Les Trois Passions

Every country has its passions -- the Brits are known to be fanatic hobbyists, Americans have their baseball, football and basketball. And the French have their big, huge, gigantic love affair with cars. From this Peugeot electric car (circa 1941, built to save fuel during WWII) to the 2010 version of it displayed behind, French auto designers have led the way in innovative and sometimes crazy iterations of the horseless carriage.

Perhaps no French automobile firm sums up this philosphy more than the Citroën Car Company, founded in 1919 by André Citroën. And within the ranks of crazy-looking, beautiful Citröen cars, practically none is more treasured than the Citroën SM -- the one with the Citroën body and Maserati engine.
A total of only about 12,000 of these cars came off the factory floor between 1970 and 1975. Of these, less than 2000 ended up in the US and Canada. Seldom seen on the roads in the States, one of them lives in First Valley, Inverness, California, where it is kept under wraps, constantly doted upon by its owner, and driven only on special occasions. However, here in France, they are more visible and collected with great passion.

This past week, at La Porte Versailles Exhibition Hall Number 7.3, (a vast space the size of several small towns), the 35th Retromobile held court, attracting thousands of vintage car fanatics. Along with the most glittering display imaginable of French, Italian (Bugattis!), Belgian, German, English, even a few American cars (Mustangs and 'Vettes), were an equal number of stalls selling model versions of all these cars, and endless aisles of stalls selling hard-to-find spare parts for the full-size models. Matthew spent over eight hours there on Saturday, absorbing everything Citroën SM he could see, breathe, touch and talk about, and proudly showing everyone photos of his own recently restored SM. By the time I got there, he had added another membership card to his growing collection -- SM Club de France. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the car. We will travel to Reims in May to join in the celebration. Stay tuned.....

Meanwhile, over at La Galerie Pinacotèque on Place Madeleine, an exhibition celebrating the Golden Age of Dutch Painting closes this week. Going to museums provides another kind of passion for Parisians. People have been queuing up for hours every day during the four months this show has been on. We joined the queue today -- cold, snow showers, biting wind at times -- and were rewarded by an astonishing display of over 130 paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, tapestries, silverware, and glassware by Dutch masters from Rembrandt to Vermeer, including Jacob van Ruisdael, Frans Hals, Jan van Steen, Paulus Potter, etc. etc. Really too much to take in on one visit -- the still lifes, the portraits, the landscapes, the depictions of village life. My eyes were glazing over by the end. Even though the place was packed, French art lovers are always polite, moving on from one work, to allow the next person to drink in yet another Rembrandt portrait.

And the third passion? -- well, guess who joined the Club Med Waou on Grands Boulevards and went for her first session today? - oui, c'était moi. A bit intimidating to enter a French gym's women's changing room and observe the, mostly, razor thin bodies that French women tend to maintain throughout their lives! But, here came my coach, Nathalie, maybe 23 years old and, thank goodness, with dimples in her cheeks and not one of those razor-thin bodies. Utterly charming, she led me through the various machines, and between the two of us, we managed to translate the kilos back into pounds, and come up with a program approximately the same as I usually put myself through at the West Marin Gym. The lighting throughout the facility is suitably muted, which means you can sort of forget that, at this point, you only manage 10 kilos on the chest press, where others effortlessly push four and five times that....

À bientôt!