Welcome to Paris In July

This month I am going to be participating in Paris In July - a month long blogging extravaganza that focuses on all things Parisian and French! Paris in July is being hosted by Karen from Bookbath and Tamara from Thyme for Tea and you can still sign up to join in on all the fun.

I expect that I will have three or four posts all up, but there could be more.

For my first post I am sharing a quote from Susan Johnson's book My Hundred Lovers. There were actually numerous posts which talked about the main character's love of Paris (in this passage she calls herself the Suspicious Wanderer) but I had to pick just one! The quote comes from pages 100-101

That summer in Paris began in one single, gleaming day. One evening the Suspicious Wanderer went to bed with the sky starless, unseen clouds dense with rain. In the morning she opened the shutters to a glittering new word. Sunlight polished windows and rinsed the streets, shutters and doors and windows were open everywhere, flowers had boomed overnight. She thought she heard laughter.

She look down at herself, dressed in one of Nasser's oversized T-shirts, shrugged, then grabbed her bag and house keys. 'Paris, here I come," she said, running down the circular stairs two, three at a time. The old stairs with their narrow wooden steps and thin, curved wooden handrails never failed to lift her heart and they lifted it now, high, high, higher.

On the street everyone looked happy. It was already hot, and she wasn't wearing anything beneath her T-shirt. The cotton rubbed satisfactorily against her high pink-tipped breasts, still unsuckled. She strode purposefully down Avenue du Maine, past Metro Alesia, past the beautiful creamy stone church on the corner, past scooters and markets and old ladies with shopping baskets and students with cigarettes and scarves.

'I will stop at the first cafe I like the look of,' she said to herself, and by this she meant one that faced exactly the right way into the sun, with a table and chair situated exactly in the position she wished it. It drove Steph and Nasser mad, her insistence on choosing exactly the right cafe, with exactly the right chair at the right table.

'Just bloody sit down, will you?' Steph was likely to say.

'S'il te plait, Madame Marie-Antoinette,' said Nasser.

But now she was alone. She saw a cafe up ahead, one facing the right way into the sun. She sat down. Immediately a waiter, wearing the obligatory whie Parisian waiter's apron, came up. 'Mademoiselle?' She ordered and sat back, happy.