by Carolyne Lee, an Australian Francophile

My hometown newspaper the Melbourne Age features a long article today on how the Atlantic salmon are returning to the Seine, and how this is a sign of the improved water purity. Love the picture of the fisherman at Suresne with his 7kg salmon!

 Like many Australian women, I LOVE French bed linen, and have bought several sets over the past few years. Last month I bought a beautiful set by Anne de Solène in the soldes at BHV (I’ve just discovered her website and you can see the one I bought on the left).

The only problem with buying bed linen in France to bring back to Australia is that the standard sizes are different, so you need to have the dimensions of your bed, and your doona, written down.

I discovered this after I brought my first set of French bed linen back to Australia a few years ago. The fitted sheet was perfect, but the housse de couette (doona cover) was 30cm too wide. But instead of taking it in and cutting off the excess, I decided to run a line of stitching down each side, on the outside (as opposed to the inside) of the cover, 15cm in from the edge. After the doona was inserted, it was held in place, and the extra material hanging down beyond the line of stitching created a ‘valence’-effect on each side of the bed, complementing the wide ‘sleevy’ thing at the bottom of French doona covers, which also creates a valence, at the end of the bed.  I’ve always preferred this to the Australian type with buttons or fasteners, and which barely cover the end of the mattress.

With the doona cover I just bought, I had the problem again, and worse, because I could only obtain the larger size, judging from the dimensions on the packaging; but I loved the design so much I HAD to take it, especially at BHV soldes price.

Back in Australia, after carefully measuring both my mattress, the height of my bed and my doona, I found the new cover was 20cm too long, and 60cm too wide. So I sewed a straight line of stitching along the top, 20cm in from the edge, and another two lines, similar to what I’d done with the previous doona cover, one down each side, 30cm in from each side edge.

At the top I then had a piece of fabric to fold over near the pillows, which works well, and a valence on each side, which doesn’t quite reach the floor.

Obviously you need to know the height of your bed if you are going to do this, and if you are innumerate like me, you might want to check all the measurements twice, and draw diagrams to guide your sewing, as I did.

 But the effect is stunning, and of course completely unique (duhh… until everyone reads this, I guess)…

My blog is now featured on the cover of my new book–Word Bytes: Writing in the Information Society! (can be bought at http://tinyurl.com/m9mnev )

 I’ve been meaning to go to the fabric market—Marché St Pierre—for some time, and today I decided I would finally do it, heat wave or no heat wave. While hordes of tourists and everyone else were dragging themselves up the hundreds of steps to Sacré Coeur, which looked to me more like an ascent to purgatory in a temperature that must have been over 30 degrees, I headed into the (mostly) air-conditioned fabric shops.

 I’ve recently taken up dressmaking after a long break from it. After spending so many years in academia, living inside my head (as my physiotherapist tactfully puts it!), I find that I often ache to be doing something with my hands, and sewing is just the thing.

Choosing dressmaking fabric is a wonderfully sensual experience, and especially at the Marché St Pierre. It’s a cornucopia of colours, patterns and textures. I like to let the various pieces of fabric that attract my eye suggest to me what they ought to be made into.

A couple of today’s suggestions were: a fitted pinafore dress in a small check of red and black fine wool (at 3 Euros per metre!), for when I return shortly to the Melbourne winter; a French version of a liberty print in grey, blue and muted red cotton twill is just asking to be made into a long-sleeved crossover dress; two pure cottons, one beige and one white, each embroidered with lacy patterns in the same colour, will make cool summer dresses (I couldn’t get summer out of my head, thanks to the searing heat here in Paris at the moment).

 My favourite fabric shop was Tissus Reine for variety and sheer sumptuousness (the French liberty print came from there), but I found my best bargains at Les Coupons de Saint-Pierre, and some of the smaller shops. Some specialise in curtains and upholstery fabrics, while others have all types. Today I was only interested in the tissus habillements (dressmaking fabrics).

 On the hill above, the white domes of Sacré Coeur shimmered in the hot air, while inside the fabric shop the voice of Serge Gainsbourg played in the background. For a brief time, I thought I was in heaven.

As I was leaving a restaurant in Lyon today, I espied this poster. Translated, it says:

If the book had been invented AFTER the computer, it would have constituted a major advance. Its qualities are remarkable: lightness, availability, low cost, functioning WITHOUT consumption of energy, optimal layout…

At the bottom of the poster is the name of a Lyon bookshop: Librairie A Plus d’un Titre.

I’ve loved the Montparnasse area since I first stayed there as a guest in the incomparable Pension Les Marronniers, just opposite the southwest corner of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The area known as Montparnasse comprises parts of the fifth, sixth, fourteenth and fifteenth arrondissements.

The last time I stayed there, a few years ago, it was summer and another pensionnaire and I would walk down the rue Vavin to the carrefour Vavin (Vavin crossroads) where the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail intersect. The cafés on and near this intersection have for the best part of a hundred years been a hub of  Parisian café society, patronized by students, artists, intellectuals and writers.  Near the carrefour my friend and I would see a film and then have a drink afterwards at la Coupole.

La Coupole is my favourite, and I cannot go there without remembering it’s the place where in 1940 Simone de Beauvoir worked on parts of her novel L’Invitee, or The Guest in English. Unsurprisingly, it was a favourite café of both her and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as of Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett.

Nearby Le Dome also claims de Beauvoir as a regular, and indeed she was born in an apartment in the building facing it, right on the corner of the two boulevards, and lived here there until the age of 11. In the first lines of the first volume of her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, de Beauvoir writes:

“I was born at four o’clock in the morning on the 9^th of January 1908 in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and overlooking the boulevard Raspail.” (p.5)

A few years later, in 1911, the bistro on the ground floor of the same apartment building, was bought by a Monsieur Victor Libion, and baptized La Rotonde. He little suspected at the time that his café would become one of the leading lights of Parisian life, according to the café’s own story of its history. According to this story, the artists of Montmartre descended upon it, and even Lenin and Trotsky held several meetings there. Simone de Beauvoir and her sister Louise were also said to have frequented it as teenagers.

La Coupole, too, did not yet exist at the time of de Beauvoir’s birth (it opened in 1927), something to which she also alludes in her memoir:

“In the boulevard Montparnasse, on the site where the Coupole now stands, was the Juglar coal depot out of which came black-faced men with coal sacks on their heads; among the piles of coke and anthracite, like the wisps of charred paper in the sooty limbo of a chimney…” (p.23)

Addresses : La Rotonde (est. 1911)  105 boulevard Montparnasse ; La Coupole (est. 1927)  102 boulevard Montparnasse ; Le Dôme (est. 1898)  108 boulevard Montparnasse.

Reference: de Beauvoir, Simone. (1959/2005). Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, New York: Harper Modern Classics.