I was going to visit the Musee D’Orsay and look at more paintings, but art fatigue was starting to set in, so I decided to leave it till next time. Instead, I spent my last couple of days in Paris just oozling around and hanging out with Paul and Joelle. On my way to their place I went into a shop I’d seen before, but which had been closed - Senteurs de Fée (’Fragrances from the Good Fairies’). It was full of fascinating elixirs and oils, and there were six or seven perfumes - all eau de parfum - in pretty bottles. I sampled them all and thought they were quite simply the loveliest and most wearable perfumes I’d smelled in Paris. Not incredibly fancy mixtures, perhaps, but very high quality, and balanced to perfection. One of them was a violet scent, Coeur de Violette. I adore the smell of violets, but every violet perfume I’ve tried in my life has done one of two things: either the scent goes bad on my skin, or it vanishes very quickly. Not only did this one smell great on me, it stayed for hours. I bought a bottle and asked for the recipe. It contains essential oil of violets, olibanum, myrrh, and oakmoss (I don’t have the proportions, sorry). It’s strong, but I don’t feel like it’s wearing me. It’s so nice to finally find something you’ve wanted for ages.

I brought some fig aperitif over to Paul and Joelle’s. We realised that it just had to be mixed up with dark chocolate, heated to make a sauce and poured over things like biscuits and blackberries. Here’s some disgusting person licking the pan (does she think it’s Mick Ronson’s guitar?):

Mmm, she thinks she’ll have some more:

Paul cooked beautiful scallops and gave me a chef’s tip. If you buy frozen scallops, thaw them in milk - it’ll take the nasty freezer smell away.

Their place is something of an Aladdin’s cave of curios, including - while we’re on the theme of smelling - a bizarre and curiously poignant collection of noses from old statues. As far as Paul nose, it’s the largest such collection in the world. He inherited most of the noses - including a wooden nose from an English gothic statue of a bishop and a scungy-looking melted nose from Pompeii - from his grandfather, who, it seems, was quite the archaeological adventurer. Naturally, some people have taken Paul to task over hanging on to all this nasal booty. A couple of the noses actually belong to statues that are in the Louvre (fucking everything is in the Louvre, I swear), and one woman was incensed that he hadn’t handed them over. He said he would when the Louvre hands back its sphinxes and what not to Egypt. Which seems fair enough to me.

Noses from the Swendsen collection:

Oh, and I found another bakery selling those chestnut cakes - barquette aux marrons. I bought one just to see if it tasted of blue cheese too. Well, it tasted entirely of mild-mannered, sweet chestnut cream. So I guess i was very lucky not to be sick after eating the other one. The lesson? Never buy from ‘the oldest bakery’ in any town - the cakes may be as old as the shop.

Paul has a wacom tablet which he let me have a go of. It was pretty cool, though not as easy to use as I thought it would be. I have to say, I prefer the feel of pencil/charcoal and paper. On the other hand, you can erase as much as you want, and there’s no mess. The first thing I drew was this little cat:

Then I scribbled some Venetians all of my very own:

On the last night we ate Indian and wandered home looking in shop windows. Joelle and I were delighted to find this motoring Barbapapa:

Paul was more taken with the car (his family had one like it); actually, as I recall from Barbapapa’s Ark, Barbapapa was an environmental crusader who didn’t drive a car even back in the 70s. Maybe it’s Barbabright disguised as a Barbabuick…