A Parisian Advent of Delights- week 2.

"The Ladies Paradise"

It’s been “one of those” weeks and even if I’ve kept up with publishing one delight per day (with one exception- but as Ross Gay- the Delights man himself says- “blowing it off” IS a delight. So, with his permission, I’m declaring that one day missed is actually fine.) I’ve often felt overcome with emotions and some holiday and work related stresses. Writing this essay is a welcome opportunity to sit for a while and to slow down during this agitated period. I hope you’ll join me.

Still, amidst the stresses, collect delights I did. And it’s an interesting exercise for many reasons. Delights, as Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights explains it, are different from pleasures. Pleasures are lovely things: a piece of bread that you tear off the still warm baguette on your way from the bakery or noticing an interesting face ( as Zadie Smith writes in her wonderful essay “Joy” that you can read here Zadie Smith – Joy | Genius) are pleasures. Their “…end brings no great harm to anyone, …, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth” to quote Smith again.

Delight is different. It includes a feeling of transience and loss, of the fragility of beauty and life itself. Ross Gay says: “ I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both “of light” and “without light”. And both of them concurrently is what I’m talking about. What I think I’m talking about. Being of and without at once.”

Writing a haiku is a practice in delight. That short poem is like a tiny feathered ball of a bird that we hold ever so lightly in our palm. A haiku captures a moment, a moment that is here and then gone. That strange mixture of “terror, pain and delight” that Zadie Smith talks about.

That feeling of delight, with its bitter sweetness, has washed over me, when I was standing in the forest last Sunday, basking in some unexpected and brief sunshine. Tiny birds were softly chirping and gliding- falling around me from the top bare branches of high trees that stretched into the blue sky.

Long limbs of trees

By birds like droplets

Awakened.

As I’m looking over the delights written down this week, I see how many of them are found in words. For example, this new one I’ve discovered -beautyberry. Now I like this shrub with its bright purple berries even more.

Another “wordly” delight- this essay by Zadie Smith that I’ve referenced above. Just like the birds in the forest, Smith’s words glide and assemble themselves into sentence, like beautiful threads of pearls. Words are magic- with them we create the worlds that forever appear in the minds of the people who read them. But most of all- in the best of cases- they capture this very instant of magic. Here one second and then gone…

In big part my overwhelm this week was due to the fact that I’ve been acutely aware of how little daylight we’ve been getting. The darkness greets me in the morning when I go to work and envelops me on my way back. More than that- the sky over Paris has been perpetually cloudy lately. The city is still beautiful- maybe even particularly so, as everything grows calmer and slower, in the shroud of sepia colours. Yet, when the feeling of despondency starts creeping in, when one feels the need for some contrast and brighter colours, there is one solution that never fails: the lights of Grands Magasins.

According to the Parisian Tourists Bureau there are 8 department stores (Grands Magasins) in the French capital that are not to be missed when visiting. Shopping anywhere, but especially in a big department store doesn’t even start to make it on my list of delights. But their Christmas window displays: temporary – and made delightful by this impermanence- are slices of pure magic.

Le Bon Marché is the oldest department store in the world to still be open. In 1852, a French businessman down on his luck, Aristide Boucicaut launches Le Bon Marché and with it a new approach to shopping. The building itself is an elegant palace of glass drawn by Louis Boileau. This lightness made possible by the metallic structure created by non other than Gustave Eiffel. No surprise then that this year’s Christmas displays had for their main theme the celebration of the Eiffel Tower.

Shopping becomes a leisure activity and the department store a place where women can go to escape their duties for a while. Boucicaut and his wife, Marguerite Guérin, made it possible for the customers to touch the products and even try them on, simply walk around to “have a look”, meet their friends for coffee. Women are able to leave the house without their husbands (what husband in his right mind would accompany his wife for an afternoon of shopping?).

The Boucicaut couple instituted such things as regular sales, selling by mail order or making the collections seasonal. Their employees got one day of -payed- leave per week as well as a retirement fund and had their healthcare expenses paid. Young women from all regions in France came to apply for a job. Next big department store to open is Le Printemps in 1874, followed by Galeries Lafayette twenty years later. Then, Macy's in New York (1896), la Samaritaine (1900) and in 1909 Selfridges in London.

I chose a cold and grey Monday morning to go see the window displays. As I was getting closer, already being drawn in by the lights that I could see at the end of the street, I heard the music- some old French melodies. The store was reaching out its magic to me.

Galeries Lafayette is another department store where lights and magic abound. The window displays are more “consumer” oriented featuring some of the products on sale in the store, which is not the case with Le Bon Marché. But one forgets all about her « shopping list » when entering inside.

Two cousins from the Alsace region Théophile Bader and Alphonse Kahn have started their business venture in 1893 when they bought a small haberdashery (what a delight this word) at 1 rue Lafayette. In 1896, they owned the whole building and in 1904 they began their expansion to the boulevard Haussmann.

Les Galeries are situated not far from the Parisian Opéra and I found some parallels between these two institutions. Mostly the store becoming a stage: a place to show yourself and to be seen just as much, if not more than to buy. Just look at this structure- the whole interior of the store is structured around the central hall- a stage under the cupola.

Feeling of delight is like a gasp, beauty so perfect that it almost hurts. It seems fitting to finish this essay with an image of the glass walk that is installed during the Christmas holidays right under the central cupola in the Galeries Lafayette.

More delights to come next week and meanwhile don’t hesitate to share yours and to press « heart » under the post as it will both help bring this post to more people and just simply delight me.

Thank you so much