Brown Dog in Paris, part 2

Artéfact, taken from the artist display space

Our visited lasted 10 days. Our timing was pretty good. Paris and France have been wracked with protests over changes to their retirement system. We arrived the day of the first protest. There were some disruptions in train and bus services during the stay but nothing that stopped us from getting to where we wanted to go. We checked daily train and subway schedules and planned our activities around what we could and couldn’t get to. The legislation work its way through the National Assembly and was approved the day before our flight home. We boarded our plane a few hours before the more violent protests started up. Highlights of the trip included a visit to Artéfact tea house in the Marais. Artéfact has a small artist gallery. We picked up some tea (that was flavored with mint from Oregon) and a couple of small books from independent publishers. They had a zine feel even with the ISBNs on the back.

Another day we visited the Père-Lachaise cemetery to track done a few grave sites. One prime goal was to find and measure François Mérat’s resting place (read our upcoming publication of his tea report to find out why). We also tracked down a few other obscure figures and the not-obscure Marcel Proust. We made a point to stop at George Méliès grave site. We had contributed to the Kick Starter set up by his great granddaughter to rehab the grave site. She is now working on putting together an English translation of his autobiography and other related documents held by the family. We are in on that project too. We then made the obligatory American-in Paris stop at Jim Morrison’s grave (oddly with no other visitors present). We notice more activity up the path from Morrison’s grave and went to look. This was the only heart breaking encounter during our visit. Several young people were gathered around the grave of Suzon Garrigues, 21 years old when she was killed in the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 – one of 90 people who died that night. Flowers and numerous candles decorate her grave. Our youngest just turned 21. The thought of her death and the affection demonstrated by visitors was touching. She never had the chance to grow old because of someone’s hatred. It is upsetting to think of it even now.

Père Lachaise

…

We had another book adventure a few days later. Each Saturday used book dealers gather under a pavilion near the George Bresson Park in southwest Paris. There are folding tables covered in boxes upon boxes of books. French language books to be sure, but hidden gems await. We turned up two keepers. A history of the Mérite Agricole award. Several of the writers we are translating received this award. It is a little bit obscure, even to the French. The book is modern so we can run it through a machine translator and get a pretty good English version to read through. We won’t be able to share the translation but will use any nuggets we find to improve the Wikipedia entry on the award and enliven footnotes we write for our own publications. There was one other unexpected but exciting find. A cool looking old paperback with art deco cover and uncut, browning pages: Les Homme de Bar by Louis Delluc. Turns out Delluc is quite well known in France but not so much in the US. He was a critic and movie director who died in 1924 when he was only 32 years old. Our book is his only work of fiction. It was published in 1923, 1 year before his death. We have not turned up an English translation. That makes it something we can work with – it is in the public domain in both the US and Europe. Literary works require more expertise and generally higher cost to translate. You need an intelligent translator to capture the nuance of the author’s words. We’ll explore that before committing to working on that one.

We spent much of our time wandering the streets, stopping at shops and cafes along the way. We did make an effort to visit the numerous bookstores around the Sorbonne. We poured over several stacks of old and new books and made a couple of finds. One notable work was a newly published zine like pamphlet – part of a series that focus on one ingredient per book. There are ten recipes presented over 24 pages of heavy, colored paper with uncut edges. A string binding ties the cover to the pages. The printing appears to be letter press. The booklets are put out by Les Edit

An elegant pamphlet

ions de l’Epure. They are in French, but should be readily translated with DeepL or Google translator. We just need to cut the pages apart to allow scanning. Hopefully, the recipes will match the booklet’s beautiful design.

Book shopping around the Sorbonne

We made it home the next day after half a day’s travel. We got to our car in the long term parking around midnight. The battery was dead. We had to call for a jump. Big hassle, but who cares. We had a great break.