Fonda's Marais

Jane Fonda’s France is not normal. The American actor first came here at nineteen, staying at a villa her father, Henry, had rented near Villefrance in the south. There she met the Agnellis, Jacqueline Ribes, Princess Monica Gircona, and brother Bino, Count and Countess Volpi, JFK and Jackie, Onasis, Picasso, Cocteau, Hemingway and Chaplin. This year Jane Fonda is 70!

She went swimming with a naked Garbo, but kept her costume on. She took an apartment in Paris, on the avenue d’ Iêna, went to art school but – unlike Robert Redford – never got to paint. At a dinner-dance at Maxim’s she saw a man with exotic eyes and “an erotic aura” but nothing happened. Instead she had an affair with a playboy who took nude photographs of her; Henry Fonda ordered her home.

By the time she returned to France in 1963 Fonda had a fledging movie career and was taken under the wing of the French actors, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand. They were, Fonda says, “engagé” – politically active.

This time, shortly after JFK’s murder, and an impotent courtship (which tells us something), she began a relationship with the man with the exotic eyes. They found a house together in the Marais, she learnt to cook and helped arrange “threesomes” for her partner – and husband to be – Roger Vadim Plemiannikov.

“I’ll tell you what I did enjoy,” Fonda writes about these frolics, “the mornings after, when Vadim wa gone and the woman and I would linger over our coffee and talk. For me it was a way to bring some humanity to the relationship, an antidote to objectification. I would ask her about herself, trying to understand her history and why she had agreed to share our bed…”

Many things are interesting about the Fonda-Vadim relationship: not least that it was a “big” and symbolic one, open, glamourous and “free”. French most of all, in most non-French eyes. Vadim “abhorred jealousy”, but had a gambling addiction – on anything, even racing Scalextrix model cars. He did not, surprisingly, rate fidelity high on the “to do” list. But then Vadim was haunted by his teenage experiences of occupied France in the Second World War – much later in life he wrote a gothic novel of sex and death, set in that era.

“At 16,” he writes,

“I had established a rule for myself: I was going to take the best from life: The sea, nature, sports, Ferraris, friends and pals, art, nights of intoxication, the beauty of women, insolence and nose-thumbing at society. I kept my politics…but refused commitment of any form. I believed in man the individual, but had lost my faith in mankind at large. ”

Vadim sounds a little like many men of this generation. At least his friends were interesting: Gide, Dali, Piaf, Cocteau; and Vadim shared a mistress with Hemingway for a while. And read aloud to Collette in her apartment.



When the pair first got together they were given somewhere to live in the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs by Commander Paul-Louis Weiller. It was on the rue Vieille-du-Temple, a hundred yards from where I am now staying. It was huge space, filled with artists, friends and young models; a room was always kept for Chaplin but the Vadims never saw him. Roland Petit, who had directed Leslie Caron at the ballet, lived there as well.



History’s hauntings happen in the strangest places. Drawn to the Fonda story as an example of chosen exile, I am suddenly considering the nature of modern romance too, incredibly close to the Parisian base of Fonda-Vadim. Fonda was exiled not just from America, but from the American way, and yet choose to be with a playboy Frenchman whose autobiography was entitled “Memoirs of the Devil.” (It’s a pretty self-serving text, full of stories about the week Ursula Andress came to sleep (celibately) with Vadim and his first wife, Brigitte Bardot.)



And now walking in the same street, and away from my own, the Rue Des Archives, with the giant repository of national history, I am thinking about why relationships work or fail.

Fonda hints that she was with Vadim because he had been (and would be) with beautiful and famous women: he validated her. For all the coquettish sexuality of “Barbarella”, in which Fonda starred and Vadim directed, hers was a very one-sided relationship: she gave, he took. Vadim, after all, had lost his “faith”.

He was a good father though, it is said. And for years Fonda was happy, if bulimic, bisexual, neurotic and just plain confused.

In Bar three, just around the corner from rue Vielle Temple the soundtrack is Blondie and The Pretenders: the French relationship to contemporary music has always been a little skewed, a little retro, tonight is no exception. Spiky American pop-princesses seem about right when thinking of mid-life, post-Vadim Fonda living back in America, when “Hanoi Jane” – who followed Barbarella – was replaced by the “Activisit-Populist” actor of “The China Syndrome” and “Coming Home”. Hanoi Jane would have liked these rock-out women, even if she was taught the guitar by her friend, David Crosby.

I watch the male-female relationships (from many, many countries) in the bar, in their infinite variety: this is BoHo land in the straight part of the Marais – itself a kind of Parisian SoHo. These are not the sons and daughters of marriages such as Fonda and Vadim, but neither are they so utterly different from them. The hauntings of family, and of the lives of men and women active in the 60s and 70s, lives on in us now.

For Thomas Coryat the hauntings were those of the Classics, Latin inscriptions, visions of his heroes, Virgil and Homer. His father had died just before he travelled and though he does not write about it, this must have been some kind of catharsis and catalyst for change.

Our hauntings are not just the sudden remembrance brought on by “Precious” or “Call Me” heard in a bar, the potency of cheap music, as Coward put it. There are also echoes that just arrive. “I have a sudden memory of New York, the eighties, it was very hot, very late, I could hear opera blaring out, really loud, it was like that Scorcese film (After Hours). There were people everywhere. And then, in some small bar, the opening chords of “New York, New York”: time to go home,” Portia says, walking late night in the Marais with me. This is how some of our forgotten memories work. Others are more deep-seated.

When things weren’t going so well, the Vadims bought in the countryside, later still Fonda got pregnant, thinking that would save the marriage. (They finally married at the Dunes hotel in Las Vegas, afterwards they watched a floorshow that involved stripping French revolutionaries: the climax was a naked beheading at the “Bastille” to the music of Ravel’s Bolero). Afterwards Vadim went gambling; Fonda slept with his mother that night.

When pregnant Fonda was taken by Simone Signoret to an anti-war rally in Paris. The Americans were in Vietnam. “But remember,” Signoret told her,

"we were there before you, we French, and the attitudes that Schell [Jonathan Schell, author of the early Vietnam exposé, “The Village of Ben Suc”] describes the Americans attitide towards the Vietnamese – the total disregard, as though they aren’t human beings – these were the same attitudes Les Colonistes Français had. The difference is we didn’t need to hide it…you must know that at the end of World War Two when France had to go to war to keep Vietnam as her colony, it was your country that paid most of our military expenses…the French couldn’t have won alone, and colonization is a terrible thing…”

I wonder if stars, and us mere mortals can be engaged in the same way now. Or perhaps we have too many hauntings: have read about the Sixties, Vietnam, and student activism – and how that time led on to Aerobic Videos, Nixon, and later the increasing importance of us, as “individuals”. This Christmas Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was: “You”, because, it claimed, we are now in control. The cover was reflective. We buy the magazine to bask in ourselves. We read it, plugged into our I-Pod.

“I knew that if I threw myself heart and soul into the anti-war effort, a return to the permissive, indolent life I shared with Vadim would be unthinkable,” Fonda writes. But she did do it – whatever one thinks of her stance.

In Calais, I met the thirty-one year old Gigi, a highly intelligent Art History student, working in tourism. She had been shocked to be asked in Colorado, where she studied, about the French in Vietnam. Shocked because she didn’t know that history. How much can we care to remember? Is the haunting why we constantly seek the new? Why we “reposition”, and start again.

Jane Fonda’s life is a case study in renewals, just as the Marais now, glossy and chic. At least in part of the history, Fonda became engaged. It didn’t happen in the Marais though: that is for pleasure alone.

Written after the lightning...

...which wiped even the wifi out. This is another fi-fish, 48 hours later.

“The unexpected encounter is a crucial theme within surrealism…”

Mark Polizzotti



Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!).

Andre Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto, 1924.


A few years after the end of the Second World War an already weary young romancer, writer and would-be film-maker met a young girl dancer on the ferry from Calais to Dover quite by chance.

It was 1949. Roger Vadim was searching for a star for his first film script, Les Lauriers Sont Coupés: back in Paris he screen-tested two actresses, one them the girl on the boat.

“I had come across Leslie Caron on the Cross Channel ferry and advised Marc Alligret to go see Roland Petit’s ballet La Rencontre, in which she was a strange and a fascinating sphinx, a snowy slyph wafting high above the stage on a thread from her spider’s web. On the screen, she possessed both charm and presence, but her inexperience worried the producer, and she was not signed. Shortly afterward, thanks to the test, she went off to Hollywood, where a fabulous contract was awaiting her.”



The other screen-test was Brigitte Bardot. Vadim married her (one of five wives), and as a Simulacrum God, he “Created (naked) Woman” with “BB” in 1956. Soon afterwards, and over the Atlantic, America “discovered” French Film.

Why Not?

In Hollywood, Leslie Caron returned to Paris, almost, with An American in Paris, the musical with Gene Kelly. Here is how she remembers getting the film part, it is quite different from Vadim’s version: “I was born in Paris to a dancer-mother and was prima dancer of the Ballet Champs d’Elysée when I was 16-years old. I was performing the ballet drama, Oedipus & the Sphinx, when Gene Kelly spotted me on the opening night and chose me for An American in Paris.”



In “Revolution of the Mind”, a Life of Andre Breton by the American, Mark Polizzotti, he explains that Breton: “often evinced a will to improve upon the mundane aspects of life, to recast them into something larger and more resonant – even if, at times, it meant adjusting his curriculum vitae. He claimed that he had no use for the “empty moments” of his life, the instances of “depression or weakness” that would nonetheless visit him so regularly, preferring instead to accentuate the unusual or dramatic episodes, to project them beyond simple biography into something approaching universal truth.”



I think that Breton and his Surrealists, informed by the ideas of psychology, the unconscious, and of The shapeless, memory-haunted City – and this sense of “improving” on the mundane, or an objective truth – pretty much invented one major strand of modern travel. The travel that is random, about cafés and careless, aimless, afternoons walking somewhere; which is about stories (imagined or real, improved or altered) not sights, seen - or missed – and photographed. It is about catching atmospheres, not the waiter’s eye; the alternative to this being the “collector” travel that is about reservations at restaurants, catching the hip show in town, the big art show, the most fashionable club. Both are equally valid, of course. But their evolutionary matter is very different. The latter start with Tom Coryat, morph into the Grand Tourists, and now…perhaps they are on the “Brand Tour”.

Once upon a time the “collector” traveller has perhaps seen An American in Paris, and wants to walk by the Arc du Triomphe, dance near the Seine. Or they have read a guidebook, or a restaurant review in the IHT. Heard about the great new Picasso show at Gallery X. This is not the Surrealist’s way, nor – for a long time – the backpacker’s.

“The Surrealists offered a critique of bourgeois sexual relations, masculinity and femininity, institutional treatment of the ill, social prejudices, religious bigotry, Eurocentrism and colonialist politics. Their anti-paternalism ran deep, and – I only mean this as a positive analogy – was that of the child (male or female) who questions the rules and values of an adult culture whose only reply is that as a parent they “know best”…” writes David Bate.



Ok. But how does a city “know best”? Often through the way its local and national government funds, promotes and advertises museums, galleries, and attractions of course; but more often through the stories told about it from a wide series of sources, not just its own. How, say, America had viewed Paris in the sixty years since the end of WW2: from Gene Kelly’s Paris, built on a Hollywood lot. “Well, for starters, it was never shot in Paris because in those days all films were made in studios. But I think it was the first ‘real’ musical that was made, with its amazing sets, music and choreography. The last scene took three months to choreograph and one month to shoot. The sets alone took three days to create. Everyone thought we were insane to end the film with a 20-minute ballet sequence, but it turned out to be the most talked-about feature of the film,”
as Vadim’s “protégé” Leslie Caron explains. Within a decade another kind of Paris described by the cinema of the “Nouvelle Vague.” Quirky, irreverent, obsessed with American pop-culture, cinema itself.

And there are later Parises: in Benieux’s film “Diva” or Polanski’s “Frantic” (Americans in peril in 1980s Paris). The Paris of “Three Colours Red”; “Moulin Rouge” or “The Da Vinci Code”. Bertolucchi’s “Last Tango” or more recently “The Dreamers”.

In the view of Walter Benjamin, the great critic and champion – if not “creator” - of the idea of the café-observing “flaneur”, following his heart, or some other major organ, around the City of Paris, is first formed fully through Breton’s novel “Nadja”, even if its origins go back to the nineteenth century poet, Baudelaire. In this strange novel, with photographs, a narrator describes walking parts of Paris, and an affair with “Nadja” that goes wrong. The aimless quality of the journeys he makes is very similar to what is a now quite mundane tourist idea: wandering Paris in a half-state, remembering, imagining, and experiencing, everything from the Revolution, through Miles Davis’s affair with Juliette Greco and a glimpse of Diana at the Ritz. “What is revolutionary in Nadja’s hallucinations is the recovery of scenes from historical Paris; her life is not subjected to dreary work, rather to the work of dreaming impressions of Paris. “ David Bate writes.



I like this sense of the city-story shifting in our minds as we walk, growing restless and re-writing itself, pulling in history but not being overwhelmed by it: Vadim’s Paris (with Fonda) was not Fonda’s, as we shall see.

But do we hear (and see) the overt history at Notre Dame when we copy the Surrealist drive for chance and the unexpected and just turn left when we feel like it, or do we merely seek to generalize from the “look” as we sit safe with our coffee and “watch” from afar? Do we find a meaning in the galleries of the Louvre, or just see a Dan Brown novel being acted out?



Which is, of course, one very real “meaning” of the Mona Lisa these days. A profitable one; probably as profitable as the visions of France in “And God Created Woman”, “An American in Paris” or “Moulin Rouge”.

And yet all these stories can help to bring us to a place, and pretend for a while that we are living out their fictions. This weekend, an aimless stroll through the Marais, a lunch, some Picasso, somewhere, shops full of 1960s newspapers, modern art and ancient churches. And in the Place des Voges, the Victor Hugo café (full) and nearby his house (almost empty despite the free entry).

Hugo was no surrealist – but I have avoided him too long (ever since Montreuil, in fact) and now here he is, confronting me: this encounter was by chance. I must respond to it.

Why not? Tomorrow: I must write about Hugo.

And I’ll come back to the Surrealists, Flaneurs and Wanderings when I’ve shaken off the atmosphere of the Marais in the Rain.

See Paris, just about

St Denis Market

Pentecostal Paris to Follow



"I went to St Denis , which is foure miles from Paris, the foure and twentieth of May…after dinner, where I saw many remarkable and memorable things. I passed trhough a Cloyster before I came into the Church. ..Images of many of the French Kings, set in certain woden cupboards…[the Crown itself…a “sword of King Solomans” Dogobert stuff….Scepters etc…drinking cup of John of Gaunt…]"

Thomas Coryat

Dusty in St. Denis

“…one of the most commonly repeated patterns in the lives of travellers is some degree of personal transference to the cultural identity of the people whose lands they have wandered. This new sense of self could leave them unable or ill-equipped to resume permanent residence in their country of origin…”

Mark Cocker – Loneliness & Time, British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century.




Thomas Coryat remained in England only a year after he published, travelling next through Turkey, Persia and India. He died in Surat in 1617, not yet 40.

The Paris trains don’t like St Denis station, though scheduled to stop. The first speeds on to Stade de France and the rugby statium. The return train goes past and on to somewhere.




There are hundreds of commuters leaving St. Denis when I finally arrive. The area around the station feels like a port. It is a holiday weekend, Pentecost, and all the cheap hotels are full and there are plenty to tell you so.

The first stalker follows around, “Go there, or come with me, I’m very cheap.” Me too: but no thanks. I find a house-hotel by the Polish community centre with a courtyard full of prams and mums. It’s opposite the Hallal butchers and has a room.

Tim Moore wanted to like St.Denis but didn’t. He moved on to a Formula One hotel further out at thirteen euros a night and kept his car’s hubcaps in the room. I love it here. Everyone is out of the street, there’s not a hint of uniformity. Down past the crowded streets filled with kebab restaurants and palmist stores, and across the large open market, is the Basillica, bringing cool, and the tombs of the “Old Kings” of France. Another beast, the Basillica. Where did all the money for these things come from?

St.Denis is Paris these days. It used to be a bridging point, a Hampstead or a Richmond from where it was a half-day ride into the City proper. Today it is like an altitude tank – an attitude tank – for the Seine-centre. Here all is streetwise poly-culturalism: one quite normal women’s clothes store is called “The Pussy Club”. It has a “No Dogs” sign in the window. There is a major art gallery; the St.Denis festival is advertised everywhere. In London this area would have been gentrified twenty years ago. Young kids roller-skate in the Victor Hugo square next to the Basillica; in Peter of Montreuil park some sun-bathe, others “smoke.” And we the last tourists try and fail to get the entire Basillica in our viewfinder.




In the “cultural café” – I am very near a university, I can smell it – many have had white graffiti painted on their arms and drink Coke. The cycle is thus: offer, acceptance, paint, photograph, look at photograph. At one stage half of the café is photographing itself. There is a DJ in the café; instead of the radio there is Dusty Springfield, Lovers’ Rock, Brazilian beach “hymns”, “No, no, no.” Men sit with laptops, women read books. A free magazine laying about writes the following about the English fusion band, Incognito:

“Incognito est l’indéboulonnable Rolls de la soul british capable de faire swingeur une division panzers hémiplégiques en un claquement de doights.”

You don’t get that in the New York Times.







At dusk the streets are still busy; in Victor Hugo square a police van and many police just making sure. In the internet café here are Chinese, Indian, African, Moroccan and me.

And in the Basillica the Kings of Old France are smiling, surely.

Almost 700,000 Britons have moved to and settled in France; in fact there are 31% more British moving permanently to France than there are Maghrebians moving from Northern Africa says Expatica.com

Fifteen years ago, in the Indpendent newspaper, the great travel author, Jan Morris describes the “classic” British travel writer as having: “the innate expectation they will be befriended by consuls, put up by ambassadors, entertained by friends from Oxford or bump into influential acquaintances…”

Today I met the Hallal butcher. There are probably more travellers tales in one square mile of St.Denis than in all of William Daunt’s Travel bookshops put together.

Eyes Wide Shut

At the Auberge in St Leu rising for breakfast at eight raises eyebrows; by ten the market shows little signs of life either. A sleepy town, even the bikes are moth-balled. The 10:19 train to Paris, via Creil, arrives at 1:19.



By then there is a crowd...of three.





The pace changes getting off the train at Creil. There are nine officials waiting at the exit, three have guns. I run through an obvious litany: the ticket office at St. Leu is closed. The train is three hours late.




“What about the conductor, why didn’t you buy from him?””
“I didn’t see him, the journey was only ten minutes.”
“Follow me.”

After the beige buildings and greenery of St Leu, this is an explosion of new colours. Here there are people hanging out; Tangine bars, a big open market. Railway street is full of hotels, bars and internet cafes. I am closing in on a major city. I must be in “Watford.”





The street life is infectious. Girls in Islamic headscarves read “Closer” magazine, or “Public.” A younger Amy Winehouse sings along loudly and relatively tunefully with her I-Pod. A young black Hipster in low-slung, with record sleeve earrings, spends five silent minutes a few feet from her, just smiling. Eventually he gives up, comes and sits next to me, and says, “She’s a good singer, isn’t she?”

In the internet café a Croatian girl is videoconferencing with a shaven haired man in Split. Outside all is parade. Instead of one local shop there are thousands offering up products from every part of the world. No sign of Clooney though, he’s probably in the shopping mall out of town.



My entire possessions.

Men will do Anything for Attention

In France it is no different. Milan 2, Liverpool 1 (Inzaghi 2).

Self Portrait with Soap Opera

After Helena Bonham-Carter



And E.M Forster

Madame Bovary & the Champions League

For Traditionalists


Clermont finds Thomas fascinated by a “wanted” poster – for an Englishman, naturally. I think he’s light on details because Paris is pulling him in. He’s seen carved birds, met pilgrims, enjoyed several active gallowes: but his most vivid description is of the countryside.

St Leu is a sleepy village on the Oise rive. The major hotel is on the river-bank and is tight with middle-age at lunchtimes: there are no rooms. My auberge is over the bridge; heads are more shaven here. “There are boats on the river?” I ask.
“Boats but for you no regatta.”
“Shame.”
“A shame for you, but not for us. Enjoy our little village monsieur.”



Street Theatre


There is a central square with a flourishing outdoor market, everything is cheap and the products local. Except the best thing, the grocer says, handing me a slice of melon from his home country of Morocco.

There is another huge church on the hill. From its grounds the view is across Oise country, and down to a Peter Greenaway set. There is only one mystery to St. Leu: why in a village of perhaps twenty shops, of which half a dozen are banks or building societies, are there four hairdressers within 100 metres of each other. Hair here seems no more special than Calais or Amiens.



For Victoria



For Peter Greenaway


There is absolutely no chance of internet access here, then I see a sign for a Mediatech (which is a library in a modern building plus a computer). Inside a lot of children rush about and take in the exhibit on “Europe”. It seems cruel to keep them from playing on the computers.

But hell, a man has to post.

Tonight is one of those spiritually enhancing European moments: the cup final of the Champions League, taking place this year between Milan and Liverpool – in Athens. I’ve watched football from all sorts of bars around the world: tonight it would not be right to lock-up in my room and watch alone. But where to go?

In the Auberge all is eating. In the market square a young man cycles around and around wearing a Jamiroquai hat. Towards the church – rien. And then, down a side street: two men in sportswear on mobile phones standing outside a gothic darkness. There is an open bar-tabac. I go inside.



Sarkozy Night Fever


The bar room is twice the size of my hotel room. That is, one quarter the size of shoe box. Nasty rap is playing from a computer. On stools at the bar are five Frenchmen, one black, four white, all of indeterminate age. “Monsiuer. Le Champions League. I can see it?”

All smiles: heterosexuality is “go.”
“A beer for monsieur.” Soon enough I even get my own stool, and the rap just fades away.
As in Picquigny everything is handshakes and politeness here. The more adventurous navigate the complexities of “Le Red Devils have spirit” & “Viva Les Anglais.” But most opt for the English approach.

“Ah, so you are Italian?” says the owner. “From Milano?” An elderly gentleman decides to spend the evening mangling the Italian language. Then the action begins. More people arrive, handshakes and kisses, but not from one young man.

He is ugly: a cross between the Liverpool footballers, Craig Bellamy and Peter Crouch – and not in a good way. He’s dressed for an audition of “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” and alternates drinking vodka and cokes with speeding around the tiny bar, checking his phone, and shouting out. The old men of the bar are wary. “Craig-Crouch” has attention deficit disorder I’d say. And no sense of personal space, he comes very close to gaze, as if I am an exhibit. Heaven forbid. When Milan score he comes to within a foot of my face and gives me the “Maradonna on Cocaine” shriek. Somebody tells him “no.”



Two new recruits at the Bovary Boot Camp


She arrives with her husband, an older man with suitable stomach. He immediately goes outside to talk turkey with the men. She has bunned-up hair, like a Victorian, it’s quite fancy – perhaps this is what takes all the time of the four hairdressers in the village. She’s attractive in flimsy black; one layer comes off straight away: there is a lot of tanned flesh around suddenly.

She talks to another woman at a table, but her body is seeking out Craig-Crouch. Soon she is between the compass of his Crouchy legs, her hands nowhere to be seen; his still fiddling with a mobile phone. She pow-wows with the woman, goes outside. Milan score again. “Pas finis, pas finis,” say my friends. It certainly isn’t: not with Madame Bovary de St. Leu in action.

Craig-Crouch speeds around the room, makes a call. When Emma B. returns he gets up, pays, and leaves. She is confused, finishes her mini-brandy, collects her over-skimpy. He comes back, still fiddling with his phone. “Let’s go,” he says. Liverpool score a consolation goal. But most of the significant scoring is in here.

“Next year,” says the owner. “Next year.” I shake a lot of hands again, but some familiar faces are missing.

Madame Bovary’s husband is gone when I get outside, Craig-Crouch and Madame Bovary too. In the market square the cycling Jamiroquai is still doing laps. He’ll need to find some steroids if he’s thinking of entering the Tour.

During a sunny birdsong of a morning the main question on the TV2 breakfast show is: “How will male sexuality evolve?”

In St. Leu I think we know the answer



Home and the Oise

Of Words the Monopoly

When thou wast borne, some say, & all do thinke,
The urine that thou mad’st, was perfect inke.

Better than Rhubarbe purging melancholy
One that hath got of words the monopoly
That evesdrops a phrase, and like a spie
Watcheth each bombast word, as it doth flie.

His presence is more grateful unto all
Than a new play, or on some festivall
Strange squibs and fire-works, which do clime the skies
And with their glaring sparkes mate vulgar eyes

He knew and felt the Boores, yet was not boorish
He new and felt the whores, yet was not whorish

Laurence Emley on Tom.




Extracts from Northern France

…The fairest cage of birds that I saw in al France, was at the signe of the Ave Maria in Amiens, the workmanship whereof was very curious with gilt wyers. In the same were four Turtle Doves, and many gold Finches, with other birds which are such as our hempseede birds in England.

The first Pilgrime that ever I saw was in Amiens, a very simple fellow, who spake so bad Latin that a country Scholler in England should be whipped for speaking the like. He told me he had lived two yeares at Compostella, a city and University of Gallicia in Spaine, where Saint James is much worshipped, wherehence he then came, and was upon going to Rome. He had a long staffe in his hand with a nobbe in the middle, according to the fashion of those Pilgrims staffes, a chaine about his necke full of extraordinary great beades, and a box by his side, wherein was the picture of our Lady and Christ in her armes.

…

This Clermont is a meane and ignoble place, having no memorable thing therein worthy the observation. Only I talked with a certaine Franciscan Frier there, borne in Ireland, who seemed to be a pretty Schollar and a man of good parts. He was travelling to Abbeville to preach there, I observed this in him, that he was as well able to discourse of al particular politique and state matters of England, as any man in our company: and hee spake passing good English.

This also I observed in Clermont, in the middest of the streete there was erected a gibbet with the picture of a certaine fellow called Anthony Peel, who was painted hanging on the gallowes in the same picture. Under the which his offence was mentioned by way of a proclamation for apprehending of him. The reason why his picture was set forth in that manner, was this: that as his picture was there hanged, so should he also if he might be apprehended. This custome is observed in many places in France…




The next morning being Trinity Sunday about foure of the clocke, I was transported over a river called the Oyse, which did part Picardie from the Ile of France. That day I dinned at a Parish called Saint Brixe, which was twelve miles beyond Saint Liew. Betwixt Saint Liew and Saint Brixe I observed these things. An exceeding rich and fertile country, full of corne, especially rie, meadows, pastures, wooddes, many sweete rivers, a great multitude of goodly and sumptuous houses on both sides as we rod, most whereof were said to be the Advocates of Paris. Also many goodly rowes of wall-nutte trees, about three of foure miles after we were entered into the Isle, the fairest that ever I saw till then, about two hundred at the least in a row. About two miles on this side Saint Brixe, there is a most magnificent Palace built of faire white free stone with many lofty turrets on the toppe of a hill, in a beautiful parke. This place is called Escovan. This place belongeth to Monsieur Montmorencie the high constable of France, who hath seaventeene Townes and Parishes in the country belonging to it, which are very neare bordering about it.

I went from St Brixe about one of the clocke in the afternoone and came to Paris, which was eight miles therehence, about sixe of the clocke that day: the things that I observed betwixt St Brixe and Paris were these: seven faire pillars of fee stone erected by an equall distance from each other, between St Denis and Paris….

A little on this side Paris, even at the townes end, there is the fairest Gallowes that ever I saw, built upon a little hillocke called Mount Falcon, which consisteth of fourteene fair pillars of free-stone: this gallowes was made in the time of the Guisian massacre, to hang the admiral of France Chatillion, who was a Protestant, Anno Dom. 1572.

The Full Monty: God bless French TV

On a distant planet named “Cannes” a film festival is in full weightless swing. It is the cue for French television to go “French Glamour” mad. On TV2 last night Sophie Marceau held court in blue while a Select Committee of Telegenics interviewed her about such things as female masturbation. But it was “Arte” that came up trumps.

Arte is serious cultural television. PBS and the BBC. But serious. Last night in a bid for pop-cultural ascendancy – or something – it ran a two hour special on French Actors (women). It told us all about “nudity”, modelling, being Icons, and working with famous directors. One young hopeful explained the difference between the 1960s and now. “In the 1960s,” she says, “every actress was sleeping with the director. Nowadays modelling (and the big cheques) means that we can choose the films we appear in, not just those of our lovers.”

I’ll write about Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim soon, in Paris.

Instead in homage to the Surrealists, and their objet trouvées, here are some images I found through my small bolted down television in the station hotel (with scary Deep Throat garage traversing to find the tiny room) in Clermont.


They got them all, almost. Guess the list and there will be a prize.