Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14 , Chapter 15 , Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24, Chapter 25 , Chapter 26, Chapter 27, Chapter 28, Chapter 29, Chapter 30, Chapter 31, Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Chapter 34, Chapter 35, Chapter 36, Chapter 37, Chapter 38, Chapter 39, Chapter 40, Chapter 41
Repair
Paris repairs. Consider the Hôtel de Ville, city hall, in the 4th arrondissement, a giant sand castle fantasy that dates from 1357 and is still the working center of the city. At night, it sparkles like a dream come true.
Take the Metro to the station of that name or simply walk Rue de Rivoli. Start in Marais and follow that road all the way to the Louvre or further if you’re going to eat at Le Zimmer.
Take the Metro to George V: Don’t miss the Champs-Élysées.
But walk this city.
The repairs will startle. The lining of my heavy black coat, its hem that touches the top of my boots, got caught on a boot link: separated and frayed. I could’ve walked into any dry cleaners along the streets of Marais and gotten an excellent repair. But it was Sunday. So I pinned the hem with safety pins and walked to the open market at Bastille: fresh food: roasted beets (yes, they roast them for you), cheese, meat, fish, a rabbit for dinner (Yes, I cooked it. See the recipe below.) But I also found needle and thread and so could do the repair myself. I am not the seamstress my mother was, nor as good as anyone in the Parisian dry cleaners, but the satisfaction of the needle and thread in hand healed.
Repair.
Paris dreams. For at night we repair through sleep and dreams. Parisians do not balk at movies and books with dreams. In Paris it is safe to dream. It is safe even to write about the dreams. Hélène Cixous wisely advises,
“Crossing the frontiers to the other world without transition, at the stroke of the signifier, this is what dreams permit us to do and why, if we are dreamers, we love dreams so much. It’s the cancellation of opposition between inside and outside . . .”
I go into the closet, hear a noise, perhaps the neighbors, I think, and lean closer to the wall to listen.
This is, of course, absurd in the way that dreams are.
From inside the closet, from the wall something touches my breast. I’m unable to move or see.
Paralyzed the way we sometimes are in dreams and in this case also blind.
I try to open my eyes but can’t. And still I see. I am no longer the center of the picture. I am the observer. Someone else goes into the closet in the light and finds a box. In it is a large crude oddly shaped oboe. A musician decides to try to play the instrument. It is difficult at first but then he wets the reed with his tongue and the oboe responds to his mouth, his touch, and the sound becomes more compelling, the playing more necessary.
But then the oboe is lying on a bureau. It waits for him—like a demand: When will you be home? When will you play me?
I was hidden.
I lay alone in my bed in Paris and knew this: To be absent was how I dealt with D.’s inability to connect. “Only connect . . .”, E.M. Forster tells us in the epigraph of Howard's End. How often I have read that line, spoken it. How deeply I thought I had understood when I had not.
Yes, D. left me, but where was I?
When the light came late in the morning as it does in Paris before spring, I walked the streets of Marais. There I stood somewhere in the 3rd or 4th before a repair shop for clarinets and oboes and saxophones and flutes . . .
If only I could paint this. Perhaps I will for the dream that moves from the wound to become something other than itself reinvents, repairs.
And I dream . . . without transition: hat trick, bedtrick, mind trick.
Here is Melissa Clark’s wonderful recipe for Mustardy Braised Rabbit with Carrots.
Mustardy Braised Rabbit With Carrots
Time: 2 hours 45 minutes
A Good Appetite: Braised Rabbit, Easier on the Fat (The New York Times)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 thyme sprigs
1 rosemary sprig
1 whole clove
1 2 1/2-pound rabbit, cut into 8 pieces, rinsed and patted dry
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper
1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) extra virgin olive oil
4 large leeks, halved lengthwise, cleaned and thinly sliced crosswise
3 tablespoons chopped fresh sage
1 pound carrots, peeled, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2-inch chunks
1 celery stick, diced
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 teaspoons whole coriander seeds
1 cup dry white wine
About 2 cups chicken stock
1 to 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard, to taste
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, for garnish
Buttered noodles, for serving (optional).
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place flour in a shallow bowl. Tie thyme, rosemary and clove in a spice sachet or square of cheesecloth (or just toss them in pot if you do not mind accidentally biting into clove later).
2. Season rabbit pieces all over with salt and pepper. Coat each piece evenly with flour; tap off excess. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in a large oven-proof Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Sear rabbit in batches, until browned all over, 5 to 6 minutes a side. Transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate.
3. Add remaining 1 tablespoon oil to pot; reduce heat to medium. Add leeks and 2 tablespoons sage and cook, stirring, until softened, about 2 minutes. Stir in the carrots, celery, garlic, coriander, salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, until vegetables begin to color, about 5 minutes.
4. Add wine and increase heat to high; simmer, scraping up browned bits from bottom of pot, until reduced by half, about 5 minutes. Return rabbit to pot. Add stock (it should come almost halfway up the sides of rabbit) and herb sachet (or herbs and clove). Transfer pot to oven and cook, partially covered, until meat is fork tender, about 2 hours.
5. Transfer rabbit pieces to a serving platter. If liquid seems too thin, place pot over medium-high heat and simmer until it thickens slightly. Discard sachet. Stir in mustard, to taste. Spoon sauce and vegetables over rabbit. Garnish with parsley and remaining 1 tablespoon chopped sage. Serve with noodles, if desired.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material in chapter 41: Hélène Cixous: Excerpt from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous, translated by Susan Sellers, copyright Columbia University Press, 1993. Used by permission of Columbia University Press and by permission of the author.
Coming next: “The Last Place You Look”
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Love,
Lovely, Mary. Like David, I have good memories of walking in Paris (though I will say again that Prague is unbeatable in this regard, too!).
That repair shop image, and the echoes of it in your own healing, is exquisite. The recipe looks fantastic, too.
Rabbit stew is my country's (Malta) national dish and the only thing I miss since I started trying to keep kosher. Thank you for this snapshot of Paris.