francofiled

  Liber tie , Égali tie , Fraterni tie It's the day for it!  Bonne fête nationale !

  Françoise HARDY has left us at the age of 80.  Time then to revisit her reflective 2018 album, Personne d'Autre.  The sleeve notes record: "Pour des tas de raisons raisonnables, je n'envisageais pas de refaire un album".   So pleased that she did make it thanks to conversations between her and producer Erick BENZI.    The last track of the album, Un mal qui fait du bien was co-written in September 2017 with Thierry STREMLER.  The final couplet roughly translates as "I stop there, I hold back; neither last word nor final word..." It says:  "j'arrête là,  je me retiens ; ni dernier mot ni mot de la fin..."

We recently took a mid-week break in one of our more prestigious hotels and among the facilities I spotted on arrival was a small library space but with expansive shelves. Books! Forget about the spa; a reading nook is my pamper place. Getting absorbed in a book is something that I really enjoy and what a delight it was to find these volumes from the Masterpiece Library of Short Stories.  Naturally I picked the one marked FRENCH - Volumes 3 and 4.  Just look at this contents page. Wouldn't you be tempted to spend an hour or two?  Well, I was and that's just what I did.  It was time well spent. What a labour of love it must have been for editor Sir JA Hammerton   He and his board of eminent critics worked under the auspices of The Educational Book Company to compile these volumes of stories across countries and time periods. The books, dating from the early twentieth century, naturally show signs of age, wear and tear but those stories are timeless...

 I've only been to a couple of such exhibitions in which the work of artists is projected onto walls, ceilings and screens to the accompaniment of musical soundscapes. As it was nearing the end of its run in Belfast at the Carlisle Memorial Church we decided to make a day of it and visit The Claude Monet Immersive Experience.   Although not as extensive as an experience we viewed in Paris at the Atelier des Lumières  we very much appreciated the scale and depth of this one and its venue -  an old church at Carlisle Circus in Belfast. It was just right and care had been taken to present material in fine detail. Monet's art was set in context through several information boards, again that music bathing us in sound. A walk through a set with the bridge and the artist's home at Giverny; books on top of a table as if they had just recently been read and set down. Details. We moved on through into the body of the church taking a seat in one of the many deckchairs arou...

  Not long to go to a talk with my daughter, Rachel on the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. It's for the Cercle français de Belfast and will cover Edgar DEGAS' sculptural masterpiece and Camille LAURENS' book of the same name published by Les Fugitives press.  Oh, and Théophile GAUTIER gets plenty of attention too thanks to his short treatise on Le RAT - the name given to the young dancers at the Paris Opéra. One of those "little rats " is the subject of the talk, Marie Geneviève van GOETHEM.  She was born in 1865 and grew up to be our Little Dancer and model for Degas.  Check out the Cercle here  and the book at Les Fugitives available here . It's fascinating and well worth a read.  Maybe see you there?

An old friend has left the magazine shelves - France - the magazine for Francophiles.  I collected it for very many years, since the 1980s and started becoming a subscriber with Issue 2.  Back then it was published four times a year and was a very collectible publication. You could even get slip cases to hold four issues, the series for a year. Later it was published monthly and still managed to retain its freshness with new and interesting articles. While sometimes some features would recur they always had a different angle or approach. Back then the magazine had competitions and I was lucky there on a couple of occasions winning some lovely French-themed books.  But my special win was a return Motorail package with ferry crossings between any two rail stations.  I opted for Calais to Nice return! Eventually decades of issues built up and I decided on recycling and give aways. I have held on to several significant issues: The 150th offering and the homage to Paris e...

A Bastille day breakfast to start the day right. Couldn't find my French flags so improvised with fruit bowls of blueberries, yoghurt and raspberries. Croissants and apricot jam to follow, love it! Bonne continuation !

Smile! Yes this puzzle brings back a memory and makes me smile. I did it once before - although that's not strictly true as in a sense I didn't quite complete it, someone else did. It was back in 1974 and I was living then in Vierzon, renting a room from a propriétaire on the outskirts of the town. There wasn't much to do in the evenings and one way of passing the time I decided was to tackle a jigsaw.  A good sized one mind you, at least 1000 pieces. Thanks to the local librairie I was able to to get a puzzle of La Joconde, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and it turned out to be a labour of love. I hadn't at that stage seen the original in the Louvre and when I did it struck me as smaller than I expected.  All the same I got to know those brush strokes fairly well and the background?  Well there's a lot of detail there too.  Jigsaws are a great way to appreciate a work of art. And as for the smile?  Getting there. My efforts with the puzzle were ...

Ever had a coffee that was too hot to drink? What about one that was too hot to hold? That latter sometimes proves to be the case when we serve it in some cherished French porcelain Mazagran drinking cups. The ones pictured above are part of a set purchased as a gift way back in 1974. They were bought in Vierzon at a weekly fair at which various artisans plied their wares. I haven't been able to trace where exactly they were produced but each carries the mark "Atelier de Tabalou" and I'm wondering if they come from the Limoges area, home to other fine porcelain products. Mazagran refers to both the drinking cup and a type of coffee popular in Algeria. There's a little more detail over at this wikipedia link . One way of cooling the coffee and the cup is to place a long handled spoon in the hot liquid - it dissipates the heat. I find though that if I hold the cup at its base, holding a finger under the rim for stability it's easy enough to manage.  Ni...

Leaving the Queens Film Theatre Belfast today I picked up a very impressive programme for the UK French Film Festival 2017.  Although QFT isn't showing all the films being screened during the festival it is showing seven listed below. The Festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary and the silver jubilee edition of the programme has been extremely well produced and worth keeping as a souvenir reference guide. As a francophile and a francophone it's great to see the number of films showing and the range of cinemas taking part.  The programme contains an at-a-glance guide to what's on and where.  The films are helpfully cross-referenced to blurbs on the content and as well as offering contemporary films, the programme contains several classics. Check out the full listings over at www.frenchfilmfestival.org.uk meanwhile here is the list of seven films showing at QFT: Louis Malle's Le Feu follet - The Fire Within on 25 November Alain Gomis's Félicité on 3...

As was promised in my last post on Cases of Cognac to Belfast available here  I added some cognac to a Belfast Crystal glass and paid a silent toast to those mentioned in the post.... Admittedly it was with a VSOP rather than a 3* but then it is whatever's to hand. Right?

The Friend at Hand is more than just an Irish Whiskey shop in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, it is also an emporium that houses a vast array of whiskeys and whiskey memorabilia; legacies of a bygone time which are definitely not for sale, providing instead a visible, authentic record of the many distilleries around the city in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Among the items on display was the framed telegraph request pictured above. Found in Belfast That evocative word - Cognac   - near the top of the page caught my eye and, interest aroused, I noted the date: 8 August 1891. 1891 - This is a remarkably well preserved document but I wondered what on earth was an order for brandy doing as a display item in a whiskey store.  I set about finding out.  The telegraph as you can see was addressed to a company in Cognac.  This lead me to an internet search but my initial queries on Bouhelleau or Bonhelleau and other variants returned zero results. The solution la...

The origins of this talk by Hélène GUILLET and Philip McGRORY date back to an idea of then French President, Nicolas Sarkozy to mark Ireland's chairmanship of the European Union. He had the idea of an exhibition charting connections between the two countries. The exhibition was set out in a series of panels with commentaries in English, French and Irish. We were therefore honoured that the person tasked with providing the French translation was none other than our speaker, Hélène. Our speakers explained the origins of the Collège des Irlandais in Paris on the rue des Irlandais near the Sorbonne. Hélène showed us a picture of a wedding ceremony being performed in the famous cultural centre. It was her wedding from two and a half years ago in which she married Cairan who also worked on the President's commemorative project mentioned above. Next, Philip brought us closer to home and into Lisburn. He shared a little known fact that Lisburn was the only town in Ulst...

                                        It was a talk that we had wanted to do for a long time at our French Circle, le Cercle français de Belfast . And so it was that around twenty of us braved the inclement February weather and settled in the warmth of the Dark Horse Coffee House as Claudine McKeown presented her personal look at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, home to many renowned artists and writers and as we were to hear to Claudine herself in her student days Claudine, ably assisted by husband Seamus in managing the technology, explained that her talk would be in French, supported by PowerPoint slides in English.  This approach found favour with many present. She started by locating the area geographically in Paris, highlighting some of the key landmarks of the 6th arrondissement. Claudine then focussed on the construction of the Abbey churc...

There is a lovely custom that takes place all over France, throughout January. La fête des rois on 6 of the month commemorates Epiphany when the three kings or magi came to pay their respects to the infant Jesus. In many homes and offices, family and friends get together to enjoy a "galette des rois", helped down with a glass or two of fizz, white wine or sometimes cider. The galette is a type of cake made up of leaves of puff pastry with a filling of almond paste. A "fève", literally a bean but more often a tiny ceramic object, is baked inside and the cake is presented with a golden paper crown.  Portions are disributed with a warning to eat carefully and the lucky person who finds the "fève" claims the crown and is honoured as king or queen of the occasion. Earlier this month, the Cercle Français de Belfast gathered in the Dark Horse Coffee House in Belfast's Hill Street to celebrate La Fête des Rois. 50 of us munched our way th...

2004, Entente Cordiale, Commemorative Crown One of the beneifts of social media that I appreciate is the ease with which I can keep in touch with news and stories from France. I have a particular interest in Le Berry in the Région Centre and so will often browse to the local edition of newspapers.  Recently a story caught my attention in Le Berry Republicain .  A statue had been found in a clearing in an estate in the Sologne. It used to belong to a factory in Vierzon but had been moved when new owners took over in the 1960s. The statue was referred to as La Française and it made me think of my favourite French symbol - Marianne.   Although the French flag is the only official symbol for France, Marianne embodies the values of the nation.  She has two sides to her character - the angry warrior on the Arc de Triomphe or the sower, scattering potential, as depicted on French coinage and stamps. The newspaper article refers to the Roman goddess, ...

  Kensington Palace Gardens, backing on to the grounds of the Palace itself, is an impressive avenue of varied architecture, the London homes of many of the world’s ambassadors. I had come, on Monday 29 March 2010, with my family and some friends to the French Ambassador’s Residence for a ceremony in which, along with a dozen others, I was to be decorated as a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques for services rendered to French culture. We were made to feel very much at home, although I was a bit anxious as I knew that I had to make a short speech to the gathering later on. The welcome glass of a crisp white wine helped to steady the nerves and I was able to relax into the occasion. The Residence is a beautiful, elegant home embellished with marble busts and tapestry. The salon being used for the ceremony was infused with a soft purple light accentuating the colour of the palme’s ribbon. The Ambassador, a charming man, immaculately dressed, introduced himself and welco...