Paris bulletin 3 2010

There was a faint whiff of spring in the air yesterday afternoon when I set out to catch a bus to the place de la Madeleine, hoping to get into the newly opened Munch exhibition at the Pinacothèque. Silly me – a bright Saturday afternoon in the middle of the school half-term holidays. Not a hope. The queue was round the block.So I went for a look round Fauchon, which is just next door.

Fauchon is probably for foreign tourists the best-known of France’s purveyors of épicerie fine and aliments de luxe. Its founder, Auguste Fauchon first started trading in the 1860s on the same site as the modern-day Fauchon. He did so well that by 1905 he was able to expand into mail-order so that gourmets all over France could buy his teas and condiments. Since those early days the fortunes of the company have been mixed. It tried catering to the mass market for a while but in recent years has veered back towards its clientele of choice – the rich and the titled. At present the brand sits somewhere in between those two extremes: over-priced, undeniably top-quality, extremely chic - but ‘accessible’ in a way it never used to be. You get a strong sense of ‘les people’  (the French word for celebrities) both in the shop itself and on the website www.fauchon.com .It’s there in the mix of the self-service layout of the store, which demystifies the merchandise and encourages the novice consumer to buy items he or she might hesitate to ask for over a counter, and in the goods on sale – exquisite foodstuffs, wrapped or bottled in sexy little jars and boxes, trays of fruits glacés like jewels, rows of severely elegant chocolates. And everywhere the Fauchon trade-mark sizzling pink alongside the black and white of their wrapping paper.

I walked on down the rue Royale, past la Durée (les macarons), which was so busy there was a queue out onto the street, past the high-end jewellers with their locked doors and security guards, and so onto the place de la Concorde and through the Tuilleries. I was aiming for the Louvre and a look at the musée’s most prestigious acquisition in late 2009 – a portrait by Ingres of Comte Mathieu-Louis Molé. It hangs in the Salle Denon, very close to another famous figure of the same period, the duc d’Orléans, also painted by Ingres. You can see for yourself why the Louvre was so keen to buy the Molé by clicking on www.louvre.fr and searching the site under ‘portrait Comte Molé’. It has such presence and depth I’m just sorry it isn’t in a room all by itself. But you could say the same of any number of the paintings and exhibits – so many deserve more space than they can have in the effort of the curators to show as much as possible of France’s extraordinary patrimoine artistique. If you spend a few hours among the riches of the Louvre you can end up feeling rather as you might do if you sat down and ate a whole tray of Fauchon chocolates or half a dozen la Durée macarons at one go.

While I was feeding my eyes (and soul) on all this rich cultural fodder, a long procession of demonstrators was ambling along on the road that separates the Louvre from the Tuilleries Gardens. From inside the Louvre you could tell something was going on but not exactly what was being shouted. The demo seemed to be organised by the parti communiste Maoiste de France but had a number of splinter groups sheltering in its ranks – a bit like those little fish that nip in and out of the mouths of sharks, keeping their teeth clean for them. I saw them in Jacques Perrin’s wonderful film ‘Oceans’ which is showing in Paris at present (same director as made ‘Le Peuple Migrateur’, the film which charted the migration of birds across the world).

 

There were lots of placards proclaiming ‘non au cas par cas’ (a reference to the government’s policy of piecemeal regularisation of immigrant workers, many of whom have lived here for years, paid taxes and their social security contributions, but still have no legal right to remain in the country); a massive contingent of Tamils shouting ‘Rendez-nous nos terres’; a handful of mainly elderly Americans carrying one banner between them - ‘Americans against war’. Someone thrust a special edition of le Drapeau rouge into my hand – ‘Prolétaires de tous pays, unissez-vous! Contre le colonialisme moderne et ses valets! Unité !’

A typical Parisian Saturday afternoon, early in the year. By the time I made my way to the metro the first drops of rain were splattering the puddles in the Tuilleries, the wind was beginning to rise and garden was emptying fast. By this morning some areas of France had been laid waste by the winds and rain, a few poor souls had been crushed under falling branches or drowned in the floods and the Seine was churning grey and relentless through the heart of the city, rushing a jumble of storm debris headlong towards the coast.