Antwerp is my home town, so Paris is about good two hours away by train. I must admit that I have a troubled relationship with Paris. The romance of eating baguette with Camenbert for a week wears thin when there is no money for anything substantial. The good for me in Paris was a small café where French poet Jacques Prévert read poetry, seeing King Lear in the Odeon as directed by Giorgio Strehler in 1978 and Le theatre du soleil from Ariane Mnouchkine... Yet I also had to work one time in Paris as an interpreter and nobody could take care of my kid, so she ended up at the people organizing some folk dancing she barely knew... The sadness on the 15th floor of a sterile hotel in an bleak suburb rushes back thinking of it now. I almost gave up my job over that. But then there was the rue des Arts and my late husband meeting Madame André Besnard speaking  about the show they sold out...

All is changed

nothing stays the same

but the street

on which the changing

walk until words

of past

hurt

for lack of a tomorrow

The fading star

of laughter lost

hears but the

murmur of memory

on rue St André des Arts

meeting Madame Françoise Besnard

Later came the two week cultural course, enjoying Montmartre and Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, the architect and sculptor, who was student of Rodin and teacher of Giacometti. His Atelier is to be found in the stables of Montparnasse when Montmartre got too expensive. He also designed and decorated the 'Theatre des Champs Elysee", Place de l'Alma. After admirering his anti war work I slowly enjoyed my 9 € petit café in Café de Flore and watched the city go by and made my peace with Paris.