WOMEN AND PARIS
By Armen Pandola
As you walk around Paris, you notice that every street, alley, square, park and place has a name - and it isn't 22nd Street. Paris has more street names than you can shake a stick at if that is your idea of fun. It has 100 streets named after famous mathematicians - can you name one? No? Not even Descartes? Look here. How about women? Just one - come on, you know Edith Piaf has to be one. Well, she didn't rate a whole street, just a"'place" - sort of a pedestrian zone.
There are only 300 streets named for women out of more than 6,000. But Paris and its first female mayor, Anne Hidalgo, want to change that. Last year, Paris named its first street for a fashion designer - alle Sonya Rykiel. Yes, it's only an alley - but one where Madame Rykiel shopped for fruits and vegetables.
There are several great tours you can take run by The Women of Paris that will tell you about the women who have played a defining role in different areas of the city’s history. I took the Sugar and Spice Tour - it combined some much-needed history about women in Paris with everybody's second favorite activity - eating chocolate.
Founder and tour guide Heidi Evans, a Paris-based Brit took our group from the square in front of Saint-Germain-des-Prés church on the Left Bank to several of the best chocolate shops in Paris, and, along the way, introducing us to various places made famous by French women.
Did you know that a woman first published James Joyce's Ulysses, named by most authorities and the best novel of the 20th century? Yes, when publishers refused to have anything to do with a 730 page book about the wanderings of a Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, ending with a 30+ page sexual reverie by his wife, American-born but life-long Parisian Sylvia Beach risked her own money to publish it. It ruined her financially and when the Germans occupied Paris (1941-44) she closed her bookstore, Shakespeare & Company (there is a bookstore with that name in Paris today but it was opened in tribute to Beach's original).
The lives of many more French women who helped shape Paris and france are told with surprising details - you want to guess who, after Victor Hugo, is France's second best-selling author? Read on.
In between stops, Heidi takes us on a tour of the best chocolatiers in Paris, many of them unknown or little known in America. Like Henri La Roux. He became famous, first, for his buttery caramels which he makes in many flavors, each of them your favorite after one taste.
Chocolate in Paris is very serious business - the stores are like mini-chapels, quiet, somber, peaceful. At each stop, the tour came with a sample - oolala, my mouth waters just think of them. Pierre Marcolini makes 'tea hearts' that have to be tasted to be believed. Georges Lanicol makes pastry-candies like his Kouignettes, small pastry made from puff pastry dough with pure churned butter and caramel. Popelini makes little cakes that taste like nothing you have ever tasted. Finally, the famous French macaron by one of the best, Un Dimanche å Paris. I am not a big fan of macarons, until I had a real one like these. The flavors explode in your mouth like a gustatory version of the end of Tchaïkovsky's 1812 Overture.
So open your mind and your mouth for this tasty, enlightening tour of Paris.
Oh, and that author who is second only to Hugo in France - George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, changed her name to a man's so she would be given a chance to make it as an author in a 19th century dominated by men. She wrote dozens of best-selling novels and plays but remains famous today, mostly, for her long relationship with composer-pianist Frédéric Chopin. Plus les choses changent plus elles restent les mêmes.