Protestant January

Deep winter is not pleasure-loving Paris’s natural state

Dear Friend, 

Happy New Year! Bonne année ! Anyone that lives in France will know that this wish is ubiquitous and obligatory, certainly this week, and quite often well into the later weeks of the month.

I had the chance to say it last night when I went for dinner in Pigalle, the hip going-out district to the south of Montmartre, in the company of three friends. The four of us make up what is undoubtedly one of the best WhatsApp groups I am part of. It was first founded during the pandemic as a cheery reminder of more sociable times, and the picture for the group is still a screenshot of the four of us on a merry FaceTime video chat. The three other women in the group are all highly intelligent and hilarious and at some point I’ve written about each of them (Rosie, Sutanya and Hattie) in these letters. The group has continued to be a boon long beyond the pandemic. 

Rosie and I were the first to arrive. We both commented that we were quite enjoying getting back into our normal routines after the Christmas festivities. I mentioned that I have quite enjoyed doing normal, gentle things like shopping for this week’s groceries, or writing appointments for the month ahead in my diary. Rosie, always ready with a pithy phrase, immediately framed the vibe of the month as “Protestant January” – a return to work and routine after the excesses of les fêtes. Despite both living in France for many years, we agreed that we still took some satisfaction from such typically ‘Anglo-Saxon’ discipline and privation. 

As we were discussing this, our friend Sutanya arrived. She is a New Yorker who has fully espoused many elements of the French attitude to life, especially when it comes to matters of joie de vivre and living in the moment (she writes about the process of embracing those elements of French culture in her memoir, Dinner For One). When Rosie mentioned Protestant January, she looked suitably revolted.

Happy Protestant January

Paris is famously not a very Protestant place, historically or spiritually. 

“Paris vaut bien une messe” or ‘Paris is well worth a/one mass”. — Henri IV (Henri de Navarre) — the Protestant king who became Catholic to be King of France and settle the Wars of Religion

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Before Christmas, I was invited to a grand party at Le Meurice, a Palace hotel that sits opposite the Tuileries Gardens in the centre of Paris.  The party honoured 10 years of collaboration with superstar chef Alain Ducasse, who was in attendance, as well as the contributions of hotshot pâtissier Cédric Grolet, whose famous pastries regularly have crowds queuing up outside his nearby boutique.  

It was a feast worthy of the ‘Be My Guest’-singing candlestick in Beauty and the Beast. The perimeter of the large Versailles-style reception rooms was lined with booths and stands serving food items  from the four corners of France (oysters, terrines, cheeses, pastries etc etc.).  At some point, the music stopped, an announcement was made, and a flock of tall-hatted chefs of various ranks swept into the grand reception hall bearing a giant cake. They were trailed by a train of confrères brandishing sparklers. When I showed a friend the below picture of the scene, she said, “that is the Frenchest thing I’ve ever seen.” 

Catholic Christmas vs. Protestant January

In this most Protestant of months, then,  Paris is not at its happiest. People seem grumpy, uptight, a little aggressive. I have seen a higher-than-average amount of Parisians out braving the near-zero temperatures to go for a chilly run, which is pretty Protestant…but overall, the general feel for this time of year is grit-your-teeth, keep-your-head-down, and wait for the sun to come — and crucially, for the café-terraces to be warm enough for lingering again — in March.

Until then, I’ll quietly enjoy my Protestant pleasures. Some of my Protestant activities so far this year have included: 

• Sorting out my wardrobe, my kitchen cupboards, my coat stand — putting everything in order so it’s more efficient and pleasant to use.

• On the tech side: following a hack I read in a ‘new year new me’ type article, I’ve set my phone to a black-and-white colour scheme, because apparently it’s all the bright colours that help to make our phones more seductive and addictive. I’m not sure if it has made me use my phone any more healthily, but it does seem to make it feel a bit less overwhelming. Then again it’s less convenient when I want to actually look at things in colour. We’ll see how it goes! 

• Doing various bits of very dull, sometimes maddening, admin that I am unable to put off any longer. 

• Clearing my laundry backlog.

• Buying sensible seasonal Protestant vegetables, like leeks and cauliflower. 

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Le Grand Paris

Saint-Ouen in Paris

At the end of last year I wrote an article for The Telegraph about the redevelopment of the near suburbs of northern and eastern Paris happening before the Olympics this year. Please find a little extract below:

Paris began as a small island in the Seine and in the 2000 years or so since, the city has been growing outwards, ring by ring, each annexation saying something about the politics and economy of the age, from the first Roman wall to the 1970s ring-road, the infamous Périphérique. This four-lane road served to cement the dividing line between Paris “Intra-Muros” and the banlieues (suburbs).

These suburbs include both the more well-heeled banlieues aisés of the West, as well as the historically working-class suburbs to the northeast of the city, many of which are historically Communist-voting (the football team of Saint-Ouen, for example, is called The Red Stars).

It is this supposedly gritty corner of the Parisian metropolitan area that will house the Olympic Village and many top events in 2024. In preparation, there has been significant infrastructural regeneration in the last few years. Most significant is the ‘Grand Paris Express’, a plan to increase Metro lines in and out of the city, beginning with the current northern extension of the Line 14 Metro, which creates a pleasant and quick link to the city from Saint-Ouen and reportedly by next year from Saint-Denis further north. This line is also fully accessible for people with reduced mobility, an area of provision in which Paris is often lacking.

When thinking about Paris’ relationship to its suburbs in comparison to London, for example, the first thing that must be emphasised is the contrast in size, layout and even mentality when it comes to the relationship of the city and its suburbs.

Thanks to the Haussmann renovation of the Second Empire, the 20 arrondissements of Paris inside the ring-road has a fairly uniform look, characterised by the six-storey sandstone buildings and green-coloured details like street signs, press kiosks and Metro entrances. Step foot on the other side of the périphérique and suddenly everything changes.

Les Docks in Saint-Ouen

You can find the link to read the whole article here, or if the paywall gives you trouble, write to me and I can send you a PDF.

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Thirty-second book club

I received a glut of books for Christmas and managed to fit in plenty of reading over the break. They ranged from the joyful, like Consider the Oyster, a collection of essays by one of my (new) favourite writers, M.F.K Fisher, literally just about oysters: how they grow, how they live, how and when we eat them and when they make us sick. It was a delight! 

On the darker/heavier side, I also read an extraordinary treatise by Canadian political writer Naomi Klein, called Doppelganger. The name alludes to the phenomenon experienced by the author — famous for her critiques of capitalism and her writing about the climate emergency — of being confused with another North American writer called Naomi Wolf. The latter in the Nineties became known as a fairly progressive feminist, before in more recent years, and following some public humiliations around the quality of her work, going deeper and deeper into the mediaverse of the far-Right and conspiracy theories. Klein uses this doubling of herself and ‘the other Naomi’ to explore the ways in which communities of hate and misinformation form online, and how that links to the real world both historically and today. It’s a very intelligent, fascinating, thought-provoking, sometimes challenging read. 

I am now reading my second Theodore Zeldin book. I discovered this writer, a British academic and philosopher with a lifelong love of France, by chance last year when I found his book The French in a market. This time I found my current read, An Intimate History of Humanity, in a charity shop in West London. On its blurb, the book is described as an “investigation of emotions and personal relationships”. I am still near the beginning, but am very intrigued by chapter titles such as: 

• How humans have repeatedly lost hope, and how new encounters, and a new pair of spectacles, can revive them 

• Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex 

• How those who want neither to give orders nor to receive them can become intermediaries 

• Why it has become increasingly difficult to destroy one’s enemies 

• Why people have not been able to find the time to lead several lives 

It was published in 1995, so sadly it doesn’t feature life-affirming WhatsApp groups – I would like to read his take!

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Thank you for reading this Pen Friend letter. Please tell another friend about it. It’s always reassuring to see new people subscribing.

I hope you have a lovely January week, Protestant or otherwise! I’ll write next week. 

Yours,

Hannah