. I walk for ten minutes; longer. For half an hour, but it's like a gigantic, aimless passagiata.

I start to watch for patterns in the crowd; trying to make sense of what's going on. I notice a group of Asian teenage boys, dodging between the plagistes with a Galleries Lafayette trolley full of bottled water. One of them detatches from the trolley and opens a little electrician's door at the base of a cast-iron lamp post. He takes out a half-empty bottle; a packet of pills. What are they?

I look back at the crowd. They haven't noticed him. They're looking out for something else, hopefully, expectantly.

There's nothing actually happening.

I remember last year's Paris Plage when I spent one sweltering afternoon at Bassin de la Villette. Like tonight, it was crowded. I missed the baby dragon monster; I missed the Guinguette*. I walked up and down the Bassin, through crowds of Parisians who, always seeming to know better, walked always in the opposite direction. 

Back to night, 2008. All the watching I've been doing has changed the nature of what I'm seeing. There's a feeling of tension. Of expectation. Perhaps it's mine.

As a woman on my own in a crowd, I'm used to feeling like this. Like most women, I've been trained to look out for a bag-snatch, an assault; an indecent proposal; an incident of some kind. What's going to happen? I look at other walkers, their cameras dangling casually from their shoulders, rucksacks gaping open and feel smug. I'm armoured in my jacket (albeit light cotton) my purse slung across my body. If there's an easy target, it's not me. But I am the only lone female walker I can see. And where am I expecting the incident to come from? Are the crowd the threat or the mark?

I'm unprepared when it happens. A middle-aged, thin, ratty-looking guy with a guitar over his shoulder grabs me by the arm. What does he want? He pulls me towards him.

In a few seconds which seem like forever, the following thoughts go through my head:

He looks scruffy. Also arty.

I don't want to be prejudiced toward scruffy people I don't want him to think that I'm prejudiced toward scruffy people. Or artists (maybe he's part of the entertainment and I should actually be extra-nice to him). I smile.

A bit. Frozenly. He might, after all, be a purse-snatcher or a serial rapist.

After all, he grabbed my arm. That's a bit inappropriate, huh? It lends weight to the purse-snatcher theory. But he looks a bit Latin. Maybe grabbing is ok if you're Latin. Maybe he's just being tactile. I don't want to be uptight. And I don't want to be prejudiced against Latins.

I turn toward him. The effect of the smile and the not-smile is somewhat grotesque.

He asks, politely,"Tu veux m'accompanier au..?"

OK. So he wants a date. It always comes from the unexpected angle. When you're expecting an iron bar, a feather can topple you.

I start to reply. But how do you gently reject a man you just assumed was trying to rob you?

Furthermore, I have forgotten that, when I'm flustered, I can no longer speak French. Instead, I make a kind of face which expresses relief, gratitude, polite regret and friendly interest. It's not really one face but several different faces fighting for self-expression over the same set of features.

He get's the point. I'm a tourist. I don't understand. He claps me on the shoulder:"A demain! A la meme heure, hein?"

And I'm left, still floundering in his wake, as the vedette* sails off into the night to find a more likely copain*.

Click on the illustration to see it bigger; click again to enlarge it further.

*foule - crowd
*guignette - informal traditional ball
*vedette - small boat; also star, celebrity
*copain - friend/boyfriend/girlfriend (I've always found this one a bit ambiguous)

A couple of mentions for Badaude this week: the lovely Milena of The Leaping Thought is very flattering...

I'm also taking part in Hitotoki Paris, which is in itself a kind of extended badaudism. I'm in twice, once with my own writing plus one extra illustration for Kincaid whose SuperEd experience stuck a chord.

I love supermarkets and can often be found wadering up and down the aisles, looking at the labels, not really buying anything and getting in people's way. Kincaid was thinking of the Ed supermarché in rue Domrémy in the 13e. When I get the Hitotoki email, I'm just coming out of Champion on the rue de la Seine in the 6e (Plus facile la vie!* as it says in the ads).

It's Saturday night and the supermarket has queues ten-deep of locals picking up ready-meals and tourists fighting over cut-price foie gras. I look at the queues, put down my basket and get out of there.

It's the hottest night of the year. Saint Benoit and Flore are crammed with people who have come from the other side of the World to stare at each other across a strip of tarmac. Only the terrace at la Palette is still full of the beautiful people, talking in French as well as English, Spanish and Japanese. There isn't a seat. I decide to go home. I'm walking down the rue Bonaparte as it happens: there's a burst of white light like one of the flourescent tubes in the vitrines* lining the street has gone pop. Then the noise, as though all the people in all the cafés in the quartier have pulled back in their chairs all at once, scraping the iron feet along the bitume* in a roll of thunder. Thunder. That's what it is. Then rain. I don't have an umbrella. No-one does. Everywhere, people are running for cover, under shopfront awnings, into doorways. The diners at the outdoor bistrot tables shuffle further under the striped shelters put up earlier  to shade customers from the sun.

I take a breath. I'm already soaked, from my face to the soles of my feet. I can't get any wetter. I have a fair distance to walk. I could run into the Metro, or into a bar, or to the nearest bus stop. But what if, instead, I stop for a moment and just let the rain stick my clothes and my hair to my skin and wash off the sweat and the grit of a hot, hot day in Paris. What's so bad about that? (I have to stop think about what I really enjoy, sometimes) As an old friend of mine once said, 'We are not made of sugar.'

I set off again, down the middle of the street, through the crowds of hooting taxis and tourists dodging back to their hotels from doorway to doorway, jackets and newspapers over their heads; feeling the raindrops spilling down my face and into my eyes, shattering the bright lights of Paris all the way to the Odeon, and beyond.

The Paris section of Hitotoki is run by the tri-continental Lauren of Maitresse. If you have your own special moment to contribute, email her from her website. You don't have to do the drawing. Maybe I'll end up doing it...

*plus facile la vie! -life is easier

*bitume - tarmac

*vitrines - shop windows

I’m sitting in a café with artist, Matthew Rose of Lalande Digital Art Press. It’s Sunday morning. We’re at the corner of two streets – just watching people. He’s an artist. He returned by train this morning from his latest show in Berlin. 

“How did it go?”

He says, “Yeah, it was great. I sold two of the bottles. 900€ each. I exhibited them at wine shop across the road from me in the 14th at, like, 200€ and I thought, in the gallery, they might go for 500. So I didn’t say anything and my dealer said, I think we should put these up at 900 and so I said, OK, but I didn’t really think they would sell. And I sold two.”

We sit down. The waitress is beautiful. Tall and slim. She wears a long and elaborate sautoir* over her work apron. She takes our order, hardly seeming to notice us. Matthew scowls at her.

“She’s not my favourite,” he says. “She’s new. And they just put all the prices up. In Berlin, coffee was, like, half the price it is here. How much is a coffee in England?”

“Well, it’s probably more expensive than Berlin, but less than here.”

“He studies the menu. Look at the price of the omlettes. In Berlin, I got an omlette and a really big bucket of iced coffee for, like, 7€. And I bought this sweater. At the Salvation Army. Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“There was a girl in Berlin who was telling me about her bags and her dress and the way it buttons and has this kind of sleeve here and how much these things mean to girls. I mean, clothes. Do you notice those things?” Matthew asks, "I'm actually interested in female semiotics."

“Yes. I’m very interested in clothes. You can usually tell a lot about people from the way they dress.”

“The girls in Berlin."he continues, "There were two looks. Some of them were like, very clean-cut. Very simple.”

“Well, there’s simple and there’s simple.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you see that girl over there. She’s wearing just a tee-shirt and a cardigan and a skirt. But the tee-shirt’s a slightly different colour from the cardigan so it doesn’t look like it matches too much. And it’s only fastened by the top button which is kind of  counter-intuitive. I mean, why would you fasten a cardigan like that? It looks simple-simple, but it’s actually simple-complicated. She’s really thought about it. That’s why it looks good.  She probably wants you to think it’s simple-simple – that she just threw it on.”

“That’s complicated… In Berlin there were these simple girls. Just a t-shirt and plain clothes; very natural fabrics.”

“Very tall?”

“Yes – No, not all so tall.”

“When I was in Berlin," I say,"all the girls were very tall. Did they all look like they all worked in a bio* restaurant?”

“Yes. No – not so grunge.  And then there were the other girls. Very trashy. Like bright lipstick; plastic stuff.”

“Like the prostitutes?”

“Did you see the prostitutes in Berlin too?"

“Yes – when you walk along the Oranienburger Straße and they’re all there and its like they’re demarcated every twenty feet and it’s like none of them can go into each other’s territory. And they look fantastic. With the corsets and the really high plastic platform boots. They’re tall.”

“Yeah. Tall. Very. And they’re all state-registered. That’s why they look like that. I was talking to one and she said they all used to dress like normal, but now they don’t have to. And it’s become, like, a look.”

“Did you ask her anything else?”

“Yeah. She said, €80 for a hand-job, or a blow-job and and an ‘erotic massage’ and she said she was proud to pay taxes and the fee also goes to pay the hotel."

"Bargain."

Matthew looks up.

"Hey, Have you noticed how the girls in Paris now all wear these very, very low cut tops? Like everything hanging out? That’s new.”

“Not really…”

“Well, I’m a guy. Of course I notice that. What about them over there.” (a couple sit down at the next table) “I’m sure I’ve seen him before. I mean what’s going on with her clothes? Hey," he adds, "do you think she’s his daughter?”

“Could be. I was wondering that myself. Well, she’s wearing nu-pieds*. And that sort of cowboy saddlebag and the hessian dress. There’s a whole rural thing going on. Like a ‘child of nature’.”

“Well the girls in Berlin looked a bit like that, but different. The girls here look like they’re just walking along, maybe going to the market. Then they’re going to sit in this cafe and drink a 5€ coke. Then they’re going to go home and write all about it on Facebook. And that’s what they’re going to do all day. But in Berlin, the girls look like they’re all on their way to work. Like they’re going to do something.”

“You could move to Berlin.”

“Well, it's true I’m not a Francophile, even though I lived here for 15 years... Did I tell you, yesterday morning in Berlin I sold two new prints?  A couple from Belgium came in and wanted them. €90 each. And they took them then and there and that was that."

“Good. That's 10€ more than then hand-job.”

“Look – the guy who’s fucking his daughter – I’m sure I know him from somewhere...
The thing you’re writing. Is there any sex in it?”

“Of course.”

"Good.”

(to see the illustration, click; to see it bigger, click again.)

*sautoir - long chain necklace

*bio - biologique - organic

*nu-pieds - 'nude feet' - sandals

Matthew's exhibition is up until 5 September at the Galerie Rossella Junck  http://www.rossellajunck.com.

Last week Badaude turned two and was cited in the Wall Street Journal (I wrote the IVYParis piece they quote from - that will teach me to call them silly). To celebrate, I am eating out at Au Pied de Fouet on rue de Babylone, just beyond Le Bon Marché

The restaurant is in the 6e, in the heart of movie-set Paris; the part tourists visit to chase a little Saint-Germain romance. Tonight, that's what I want. I don't want to go to Bastille or Menilmont. I want Paris to be like Paris in the movies. It's hot. The batiments of the rue de Babylone have been freshly whitewashed by the set designers. My footsteps echo on the sound stage of the empty pavement. Do I have a date? Yes. Does he turn up? No. I wait. This is less like a movie. I text. I'm hungry. I decide not to wait any longer.

But in Paris, it's ok to eat alone. I often eat alone. Lots of women do it, after all. And I have been out all day, walking. No lunch. So I just compensate by eating for my date too.

I have two courses plus the deux fromages with 2 glasses of wine and all the bread in the basket. I notice I am eating twice as much as any other woman in there. I am double a French woman. I am eating almost as much as the slim man sitting diagonally opposite me.

Au Pied de Fouet is small. "Upstairs," says the man diagonally opposite, who wears Cary Grant glasses and can speak to me across the tiny tables without raising his voice, "is even smaller. The ceiling is low. It is like a maison des poupées (dolls' house)." I look up. It has dolls' house checked tablecloths and a beamed ceiling.

He asks me if I understand what he says. I say, "Yes, null that I might be at French, I comprehend almost everything."

He asks me which quartier I am from. He lives here, in the 6e.

He says, "I like to go to cafe Le Nemrod on rue Saint Placide," he says. "But it's too bruyant. On ne peut rien entendre la-bas. (noisy - you can't hear anything in there). Do you live in Paris? What is your metier?"

I tell him. Then I say, "So you asked me all about my job. What do you do?"

"Oh - I make appareils acoustiques."

"Quoi?"

"Des apparails acoustiques."

"Qu'avez-vous dit?. Je ne peux pas vous entendre." (What did you say? I can't hear you)

"Hearing aids. C'est a très sexy job, n'est-ce pas? And him." He indicates his dining companion who is wearing a suit. "He works in a banque. Du classe, non!"

The two Parisiens ask me if I know the Sud-Ouest of France, where they grew up. And I say, yes, I've visited Marseilles and Avignon. NO! they say. That is the SUD. The SUD-OUEST is the Pays Basque. It's Carcassone and Perpignan and Pau. It is a pays plein de charactère. Nous sommes de Sud-Ouest!

They insist that I try their local liqueur. "It is an apple liquor," they say." "It's called Mmnmnnm."

"Quoi?"

"Mmnmnmmmnonm."

"Quoi?"

But they don't hear me. It's here. In three glasses. Clear as water.

The three of us stand up at the bar; two men with one woman in between, knocking back the colourless liquor.  It tastes like sugary pommes vertes - granny smith apples. A dolls' house liquor in a dolls' house restaurant. It would not look unnatural if we broke into a dance routine.

I'll never know what it's called, but, I suddenly realise, I'm enjoying it.

And for a moment, Paris is a movie. Not a French movie, maybe, but something frothier, cuter, in technicolor; An American in Paris or Gigi or Irma la Douce.

As I glide down the rue de Babylone, I get a texto from my ex-date.

tê ou?
(t'es ou - Where are you?)

He speaks texto. I don't, though, like French, I do usually comprehend. I reply:

APDF - toi?
(Au Pied de Fouet - toi? - Au Pied de Fouet -  you?)

Moa No+ O bar en face
(Moi non plus. Au bar en face - Not any more - in the bar opposite.)

Mais il n'ya aucun bar en face APDF
(But there' no bar opposite Au Pied de Fouet)

tê r sBenoit?
(T'es rue Saint Benoit? - Are you in rue Saint Benoit?)

Non, rue Babylone!
(No, rue Babylone!)

jetelédi sBenoit
(Je te l'ai dit saint Benoit - I told you Saint Benoit)

Tu ma dit APDF. Il existe aussi r SB?
(You told me Au Pied de Fouet. Is it also in rue Saint Benoit?)

6!
(Si!- Oh yes!)

Jentend rBabylone car je ne savais pas...
(I understood rue Babylone because I didn't know...)

Tpa fâchée?
(T'es pas fachee? - You're not angry?)

Non, j'ai passe un super bon soiree avec deux hommes.
(No - I had a great evening with two men.)

T la + b'L ab1to
(t'es la plus belle a bientot - you are the most beautiful - see you later)

I glide up to the juction at Saint Francis Xavier. I look back down the length of the long white rue de Babylone. It's beautiful. Paris is a movie set. And tonight, it's a musical comedy.

I'm a toddler. Two year olds are usually noted for their unreasonable and intractable behaviour as well as their temper tantrums.

Yes, I've been running Badaude for exactly two years today. I'll be celebrating but probably - after last weekend - with lemonade.

Looking back over the last two years, most, but not all of my posts have been about Paris.

Lauren of Maitresse, asked me, 'Why Paris?', in the context of this rather silly article in the Wall Street Journal.

Here's my reply to her (also posted on her website):

OK - so I'm British and I don't think I am part of the very special Franco-American love affair. However, read this passage from the script of the Bogart/Bacall movie, 'To Have and to Have Not' (imagine I'm Bacall - it's a nice thought...):

Official (reading passport): "Browning, Marie. American. Age? How long have you been in Fort de France?"
LB: "I arrived by plane this afternoon."
Official: "Residence?"
LB: "Hotel Marquis."
Official: "Where do you come from?"
LB: "Trinidad. Port of Spain."
Official: "And before that,from where, mademoiselle? From home, perhaps?"
LB: "No. From Brazil, Rio."
Official:"Alone?"
LB: "Yes."
Official: "Why did you get off here?"
LB: "To buy a new hat."
Official: "Why?"
LB: "To buy a new... hat. Read the label. Maybe you'll believe me then."

I'm not really talking about high fashion - and nor was Maitresse's namesake. I think I'm agreeing with James Baldwin (see the Washington Post article) who said he wasn't travelling to Paris, but leaving New York. I bought a new hat. It was as good a hat as any. I found it fitted well. And it happened to be pretty, too...

"I like having hangovers."

"No you can't mean it!"

"But I do. First you feel so bad that your brain stops working. You can't think about anything for a while. So you don't worry about any of the things you'd normally worry about. You reach a kind of Zen state. Then when you stop feeling bad you are happy to have survived. It's like a brain reboot."

These were some words I spoke somewhat rashly a couple of evenings ago.
I thought I was being clever. I also thought I meant it.
Yesterday I woke up on day two of really the worst hangover of my life.
I think I might have changed my opinion.

I should have seen it coming, when I fake-tanned my legs.

You see, four days ago, I bought a very fine dress in the soldes d'été at Isabel Marant. The dress is made from grey sweatshirt material which makes my pale legs look the colour of the belly of an uncooked fish. It is a fine dress. It just needs bronzed Mediterranean legs, like the legs of the dark heroines in Eric Rohmer movies. So I stop in at Le Bon Marché, buy some fake tan and dye my legs, failing to recall how the pain of a hangover is so frequently accompanied by the cooked-biscuit smell of chemical bronzer.

It had something to do with hope. And something to do with pride.

You see, I fake-tanned my legs to wear with the dress to meet a friend I hadn't seen for some time. He's a college friend. I see him maybe every five years. I want to impress him. With my dress, with my legs. I know I probably won't see him for another five years but I'm instantly at home with him - just as I was when I shared a house with him all those years ago. And we're having dinner at home in my apartment.

For some reason, I drink more at home than I do when I'm out. In a bar or a restaurant, I have my limit sussed. There's something in my subconscious which doesn't allow me to drink to excess. I am particularly proud of this skill. It has, after all, taken me years to develop. But at home, wedged between the wall and a collapsible table, my subconscious has an entirely different intent. It is occasionally impossible to fool it into ignoring the fact that my bed is really not very far away and I have no need to stay sober enough to stay upright on the metro.

My friend is here with his wife, whom I have met once, briefly, and their two children, the older of whom I last saw in a pram. He is a Labour candidate in a no-hope borough in the rural South West of England. I google him as I cook duck legs on a bed of carrots before he arrives. His face beams shinily from his party's website.

Is it true that everyone looks ten pounds heavier in photos?

About 10.30pm his wife takes the children back to their hotel. She is tired, she say's. She doesn't mind going to bed early. She doesn't return. We sit. And talk. And drink. Until when? I don't know.

...

The next morning. I wake up to find him sitting at my table drinking coffee out of a wineglass.

He looks at home. His upper torso is bare, white and plump. He used to be thin. I stare at it, fascinated. Each half is an unnaturally symmetrical mirror-image of itself, and it is unnaturally wide. It is so pale and wide and shining. It's all I can see. It spreads out before me, horrifyingly large, like the vast white wall of a n electro-hydraulic dam. It is making me dizzy.

This is when I realise I am fantastically hung-over.

I get up temporarily to make breakfast, but find that the action of sawing bread makes me nauseous.

Then it occurs to me to wonder why he is still here. I ask,

"Did you sleep on the sofa"

"Some of the time."

I put a hand up to my ear.

"I lost an earring."

"That was probably when you fell off the bed. You see, after you took all your clothes off and I'd tied your wrists onto your ankles, would insist on still moving. And then you rolled to one side and just fell off the bed. Plop."

I take a serious reality check.

"You are... joking, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"OK. So why did you stay?"

"Well, when you get drunk when you're younger you still have the energy to do something outrageous. But when you're older, you just go to sleep. I just went to sleep. At the table. Then I moved onto the sofa at, maybe, 4am, I think. It was getting light. Do you want some coffee?"

I can't drink anything out of a wineglass. Or maybe, I just can't drink anything.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I really just have to go back to bed."

...

My friend returns in the afternoon with his family. I remember that last night I had volunteered to take his children to see a movie.

How much did you drink? asks the eight year old.

"I don't know."

It's better that he doesn't. And, in any case, I'm not sure.

But he persists:

"One glass? Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine?"

He continues without any apparent idea of stopping. I can see the glasses lined up, the wine inside them queasily swaying. I have to stop their relentless multiplication.

"Oh - um, definitely not more than six."

I have no idea whether this is true. But I don't want to give too bad an impression.

"You should only drink one glass of wine every day," say the five-year-old, sternly. "That's what my daddy says."

I take the children to see Prince Caspian. I find two hours plus of mythological beings beating the crap out of one another oddly refreshing. I eat most of the children's salted popcorn. I go home and immediately go back to sleep.

The next morning, I find I can get out of bed. I feel like I have a hangover. I no longer feel that something indefinable has happened to me which has shifted reality by a crucial 5 centimetres. It feels like day one of a hangover I might have had fifteen years ago in the days when a hangover lasted a maximum of twelve hours.

I look through the apartment for my earring and don't find it. I find a prescription bottle of Propecia, left by my friend. I Google it. It is a treatment for hairloss. I put it in the bathroom beside my bottle of fake tan.

I go out with a friend for coffee, which I find I can now drink. I notice I am trembling slightly as one poison replaces another in my system. I tell her about the evening before the evening before.

She sympathises.

"It's ok. You only see this guy, what, every five years?"

But I can see the rings of damage spreading like circles of water from a dropped stone.

"You don't understand. These are my friends from college. There are loads more of them back in the UK. And they all know each other. Like family. And they all see each other like, every five years too. But if he tells one of them then, within around six months, they'll all know. And I only see most of them once every five years. I'll have the reputation of being a drunken slapper until I can personally disprove it to every one of my college friends. Which, mathematically speaking, could take," (I realise with horror as I calculate), "the next fifty years."

Will I still be around in fifty years, making my rounds of penance? I'm not young any more. Not young enough to drink like that. And maybe too old to live down the consequences.

"But didn't you say you drank a lot at college?"

I remember afternoons in the pub, matching the boys pint for pint. And worse nights when, for example, dressed in a scarlet turban, I attended a cocktail party and, after many glasses of something made from peach schnapps, ended up howling loudly in a bathroom several staircases away.

"But that's not me. I'm not like that any more. I haven't been for years. I didn't mean to get drunk. I hardly ever get drunk."

"OK, it may be better to look at it this way. You're reputation has not been damaged. It has just been... preserved."

As if in alcohol.

Click on the illustration to open it in a bigger window, then click again to resize it.

I'm a little proud of this mention of badaude on http://czupcaks.tumblr.com/page/2. In fact, carve it on my headstone...

"I have a vernissage* at the Palais de Tokyo tonight." Mélusine pauses to examine me for a moment. "I think it will be fun. Why don't you come?"

I don't know Mélusine. I met her for the first time today. She's a curator and owner of an art gallery  I wandered into this morning, near the mysterious hotel. I meet her there again in the evening before taking a taxi to the Palais.

Next door to the gallery is a boules pitche. Old men play while old women with immaculate red lipstick sit and watch. Mélusine goes over to one, to several of them; she embraces them, talks for a while. She turns to me. "They're - I don't know how to say it in English. Voyous. Do you know that word? You know, the guys, the real men of the neighborhood?"

"Do you mean like local guys, like Cockneys? In London they have Cockneys, like Titi Parisien?"

"No, I mean they're voyous. Men, guys. You know, they're always boasting about that they've been in prison. Like, 'I've been in prison for ten years; Yeah and I have for twelve.' ."

"Oh, voyous."

I realise I've heard the word before in a 1950s movie. Now, here they are at the end of their stretch, enjoying their retirement, playing boules peacefully in the sun.

Mélusine insists we take a taxi. In Paris, I don't take taxis. I walk or take the metro. While I watch the buildings peel by unfamiliarly from my low bucket seat, Mélusine takes calls on her mobile. How much French does she think I understand? We've been talking in English. I hear her say,

"Yes, I'm on my way... I know. She's not very attractive. Is it because she dresses so badly?" I wonder whether she's talking about me.

Mélusine wears black. A black jacket, which she does not remove; black t-shirt; black twisted rope necklace. She also wears perfume. Lots of it. Poison by Christian Dior, she says. It's so thick it forms a barrier between us. On anyone else it might have been oppressive, but on Mélusine, it's part of her allure. I've always loathed strong perfume, especially in cars where it makes me carsick.However if, as Diana Vreeland said, 'Pink is the navy blue of India' but it doesn't necessarily work everywhere ( just as certain shades of orange-red, I've noticed, look dull in the grey light of London), maybe overpowering scent also only makes sense in its heady city of origin. 

"You know," says Mélusine, "I have to do an interview at the Palais. I do an emission about the arts. For la télé. Do you know that arts show, with the chairs? But I'm so tired." She leans back into her leatherette seat. "I just got back from the Maldives last night."

We pull up on the wrong side of the multi-laned avenue du Président Wilson and jaywalk to the Palais, dodging the rush hour traffic.

...

The Palais de Tokyo is artfully distressed. It's walls, inside and out, are peeling, greyish concrete. When a building looks as hubristically Fascistic as this (the enormous winged typewriter was built, optimistically, in 1937), the only thing to do with it is to make a romantic, post-industrial ruin of it.

The exhibition inside is inspired by the Superdome stadium in Atlanta which was used as a disaster centre for the poorest and most resourceless victims of Hurricane Katrina in the US. When we arrive, the main exhibit, inspired by the stadium after its occupation, is still being prepared; curators carfully distributing crumpled Macdonalds wrappers, empty plastic water bottles and other human waste to their pre-appointed places on the artist's floor-grid. The preview-goers form temporary alliances and hang about in groups, waiting for the opening, leaving their own debris of tickets, magazines, and waterbottles. Here we are, the survivors, the stragglers, waiting for our handouts of free champagne.

What do art girls look like this year? The art girls in Paris are all wearing sarouel this summer. And weird shoes. Art girls all over the world wear weird shoes...

Mélusine, who is wearing terrifyingly high black patent platforms with dagger heels, meets an artist friend. He shows me pictures of his work on his blackberry: a car and an uprooted tree turning slowly in the white cube of a gallery. "They're beautiful, huh?"

"I have to meet with les télé people." says Mélusine. "I have a ticket for you. Go in. Have a look around. We can get together later."

I wander in past the works on time, by Jonathan Monk which I like more and more, as I take more time to look. They include a two part exhibit - possibly the most conspicuously luxurious in the World - as you have to travel to Tokyo to see the other half in order to appreciate the whole piece.

I walk past the machine that fires beer bottles at 600km per hour, making everyone jump, and laugh, dissolving the gallery atmosphere. I circle the stuffed elephant balanced on its trunk, examining it's beautifully detailed trunk-hairs; and the group of ceramic Darth Vader heads, which hum like Mongolian throat singers.

But the biggest queue is up the central stairwell is a sign to the free champagne bar. I follow the crowd. The bouncer at the foot of the staircase tears my ticket and sternly indicates the sign, 'Toute sortie est definitive' (no re-entry).

I look up at the beautiful people standing around the balcony about my head, and see something else. On the artfully peeling concrete walls, an enormously enlarged, cheerily wholesome woman in late middle age beams from a huge posters showing cartons of her new flavours - mint tea, Irish coffee and lychee. Yes, the exhibition is sponsored by Mamie's Yogurt.

...

After as much free champagne and yoghurt as I can stand, I catch sight of my friend Vic, a fashion writer, on my way out. I didn't spot him in the exhibition, despite his gleaming peroxide hair and the tightly-buttoned waistcoat worn over his freshly-waxed bare chest which curves in two unnaturally tan sculpted mounds like the breast of a roast chicken.

 I ask him.

"Did you eat the yogurt?"

"Yes. The violette is divine. It goes so well with the champagne. Are you here alone?"

"I'm with Mélusine."

"Who's she?"

"I don't know her. I just met her today. She owns an art gallery. She just asked me here."

"And you're going home already?"

"I promised to be at another vernissage in the Marais. A smaller one. Photographs. A friend is organising it."

He looks at me with a newfound respect.

"You," he says, "have the knack of being invited."

...

Click on the illustration to see it bigger. Click again to resize.

*vernissage - (n.) A private showing held before the opening of an art exhibition. [French, from vernis, varnish, from Old French]. There also is a comparable ceremonial ending of art exhibitions, called finissage. Bigger art exhibitions also may have such an event at half time of the exhibition (midissage).

I'm staying in one of the most luxurious hotels in Paris. It's a long story.

I can only say that this hotel is sooo luxurious that it's impossible to describe without swearing a lot to express dismay/emphasis.

"It's ****ing big! It's sooo ****y luxurious! It must be soooo ****ing expensive!"

"****!"

It's not necessarily a hotel you would have heard of. It's hidden in an unexpectedly leafy corner of Paris, down an enchanted alley. Almost no-one knows it's there - except those who can pay. Needless to say, I'm not paying.

My bedroom is bigger than my apartment. The bathroom actually has a bath. I lie in it's white enormity like a specimen on a marble slab, looking up at the black slate tiles. This is the first bath I have taken in Paris. I can hardly believe it. I want to take photographs. I want to invite my friends.

The bed is six feet across. I have to lie down on it to check. It is wider than I am tall.

A gilt serpent, hand-stencilled by a well-known graphic designer, snakes across the walls. There are buttons on the wall next to the its eyes. I push them and, leaning toward the head of the snake, I hear a faint hiss. I stroke the surface of the wall which is, perhaps unitentionally, scaly with the texture of crackled laquer.

I go down to the lobby and find the hotel manager taking calls from one of the three squares of tastefully mismatched modernist and Louis XV gilt chairs.

There's a fat man sitting across several of the far chairs in the rear formation. I don't know whether he's a guest or someone somehow associated in some other way with the hotel. He looks pugnacious; balding with a small, square beard. He could be a catering supplier or a movie director. He's wearing a loud, striped shirt and a leather jacket. It could be from the local street market or a version exquisitely aged by stylists from the Avenue Montaigne. He looks as though he could be very rich. Rich enough not to care.

He takes some phone calls. Is he rich? Like many rich people, he seems mildly but constantly irritated.

The manager is also nervy and edgy. She has none of the self-satisfaction of proprietors of cheap restaurants or flyblown pensions. They know what they are selling. Their menus are out on the pavement; their tariff is displayed in the window for the hotel-guest on a budget to tot up. If the customer doesn't like it, it's his fault. He knew what he was getting.

"No," she says, "There aren't many boutique hotels in Paris; any small hotels. Well, there have always been small hotels, cheap hotels - and that is good too. But the boutique hotel is just not a French concept."

She pauses:

"We didn't want to be like the big hotels in Paris. We have only seven suites. In the space, we could have had fifteen. Big hotels are sometimes a bit... impersonal. We wanted to do something more personal. We want the guests to feel at home...  But not like in a guesthouse. It is not somebody's home. We want ghosts" (she switches to this pronunciation) "to be left alone if they want - or to have conversations with other ghosts if they want to too."

She shows me the garden.

"The designer did not want flowers. Flowers are a little... vulgar. We want the garden to be like the hotel. There are lots of places which are secret, where you can be private. That's why we don't have a name on the door. You have to find the hotel. It's like a secret."

She breaks off, still not sure on which side of her "private" fence she wants to come down.

While speaking, she looks into the air beside me - not at me. The phone rings inside the hotel. She leaps up. She has been waiting for another ghost to call on her attention. 

On the terrace is a group of girls from a fashion magazine, shooting a model against the lush bamboo wall.  They hang expensive dresses on the expensive doorframes. We have to duck under them to get back inside. They sit at a garden table in a mess of coloured pots of eye shadow, discarded hats and shoes. Like me they are dressed informally: jeans, converse trainers, army surplus jackets. They are familiar with luxury; intimately connected with it. They promote it, sell it, but they do not necessarily participate in it.

I find myself longing for the cheap trashiness of Paris, elsewhere. I know that, outside, there are streets where they sell I heart Paris t-shirts. I need to go out and have a coffee in a cafe in Montmartre from which I can watch tour groups with big butts searching endlessly for the Butte.

I go back into the lobby. I notice a notice inside the front door. The designer chairs in the lobby are only temporary. They are for sale. As is the art on the walls.

As I dawdle to flick through the telephone-directory-thick architectural magazines, the rich, fat man take delivery of a Japanese takeaway. He returns to his table in the corner and unpacks two large trays of gleaming pink sushi, three of glutinous, transparent rice, two closed brown paper bags and a cardboard takeaway box. He has everything he could wish for, everything he could imagine, and more. In the privacy of the secret hotel, he arranges his trays on the low table before him and, bending uncomfortably at the waist, he takes his chopsticks and begins to eat through them, one by one, with dogged, unpleasured stolidity.