Small Things

I think it must be Paris. My usual iron-clad, sardonic posts mellow sometimes in the warmth of the sun and strange, delightful small events which are an inevitable consequence of living in one of the most painfully rich and beautiful cities on the planet.

The other day, in Le Marché des Enfants Rouges just off the rue de Bretagne in the Haut Marais, we had lunch with a  a pastry chef from Guadeloupe – talented beyond belief, on her way to becoming famous and a warm, affectionate friend. 

She fits perfectly into this eclectic milieu. Italian coffee, Breton crèpes, a sulky, bewhiskered flower-seller, Moroccan street food - it's all here. The market is the oldest in Paris, on the site of an orphanage established in 1534 by the Diana of her time, Marguerite of Navarre, wife of Henry II, the red dresses signifying the children were in the care of the local charity. It closed at the beginning of the seventeenth century and has been a market ever since.


Her website is here. My apologies for reproducing some of the images.

She gave us delicately flavoured pastries, the whole being more than the sum of their parts. Chocolate from Madagascar and wild raspberries which tugged momentarily at a piercingly vivid childhood memory.