Blue Dress Hot Mess

Series: The Paris Diaries: 02/03/25-03/03/25

Notes for the confused reader: Gabriel (Gabe) is a dog, not a child. This is a collection of pieces from my notebook, typed up; as such, some is written in real-time, some with the benefit of hindsight. It is fragmentary, but so is my mind. If something says (FA) in brackets, read: French Accent.

02/03/25:

I am standing in the queue for the Musée Rodin. The museum opened less than five minutes ago, and I am about 50th in line. I suppose I got here later than I’d intended; I was scoffing breakfast (another nutty number from Copains, this time a sort of peanut butter brioche twist. It turns out all their bakes are gluten free, but it doesn’t prevent them from being the best things I’ve tasted in Paris – bar the Comté). The line is moving fast; it is the first Sunday of the month, so I’m hoping I can get in for free. The three Italian ladies in front of me are being very judgmental about everyone’s clothes. I have never been so obviously scrutinized, and while it is ostensibly amusing, if I were being cynical I’d ask why they were such authorities on Fashion (aside of being Italian, which inherently gives you some standing); two were dressed as though ready for a hike, and the third, admittedly, might have stepped out of Vogue in about 1953. She wore a black coat cut to just below her little knobbly knees, patent black shoes which shone in the morning sunshine, a black beret, and a scarlet red-rose brooch pinned to her left breast. As it transpired, it seemed odd to be under such fashion-scrutiny when the exhibition we were about to step into was focused entirely on the merit of the body alone; serendipity, I suppose.

I emerged from the Balzac exhibition. The Italian ladies were still ahead of me, having contemplated Rodin’s casting of Balzac’s tailored suit less studiously than I. I emerged, and was met immediately by Le Penseur and the sudden rays of sunshine. I blinked. I wonder what’s in a body; is it an organism of hope, of love, of romance, or is it just something we inhabit, something we wear? Is it better to be Balzac – to have one’s empty dressing gown cast by a famous sculptor, and to be so fat that you don’t even need to be wearing it for it to be buxom enough to stand up on its own? It was his writing that defined him; not his rotund neck which was apparently the same length when measured in circumference as his stomach, though I am still wrapping my tiny mind around this bizarrely spherical concept. Balzac apparently disliked too literal iterations of himself; he thought portraits were “like creatures with no poetry whatsoever”. The poetry, I’m sure, lay beneath the dressing gown (in the metaphorical rather than physical sense). Perhaps it’s better to be athletic and pained like The Thinker – except I think his hands are too big for his head (though we all know what that means – and no you can’t see, I checked). We wear our bodies, they are not who we are. If I were writing a piece for Cosmo, I’d cite social media as ‘The Body’s No. 1 Enemy’; perhaps I’ll pitch them an article. And yet when we die, people put up statues of us if we are famous, and it is what we look like, again, that we are remembered for. Churchill and his stomach; Abraham Lincoln and his frown. Balzac’s stomach had nothing to do with his writing; except years ago we used to believe the stomach to be another brain, so perhaps if he sat down to work after a proper roasted feast his words somehow flowed more easily from his pen.

They have got to the end of their bottle of wine; the dregs swim unhappily around the bottle’s green base, discarded. When I first walked past (on my way to the brocante), they were each a glass in – the glasses filled almost to the brim and sitting expectantly on the table between them glistening like rubies. One man is large; one man is small – in width rather than in age. (Though perhaps in light of my recent comments I should no longer take into account their outward, bodily, physicality). They are wearing enormous overcoats made from thick lamb’s wool – dyed navy – and they are talking about poetry. If it weren’t the absolute truth of a Sunday afternoon in the left-bank of Paris, I would allow you to accuse me of being overly-romantic. I see corduroy everywhere: in the brocantes, hanging limply on rails, in the vintage clothes shops hugging tightly to mannequins, on people’s legs, around their shoulders – on men and on women. I am yet to see it on a dog. I see penny loafers worn with socks, and trousers which end in an upturned hem just above the ankle (especially on men – young).

We have met two pure-bred Cavalier King Charles’ (Gabriel is a mutt by comparison, but a very handsome one). The first was four months old and was so tiny she might’ve been born yesterday; she walked around the Palais-Royal with a young man at the end of her lead (she tottered and swaggered all at once, like a drunk girl coming home from a nightclub and obstinately refusing to remove her heels), and she had a pink bow around her neck. I wish this were fictional, but it isn’t. She was quite the sweetest puppy I’ve ever seen; I didn’t know God made them so small. The second was a fat and stocky six-year-old who looked just like his owner (in quite the nicest way possible) because his owner was absolument charmant (FA) and spoke to me in the street with our dogs cowering warily at each other from between our respective legs for nearly 5 minutes. He remained oblivious of their obvious dislike (entirely surface-level. The Balzac exhibition would have told Gabe off for being overly judgemental about another’s appearance); I suppose Gabriel must have got that feeling of picking your toddler up from nursery and realising you really hate their new-best-friend’s mother (I, of course, have never had this feeling (not having a toddler), but I can picture it all too well). I have met a man with a chocolate Labrador puppy who looks like he will inevitably be very fat and old in the future in the way that only Labradors can be, and will have arthritis and will definitely smell, but is at the moment quite the sweetest ball of melting Cadbury’s Dairy Milk ever to swagger the pavements of Paris. His owner dropped his lead, leaving the puppy gallumphing across the 9 o’clock evening street as though his new-found freedom were the greatest game in the world, his owner chasing after him and shouting at the top of his voice “Attrape le chiot, attrape le chiot, attrape le chiot!”. (The population of Paris did not move; in fact, they laughed).

03/02/25:

I have returned from the Dior Gallery and it feels odd to read over what I wrote yesterday. Clothes, fashion, the sheer human skill — the artistry of Dior to wrap a woman in florals and make it not just be groundbreaking for Spring (hear Meryl Streep in your head). Christian Dior said his work was “ephemeral architecture”. The female body was his muse: he dedicated his life to it. I wonder what he would have done with Balzac’s dressing gown.