A CHANGE IN THE SEASONS

GETTING ON FOR AUTUMN.

            It was the hundredth birthday of my mother-in-law Claudine on Saturday. The extended family gathered at our apartment for a celebration. As customary, the group photo featured the oldest and youngest together. Our daughter Louise is the smile in the centre (with Marie Dominique in white) and Claudine, seated to the right, is nursing the newest addition, Leonie, aged three months.

Interestingly, both girls resulted from marriages of Australian men to French women, Trell from Western Australia having married Louise’s first cousin Alice, just as Marie Dominique and I did more than thirty years ago, and both in the mairie of the same tiny village where Claudine has her country house. Pure coincidence – but one can imagine  future statistictians puzzling over a cluster of Franco-Australian marriages in this remote hamlet.

To people like myself, of a melancholy disposition, autumn – Fall to you Americans - offers ample opportunity for moody reflection. Verlaine had it right: “The long sobs/Of the violins/Of autumn/Hurt my heart/With a monotonous langour.” James Joyce too, in his majestic story The Dead, with its intimations of mortality; half in love with easeful death.

“Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

But autumn brings much to Paris that those who love the city anticipate with pleasure. On the way home from the market this morning, I detoured through the garden of medicinal plants in the grounds of the Abbey of Cluny. In its day, the monks would plant the more aromatic herbs – thyme, mint, sage - in gaps between the flagstones, so that, crushed under their sandals, they released a waft of their scent.

Outside the railings, a string of white canvas stalls lined Boulevard St Michel as they would have lined Paris streets centuries ago, selling products for which there was no market in summer. The baskets of dried fruits would have gone sticky and invited wasps and flies, the cheeses begun to deliquesce like those Zola describes in The Guts of Paris.

“The patches of mould on their crusts were melting, and glistening with tints of ruddy bronze and verdigris. Beneath their cover of leaves, the skins of the Olivets seemed to be heaving as with the slow deep respiration of a sleeping man  A Livarot was swaming with life and in a fragile box behind the scales a Gérome flavoured with aniseed diffused such a pestlential smell that all around the very flies had fallen lifeless.”  

            Likewise the nougat – honey candy, displayed in blocks and slabs, each one riddled with a different mixture of dried fruit and nuts. After nibbling on some crumbs set out to catch the punters, I bought an over-priced slice of the salt-caramel flavour, as much for the idea as any liking for it. (In fact, once I got home and Marie Dominique had a chance to scoff at my gullibility, we tried it, found it excellent, and finished half the slab.)           

The rest of our diet is also changing. No more nectarines and Reine Claude plums until next year, but welcome the first wood mushrooms; golden girolles and those lumpy dirt-encrusted cepes. In a while, the chestnut roaster will appear outside Deux Magots with his oven improvised from the top of a metal drum and coals of charcoal underneath.  

FABRE D’EGLANTINE.

At the time of the Revolution, in 1789, they changed the calendar so that the year began in October, at the natural division of the harvest. The months were renamed too. Just now, we’d be coming to the end of Vendémiaire, the month of the vendange or grape harvest, and about to begin Brumaire, the month of mists, then Frimaire, the month of frost.

The farmers loved it, but they weren’t the ones running the country, so its prime mover, a song-writer, playwright and actor named Fabre d’Eglantine, was executed in 1794, about as irrefutable a sign of official disapproval as you could hope for. The same tumbril carried both him and his mentor Danton to their appointment with Madame la Guillotine. It's said that, on the way, Fabre complained he hadn’t been able to finish the poem – vers-  he was writing. Danton told him he’d soon have all the vers – worms – he could use.  

Hmmmm….. I guess it’s how you tell it.