I lived in Paris back in the early-nineties.

©AGJ (using a Pilot Fineliner)

I was a grad student, at the time, and had a fellowship to do research on Paul Cézanne at the Musée d’Orsay. While I plugged away on my own stuff, I also worked on a Cézanne exhibition that would have a splashy opening in Paris before travelling to London’s Tate Gallery, then over to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Every day the curators would send me off to various libraries and archives with a shopping list of facts they needed confirmed about Cézanne’s life: his apartment numbers across the city, who he lived with and where he bought his painting supplies — that sort of thing. I dealt with a lot of bird-like women working behind library counters and became friendly with the French-speaking Italian vendor who sold me a ham sandwich and fluffed coffee every day in the café around the corner from the Biblioteque Nationale. Like the gang at Cheers calling out “Norm!” he would shout out “Alta!” (Italian for “tall”) every time I came into his store.

Sometimes I still can’t believe I lived in Paris. I had no permanent home back then and threw myself at opportunities without ever making pros and cons lists. My instincts about my interests were that certain.

So as markets roil and my stomach drops, I wanted to share some current observations about Paris collected by my friends, Stephen Strauss, a fellow journalist, and his wife Betty White, a painter. They are spending the summer in Paris and sending back detailed missives about their adventures.

Here’s a letter Stephen sent last week. I love it.

What don’t you expect to see in Paris

American Plains Indians in tribal gear dancing their tribal dances along the newly white sanded banks of the Seine while tourists in tour boats wave to them.

Graffiti on a Paris wall saying: “Sorry to write on your wall.”

The absolute favourite drink of cool Parisians being a diet coke called Coke Zero – the favourite no matter what vintage.

Scads of young, beautiful, wealthy Parisians taking out packs of Camels, Marlboroughs, Lucky Strike and other American cigarettes with Fumer Tue/Smoking Kills written in large letters on their backs and still smoking because it is cooler to be cool than to avoid cancer.

Anything, except for French wine, sold as cheaply as it is in Canada.

A young French couple asking an old Canadian couple for advice on what makes a marriage last after having known one another other for 10 minutes and being told that a similar sense of humour is more important than sex in the long run. And watching the French couple listening extremely, extremely intently to that bit of unromantic advice.

Cars and buses and trucks streaming clouds of this season’s latest pollution.

A photo gallery sign saying it doesn’t sell reprints.

The best Iraqi food in the world.

Hyper aggressive deaf/mute beggars.

A fully furnished apartment which somehow still lacks a can opener.

Being much more afraid of bicycle riders than car drivers when it comes to pedestrian safety.

The fate of a French woman who wrote a treatise during the French Revolution arguing that men and women should have equal rights. She was guillotined.

A favourite thing to throw into fountains now that the euro has become such an expensive coin. Individual playing cards.

A six-pack of Snickers.

Someone taking foie gras home in a doggy bag.

Three Turkish television stations.

When I lived in Paris, predatory businessmen searching for a cinq à sept used to chase me past apartment buildings like this. After a while, I stopped worrying about what was behind me and started thinking about what was beyond the balconies in the flats above. I imagined rooms dressed in faded cream and mint striped wallpaper that was peeling back at the edges and marked up by run-ins with Louis XV furniture.

There also had to be gilt mirrors in every size and shape. And they could never be rearranged on account of their chatelaine’s thirty-year nicotine habit which had tinted the walls two shades darker than their original colour, grounding the mirrors, several second-rate Impressionist paintings and a prized Boucher to the spots first determined when she moved in.

This oval beauty is from the eighteenth century.

The owner, a woman surely named Claudine or Aurélia — no, Véronique! — had advanced degrees in art history from the Sorbonne and lived alone on the fourth floor of this Haussmann treasure. Alone but never lonely, Véronique entertained a handful of alternating male visitors with whom she passed a Gauloise and flicked her Zippo. Except for some baguette crumbs, a bottle of Veuve, and a box of stale macarons, there was no food around — ever. Eating took place in the cafés down the street. Insouciant and witty about life and its contradictions, Véronique was dead serious about cheese, foie gras, snails and Fraises de Bois (forest strawberries).

Veronique had several steamer trunks full of her grandmother’s clothes, I imagined, just as the panting behind me subsided and my shadow took a sharp turn down another cobblestoned back street. Finally, I sighed. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Mémère had been a cabaret singer and coquette with as many fancy gloves, hats, sparkly broaches and feather boas as one would expect of a woman in her field. Véronique inherited them all, and kept a pair of buttery soft beige kid gloves in her lingerie drawer.

My take on Degas

Here’s grandma in her heyday, singing about love found and lost. She looked and sounded harsh by the end. But Véronique said she lived by her own rules and, really, that’s all that mattered.

*I was on a press trip in Québec City earlier this week and couldn’t help sinking into this francophile reverie.