Paris Times Eight Read Online Free PDF

the afternoon I visited the atelier of the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, located on the tiny Place Furstenberg, down the street from the apartment. It had been his residence, and studies for his enormous canvasses now hanging in the Louvre were on display. But even though these preliminary paintings were smaller, they were just as magnificent and decadent as the final paintings, each dripping with blood and morbid sensuality. They intimidated me, made me feel small, made me feel acutely my own mortality, and I was just nineteen.
    MY LAST SIX and a half weeks in Paris were one long and inglorious existential moment. I should have been enjoying myself, should have been relishing my first time in Paris as a young woman. This was the capital of feminine charm! But instead I too often worried about doing and saying the right things. I felt this mostly when confined to the apartment, with its strange ménage à trois brewing inside its stuffy rooms. Outside that oppressive apartment I liked my relationship with Paris. I pursued a growing relationship with the city itself. I found that if I let it, Paris could seduce me, make me feel alluring. At the Louvre one day a young Parisian in a dress shirt and tailored pants, blonde hair combed back and smelling of an expensive woodsy cologne, cruised me while I was eyeing the Grande Odalisque by the French painter Ingres. He invited me, at the instant, to run away with him to his family château in the country. I didn’t go, of course. But inwardly I wanted to abandon all responsibility, embrace what he was obviously embracing: a vision of me as desirable.
    My only real companions in Paris were the two boys under age ten whom I was there to mind. They were also my only hope of feeling I was good at something. I was, if nothing else, a gifted babysitter. I loved children. As a teenager I had happily volunteered at the Catholic Children’s Aid in the newborn division.
    I took both children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where there were swings and a sandbox—a real park by Canadian standards. That was where the other children of Paris were—never scattered in the street but enclosed in leafy green spaces where you could admire them, as you did the outdoor sculpture ringing the periphery. I stood by, watching little girls in starched white dresses, patent shoes, and ribbons in their neatly plaited hair, little boys in seersucker shorts, knee socks, and handsome cotton vests worn over their linen short-sleeved shirts. As they ran up and down the ladder of stairs connected to the slide, stern-faced adults supervising their every move (and quick to shove their charges into sweaters at even a suggestion of a sneeze), I wondered why Parisians ritualized child’s play, kept it in a special place. My mother let my brother, Kevin, and me play outside for hours and we always knew to return home at dusk.
    Jenna and Nigel raised their children differently. They were always supervised; there was an understanding that these children were to be intellectually guided every step of their young lives. But when I was out of Jenna and Nigel’s sight, I let the children run wild. I forbade them to read out of doors. I dressed them in T-shirts and shorts. They were a stark contrast to the French kids, perfectly pressed and in linen. We looked like vagabonds, loitering around the large fountain pools, making smacking noises at the large gold carp swimming brightly beneath the surface. Christopher once threw a handful of sand into the pool, eliciting stares and hissing sounds. I pretended I didn’t hear. Later in the evenings, as was the house rule, I slept with the children in their room. Edward kicked me in the belly. Christopher lay wrapped tightly in his dreams, holding my hand. I felt at times they were my children, and because of them I vowed, once I grew up, to have a house full of boys for myself.
    I wrote my mother impassioned words on picture postcards of