Author Archives: Mayken

Electing the King in the French Republic

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The Galette des Rois, the King Cake, has a long tradition in France. It is eaten on or around Epiphany, Kings’ Day, January 06, celebrating the visit of the Wise Men, or Three Kings.

The tradition associated with the galette, however, is much older and goes back to Ancient Rome, where during the Saturnalia, a festival around the end of December and the beginning of January, among others, a “King of the Saturnalia” was elected, according to certain sources, with a bean hidden in a cake.

Throne of the French King, château royal d’Amboise

The tradition lived on through the Middle Ages and to the Renaissance where it so happened that one Kings’ Day, the real king, François Ier, after much feasting and celebrating and drinking, wasn’t happy about the “elected” king and with his friends started a snowball fight against him. During that fight, he was hit in the face by a snowball containing a hard object, leaving a permanent scar that he hid by growing a beard, setting a new trend among the male members of the nobility.

François Ier without and with a beard (by Jean Clouet and Titian respectively)

For King Cake celebrations at (by then bearded) François Ier’s court, I recommend this excellent blog post by fellow writer Julianne Douglas.

Even the Sun King Louis XIV kept up the tradition, but the French Revolution tried to do away with it, for obvious reasons. The feast of Epiphany was changed to the Sans-Culottes Day (during the Revolution, sans-culottes, literally “without breeches”, were the common people of the lower classes); however the sans-culottes changed the day to the “Day of Good Neighbors” and the cake became the galette de l’Égalité (Equality Cake) and returned to the table.

Today, it can be found in bakeries and supermarkets as early as Christmas, filled with frangipane or in variants including apples or chocolate. The bean (fève in French) has long since been replaced by a porcelain figurine, the collectors of which are called fabophiles.

In this video, Jamy Gourmaud explains the reason: The king of the day had to pay the drinks for everyone, and people would rather swallow the bean than incur the cost. To stop that practice, the real beans were replaced with porcelain ones.
Each cake sold comes with a paper crown for the person who finds the fève in their part.

The cake is cut in as many parts as there are people, and the youngest person in the room hides under the table and announces who gets the next part to be served. The person who finds the fève in their part gets to wear the crown and to choose their queen or king consort.

King Louis XV’s crown (Louvre, Paris)

The only King Cake in France that does not contain a fève is the one served at the Élysée Palace for the President because, in holding with the principles of the French Revolution, one cannot be at the same time president and king.

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Royal Squares, Circles, and Triangles

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In France, and even more so in Paris, a place royale, literally a royal square, was meant to surround a royal statue, mostly an equestrian statue in the Roman tradition, but later also pedestrian statues. People could walk in the square and admire the statue of their king.
There are five places royales in Paris that have undergone changes over the course of history.

1 – Place des Vosges


Initial name: Place Royale
Inauguration: 1612
Statue: Louis XIII
Origin of the name: The French Département Vosges (in eastern France), was the first to pay its taxes under the French Revolution.
Location: Marais, 4th arrondissement
Story: Ordered by Henri IV, it was inauguration at the occasion of the engagement of Louis XIII with Anne of Austria.

2 – Place Dauphine


Inauguration: 1614
Statue: no statue in the square, but a statue of Henri IV stands in the middle of the Pont Neuf
Origin of the name: Named for the Dauphin, the heir apparent, the future Louis XIII.
Location: Île de la Cité, 1st arrondissement
Story: Created by Henri IV following the construction of the Pont Neuf. (It’s actually a triangle, by the way.)

3 – Place des Victoires


Inauguration: 1686
Statue: Louis XIV as Roman Emperor
Origin of the name: in celebration of the military victories of Louis XIV
Location: 1st and 2nd arrondissements
Story: Financed by the Duke de la Feuillade, Marshal of France, it is the first square created by a private individual to celebrate his sovereign. (Also it is actually a circle, not a square.)

4 – Place Vendôme


Initial name: Place Louis Le Grand (Louis XIV)
Other names: Place des Conquêtes (Conquests Square), and during the Revolution, Place des Piques (Pike Square, from the pikes on which were displayed the heads of the beheaded by the guillotine)
Inauguration: 1699
Statue: initially Louis XIV (destroyed in 1792), presently Napoléon Ier at the top of the column
Origin of the current name: The square was built in the place of the Hôtel de Vendôme, a hôtel particulier or townhouse.
Location: 1st arrondissement between rue de la Paix and the Tuileries Gardens
Story: Initiated by Louis XIV, his grand project never saw the light of day. In the end, the square was built by the City of Paris. One of its prestigious addresses houses the Ritz.

5 – Place de la Concorde


Initial name: Place Louis XV
Other name: Place de la Révolution
Inauguration: 1772
Statue: Louis XV, destroyed and replaced by the Egyptian obelisk
Origin of the name: Reconciliation of the French people at the end of the Terror (bloody period during the French Revolution)
Location: 8th arrondissement, between the Tuileries Gardens and the Champs-Élysées, on the “royal axis”
Story: During the Terror, it was the location of the guillotine where among many others, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette were beheaded.

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Nicolas Flamel

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You might know Nicolas Flamel from fiction stories or movies, where he is portrayed as an immortal alchemist who discovered the philosopher’s stone. But did you know Nicolas Flamel was a real-life person?
Most facts about him are debated and vary from one source to another, so I’ll stick with the key points.

Nicolas Flamel’s birth year and place are uncertain, but he was probably born around 1340 in the Paris area. He died on March 22, 1418 in Paris.
As a child, he was lucky enough not to die of the plague, which in 1348 killed between a third and half of the European population.

In the days long before the printing press was invented, Nicolas Flamel began his career as a public writer in a small single-story house in the rue des Écrivains, Writers Street. This street disappeared when the central east-west axis rue de Rivoli was created in the 1800s.

Nicolas Flamel married Pernelle, twice widowed, with whom he opened a small shop near the church Saint Jacques de la Boucherie, and a workshop nearby specialized in precious manuscripts. He financed the construction of a doorway of the Saint Jacques de la Boucherie church, the arcade of which showed him with Pernelle. Today, only the Tour Saint Jacques remains of this church, a tower which was built a hundred years later.

The Tour Saint Jacques seen from Rue Nicolas Flamel

It was often speculated how the Flamels acquired their wealth, and Nicolas was rumored to be a successful alchemist. In reality, Pernelle brought money into the marriage from her previous two husbands, and Nicolas had a successful career as a scribe and bookseller. He also owned several houses in Paris and its suburbs, real estate investments that in the economic depression of the Hundred Year War contributed to his wealth.

They contributed financially to churches, and Nicolas continued to do so after Pernelle’s death in 1397. He had several houses built to house the poor. The only one still in existence is located at 51 rue de Montmorency (3rd arrondissement) and is said to be one of the oldest stone houses in Paris.

Nicolas Flamel died in 1418 and was buried in the church Saint Jacques de la Boucherie. His bones, together with Pernelle’s, were later transferred to the Catacombs. His tombstone can be seen in the National Museum of the Middle Ages – Musée Cluny in Paris.

location of Rue Nicolas Flamel and Maison Nicolas Flamel

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New shop, old signage

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You might know this: You come back into a neighborhood where you haven’t been for a while, and a shop you remember has changed. The cute little tearoom has become a shoe store, or the flower shop has been transformed into a bookstore.
Sometimes I come across shops where you can see what they used to be – generally something very different. Let me show you some of them.

This place in the Marais neighborhood (4th arrondissement) used to buy horses, as “achat de chevaux” indicates, certainly to transform them into meat which would have been sold at a horse butcher’s, a boucherie chevaline, recognizable by the horse head over the entrance.

This former Hamman (also in the Marais) now houses a fashion store on the ground floor, just like this bakery.

Here we have a former fishmonger’s that clearly doesn’t sell anything any longer.

This fishmonger’s, on the other hand, seems to have traded the sale of poissons, fish, for the sale of boissons, drinks.

Check out the first letter up close!

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The First Métro Line

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The first métro line in Paris was opened for the 1900 world fair. It ran from Porte de Vincennes on the eastern city limits to Porte Maillot on the western end and linked the different sites of the world fair as well as the Olympic games sites in the Bois de Vincennes. Today, it runs as far west as the La Défense business district which is outside the city limits.

Line 1 runs pretty much straight east-west on the historic axis of Paris, including the Avenue des Champs Élysées.

It crosses every other metro line except for the 3 and the 10 and is the most used, both by locals and by tourists, serving notably the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Champs Élysées.

Built in part under the open sky, notably under the rue de Rivoli and the Champs Élysées, the corresponding stations are boxes the width of the street. Their walls are practically on the same level as the foundations of the buildings above.

Under the street…
…the métro station.

The boxes were covered with a roof, as above at the Hôtel de Ville station with steel bars and rivets.

When the metro trains were lengthened from 5 to 6 cars, the platforms had to be extended as well, from 75 to 90m. In stations with fewer passengers, they simply dug into the tunnels, as at the far end of Saint Paul station below.

Since 2013, the line 1 is entirely automatic. In order to avoid any accidents or suicide attempts, all stations have glass walls along the entire length of the platform. There is no driver and you can stand at the head of the train. Let me take you on a ride.

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The oldest tree in Paris

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The oldest tree in Paris, a locust tree, stands only a stone’s throw from Notre Dame. In fact, you can see the cathedral from the tree, and presumably, the tree from the cathedral.

The species’ Latin name Robinia pseudoacacia, honors the royal French botanist Jean Robin, who introduced the tree in France. It was he who planted this particular specimen 400 years ago in what is now the Square René Viviani, a small city park in the 5th arrondissement, near the well-known bookshop Shakespeare and Company.

Ready for some history? When the tree was planted in 1602, Henri IV was king of France. He was the protestant king who converted to Catholicism and promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which gave Protestants religious liberties and effectively ending the bloody Wars of Religion.

Henri’s son and successor, the future Louis XIII, was one year old, and Henri himself was still nine years away from being assassinated. The tree’s next-door neighbor, Notre Dame cathedral, was already 250 years old.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Brit Bartholomew Gosnold, reached Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket.

Location of the oldest tree on a map of Paris
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When Paris gets its feet wet

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Pont Notre Dame during 2016 flood

Every once in a while, and mostly in the winter months, Paris will get its feet wet. The city is cut into Left Bank and Right Bank (as I explain here) by the river Seine which has its source near Dijon and flows from there roughly northwest to reach the English Channel at Le Havre. Its drainage basin covers most of the north of France.

Despite the existence of several large storage reservoirs upriver of Paris built since 1950, the river has repeatedly risen to high levels in the city, especially in 1924, 1955, 1982, 1999-2000, June 2016 and January 2018.

flood markers at the river fighter-fighters – see 1910 at the very top?

The worst flood, however, dates back to 1910 and is often qualified as a 100-year flood. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t mean it occurs once in a hundred years, but has a one-in-a-hundred chance of occurring in any given year.

The 1910 flood resulted from a combination of high rainfall, snow and frozen ground, flooding of several tributaries of the Seine and the already saturated underground of the Paris Basin.

Over only ten days, the Seine rose to the 8,62m level (at Pont d’Austerlitz, the official point of reference) and took 35 days to go back down, peaking on January 28. All the neighborhoods along the river were under water, and people had to use boats and wooden walkways (like you see in Venice during Aqua Alta).

On January 20, ships could no longer navigate the river in Paris because they couldn’t pass under the bridges any longer.

photos from the 2016 and 2018 floods

On January 23, the Seine reached the quay walls which had been built to the height of the 1876 flood, and parts of the city were flooded.
On January 28, peak day of the flood, some 22,000 basements and hundreds of streets were flooded with water and ice. The problem worsened as underground sewage pits that were not connected to the sewage network, polluted the water. The tankers that normally evacuate the sewage could no longer pass under the bridges, and the sanitary situation became worrying, with typhoid and scarlet fever cases.

The economy was hard hit, in particular bookstores and publishers whose entire stocks were destroyed. Some 20,000 buildings were flooded in Paris, as well as half of the existing métro network. The brand-new line 4, inaugurated only weeks earlier, is closed.

Flood marker in the Conciergerie on Cité Island

Today, the 1910 flood is the reference used for any rise of the river level. Throughout the city, you can find markers indicating the height of the 1910 flood.

The 2018 flood makes news headlines but remains well below the 1910 marker.

The latest two floods, in June 2016 and January 2018, made headlines around the world, and spectacular photos were posted on social networks, including by me.

riverbank in the 4th arrondissement during and after 2016 flood

The Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, both located on the riverbanks, closed down and transferred their underground storage items to street level for safekeeping. Still, these floods remained well below that of 1910.

2018 flood at Pont de Rouelle – see the 1910 flood marker?

One important if unofficial reference for the level of the river is the stone statue of the Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma. It is the stone statue of a French soldier from the Zouaves, a former light infantry regiment of the French army which took their name from a North African tribe well-known for their bravery.

When the Seine is at its normal level, the Zouave remains completely dry. During the 1910 flood, the water reached its shoulders. When the bridge was rebuilt in the 1970s, the Zouave was moved to a lower position, making any direct comparisons impossible. However, it still remains a reference for Parisians, and it had crowds of visitors during the 2016 and 2018 floods, when the water reached up to its waist.

Zouave during the height of the 2018 flood
Paris flood 1910: flooded areas of the city in grey
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In defense of writing exercises

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Why should I bother with writing exercises when I’m busy with my manuscript, you ask.
Exercises don’t just serve to learn a skill but also to maintain and improve it.
Let me draw an analogy with sports and take an example from swimming:

I go to swim practice 2-3 times a week on average and have done so for many years. When I do my main strokes (front crawl and back stroke), I no longer have to think about what I’m doing, not even during flip turns. (That’s when you reach the end of the pool and turn around as quickly as possible and push off the wall.) So it’s possible I get lazy and make sloppy moves. But when coach gives me drills to do, such as touching my shoulder with my hand at each stroke or close my fists, or breathe at changing numbers of strokes (3-5-7, for example), I have to concentrate on what I’m doing and focus on my strokes (arm strokes in these examples).

It is the same with writing—there are “moves” that you don’t think about until you’re forced to think about them by doing a writing exercise. As a result, you are more conscious about these particular “moves”.

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It’s a nut—it’s a chestnut!

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Do you like chestnuts?

Chestnuts (châtaignes or marrons) are the fruit of the chestnut tree, le châtaignier, which is native to the Mediterranean region but also grows in more northern parts of Europe, including all of France and Germany.
Notably in the regions of the Cévennes and the Limousin in south-central France, chestnuts used to be an important food source, hence the tree’s nickname of arbre à pain, bread tree.

Dried and ground, the chestnuts make for a kind of flour that needs to be mixed with some wheat flour in order to make bread, pancakes, or pastries, which you find mainly in Corsica.

The département of Ardèche (in south-eastern France) is famous for its chestnut specialty crème de marrons, chestnut cream, which you can purchase at any French supermarket in the jam section.

If you are looking for roasted chestnuts from a street vendor, follow their cries of “Chauds les marrons!”
Another French specialty are marrons glacés, candied chestnuts, a popular Christmas sweet.

The sweet chestnut is not to be confused with the horse chestnuts, utterly inedible. The horse chestnut tree is the one producing white pyramids of flowers that are called candles in German.

During a recent walk in the woods—I write this as of mid-November—I came across a group of chestnut trees that had the ground littered with chestnuts. Some were still in their burrs, but most lay among the leaves. Picking them up proved more fun than expected, for as soon as I had spotted one chestnut, I suddenly saw them everywhere. Within a few short minutes, I had collected 650g of them.

I’d never made roasted chestnuts myself, I usually buy them from a street vendor. But I found a very simple recipe I’d like to share here.

Roasted Chestnuts

Rinse your chestnuts and let them dry. Then make an X-shaped incision into each.

Preheat the oven to 220°C (about 430°F).

Put the chestnuts into the oven on a baking sheet or into a flat oven dish for about 20-25 minutes, until they begin to blacken.

Let them cool down before removing the skin which is not edible (or at least, not very digestible).
Enjoy.

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M is for Métropolitain

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When Paris decided it needed an underground train network, the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris, the metropolitan train company of Paris, was founded. It later bought up other smaller companies and incorporated their lines into its network, all under the name Métropolitain.
Unlike other big cities which have a certain uniformity in their underground/subway signage, Paris has various different signs signalling an entrance to the below-ground transport network.

It all started with the Société Nord-Sud, whose initials can still be seen in the frames of some billboards on the platforms.

Nord-Sud built and ran three metro lines in the early 20th century before being bought up by the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris

The most famous entrance signs are those created by Hector Guimard in Art Nouveau style. There were two different types, with and without a glass roof. Of the former, only two remain today, at the stations Porte Dauphine and Abbesses.

The roof-less type is quite numerous and can be found all across town.

This type was given to other cities around the world, such as Mexico City, Chicago, Lisbon, or Moscow. These are all copies, though, the only original one was given to Montreal at the occasion of the World Fair in 1867. It can be found at the station Square Victoria.

The 1920s saw the introduction of totem sign, first more elaborate

then simpler:

At Madeleine station, the totem signals a metro entrance that doubles as an underground passage.

A few stations have particular entrances, such as Vaneau.

The most easily visible sign, however, might be the unadorned yellow M, dating from the 1070s. Not to be confused with another yellow M, it is surrounded by a steel circle and illuminated from the inside at night.

And would you believe that this is a métro entrance? It is indeed, at the station Palais Royal. The kiosque des noctambules, the night-owls’ booth, was created by an artist and set up in the year 2000.

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