Le fête des rois = galette

If you're a Christian, you know that Jesus was born in a manger, in a stable behind an inn. There was no publicity, no arc lights (except a star), no viewers (except for some shepherds passing by).
     And then arrived three wise men from "the East", the Magi: Melchior, a Persian scholar; the white-bearded Gaspard, a king of India; and Balthazar, a Babylonian scholar.
     Of the Gospels, Matthew is the only one who mentioned them, which is interesting.
     But whatever the history - and who of us could prove any of it, either way? - in France the Wise Men are responsible for one of the sweet culinary wonders of the world: the galette des rois - the pastry of the kings (three). A delicious treat you can find on January 6th. (And now sometimes longer.) It's something I look forward to every year. This year I will miss it because of covid. Luckily, I have a French friend here, a baker/chef, who makes them.

Bonne année et bonne santé." Happy New Year and good health. It’s what you hear as soon as people sober up from their New Year’s Eve festivities (La fête de Saint-Sylvestre), which are monumental, especially gastronomically. For fear of losing your French nationality, you must start with oysters and then move on to other equally rich things, all washed down with the appropriate wine and finishing with champagne. And chocolates.
     Even if you get your lords a-leaping confused with your geese a-laying (but still always chime in on the “five gold rings” part), you know about the Twelve Days of Christmas. But do you know what it means? It starts the day after Christmas and runs for twelve days, ending purportedly in the day the Three Wise Men - aka Magi - arrived at the manger in Bethlehem bringing gold and frankincense and myrrh.
     To mark that day with a pastry (it is France, after all), French bakers invented the galette des rois - or if you’re in the south of France the brioche des rois (basically the same thing but with with a brioche base instead of puff pastry). Unless you drink a lot of champagne or tea with it, the plain galette can be dry, so personally I always buy a galette fourrée à la frangipane - puff pastry with almond paste inside.
     Also inside is a fève - once a dried broad bean, but more often now a ceramic figurine which can range from one of those Three Wise Men themselves to Mickey Mouse to... oh, just about anything. (One year I got a kind of tiny ceramic rolling pin that opened up and had a miniature recipe for clafoutis, a delicious custard dessert with cherries on top.) French dentists have erected a monument to the fève, because unsuspecting victims have broken many a tooth on it, thereby ensuring their livelihood. Should no dental catastrophe ensue, the person who finds the fève is declared the king or queen and given a golden cardboard crown to wear. (It comes with the galette.) Sometimes they’re supposed to buy the next galette, but that may be the baker’s ploy; other times they just get to kiss everybody.
     The brioche des rois is indigenous to the south of France, and is fashioned in a semi-circle, reputedly to mimic the turbans of the Magi. The candied fruit on top is just to brighten up a short winter’s day by adding a bit of color... and to sucker children into eating it. (It’s similar to the Italian panettone, which had always been by far too dry for me until a smart friend told me to make it as French toast, and now I love it!)

But the New Year is more than just pastry.
     First of all, French people don’t send Christmas cards. Perhaps that’s left over from the concept of it’s being a religious festival and all minds should be on God. For whatever reason, cards are sent, but later, to wish a happy new year. They can be sent any time during the month of January, but I’m convinced that the date on which you send them is perceived by the French as an indication of what kind of person you are. (Do you procrastinate? Or are you the timely sort?) The French can be very judgmental. And of course you must add a little handwritten message, although those typically American “yearly state of the union” enclosures are not required.

And then there’s the Bonne Année handshake/kiss (depending on how well you know the other person). Ah yes. This is the true New Year’s test of French-ness. But not this year, because of covid.
     The rule is that you must wish a Happy New Year to everyone around you - not only family and friends but also anyone with whom you have dealings, even on a customer/shopowner basis. If you do a quick mental calculation of how many people you interact with in your daily routine, you’ll see that wishing them all Happy New Year can be daunting.
     And you must do it only once, because to wish them Happy New Year a second time just proves that a) you weren’t paying attention the first time around, b) they personally don’t merit being remembered as already having been greeted, c) you didn’t mean it when you said it, d) all of the above.
     If you live in France year-round, especially in a small community, it’s easy to keep track of who has been Bonne Année-d. If you start on January 1st, you may have a good chance of not giving double-greetings. But if you live in Paris, things can get iffy, given the number of people involved. And if you live in Paris only part-time, as I do, and so you start The Greeting Process part-way into the month... Well, to say you’re walking on eggshells is putting it lightly.
     Once, in mid-January, I went into the neighborhood five-and-dime/hardware shop, run by a nice Asian gentlemen originally from La Réunion, one of France’s overseas states (think Hawaii). I go in there several times a year, and I talk with the man each time. But still I’m far from a weekly customer who boosts his sales greatly. He greeted me with a big smile, came out from behind the counter, his hand outstretched, and said “Bonne année, Madame, et bonne santé”. With all the people who come through his shop, how did he remember he hadn’t seen me, in particular, yet this year?
     And it’s been the same thing with all the other shops. The butcher, the wine merchant, the newstand... Of course, maybe my periodic disappearances and reappearances make me stand out. Still, this is an acquired skill. I’m getting quite good at it myself after all these years.
     Or perhaps there’s a bonne année neuron in the brain and I've managed to turn it on.

Recipe: Moules marinières

I spent all the summers of my childhood on or near the Atlantic coast in the (then-)pretty part of central New Jersey (yes, there was one, on the Toms River... Island Heights and Seaside Heights).  I learned to swim in the almost-saltwater slightly upriver from Barnegat Bay, on which my father, in his youth, had learned to sail.  Spent my summers walking the sands, digging out clams, then cracking them open on any stones available.  We’d rinse the sand off in the seawater and eat them right there, feet still in the tides.  Couldn’t have been fresher.  (Maybe it’s not a good idea to do that any more, pollution having multiplied since then.) 

In spite of all that, I'd never eaten mussels.  Clams, oysters, crabs, shrimp, crayfish, yes.  But no mussels.

When I arrived in France to study at the Sorbonne in 1968, the seafood restaurants in Montparnasse, or the simple cafés that had shellfish on stands next to their entrance, caught my eye.  And set my stomach growling.

Luckily mussels weren't an expensive dish, even for my student finances, which were... shall we just say "limited".

And they were yummy.  

Plus they came with French fries.  Moules frites.

So if you can find fresh mussels, and you want to plan a dinner for your covid bubble where you can get your hands dirty on something delicious while keeping up a conversation, all accompanied by a dry white wine... this is for you.

To feed four people, you’ll need:

- 3-4 pounds of mussels, medium-sized

- one large white onion, diced

- 5 or 6 sprigs of parsley, coarsely chopped

- 1½ c white wine

- an optional stalk of celery, strings removed, then diced

- some freshly ground pepper

You’ll need to make sure the mussels are “clean”, which means no barnacles or seaweed still on the shells.  If there are any, just scrape them off with a sharp paring knife.  And make very sure the mussels are all alive, which means not opened.  If some are open, tickle their insides with the knife; if they’re alive, the shell will close.  If the shell remains open, you absolutely must throw that mussel out - it’s shuffled off its mortal coil and could make you very ill.

Once the mussels are clean, put them in a large pot, along with the onion, celery, pepper, and half the parsley.  Pour the white wine over them.  Cover and bring to a boil.  Cook for about 2 minutes, shaking and tossing the pot from time to time to make sure all the mussels are in the juice at one point or another.

       Check that all the shells have opened.  If not, put the pot back on the burner for a minute more.  You don’t want to overcook this or the mussel meat will be withered and less tasty.

Serve up with a slotted spoon into individual bowls, putting the broth in a serving dish.  Along with their own juice, the mussels will probably have given off some sand that was in the shell, so make sure you leave it in the pot.  Decorate with the rest of the parsley.  Couldn’t be any easier

Dig in while it’s hot.  (And provide a big bowl for the empty shells in the middle of the table.)

Serve with crusty French bread if possible, or Italian.  And a dry white wine.

By the way, all the alcohol will have evaporated in the cooking, so you don’t have to worry about serving this to underage diners or non-drinkers.  Trust me.

Out & About: Museums - Van Dongen and the Bateau-Lavoir

I’ve lived in Montmartre since 1970.  That’s longer than most of my neighbors have been on this Earth.
     Back in those days, the Musée de Montmartre was just a little house built in the 17th century.  That house has a name, the Maison du Bel Air (House of Fresh Air) and originally came complete with a vineyard, which is still there, next door but now separate.  The house was bought in 1680 by the successor to Molière, famous French actor and playwright Rosimonde, as his country home (at a time when Paris was far away by carriage).
     Centuries later, the little house is still there, now reputedly the oldest building in Montmartre, and is used for the museum’s permanent collection.
     But the building through which you enter, once in bad shape and uninhabited for decades, has now been totally renovated - in the style of the era though! - and houses the museum’s temporary exhibits.

This season it’s Kees Van Dongen, another Dutchman who moved to Paris, as did Jongkind, Van Gogh, and Mondrian.
     Invited by Picasso, Van Dongen moved into the now-famous Bateau-Lavoir, a long wooden building where artists lived and painted, side by side, in cramped, cold quarters.  Together, the two shared artistic inspirations, such as the various balls but also the Cirque Médrano, a circus that’s now disappeared but was still there when I moved to Montmartre.  (The two artists also shared women, including Fernande, who was Picasso’s mistress when they met... before becoming Van Dongen’s.)

Like many of his era, Van Dongen shows his classical training in his early works.  It served him well even once he had changed to his new love, fauvism, with its bright colors and the opulent silhouettes that were a slap in the face of his old friend Picasso’s cubism.  Sometimes his canvases seem unfinished, with those bright colors forming only a sort of frame around the subject, and both standing out against a blank background.
     His wide-ranging styles are obvious in one corner of the main floor where there are three very different works from one year, 1906.  Chinagrani, on the left, is a very minimalist depiction of the dancer of that name, all in blue and elongated.  On the other end is Le Cirque, an example of his colorful fauvist talent.  Between the two, Aux Folies Bergère is pure Impressionism.
     Also on this first floor, in a little alcove, are some works by his good friend Otto van Rees, including a lovely one of his lover, Adya in the Bateau-Lavoir (1904).

Upstairs are grouped many of the portraits from the 1920's that helped make Van Dongen rich, successful, and even mondain, which could be translated as “part of the glitterati”.  The first is of Marie-Thérèse Raulet relaxing in a typically Roaring Twenties dress, her eyes almost closed, her head resting on the sofa, her hand draped languorously over its arm.  It’s a very different style from Woman Sewing that hangs downstairs, painted with broad strokes to transmit more a feeling than a likeness.  In this later period of his life, Van Dongen became somewhat cavalier about art as a way of making a living.  “The essential thing is to elongate the women and especially to make them slim. After that it just remains to enlarge their jewels.  They are ravished.”
     In La Parisienne, the woman’s hands are painted in a much more traditional style, while her face is minimalist and one-dimensional.  Perhaps that is what he called primitivism?

In addition to his paintings, Van Dongen made a living from illustrations sold to various magazines throughout his career.  He was also in demand by authors, including Proust, who wanted him to illustrate their works.  Some of his creations are included in this exhibit.
     Most of the works come from private collections, but also from museums in Paris and Holland (Utrecht, Rotterdam, Amsterdam).  As with the Mary Cassatt exhibit at Musée Jacquemart-André, it’s a treat to have the chance to see works that have never before co-existed in one place - including in the artist’s studio, given that they date from different eras.
     The exhibit is small, as befits the setting.  But it offers a good representation of Van Dongen’s successive styles and periods.


Two “asides” to this visit.  One is a parenthesis:  Otto van Rees.  The other, at the end of the exhibit,  is a visit of Suzanne Valadon’s actual studio.  She, too, was one of the beauties Van Dongen pursued.


Van Dongen & the Bateau-Lavoir

Musée de Montmartre
12 rue Cortot; 18è
Métro: Abbesses or Lamarck-Caulincourt

01.49.25.89.39
https://www.museedemontmartre.fr

Until August 26, 2018

Daily 10-7 / closes at 6 pm Oct-March

9.50-12 & 7.50-9 €, free under age 10

Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, in Fontevrault Abbey

FRANCE 101

"But I know nothing about French history," you might say.
"Ah, but you do!" I would reply.
Robin Hood?  Richard the Lionhearted?  Prince John?  Sound familiar?
Religious?  How about Saint Patrick?
Or a bit harder now:  William the Conqueror?  Eleanor of Aquitaine?

Let's go chronologically.  England was a "green and happy land", as the hymnal says, until 1066 when William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, sailed across the Channel from France and defeated England's King Harold in the famous Battle of Hastings.  With that defeat, England's fate changed hands for two centuries.
English, which had flourished as a language, now was spoken only by the Common Man, while Latin governed the church and French, in its Norman version, ruled the castle.  For example, while English serfs raised and ate pigs, by the time they reached the Norman's table they were porc.  Sheep became mouton, ox or cow became boeuf, calf was veau and deer, venaison.  (Do those French words sound familiar?  If not, ask your butcher.)
In 1154, Henry, Duke of Anjou in France and grandson of William the Conqueror, was crowned king of England as Henry the Second.  Henry's wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had previously been Queen of France for 15 years, even going on the Second Crusade with her then-husband, King Louis VII.  But she was a bit too wild and sensuous for Louis.  They became estranged and the marriage was annulled so that Louis could remarry (Catholic country, no divorces).  That meant Eleanor's dowry was returned to her:  the entire province of Aquitaine.  Just as William had brought Normandy into the English realm with him, so Henry brought Anjou and Eleanor, Aquitaine.  Now the borders of England stretched all the way down the Atlantic (with the exception of Wales) from Scotland in the north to Spain in the south, and inland on the Continent almost to the gates of Paris in the tiny kingdom of France.

Chinon Castle

Now for the easy part.  Remember Richard the Lionhearted (think Robin Hood) and his evil brother Prince John?  Well, they are two of the sons of Henry and Eleanor.  And where did Richard die?  No, not in Sherwood Forest or on one of the Crusades, but at Chinon in France’s Loire Valley, at the castle where Joan of Ark later offered her services to the French king to help "throw the English out of France", services for which said English burned her at the stake.  And where are Henry, Eleanor and Richard buried?  No, not in London's Westminster Abbey.  Their graves are in the Abbey of Fontevrault, again in France's Loire Valley.
"But what’s this about St. Patrick," you ask?  Well, he was born in England, carried off into slavery by Irish raiders, then later after being freed studied at the Abbey of Lérins, on a tiny Mediterranean island off of Cannes.  Right next to the island of The Man in the Iron Mask (but that's another story).

So you see, you may never have set foot in France, or read about its history, but you know a lot about it.  You just didn't know you did.


Additional reseach:

Bayeux Cathedral

William the Conqueror:  go to Bayeux and see the famous tapestry woven by his wife Mathilda.
For Richard Lionheart, tour Chinon and its castle.
For Eleanor, Richard and son Henry, visit Fontevrault Abbey near Chinon.
For a touch of Aquitaine, try any Bordeaux vineyard or truffle farm in Périgord.
Joan of Ark - choose Chinon, or Lorraine where she was born, or Rouen where she was burned
For St. Patrick, take sunscreen, travel south and hop a ferry from Cannes to St. Honorat Island.

Out & About - King Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh

It’s a sunny day in Paris - finally! - and I’m walking across the 2½-acre Parc de la Villette, past the famous Baltard glass-and-iron structure (one of several) that was once the Poney Club where my children learned to ride when they were very young.
     Of course before that time, all these buildings were a meat market, replaced by a huge modern slaughterhouse that never slaughtered a single animal because all those activities were hygienically banned from within Paris and sent to the suburbs.  The never-used slaughterhouse was refurbished and is now the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie museum, with the Géode Imax theater behind it.
     Also within this park on the northeast edge of Paris are the new Paris Music Conservatory, the Cité de la Musique with its museum of all things musical, the Zénith concert and sports arena, the Philharmonie concert hall, the Grande Halle cultural center, a theater and... a riding school... for my grandchildren this time.

But I digress.
     Why am I here?  Because I want to see the “King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh” exhibit that’s playing in the Grande Halle.
     This will be a bit of a rerun for me.  Or rather a remake.  Because I saw these objects in the Tutankhamun Room of the Cairo Museum when I was there in 2017.  But they were all a hodgepodge, massed together in showcases with little breathing space for them to shine as solo items.  Here in Paris, knowing the French, they will be staged, highlighted, spotlighted in striking fashion.  It’s what the French do best.

And once inside, which involves standing in line, even with a press pass, I’m not disappointed.  The vastness of the building, with its high ceiling, makes for a spacious exhibit.  Sometimes only a few items in any one room... but multiple spectators, so that was a wise decision on the curator’s part.  And spotlights are indeed involved, the entire area being plunged into almost total darkness for maximum effect.  All the better to accent the goldenness of the 150 items, which sparkle from having been newly - and ever-so-carefully - cleaned before the show set out on its worldwide tour.
     I recognize Tut’s chair and bed from the Cairo Museum, as well as much of the jewelry, pectorals and statues.  But here they are even more striking in their visual solitude.  A solitude poles away from how they were found heaped in Tut’s tomb by Howard Carter in 1924.

      There's a golden statue of my old friend Horus, the hawk, with a magnificent disk above his head.  And a fan with the representation of an ostrich hunt in a chariot etched into its golden surface.
     Also striking against the darkness of the room are the alabaster objects:  a wishing cup and - at the very end of the exhibit, to bid us farewell - a statue of the young king, who ruled from age 9 only to age 19.  Ten years in the life of a boy whom we still talk about 3,342 years after the young pharaoh passed into eternity.
     In one showcase is a replica of Tut’s sarcophagus, fashioned out of a matte slate-grey material against which the crook and flail jump out at you.  Wondering why the sarcophagus is not part of the exhibit, I ask.  I’m told it was slightly damaged when it last traveled to Paris in 1967.  And so it doesn’t travel any more, to Paris or anywhere else.

But all the items on display here will be traveling around the globe one last time.  The tour launched in L.A. at the California Science Center in March of last year.  It took in $5 million from about 700,000 visitors, with the Egyptian ministry taking $4 for each ticket.  And that money will help pay for the new Grand Egyptian Museum still being built in Giza, across the Nile from Cairo proper and the objects’ former home in the Cairo Museum.
     Paris is the second stop on the tour, a six-month show.  After that, in the fall the Golden King exhibition heads across the Channel to London and then later on to Sydney plus six other cities including in Japan, Canada and South Korea.
     We’re told this will be the last time these objects are seen outside of Egypt.  After the tour, these golden treasures will join the others - especially the sarcophagus - in the Grand Egyptian Museum, not far from the Pyramids and the Sphinx.  The museum isn’t finished yet - and has had a difficult birthing, given the changes in government - Mubarak, Morsi, el-Sissi - since its ground-breaking.  According to an Egyptian archaeologist friend, “the conservation center in the museum has been active since 2014 or even before”, and Tut’s collection has been moved “to the labs of the conservation center to be cleaned and restored with more advanced methods that brought more beauty to the items”.
     For the first time, the entire collection will be on display in 2020 in one place:  at the very heart of the GEM in Giza.  And it will be the only place you will see anything of King Tut’s ever again.

King Tutankhamun

P.S.  If you want a look at something else from Egypt, how about the Luxor Obelisk in the middle of the Place de la Concorde.  Napoleon brought it back from his marauding in that southern land.  The second obelisk was also given to the French back then, but remains on site in Luxor.  France magnanimously told Egypt it could stay there, that they gave up their ownership of it, probably because of the intricate and expensive logistics of bringing it to Paris.  They got lucky with the first one.



King Tut:  Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh

Grande Halle de la Villette
211 avenue Jean-Jaurès; 19è
Métro:  Porte de Pantin

01.40.03.75.75

Until September 15, 2019

Daily 10-8 / Fri 10:30-8:30

22 & 18 € (2€ more on week-ends and holidays)

Out & About - Les Nabis et le Décor

Paul Ransom, Canards (Ducks)

Pretty much everyone is familiar with the Impressionists.  But what about what came after them?  What about the Nabis?
     The who?
     The Nabis.  They were opposed to Impressionism because they felt it was too close to reality, an opinion that I find a bit strange.  I mean, the very essence of Impressionism was that it was just an impression, not reality.  That’s what critics criticized about it.  But some artists felt that way, and they chose a word common to Hebrew and Arabic to explain their ambition to be something else, something new.  That word was Nabis, meaning prophets.
     The Nabis (1888-1900) were fascinated by Gauguin and by Japanese prints.  They tended to view their art as having more of a decorative role and wanted to erase the boundary between fine arts and applied arts.  That led them to work extensively in tapestry, wallpaper, stained glass and ceramics.  In their paintings, their style was more flat and colorful, with faces often left blank.
     Some of the names, such as Pierre Bonnard or Edouard Vuillard, may be familiar.  Others may be new:  Paul Sérusier, Paul Ransom, Maurice Denis or Ker-Xavier Roussel.

Vuillard

In the first room, the theme was women in the garden.  The piece I liked the most was by Vuillard, who painted nine panels for the living/dining room of his rich friend Natanson.  At Natanson’s death, the panels were split up and now live in several different museums and collections in several different countries.  My favorite shows mothers with children of various ages in a garden.  One, a boy in the foreground, has his back turned but it seemed to me that he was about to get up to some mischief involving a younger child close by.
     Of a much simpler style was Roussel’s “A Garden”, as seen through a window with four panes.  Again, a boy has his back turned to us, letting our imagination run free.  And a busy woman is half hidden by a tree.  What is she doing?  Is she caning the chairs we see?  And what can we say about those strange leaves falling from the trees above?
     Demonstrating the decorative side of Nabis art is Ransom’s “Canards” (Ducks).  The colors are bright - aqua-ish blue, light green, splashes of orange for flowers and on the duck’s bills and feet.  The vines create motion and the ducks are caught in various poses and activities.  It’s actually a draft for wallpaper, again linking fine and applied arts.
     That link was also evident in three pieces of painted china.  I preferred the simplest:   “Femme et Chien” (Woman with Dog), a Vuillard that uses only black ink strokes on white porcelain with just a touch of pale yellow for her hair, the dog’s spots and what might be the earth below.
     There you are; that’s my selection.

The Luxembourg Museum is rather small, which makes it comfortable.  But it can get congested fairly fast.  So be patient.

Edouard Vuillard, Femme et Chien (Woman with Dog)

Ker-Xavier
Roussel, A Garden

Les Nabis et le Décor

Musée du Luxembourg
19 rue de Vaugirard; 6è
Métro:  Rennes, St. Placide

01.40.13.62.00

Until June 30, 2019

Daily 10:30-7 / Mon 10:30-10

13 & 9 €

Les Saints de Glace

When you move to a foreign country, you learn certain new things that are cultural touchpoints to your new environment.
When I moved to France, one such discovery was the Saints de glace, the Ice Saints.
Being from the north of the States, I’m familiar with snow and ice.  In Houghton, way up in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an ice festival is held every February.  I went one year.  The snow on either side of the streets was literally higher than I am tall.  And the ice sculptures were amazing... and huge!
But the Saints de glace have nothing to do with that.
And they happen in May.
In Western Europe, there are varying amounts of snow in winter.  Paris gets very little.  But there are still overnight frosts to deal with.  Especially if you have a garden.  And especially if you’re a farmer growing fruit trees or wine grapes.
     And that’s where the Saints de glace come in.

Each day in Roman Catholic countries has at least one saint.  Sometimes two:  one male, one female.  In mid-May, days are usually warm (although not this year), with a sweater being all you need, or a light jacket.  But the nights are another thing.  Temperatures can drop quite a bit.
In France May 11, 12 and 13 are the Saint de glace, the Ice Saints days.  The 11th is (or rather was) for Saint Mamertus, archbishop of the city of Vienne in the Rhone Valley of Roman Gaul (i.e. today’s France), who died in 474.
The 12th is for Saint Pancras - of the London train station of the same name.  He was the nephew of St. Denis, patron saint of France, whose head was lobbed off by the Romans just around the corner from me, whereupon he picked it up and walked north, down the hill of Montmartre and across the plain until he finally dropped in a place now named after him, where a basilica was built and where all the French kings and queens are buried.  (Well, most of them.)  But back to the nephew.  Pancras is the patron saint of children, probably because he was beheaded at the ripe old age of 14 around the year 304.
May 13 is for Saint Servatius, who was the bishop of Tongeren, in what is now Belgium, and died near the end of the fourth century.  Although he was highly popular, he’s since been replaced on the calendar.  Legend says he was a cousin of Christ and/or John the Baptist and a descendant of Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary.

Horticultural advice in much of France is not to plant before the Saints de glace have passed.  Which is true for the north of the United States as well, and there even not before Memorial Day.  Especially as climate change has made many winters milder, causing plants to blossom and bud earlier.  Galileo and his pupils confirmed this weather pattern for the years 1655-70, reporting a cold snap over the days of the Ice Saints.  This year, wine growers are having an awful time, going to extraordinary lengths to try to keep their grape buds from freezing, or getting burnt by the morning sun hitting the frozen dew on them.
As I’m not here in my Montmartre hideaway much right now, and I don’t grow grapes, I’ve planted already anyway, just to cheer up my little private garden that went through a rough winter.  I have been bringing the pot of basil indoors though many nights.  The rest will have to fend for itself.

But the fun thing about these saints’ days has nothing to do with planting.  It has to do with homonyms, words that are spelled or sound the same but have different meanings.  In French there are saints - saints - and seins - breasts.  Both pronounced absolutely the same.  In other words, May 11-13 could be interpreted as the Icy Breasts Days.  I guess one would result from the other, if temperatures were low enough and if you dressed scantily.  Anyway, it always makes foreigners laugh when they first hear Saints/seins de glace.  And young French children also.
But we’re almost through them now.  One more day.  So button up.  And perhaps light a candle to those Ice Saints.