Oh, How I Miss...

The requisite afternoon cafe and pastry.

At my favorite patisserie that we saw, where Jonathan discovered canneles,

And where this lovely lady greeted us in front.

Don't know why I like this so much: instructions in a bakery window.

Paris Street Art

Everyone is better turned-out in Paris, even the little porkpie'd stencil men.

Illustration from a reworked Little Red Riding Hood.

Jonathan blending in with locals.

Another children's book illustration in an art book shop on Quai de Valmy.

Le Love.

Paris Markets

We're back! I have so much to show you. First...


My absolute favorite part of Paris was the markets. Our apartment in le Marais was just a few blocks away from a major greenmarket. Sunday morning there reminded me that the world hasn't changed all that much: A fruitseller shooing away a little boy who was running his hand over all the oranges and ruddy-faced fishmongers chatting with basket-weilding old ladies.


Unlike our city farmer's markets, which feel quaint but inaccessible for a regular shopping trip, these rows and rows of stalls definitely seemed like the place to get fixings for Sunday supper as well as a bit of old-fashioned people-watching.


Maybe it's all an act, and the French folk all return home and pop open foil-lined TV dinners, but it just seemed inevitable that they would all be as inspired as we were to construct our own little Belgian still life (we couldn't get enough of those strange paintings at the Louvres).


Indeed, we spent a good part of our last day wandering the stalls, and we even put together a little charcuterie picnic for the plane. When they came around with airplane pasta, we just shook our heads and gestured to our parcels wrapped in butcher paper.

Barbizon Girls

Students at Westover, in what I'm pretty sure became my Latin classroom. The uniforms were way cuter then.

Does it make me less of a modern woman that a felt a pang of nostalgia reading the Times article on the Barbizon? Nostalgia both for my actual days at all-girls boarding school, and for an imagined past that is a pastiche of The Bell Jar, Thoroughly Modern Millie, A League of Their Own, and the story Carol Burnett tells about her poor early days as an actress in New York City when she and her four roommates shared a single audition dress that they would each reserve for important days and return cleaned.

Sylvia Plath, with an exerpt from her diary. From the Smith Libraries.

The Daisy Chain Ceremony at Miss Porter's, from the Vanity Fair article on the hazing scandal. This was Westover's rival school. I almost went to Porter's instead.

Maybe the cold weather puts me in an academic mood with style to match (practical footwear and tweedy jackets are much more condusive to Big Ideas than summer dresses are). Maybe balancing work, love and friends makes me miss the no-boys-allowed policy, with its implicit warning that you have things to do, girl, that don't require putting on lipstick (never mind that it's just a fashion thing, the chicness and ease of girls who are absolutely feminine, but with a boyishness that comes when you are not on display.

Carrie Mulligan in An Education

Members of the Women's Land Army, via Lark About