Janice MacLeod - Dear Paris: The Paris Letters Collection

To Christophe & Amlie,

my best souvenirs from Paris.

Contents

Introduction

Dear Reader,

The Paris Letters project began in a caf in Paris. I was filled to the brim with the desire to share all the treasures I was finding in my new city. I had recently discovered the illustrated letters of Percy Kelly through my friends Karen and Rob while visiting them on a trip through the UK. His combination of art and words sent as a letter to a friend was magical. A letter would be the perfect art form to share Paris through my eyes. Plus, I was investigating a charming new beau I had met in Paris. The lovely Christophe and I had locked eyes on rue Mouffetard, a market street in the Latin Quarter. He was roasting chickens at the boucherie . I was sitting at a caf across the narrow street. Soon, other things began to click, and I moved in with him. He didnt speak English. I barely spoke French. He was a butcher with sharp knives. Logically, this was a bad idea, but we leaned in anyway, as if forces beyond our control were magnetizing us to each other.

The details of this little love affair appeared in my book Paris Letters, which is where I describe just how I came to be an artist in Paris by creating illustrated letters and mailing them out to those who subscribed on my Etsy shop. Some of the letters in the volume before you can be found in Paris Letters . Other bits of artwork and words from the letters were reconfigured as journal entries in the subsequent book A Paris Year , a travel journal of my time in Paris, which contrary to the book title, was a great deal longer than a year. In fact, my little project spans the time from 2012 to 2020. Most letters made their splashy debut in mailboxes of loyal subscribers. I also created a few travel letters and added the most popular, since life in Paris tends to include travel.

The letters presented here could be considered at best a best-of album, or at least a most-of album. Once I reached the 0-letter mark, I noticed my binder of letters was getting thick and heavy. My subscribers who dutifully added their letters into their own binders felt the same. We wanted something easy to handle and flip through, something to slip into a bag for perusing on a park bench or caf, something to sum up the project nicely. I think this volume does it.

When I first arrived in Paris, I felt like I was late. All the museums and plaques and galleries referred to events that happened already: Napoleon, the Revolution, the Belle poque, the Lost Generation, and the Beat Generation had already come, conquered, and left an army of statues and books in their wake. But as I sifted through my letters in anticipation of this book, I noticed that so many significant events did happen between 2012 and 2020: elections, terrorist attacks, the World Cup, the Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vests) demonstrations, the Notre Dame fire, and the loss of icons like crooner Johnny Hallyday, chef Paul Bocuse, and designer Karl Lagerfeld. Stuff happened. And stuff happened to me, too. These letters hint at my own history with Paris. I arrived alone, fell in love, started a business, married, wrote books, had a baby, survived cancer, and still managed to write, illustrate, and send out letters to thousands of people around the world month after month. My book Paris Letters ended up on the the New York Times bestseller list; A Paris Year was hailed as one of USA Today s most beautiful books; and the letters themselves were studied in an Oxford University textbook, which astounds me to this day. Pas mal. So it seems I wasnt late. I was just getting a taste of the top layer of a thick mille-feuille of Paris history.

The letters are addressed to ine (Pronounced aahn-ya, rhymes with lasagna), who is my lovely friend who has written letters to me for ages. There is one exception: this is the letter written in March 2014 featuring Caf Le Papillon. This letter was written to a lady named Patricia Lutz. She subscribed to everything I had. There was a moment in time when I had started an offshoot series of letters. I had one subscriber: Patricia. Years later, her family would contact me to let me know that she had passed away suddenly and they had found all the letters tucked in a drawer, including this particular letter, of which I didnt even have a copy. On the day I wrote the letter, I was sitting in a caf (quelle surprise) and thought I should take it home and make a copy. But I was on the other side of town, my feet hurt, and the post office was nearby. Plus, I never thought Id need it for an anthology. I folded it, stamped it, and popped it in the post. Thankfully, her daughter Bernadette was able to send this humble author a copy. Now I continue to send and address letters to Bernadette, but I write them for Patricia, whose ghost, I hope, is peering over Bernadettes shoulder to read the latest missive.

Some letters are missing because I cannot bear to look at them again and will not subject you to the horror. There were some real stinkers. If you own a letter from me that didnt end up in this book, burn it. And Im sorry. Ive also gone back and edited, smoothed out some lines, and repainted as I bettered my skills. So if your letter doesnt look like the one presented, I hope the edit presented here is considered an improvement. Finally, a word about endless optimism. Thats what these letters reveal. When you really think about it, Paris history is a bloodbath. So many murders, wars, and plagues. And today, the disgruntled Parisian has even become clich. To deal with the strikes, leaky pipes, high prices, crime, and air quality on a daily basis requires a tough skin. Despite all this, I love her. I love her though all this, perhaps because of all this. She is able to feed my curious mind month after month, year after year. What other city can say this? Rome is so good at being Rome, with all those brilliantly lit ruins, but it does lean a little too closely to one time period for me. New York, too young. London, already covered by deep divers, like those scholars from Oxford and Cambridge who are compelled to investigate and write about something, but nationalism keeps them close to the clotted cream and Marks & Spencer. For me, the only other place that comes close to Paris is the whole rest of France, which shares the rich history but loses marks on the vast space in between. In Paris, its all crammed into one crooked street after another ... this is where so and so lived, and just down the street, so and so lived here. They could have walked by each other had they not been born a hundred years apart. In Paris, they can easily be connected by a street, an artistic style, or a caf they both frequented. Just connecting two famous thinkers who lived in Paris on the same street can have me pondering them for days. Did they have similar thoughts about the same cafs? One of them angry that a new modern caf opens, then a century later, the other delighting to have this old relic at his doorstep. This is the kind of thing that ends up in a letter.

My final letter is at the end of this book. Ive had such fun writing about my dear Paris, one letter at a time. I still have these and other Paris art selling in my Etsy shop, which astounds me. Before I started this project, there wasnt even a category for letter subscriptions on Etsy.

Now, industrious artists are sending letters about their gardens, their cities, and whatever else. I arrived in Paris when people had forgotten about sending letters (email being so much easier and not requiring a stamp), but my little letter biz stirred up something. People picked it up again. There is, indeed, still a thirst for fun mail. And I have garnered many pen pals who started as subscribers and sent me letters in return. For this, I am glad. We could all use a treat in the day, and having a fun letter arrive in the mail is indeed a treat. The letters had a great run, and letters from the archive are dutifully sent out daily to those who order from my Etsy shop, but its time to get back to, or start, something else. Im not sure what that looks like, but I had no idea when I landed in Paris that Id be doing this for the next decade of my life. And now ... what will I do with this one wild life of mine? Not sure. But I think Ill ponder the idea at a caf around the corner.