In honour of Bastille Day tomorrow here is a little excerpt from the VERY soon-to-be-published My Grape Year. If you could like to race me to the finish of this latest instalment in my "Grape" series, just enter my contest to win a free week at the Grape Rental of your choice in Burgundy.
This excerpt comes near the end of the book, when Franck and I spent the entire night dancing at the 14th of July balls in Paris the day before I had to fly back to Canada.
***
A few hours later, Franck and I were nestled in a brasserie in the Sixth arrondissement. We just finished a dinner of a goat cheese salad, steak frites, and fromage blanc. This was all washed down with a strong house red, which made me teeter between joy and sadness every few seconds.
He reached over and checked my watch. “The balls will be starting.”
We paid up and stepped out into the Parisian evening. Every cell in my body rejoiced at how I was actually living this moment – French cars whipping by honking at each other, the warmth of Franck’s arm around my shoulder, the muggy air of Paris in the early summer, the whistle of firecrackers being set off by kids in adjacent streets, the jingle of a few francs in my pocket…
Better yet, I understood everything that was happening around me – every expletive yelled by the pedestrian who had just been cut off by a mobilette roaring around the corner, the chatter of lovers chatting at a café table we passed, the waiter taking an order…this was an entirely new life I was living and it hadn’t, in the grand scheme of things, taken that long to create.
Franck led us along several dimly lit back streets.
“How do you always know where you’re going?” I asked. “You never even look at a map.”
“I walked a lot when I lived here,” he said. “Kilometres and kilometres every day. There was always a new adventure waiting.”
We could hear the noise of the fire hall several blocks before we arrived. The street echoed with the sounds of laughter and loud accordion music.
People were spilling out of the courtyard of a large stone building. Strung across the courtyard in a half-hazard fashion were strings of multi-colored lights. A wine stand was set up at the rear of the courtyard and its menu was simple; a glass of red or white for the price of ten francs.
People were already dancing, young and old, chic and bohemian. Franck ordered us each a glass of wine served in plastic goblets. We sipped as we watched the festivities erupting around us. The night was warm, and tiny stars began to light up the sky like sparks. I put my empty glass back down on the table and Franck followed suit. He swept me into the middle of the dancers and we lost ourselves in the accordion music. He spun me around and around until the revellers surrounding us became a blur and I felt like a small part of a much greater whole. Nobody in the crowd hung back on the sidelines. If they had no one to dance with, they danced anyway, and were soon swept up into the frenzy of celebration.
We humans need this, I thought. We need to let go of the routine of our everyday lives and just celebrate the mere fact of being alive. The French were awfully gifted at that.
Soon Franck took my hand, and led me out of the writhing mass of dancers. We walked for about ten minutes, laughing and enjoying the site of the fellow revellers out in the streets before we ducked into the next fire station for another glass of wine and into the whirlpool of another celebration.
The night stretched out from fire station to fire station, from neighborhood to neighborhood.
At about five o’clock in the morning, the sky began to pale, to welcome a new day. The day I dreaded since I met Franck. The day I had to leave him.
“I know a brasserie not too far from here that is open all night,” Franck said. “Should we go and rest our feet?” Mine were throbbing from all the dancing, so I agreed.
In the brasserie we huddled together on the leather seat. I inspected my blisters, which were impressive, both of us agreed, and we snuggled as we waited for our order of two large café au lait with croissants and jam.
The chime of a church bell rang six times.
“That was the bell at Nôtre-Dame,” Franck said.
Normally I would have loved that fact, but it only drove home that my time left with Franck was no longer measured in days, but in hours and minutes.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Franck observed.
***
