Moved in With a Charming Frenchman

A couple of years ago I met and moved in with a charming Frenchman who was finishing up a stint with a US company, and we returned to France together when he was transferred back. Although his friends and family seem to have accepted me, and we talk a lot about a future together, I find him very different from the way he was back home. My biggest complaint is that he criticizes me constantly, even for the most insignificant things, and when I react to this, he accuses me of being oversensitive. How can I make him understand that his behavior is really eating away at the relationship?

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Bilan for the New Year

Commentary, February 1996

A year – the unit of time – in France is seamless. And, aptly, February is both a time to finish up farewells to the past calendar and begin to think about the new year’s “grand vacances,” only six months down the road, at the foothills of “la rentrée.” Christmas will be on us again in a wink. Oysters and foie gras and salmon fumé, blinis, Champagne. In February you eat the last of these things to close down the season, to squeeze out the last traces of “fête,” like skiing those last runs in the late late spring. “Adieu” collides into “bienvenue.” Continue reading “Bilan for the New Year”

For the love of pearls

 Style, February 1996

When I was 12, my mother presented me with my first pearls: a small pendant in the form of a tiny cluster of creamy white “grapes” topped with two gold leaves. Mesmerized by the iridescent luster of my first piece of fine jewelry, I immediately developed a fondness for pearls that has never faded. For me, they are the symbol of grace, elegance and beauty in its simplest state. Warm to the touch, tender to the eye, they do not sparkle, they glow. Continue reading “For the love of pearls”

Metz for the Holidays

 You needn’t leave the country to find the holiday bustle and cheery atmosphere of a traditional German Christmas market. Just go to the ex-German part of France. While the Alsatian markets are probably the best known, Strasbourg and Kaysersberg are a bit far for a rail weekend. But Metz, the capital of Lorraine, also has a Christmas market – and celebrates the official arrival of St. Nicolas in a big way. Continue reading “Metz for the Holidays”

Julia Child Returns to Paris

Julia Child, the American ambassador of French cooking, recently returned to Paris, where she received her formal culinary training at the Cordon Bleu in 1948. America has watched her on television for 32 years. Her signature closing, with her familiar voice bidding us “bon appétit” as she poured herself a glass of wine, sent a generation of us on our way with the confidence to prepare a perfect gourmet meal.

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Josephine Baker’s Hungry Heart

Think of Paris in the ’20s, and Josephine Baker clad in a belt of bananas and a few beads leaps to the mind’s eye: an exotic image of the legendary Josephine, who somehow managed to be not only a star of stage, screen and music hall, but also the recipient of the Croix de Guerre for her work in the French Resistance. What else do we know of her? Perhaps that she was as kind and talented as she was bad-tempered and ambitious; and that she was the adoptive mother of the “Rainbow Tribe,” a multiracial group of abandoned children that she amassed after the war.

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Wayne Shorter’s High Life

At recent Paris concerts Benny Golson, Geri Allen and Chico Freeman all identified the composer of numbers they’d just performed as “the great Wayne Shorter.” Given his historic role in contemporary music, the adjective is fully deserved. A longtime member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis’ extraordinary second quintet, saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter also took part in the classic Blue Note recording sessions and co-founded the rock-fusion band Weather Report with Joe Zawinul. Shorter was in Paris last month to promote an exceptional two-concert gig, November 8 at New Morning and his first CD with Verve. I caught up with him in his suite at the Ritz, an appropriate setting since his new record’s entitled “High Life.” Continue reading “Wayne Shorter’s High Life”

The Best of Enemies

France Books, The Best of Enemies: Anglo-French Relations Since the Norman Conquest, by Robert Gibson

For over nine centuries now, the English and the French have maintained one of the greatest love-hate relationships of all time. They have fought countless bloody wars against one another and joined forces to wage war against others. As Robert Gibson points out, more Englishmen are buried on French soil than in any other land. However, “The Best of Enemies” is not, strictly speaking, a history book; nor yet another compendium of kings, queens, princes and battles, but rather a lucid study of nationalism and the emergence of two very distinct national identities. Continue reading “The Best of Enemies”