#The Paris Affair

[lgbtqreads]

Queer Histfic Set in Paris, Part II

For part I, click here. The Disenchantment by Celia Bell (1670s-80s) Mademoiselle Revolution by Zoe Sivak (1790s) Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis (1866) The Paris Affair by Maureen Marshall (1886) An Island Princess Stars a Scandal by Adriana Herrera (1889)

[magicalyaku]

Greetings! I just realized that all it takes to get rid of me is giving me a good videogame to play. I started playing I was a Teenage Exocolonist and it's so hard to stop! Why is it so good?! Aaah! Ahem. Anyway, welcome to Part Two of my big wrap up of all the books I read between April and July! The theme this time is France & Other Places! Yes, somehow France got lumped in with all sorts of otherworldy realms. :P

A Paris Affair (Maureen Marshall): Not sure why my brain thought I'd get something like In Memoriam with this. It's historical fiction as well but otherwise they have nothing in common. If I had to compare it, it'd be to Will Darling by KJ Charles (which I loved). A capable protagonist, a sly, lying, and handsome rich guy, and conspiracies. It was fun! Vivid. It made me want to actually go and look at the Eiffel Tower again. Like, I've been there as a child but it's not that special for us nowadays, right? But reading about its construction and the discourse about it, it started to feel a little special. I also liked the historial bits about Parisian culture und such. I'm not into history at all, but getting small bits in my books is nice.

The Alchemy of Moonlight (David Ferraro): Major content warning for spiders in this one. There are a few scenes in the first half of which one is really, really not fun if you can't stand spiders. Personally, I tried very hard not to think about what I was reading. /D I'm usually only bad with visual images but given that I just had an unfriendly encounter with General Spidermom and her hellspawn in my bathroom I was a little unamused. Anyway, the rest of the book was fine. (Just fine.) It's apparently gothic but despite the crawlycrawly and the old castle and the ghosts and secret tunnels, the vibe was a little lost on me. It's also set in France and apart from the occassional croissant it didn't feel French at all. The Paris Affair? So French, so lively! This one? Could have been any European country with nobility. As for the love interests, one was too good to be true (meh), the other one started out toxic, but was redeemed (meh as well). The ending, well … In some ways, it turned out pretty good (I did went woah! at one point). In others, I thought it was a little easy (didn't feel that relationship solution. Seemed to me more like "I don't want to decide, so I'll take the easy way out.") And the protagonist … he wasn't terrible. I just thought he must be the prettiest thing alive if every guy falls for him at first sight. And I wish we would have been told how his aunt knew about his preferences? Usually, in this type of story, it's revealed that the hero had like one experience with the stable boy or some lord's son or whatever, but there's nothing in here. He had never talked about it before and yet his aunt knew well enough to want to send him to an asylum of all things! Give me details! All in all, it was entertaining to read, but in the end it was just fine.

Otherworldly (F.T. Lukens): This is the book that held up the entire post. I thought maybe I'll remember something about it later! I didn't and I feel bad about. I have no recollection of the time and place I read this either. But that is how it is. It's a solid book, I'd say, otherwise I would have something to nag about. 8D Nah, Luken's books usually are good. Cute, adventurous, ultimately positive. And the cover art is beautiful.

The Diablo's Curse (Gabe Cole Novoa): This is the sequel to A Wicked Bargain. Do you have to read it beforehand … probably not? Dami is the only recurring character and there are only a few allusions to the first book. I certainly didn't remember much except the general setup around el Diablo and the contracts. And that I had some issues with Mare and how the plot progressed as in "I have to save my dad, but I'm here doing nothing for two months". That didn't happen in The Diablo's Curse! The first part is so fun with the dynamic between Dami and Silas, and afterwards it's very focused and always going forward with just the right amount of tension. Also, I just like Dami. And I like, intended or not, how their gender fluidity parallels their upbringing (as in no human culture to tell them how to be, and that paired with an adaptable body). I enjoyed reading this a lot!

Nightmares in Paradise (Ring of Solomon 2) (Aden Polydoros): I faintly remember being a little disappointed by the first volume because I wished it would try a little harder and dig a little deeper. This second volume does that, you know, a little, I think. I'm not the biggest fan of the writing style with its million pop culture references, but I can imagine kids loving it. Also, I have to give the author credit for actually writing different than in his books for older readers. I liked this better than the first volume. Grumpy Ash is good and he doesn't behave like one of the kids. I was a little shocked how easily they kill off three children in the beginning. Like wtf, can you please think about that for two seconds, dear protagonists? Never mind the main bully guy, but what about the other two? That was a little weird. Other than that, the story takes place in the Garden of Eden and has some more biblically accurate depictions of angels and a lot of "they can either be good or bad" and I wonder how actual Christians think about this. :'D

That's it for Part Two. Two more to go! Next up will be Gay Adult Fiction series. And August is almost done as well haha …

[emptymasks]

After years of saying I will make cute lil chibi European musical stickers I have finally done it! Forgive me for drawing more Der Tod's than any other character, I'm biased towards him. Hopefully I covered most of everyone's favourite Euro musicals.

They're spread across 2 listings because Etsy only lets you have a max of 70 options in the drop down. Volume 1 has German and Dutch musicals and volume 2 has French and Russian musicals.

All the musicals here: 3 Musketiers / 3 Musketiere, The Count of Monte Cristo / Der Graf von Monte Cristo, Der Besuch der Alten Dame, Elisabeth das Musical, Demon Onegin, The Last Trial, Ludwig2, Master and Margarita, Mozart das Musical, Mozart l'Opéra Rock, Notre Dame de Paris, Rebecca das Musical, Roméo et Juliette, Rudolf Affaire Mayerling, Schikaneder, Tanz der Vampire, Vivaldi.

I can’t link to my Etsy without risking Tumblr hiding the post from tag search results, but the link is in my pinned post, my carrd, I’m emptymasks on Etsy. Reblogs help support artists more than likes ❤️

[ID: Individual pixel art chibi drawings of 70 characters from various European musicals (listed above) that are available as stickers. These drawings are also available as badges where they are placed inside circles to show what they will look like as physical button badges, some of them with plain colour backgrounds and some with 1-3 different pride flags as examples of how you can customise the backgrounds.]

[tomato48]

CARS IN MOVIES

↳Nous irons tous au paradis (1977)

Réalisation : Yves Robert

Directeur de la photographie : René Mathelin

[toutplacid]

Best Affaires, angle rue des Pyrénées / rue de Bagnolet, Paris 20e – rotring 0.20, carnet nº 110, 11 juillet 2016.

[frances-baby-houseman]

We are still trying to finalize a contract on this house (a 100yo house has a lot of problems, my friends!) and there are TOO MANY LAWYERS involved. Adam is a lawyer, and he asked his uncle for a recommendation to represent us, so we have that lawyer (Steve) plus Adam's uncle has not excused himself so we also have him involved (Kenny). This is too many cooks! (too many cooks!)

We had a zoom with our inspector yesterday and he said be careful, a lawyer can protect you right out of a deal and YEAH. Kenny you need to stop asking questions! Adam put what we wanted for credits with the advice of the inspector (who I love and is my friend Marti's husband, he is GREAT, if you are buying a house in the chicago area I cannot recommend him more highly), Kenny does not need to keep offering his thoughts!!

Ugh I just want to start decorating!!

[alexlacquemanne]

Un éléphant ça trompe énormément (1976)

Réalisation : Yves Robert

Directeur de la photographie : René Mathelin

[filmap]

Chronique d'une liaison passagère / Diary of a Fleeting Affair Emmanuel Mouret. 2022

Cinema 11 Bd de Port-Royal, 75013 Paris, France See in map

See in imdb

[oh-hamlet]

I'm not usamerican and I deeply dislike the rhetoric of painting half the country evil and beyond saving for voting for a candidate who effectively ran on bringing petrol costs down. But it sickens me that a sexual predator and convicted felon who spews lies and narcissistic hate and cares not one whit for the world outside the golden walls of the usa can sail past the electoral posts and have all his vicious narcissism vindicated and more. Talk about an ego boost! I bet he's walking on air. Whatever. It's just incredible.

[archive-z]

it’s post-yr-wip wednesday, so enjoy more scenes from my forthcoming follow-up to krapp’s last tape, this time ft. events from the viewpoint of alice molloy, 1985-1989 ✨ all yr canon-typical content warnings for disordered substance use, pregnancy trauma, AIDS crisis-related death, child endangerment, codependent relationships with multiple concerning/unethical power differentials, etc.

“What mad Nijinsky wrote

About Diaghilev

Is true of the normal heart;

For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone.”

from “September 1, 1939”, by W. H. Auden 

It’s 1986 and Alice Molloy sits on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. She has been Alice Molloy for, approximately, the past thirty minutes. She is twenty-five years old. She looks out across Van Ness Avenue, at the War Memorial Opera House. She’s never been to the opera before. She’s never been married before, either. 

She rolls the name around in her mouth: Alice Molloy, Alice Molloy, Alice Molloy. She likes it. She feels like a snake that’s shed its skin, and now relaxes on the warmth of a sunned rock. She wonders how long it will take her to forget that she had any other name before this one. 

There is another her, maybe — scared and strung out — still inside, wandering the atrium. Maybe there is another her buried in a grave in Evergreen Cemetery. 

But this Alice, the one here on these steps, in this waning late afternoon sunlight, is Alice Molloy. She is Alice Molloy, with her newborn daughter, and her new husband, and their second-floor, one bedroom apartment near Buena Vista Park.  

—

December 6, 1985. The CDC recommends delaying pregnancy until more is known about the risks of mother-to-child transmission of AIDS. As of December 1, there have been 217 reported cases of AIDS among children under age 13, and 60% of them have died by the time of publication.

In Paris, their apartment is cold and there’s black mold around the windowsill. Daniel has a persistent cough. Alice wakes up nauseous. 

Three months ago, in San Francisco, Daniel gets an advance for a novel and insists they spend it all right away. 

Though he’s covering with bravado, Alice can tell he’s nervous. He’s never had more than a couple hundred dollars to his name, and never expected to have his sobriety tested in this manner either. 

They book two transatlantic tickets to Paris and a sublet in the Latin Quarter.

Alice wants to chainsmoke at café tables on crowded streets and imagine stories about passersby while Daniel scribbles in his notebook. She wants to go dancing. She wants to see the Mona Lisa. Alice is twenty-four, Daniel is thirty-two.

(Over the past several months, Alice has planned more funerals that she cares to count. She is perpetually in the final hospital visit-cremation-memorial service cycle. As the most junior member of the organisation, her duties tend to be administrative: making payments and filing bank receipts. By cash and by cheque, payments are made to the crematorium, the ambulance, the reception hall, to the sandwich caterers, to the company that rents the folding chairs and plastic table cloths, to the leaflet printers, and the delivery trucks. At the end of it all, someone has to fold up the chairs and turn off the lights. That someone is Alice. 

There is an impersonality to the deaths, she finds. Sometimes people with bring a framed photo of “the deceased” to the memorial service — a sister, a daughter, a girlfriend, a roommate, a friend. When there’s no photo, she often pictures Raequel. Twenty-two now? Would she look older? Or younger? Paris presents itself as a respite). 

Paris’ crisp October turns to a drizzly November and finally to a frigid December. Any argument that sparks between Daniel and Alice is swiftly resolved by swallowing one’s pride and huddling together under their singular scratchy wool blanket for warmth. 

In Paris, Daniel has coughed for three months. He’s smoking his packs twice as slowly because he has to take bone-rattling, hacking coughs after every few drags. 

In Paris, Alice throws up three days in one week. 

(They have both danced around this. It is the heavy, silent thing they neglect to mention. Daniel is sick. Alice is sick. With what — who knows? Fading track marks testify to their rich, independent histories of indiscriminately sharing needles and swapping bodily fluids with, at best estimate, one quarter of the Bay Area’s creatures of the night). 

In Paris, over dinner, Alice tells Daniel she’s pregnant. 

She tells him she’s pregnant and he says yeah. 

He’s staring at the cigarette in his hand, poised over the ashtray and Alice can see the gears turning inside his head. France permits elective abortion up to ten weeks, she can see him thinking. She can tell he’s doing the math in his head. 

She tells him she’s pregnant, and he says yeah. 

They finish their meal in silence, but Alice is too nauseous to keep anything down so throws up again in the brasserie’s toilette. After she’s finished, she presses her head against the cool metal of the cubicle door and then kicks it violently several times. 

When she re-emerges, Daniel has already settled the cheque. He’s got  another cigarette in his mouth, this one unlit, and he’s chewing on the filter, eyes still staring into middle distance, gears still turning. Alice has stuffed her jacket pocket with extra towelettes in case she needs to throw-up in a public garbage can on their walk back to their apartment. 

—

“We both could have it —“ Alice’s train of thought twists and weaves, running the alternatives and counter-alternatives too fast to keep track of until its a circular, tangled mess. “It would be born sick,” she says. 

“We don’t know if we—“  

“But we could. What if it’s born sick? If it’s— if it’s not able to grow?”

“Failure to thrive,” Daniel supplies. 

“I know whatAnd, in a heartbeat of indignation, Daniel ask, “What? What do you want? Do you expect a child to consent to being born?”

“Maybe the hospital finds out! Maybe it’s — taken away from us. Because it’s our fault. How could we live with ourselves?”

“We make a choice. We live with it.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Look.” Daniel presses his hand to her cheek, and his eyes fixed on Alice’s. “If it’s wrong — does it matter?” His thumb traces her cheekbone, over the scar on her eyebrow, where it turns from dark to blonde. “All human decisions are made like this.” He kisses her eyebrow. He sounds surer and steadier than Alice has ever heard him before. “No parent knows what will happen to their kid. What does it matter if it’s wrong? There is no wrong. Just you and me. Me and you. And I want to be with you. Forever.”

Later, Daniel proposes and she says no. Things are falling apart. She doesn’t trust that the centre will hold.

On their last day in Paris, they go to the Louvre. Alice wants to see the Mona Lisa. 

—

San Francisco, 1989. Alice Molloy is twenty-nine. 

A week after the World Series Earthquake, Daniel’s mother calls him from Modesto to deliver the belated news of his father’s passing, the post-script to his unattended funeral. Daniel interrupts the daily pre-school drop off routine in order to purchase a self-obliterating quantity of heroin. 

It’s thirteen hours before Alice finds him. When she finally does, he crawls to her on his hands and knees. He clutches her legs, sobbing, shaking, and high. She says nothing to him, and her cool and implacable assessment of the situation is this: I take care of you, I’ve always taken care of you. I love you, I’ve always loved you. You and me, me and you. Daniel would not die here. Their dance would not end like this.

Her fingers grasp his matted curls, and she gently forces his head back to meet her gaze. With a thumb, she carefully wipes his grimy, tear-stained cheeks. She whispers to him: I forgive you. Of course I forgive you. How could you doubt such a thing? I have forgiven you of everything before now. I would forgive you every time, even this. 

And Alice knew this: Daniel was hers. And he would never runaway from her again. 

Outside, Lena is asleep in the backseat of the car. She is three years old. 

[messytop-lipkiss]

Illicit Affairs is safe, thank goodness 😅

[puttain]

King George VI’s and Queen Elizabeth’s bathrooms, finished in a spectacular and cutting-edge art deco fashion, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. Designed by August Labouret with furniture by Jacques Adnet.

[gregor-samsung]

Un Beau Soleil Intérieur [Let the Sunshine In] (Claire Denis, 2017)

[alpinelogy]

Erika lore of the day is the fact that a while back somehow one of my teachers ended up talking about the Habsburgs and somehow we got on the topic of racing and thats how my whole class learned about the existence of Ferdinand Habsburg, professional racing driver

[tomato48]

CARS IN MOVIES

↳Un éléphant ça trompe énormément (1976)

Réalisation : Yves Robert

Directeur de la photographie : René Mathelin

[workersolidarity]

🇨🇵 Violence Erupts during Protests Against Police Violence in Paris Today

Thousands of demonstrators marched across France today in protest of Police violence.

Unions told French media outlets some 80'000 people marched across France, with at least 15'000 in Paris alone.

Early in the Paris protest, violence broke out as hundreds of radical protestors broke away from the main march and began smashing business and car windows, ATMs and attacked Police cruisers.

At one point, a Police Officer in a cruiser came under attack from protestors smashing the windshield with a crowbar as the officer tried to escape in his vehicle but the road was blocked. The officer then steps out of the cruiser with his gun drawn.

The French Government denounced what it called "unacceptable violence" during the March. "We see where anti-police hatred leads." Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on X.

The Paris Police Chief Laurent Nunez told reporters three people had been arrested over the incident. Another three were arrested elsewhere in France during similar protest violence.