Often when you buy cherries they are not very sweet, or they are tasteless or almost gone. The cherry clafoutis is a great dessert to serve lukewarm all of June. And it is so easy to make. This is the recipe given by Thierry Chevalier, chef of Cercle Interallié in Paris. Make sure to keep the cherries with their pits and don’t forget to spit them out when eating the dessert.Read More
Christian Louboutin, The birch boot at Palais de la Porte dorée
Christian Louboutin‘s exhibit at Palais de la Porte Dorée could be your first museum visit starting on June 16 th! It is so inventive and artistic that even if you hate shoes, you will love this show…and do not miss Stéphane Bern’s performance on television in the English room. Versailles is reopening again and if the weather gets better the park is obviously the great attraction with a little restaurant by the Grand canal. Théâtre des Champs Elysées has sent its subscription link so this is very promising with “Der Messias” set by Bob Wilson starting on September 16. It sounds too good to be true.Read More
Rediscovering Chantilly is part of the pleasures of deconfinement
Château de Chantilly was one of the first museums to reopen and what a collection! The Raphaël (1483-1520) drawing exhibition had just started in March and it is a renewed pleasure to see the famous “Three Graces” painting and his two Madonas fo the celebration of the 500 th anniversary of his death. But what is most fun is to follow a new path through the castle, imposed by health security reasons. And the park is as pretty as ever with its Le Nôtre waterworks and Grand canal.Read More
Viktor & Rolf for the ballet « Shape », choreography by Jorma Elo, Dutch National Ballet, Amsterdam, 2014 © Erwin Olaf
Since all operas and theaters are closed, the Center for Stage costume in Moulins (Centre de costume de scène) seems the closest way to being in a theatre again (until November)… This very special “vault of fashion” opened by Martine Kahane and Christian Lacroix in July 2006, keeps 20 000 costumes which belong to the Paris Opera, the Comédie Française and the Bibliothèque Nationale. It features at the moment an exhibition on Couturiers de la danse, with many pieces lent by Ballet de Monte Carlo, the Royal Ballet and the Dutch National Ballet, in these formerly military barracks built by Louis XV and restructured by architect Jean Michel Wilmotte. Issey Miyake, Viktor and Rolf, Karl Lagerfeld are represented among other wonderkids of fashion. Read More
A dogwood in Paris, rue de Vaugirard, near the Luxembourg garden
More dogwood pictures are being sent to me, I realize how ignorant I was about their growing presence in France! I am told there is even one in the Jardins du Luxembourg next to the Statue of Liberty… And since it is the full season, don’t miss them, the gardens of Paris have just reopened.
The saddest news of the week if of American artist Christo‘s death on Sunday, May 31. He was confined in New York where he suffered from respiratory problems. He gave his last interview to CNN a few weeks ago and it is very moving: he shows his project for the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, in his 19 th century building on Howard Street, Soho. The red rope holding the floating silver and blue fabric will give it a unique look! This amazing artist lived with his wife Jeanne Claude a giant life, financing alone his huge wrappings in Berlin, London, New York and Japan… we will miss him terribly. There is an exhibition about to open at Centre Pompidou retracing his Paris years in the 1970’s and the wrapping of the Pont Neuf. And a film which you can watch. The catalog is also for sale at Galignani’s. Read More
Spanish purse embroidered with shells, Imagin, 150€
Since she opened Juste Mauve on rue Greuze in 1973, Anne Marie de Ganay has always surprised me with her eccentric and refined taste. Born in a French aristocratic family with Argentinian connections, she was raised in English and was nicknamed “How do you say begonia in French” (it’s the same word) when she was a debutante. She has closed the shop since, but has kept private sales twice a year and provides the best presents for people like me who spend the summer as an itinerant guest all around France. After the confinement, she is putting everything on sale at 40%. I went to check before it opens this Tuesday and there are wonderful finds.Read More
The house from the garden, ©Fondation Claude Monet Giverny
Hugues Gall, president of Fondation Monet in Giverny, has already canceled all group tours and reservations for the season: when the gardens reopen on June 8 at 9.30 am, only individual visitors will be admitted in small numbers and internet booking is mandatory. But the gardeners have all been at work for months of course. For the 40 th anniversary of the opening of the gardens by Gerald Van der Kemp with Anne Aymone Giscard d’Estaing in 1980, a new book by Gilbert Vahé, the head gardener for 42 years, is published. The first year, 83 000 visitors came to see the temple where Monet lived for 43 years. Today there are over 600.000 a year.Read More
Nathalie Jeanson at Royal St George’s for the Vagliano cup 2019
French golf pro Nathalie Jeanson has been a friend to many golfers for a long time and her recent appointment as general manager of the Golf Paris Longchamp makes all of her fans very happy. This is one of the good surprises of “deconfinement” and I wanted to share it with you. She has just been asked by businessman Antoine Arnault and Pascal Grizot, vice president of the French Golf Federation, to reorganize, on the racecourse of Longchamp, the golf practice and teaching facilities. As the Vice President of the French PGA, she was the ideal candidate.Read More