Sundays with the fish mafia

Paris being extra Paris-y

Dear Friend, 

I hope you’re doing well. Thanks for your patience with the slow rhythm of letters for the last few weeks. If you are new to Pen Friend, you can usually expect to receive a letter weekly on a Sunday. 

I’ve been having one of those Parisian weeks that feels very particularly Parisian. Last week my dear friend Aggie, who I’ve known since I was three, came to visit, which was a joy. She comes quite regularly and always stays nearby, so that Paris, and specifically the little corner of it I live in, has started to be home from home for her.

Before Aggie got her train home at Gare du Nord last weekend, we had a last lunch on the terrace at the hearty, down-to-earth local bar/bistro run by a group of people I affectionately refer to (in my head) as the ‘fish mafia’, as they own a smattering of fishmongers around the area near the bar.

One of the key figures in the fish mafia is a very tall man in his late thirties. He is well over six foot and skinny with slicked-back dark hair and a handsome face with prominent cheekbones and big brown eyes with heavy lids. In fact, he looks like he’s straight out of central casting for a Parisian bistro proprietor. I feel like I could travel in a time machine to any decade in the last two hundred years, and there I’d find a version of this man, perhaps dressed a bit differently, but basically the same person – an eternal Paris type. Paris is full of such people! 

Paris types at the café, sketch

As we were sitting on the terrace, a woman who looked to be in her sixties walked past and began a conversation with my dog, Babbet. “Tu es gentil toi!” (You’re a nice girl aren’t you!), she exclaimed. Anyone who knows my dog knows that she is a shameless social climber. With little encouragement, Babbet sprung on to her hind legs, putting her front paws on her admirer’s arm. “Oo la la,” said the lady. “Un peu de douceur dans ce monde de brutes” (a bit of sweetness in this world of brutes’). This woman, too, seemed to be an eternal Parisian type.

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Fill your winter boots with Paris exhibitions 

If you are planning to visit Paris in the near future, there are lots of of great exhibitions at the moment. A few highlights:

• Modern Paris - 1905-1925 at Le Petit Palais: This vast and spellbinding exhibition on the Champs-Elysées (it’s basically ten exhibitions in one) paints a vivid picture of Paris as a huge swirling party of art, creativity, innovation. The exhibition features world-famous loans, the likes of Picasso, Chagall and Tamara de Lempicka, but also flapper fashion, diamonds from Cartier, Joesphine Baker merch, an early Peugeot car, even a Type B plane from 1911.

• Chagall At Work: Drawings, Ceramics and Sculptures 1945-1970 at the Centre Pompidou: Aggie and I went to this petite by dazzling exhibition of Marc Chagall’s sketches for ballets and the ceiling fresco of the Palais Garnier opera, as well as expressive drawings and sculptures. (While you’re there, pop and see the exhibition documenting the history of Les Halles food market, which was in the centre of town up until the late Sixties, before it moved out to the suburbs).

• Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise at the Musée d’Orsay: the painting produced in the last few months of the artist’s life when he was living in the countryside outside of Paris.  

• Viva Varda at La Cinémathèque française: A retrospective of the wonderful work of Agnès Varda, the Nouvelle Vague (and way beyond) director who kept working with intelligence and playfulness until her death in 2019 aged 90. The exhibition also looks at the ways she struggled to receive the funding and recognition of her male contemporaries.

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Second homes and hoops of fire

Ah, the smell of lavender, the sound of cicadas, the satisfying glug of rosé. What could be more delightful for a sun-starved Briton than a second home in La Belle France? But since Brexit, many people with a holiday home across La Manche find themselves grappling with strict visa rules and complex logistics, leaving some wondering if the sweet life is worth the headaches.

This week I wrote an article for The Telegraph about British people with second homes in France and how they were navigating the post-Brexit rules around how often they can travel to France. I particularly enjoyed collecting this quote about grappling with the French administration system:

“They get you to jump through all sorts of hoops and they don’t tell you where the hoops are or what size they are or whether there are flames round them.”

If you aren’t able to access the article and would like to read it, let me know and I’d be happy to send you a PDF!

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Thirty-second book club

I am still reading Middlemarch by George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans), which I was meant to have read in full for my degree, but never managed to finish. The novel’s full name is ‘Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life’ and it’s set in a fictional town in the midlands of England between 1829 and 1832. It was written in installments in the early 1870s. It’s quite different to, for example, a Dickens novel, which is all about strong, archetypal characters and gripping plots with dramatic twists and turns. By contrast, this long novel moves very slowly and seems to be concerned most strongly with studying individual people, their psychologies, how they relate to each other and how they fit into their larger society and time. It doesn’t sound like it should necessarily be that interesting, but it is! And as I read I am struck by how modern and unusual it must have been in its time, and how relevant many of the careful observations still are. I look forward to seeing where it all goes!

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That’s all for today! As ever, thank you for being my pen friend and a very special thank you to those who have kindly opted to sponsor the letter. There was a recent technical issue with payments, which is hopefully now fixed. Please let me know by email if you’re having any issues!

I will be back on the weekly schedule from here until mid December, when I will slow down a little until Christmas. In 2024, I will come back with some more features for paying subscribers:

• I already send all (willing) paying subscribers a hand-drawn postcard when they sign up — this will continue!

• I would also like to add a map and lists of my Paris recommendations  

• Special deep-dives into a specific very interesting topics

I hope that sounds good! 

As ever, if you’re enjoying these letters, please do share them. It makes a huge difference to building the mailing list for Pen Friend and it’s much appreciated.

Have a lovely week!

Yours, 

Hannah