Love affairs

I have flaunted my francophiliac tendencies in this blog. I have traced it back to its origins, when at the age of seventeen I saw And God Created Woman in a flea-pit cinema in Scarborough, on a family trip back to Britain from the United States where we were living at the time. Since then my positive attitude towards both Frenchness and feminism has endured.

Then while a student at SMU in Dallas I had the good fortune to work in an art house cinema where the Nouvelle Vague delivered a constant flow of films introducing me to Paris.

In The Observer Philip French writes:


Great films have been made in many cities but two great film cities are pre-eminent. One is Paris, where the Lumière Brothers staged the first movie show for a paying audience in December 1895 using their Kinematograph.

His article goes on to discuss and list some of the movies in which Paris was the perfect star.

I fell in love with Paris in the late fifties, although it was toward the mid sixties that I first had the opportunity to visit the city on the Seine. Paris on screen, Paris in reality, both magic.

Today is the fifth anniversary of my divorce, which terminated twenty year of marriage but only ten of connubial cohabitation.

And before that marriage Paris was my home for the same length of time, ten years. But there will be no divorce from Paris. Ever.