Memories of Bastille Day

Whatever virtues the French may have, they were ruined in advance for me by those horrific women who were my French teachers in school. I did have one charming French teacher in high school, but he was Algerian, so his kindness and virtues did nothing to buff my image of what the French are like.

Today, July 14 is Bastille Day, which I know not because of anything I was taught in those excruciating hours they called "French class" but because the French consulate was located directly across Reservoir Road from Georgetown University Hospital and every Bastille Day they threw a huge party and I even got to go to one once.  French tricolors festooned the gates and the staff made merry and it was pretty joyous, even to drive by.

Washington has always had a soft spot for the French: L'Enfant, a Frenchman designed the city and, truth be told, Washington (the man) could not have won the American Revolution without Lafayette and the French navy which arrived in the nick of time at Yorktown. Really, without the French, we might still be speaking like Brits.

So, today, I was thinking about those French having a good time in Washington, and come to think of it, likely in Paris as well.

Which brings me to Paris. Because Paris has lots of French people, I had no desire whatsoever to visit, but I got dragged into a Viking tour last November, which started in Paris.  The shocker was how nice, how funny, how charming the French were. I may not have met a representative sampling, but the people I met did not mind my massacring their language, and they were helpful when I got lost. 

In fact, one very kind French lady directed me back to my boat when I got lost on a run along the Seine.

Watching mothers, and fathers, walking their children to school on the Right Bank was lovely. At a glance, I'd say the French have produced some very fine parents.

And I am still trying to ascertain what that hot chocolate brew was. 

I loved the sidewalk cafes in New York City, when I was twenty something, and Maxwell Plum's and the cafe scene was big in New York. This was when Friday's was not a franchise but a really fun bar on First Avenue not far uptown from the 59th Street Bridge and if you showed up with a woman who was good looking, they gave you a window seat in the winter and a good sidewalk seat in the warm weather. If you showed up alone, they shuffled you to the back of the bar, but there were always lots of interesting people even there. 

But, it turns out, New York did not invent the sidewalk cafe. Hemingway was sitting around such establishments in 1927, in Paris.

  Paris can seduce you. Even Woody Allen, who famously could not bring himself to leave New York, apparently now loves Paris. Of course, that may be because you can bring your twenty year old wife when you are seventy there and nobody bats an eye.

Happy Bastille Day, France.  We still owe you for winning the American Revolution for us.