The Parisian equivalent, the Café des Chats, opened last Saturday at 16, rue Michel Lecomte in the third arrondissement, right in the centre of the city.
Cat lovers can go and sup tea or chocolate, or nibble on patisserie, all the while caressing some of the numerous cats in the place. It’s all the idea of Margot
Gandelon and she has just one problem; the café has been a victim of its own success. The café can seat just 30 people, but hundreds have been turning up, hoping forlornly to gain entry.
Another good idea is about to come up in France, a two hour show devoted to the works of Edith Piaf, that legendary chanteuse, who died exactly 50 years ago, on October 10th,1963, in the
Provencal perfume town of Grasse, a little east of Nice. She died from a ruptured aneurism, the result of excessive consumption of alcohol and morphine. But she was excessive in her talents, which flowed in abundance, and were well appreciated in her native France while she was still alive (there’s
little or no point in being appreciated after departure!) and she was the first French popular singer to break through into the American market.
Recently, Francophiles in New York organised a retro concert devoted to her music and performed by leading contemporary artists; it was staged at the Beacon Theater in New York and the whole show was recorded for television. It’s being screened on France 2 on October 5th, then again on
October 10th on TV5.
Meanwhile, a great chronicler of pop music has died suddenly. Gilles Verlant, a native of Brussels, was renowned in France for his telling portraits of musical legends. He began his career by working for
RTBF, the State-run broadcasting network in Belgium, before moving to France. He wrote biographies of many leading players in the music game, including Serge Gainsbourg, David Bowie and Francoise Hardy. In 2010, he started a series for Radio France chronicling the scandalous history of rock, which was broadcast on the local stations of the France Bleu network and on France Info. That series continued right up to his tragic death last week at the comparatively young age
of 56;the mortal accident that happened to him is something that’s all too easy to do. He fell down a flight of stairs, a sad end to a legendary chronicler.
Incidentally, if you’re flush with cash, plenty of it, and have a taste for nostalgia, you could have a look at the extraordinary apartment that’s up for sale in the 16th, for a mere €6.1 million. It was
occupied in the late 1960s by Brigitte Bardot and the man to whom she was briefly married, Gunter Sachs. The place was a mini palace, with its own private disco, its own billiards room and a host of other features, all decorated in dubious taste.
Brigitte’s name has been taken in vain by a comedy performer, who calls herself Frigide Barjot. Her real name is Virginie Merle, born 51 years ago in Boulogne-Billancourt in western Paris. She made a
name for herself as a humorist, a columnist and a political activist. In her younger days, she was renowned for her raunchy, bitingly satirical stage act. She was also a member of a band called Dead Pompidous and one of the two films she appeared in was called Make Love to Me with Two Fingers, in which she took off Brigitte Bardot. Incidentally, her present punny stage name of Frigide Bardot
means in literal translation, "frigid bonkers".
This year, her career has taken an abrupt turn that hasn’t turned out well for her. She emerged
as the leader of the many large scale demonstrations against gay marriage. She’s also a ferocious opponent of giving adoption rights to lesbian, gay and transgender (LGBT) couples. Both these viewpoints are enormously popular in France, as was evident from the huge turnouts at all the demonstrations. What the government plans to do in the name of civil rights is clearly totally at odds
with what many in the electorate believe. But it’s all gone wrong for Frigide Barjot, since she is now on the receiving end of much hate mail from the far right spectrum of the anti-gay rights and anti-LGBT adoption movement, so much so that she is now distancing herself from the whole
phenomenon.
She’s also been having troubles on the home front. Her husband is Bruno Tellene, also known as Basile de Koch. He was a speech writer for Charles Pasqua, a very right wing politician from
Corsica. Anyway, Frigide and Bruno live in a chaotic apartment in the 15th, and they’ve been appealing against an expulsion order. They had been letting the Societé Jalons, a group of students who organise humorous happenings, use part of their flat and the landlord considered that as a result, they had broken their tenancy agreement. So they’ve been busy appealing against this verdict and hope to get it overturned in the appropriate court in Paris.
There are fireworks of another kind under way at the moment, the natural autumnal
fireworks that can be enjoyed in many landscapes at the moment in central and northern France. Some of the best displays of natural colours, as the trees turn, are to be found in the wine regions, such as the Loire valley, where the autumn colours are starting to flourish, for a few short but utterly magnificent weeks.
There’s news too on the transport front, with another of the Métro lines in Paris due to have driverless trains. It’s Line Number 4, which runs from Porte de Clignancourt in the north of the city to the Mairie de Montrouge in the south. The line has stations at the Gare du Nord and the Gare
de l’Est and it runs beneath the Ile de la Cité. This line also has the station with the fantastic name, Montparnasse Bienvenue, possibly the most onomatopoeiac of all Métro station names. The work on making this line automatic is due to be completed in 2019.
It’s a long time of course since the first fully automatic line was opened, 2005 to be precise. It was the Météor line, from Gare St Lazare to the national library, named after the president who commissioned it, Francois Mitterand. In 2007, a major new extension of this line brought it to Les Olympiades, in the 13th, a resident town of skyscrapers built between 1969 and 1974 and noted for having Chinatown on its southern edge.
Also on the theme of transport, the 25th modern tram network in France was opened recently in Tours. The 15 km long north-south line has 29 stops and it all cost €433 million to build. In recent years, the rollout of new tram networks, not just in Paris but in many other urban centres has been impressive.
I was also reminded this week of an impressive Irish centre in Paris, that we tried and enjoyed, many years ago. On Radio 4, Myrtle and Darina Allen were talking about the famous Ballymaloe cookery school in Ireland; one bright idea was taking over La Ferme Irlandais in Paris, just over 30 years ago, as a showcase for fresh Irish produce. It was in the place du Marché St Honoré in the 1st and one of the best of the Allen ideas was staging Irish Sunday brunches, which became enormously popular. It popped up, long before anyone had invented the concept of pop-up restaurants.
Another reference to Ireland came up with all the news about Billy Connolly’s illnesses. It’s only a few short months since he appeared at the convention and entertainment centre in Killarney, Co Kerry, and made himself deeply unpopular. The centre has a resident photographer, a young woman who has won many awards for her outstanding work. In the middle of his show, Connolly spotted her moving around the auditorium taking photos of the event and to signal his displeasure he unleashed an absolute torrent of abuse against the photographer, using language that even shocked long time fans of his. He got absolutely no plaudits for that performance, but in retrospect, it could be put down to his illnesses. Anyway, he is now saying that it’s time for him to go, he wants his ashes scattered over Loch Lomond, while a plane is skywriting the infamous Brendan Behan quote: "Fuck the begrudgers".
It’s also true to note that these days, there seems to be a law against everything and anything enjoyable and sometimes, it can mean depriving people of a long treasured tradition. We have a perfect example here in our part of Dublin. St Bartholomew’s Church has clocks on the four faces of its tower and up
to recently, the bells rang out every quarter of an hour. Then someone complained that the bells were annoying them at night time, so rather than risk a big fine from the city council for noise pollution, the clocks and the bells have been stopped completely. Unless a resolution to this impasse is found, a 130 year old tradition in the neighbourhood is going to be stilled for good.
I must end this week’s epistle with a delightful typo from The Irish Times. Very recently, it ran an article about how people in Ireland, thanks to better diet and healthcare, are now much taller than they used to be. The article concluded by saying that “the average Irish male, born in 1980, is now 1.76 cm tall”. Now you know why Ireland is called the land of the little people!