02/12/20

Who’s Your Daddy? There’s An App For That!

PHOTO: TheSultanette — Who’s your daddy? Prince Charming, anyone?

Valentines Day! That day when love conquers all with a little help from 1-800-FLOWERS. But will romance bring you the partner of your dreams when it comes to raising babies? You know, those bundles of joy that suddenly appear (and it better be nine months!) after the wedding bells?

A recent Wall Street Journal piece, “Apps Help Strangers Have a Baby Together,” offers a stunning rethink for finding a baby-mate. While conventional mores favor the romantically bonded mommy and daddy (or two mommy’s, two daddy’s) to rear a well-rounded rug rat, apps now provide another option. The Platonic Parenting Partner.

The Journal’s Family & Tech columnist and mother of three, Julie Jargon, defines the PPP as a “would-be parent who wants to share custody of a child without any romantic expectation.” Okay, you’ll miss out on the wedding, that special day when your Uncle Charlie will get loaded and say cringeworthy things, your best friend will screw your little brother, and you’ll amass a collection of blenders.

Accuse The Sultanette of being unsentimental but you’re too late. At a discreet French boite one evening, a worldly-wise and sophisticated harem member (aren’t they all?) offered a cogent argument against algorhymic child-rearing. As I dove into the saucisse and cheese balls, he submitted that a child is best nourished in an environment of loving, committed parents.

All fine and good, I conceded, quaffing back my Chateauneuf-du-Pape. But what about the couple that has reached a state of mutual nuclear destruction yet vows to stay together “for the children”? Is a child better off growing up in an environment of mutual antipathy or consensual parenthood? The PPP is a lot like a divorce, writes Jargon, “without the wedding or the arguments.”

She also points out what every over-worked, sex-deprived Millennial knows: Hacking one’s way through the jungle called establishing a career leaves little time or energy for cultivating a serious relationship. The steady rise in the cost of living has also delayed commitments to marriage and children. Maybe the passion for child-rearing after some life experience, brings with it a dose of pragmatism.

Jenica Anderson is a geologist, thirty-eight years old, and living in Montana. She is also a satisfied customer of the co-parenting site PollenTree. She tells Jargon that while her approach to creating a family might be controversial “the idealized version of a man and woman falling in love is short-sighted.”

Jenica began her search for a PPP when men she met locally didn’t share compatible views about child-raising. She connected on PollenTree with Stephan DuVal, thirty-six, a cameraman living in Vancouver.

“You’d be surprised by the number of young, professional straight men who want to have kids,” says PollenTree’s co-founder Patrick Harrison. The London-based app counts roughly 90,000 members since its 2012 launch – with 60% female subscribers and male subscribers evenly split between heterosexual and single gay men. Conception methods vary from in vitro and intrauterine insemination to old-fashioned flesh-pressing.

After messaging and phone calls, Jenica and Duval met. Jenica sensed that DuVal’s accumulated experiences in life favored his ability “to handle obstacles in uncharted territory with creativity and follow-through.” She liked the way he thought in unconventional ways. He lived ten hours away but that didn’t pose a problem because she believed he’d stick to the commitment “if things didn’t go according to plan.”

But where is the love, you protest! To this I remind my renegade followers that you didn’t get to a blog about “contrarian views on the rules of engagement” by following the herd. The Sultanette wagers that some of you might be celebrating this Valentine’s Day in various states of polyamory. Or trading Godiva truffles and deli flowers for whips and chains, for all I know. So maybe you can allow for more shades of grey than your precious fifty?

Jenica Anderson is pregnant. She and DuVal have met each other’s parents, shared their finances, and drafted a legal contract spelling out parenting responsibilities that will take effect after the baby is born – a daughter in June. It’s all signed, sealed, and soon delivered. Or is it? Even Jargon can’t resist popping the ultimate question: “Will their non-traditional union end up in marriage?”

“It comes up regularly in our conversations,” Anderson says, “but it’s not in the forefront.” DuVal admits to being “a romantic at heart but it’s not bigger than what we’re doing now.” Then was love lurking in those algorithms after all? If so, perhaps it’s all the richer for being inspired by shared values, not paper valentines.

Love will find a way, we’re told. But Shakespeare had another take. In The Merchant of Venice, Jessica warns her suitor Lorenzo that “love is blind and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.” So choose. Tying the knot or downloading the app. But hurry. Uncle Charlie is waiting for his invitation to the wedding.

11/26/19

Solo Travel Is Trending. Follow The Crowd!

Instagram posts with #solotravel just topped 5 million. Searches for “solo travel” on Google Trend have doubled over the past five years. These stats are brought to you by Nina Sovich’s Wall Street Journal piece “Alone Again, Blissfully” (Saturday/Sunday, 9/21-22). And this is not about boomers on cruises. According to Sovich, millennials are leading the way, and if you don’t know they’re in charge you’re on vacation in Siberia.

The easy explanation is that we’ve become a nation of commitment-phobics, our most intimate relationship with our smart phones. But Sovich suggests that beyond our technical devices, we’re discovering another significant other. Ourselves. And that rather than a sign of arrested development ”being alone is an expression of sanity and self-worth.”

I have cherished memories of traveling with Male Harem members (as much in the hotel room as out). But I can recall equally rich moments traveling with a favorite ménage à trois – me, myself and I. The Sultanette proposes that when traveling solo – not enclosed in the bubble of another – we’re more open to those around us. And the world responds. “People talk to you more when you travel on your own,” observes Molly Dunn, a brand strategist, single in New York City, who has caught the solo travel bug.

But even couples are loosening the knot to experience a solitary getaway. “Solo travel no longer means you are single” says Robin Brooks, director of marketing at UK-based Exodus Travels, who notes that more married people are traveling alone. Example: The couple from Austin, Texas, married with two kids under five. He’s in tech, she’s in a startup. They tag-team vacations with childcare, so they can pursue separate passions. “We all have our unique interests,” says Brooks. “Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you can travel with them.”

And single women are going four star. They make up nearly half of the clients of the high-end travel agencies in the Virtuoso network, and 300,000 members on the Solo Female Traveler Facebook page. So never mind that maître d’ in Vienna who piteously replied to me, “I’m sorry” when I told him I would be dining alone.

Unwilling to be maître d’ shamed, I made my way the following night to the renowned Purstner, known for its wiener schnitzel – pounded tender, delicately breaded, the size of a Frisbee. But getting there offered the downside of traveling alone – getting lost without a travel buddy to help make sense of the GPS. “Ah yes! Just take a right and two lefts” said every helpful citizen I stopped along the way, but no combination of turns yielded my destination.

Through sheer resolve for a schnitzel fix, I finally stumbled upon Purstner, and the maître d’ greeted me without a trace of contempt for my single reservation. “Excuse me,” I burst out by way of explaining why I was thirty minutes, “but how is it that everyone tells you to take a right and two lefts, but I never find my way?” He smiled graciously, leaned in and said, “Madame, what you must remember is that Vienna is a circle. One never turns completely left or right.”

I never lost my way in Vienna again. And I realized that day that if you just keep walking in narrowing circles, you’ll always arrive exactly where you need to be. Which brings me to a favorite destination on The Sultanette’s bucket list: Serendipity.

It was a chilly, dismal afternoon in Paris. I was rattled from the all-night flight, the passport line, the treasure hunt to my Airbnb in the quartier Bastille. A brief walk would clear my head. As I turned down a bleak Faubourg St. Antoine it began to drizzle. I passed a park populated by scraggly pigeons. Considered buying a Paris Match at a newsstand to practice my woeful French. Why had I fallen for that cheap flight so late in the season? Why was I … alone?

And then as if bursting from shades of grey to technicolor, Paris presented herself. Not the Eiffel Tower or Champs-Elysées or Hotel de Crillon Paris, but the Paris of the Marché Bastille. The street before me was lined with purveyors of piled-high pommes and poires, artichauts and champignons. And Parisians going about their day. Mothers with small children, workers on their lunch break, grandmaman with her shopping cart and faithful terrier.

At the end of this street, the marché opened into a lot bearing a trove of tchotchke’s – books and cooking pans, scarves and gloves, ashtrays, candles and costume bijoux. An hour must have slipped by when I realized I was hungry. I had retraced my steps to the food stalls on my way to finding a restaurant along St. Antoine, when I spotted a chalk board with one word that needed no translation. Couscous! An arrow pointed towards a nondescript restaurant behind a tower of cabbage heads.

Inside, I was greeted by blessed warmth and a smiling proprietress. With lunchtime over, I chose one of the four empty tables, placed my order, and watched her scoop it into a bowl from a trio of battered pots steaming on a tiny stove. After presenting it to me, she sank down at one of the tables to watch the crowds go by.

And as the spicy couscous warmed my bones and cleared my jet lag, we began to talk: How it was cold out there, and where I was from. How she had moved from Algiers with her husband and child, and life in Paris and New York. Is that really what we spoke about in our clumsy attempts at French and English? Did it matter? We were two women taking a pause from life on a rainy day at the Marche Bastille.

When you travel solo, you quickly learn that you’re not alone. It’s the world you’re traveling with. An interesting stranger, another story, and a new adventure waits at every turn. Join the crowd.

09/24/19

When French Fashion Went To War: Vive La Fashionista!

Is fashion liberating? Some say it encourages following the herd. But you won’t find a fashion victim on The Best Dressed List. That’s reserved for women who bend trends to fit their individual power, not the fashion police.

The history of feminism has been a story of good girls breaking rules and burning bras. We’ve always dressed, and undressed, for the revolution. So when The Sultanette learned of the exhibit, “French Fashion, Women & The First World War” at the Bard Graduate Center on New York’s Upper Westside, I put on my stilettos and sprinted across town for a look.

I had gotten a sneak preview at The National Arts Club in Gramercy Park, where co-curator, Maude Bass-Krueger, gave a lecture on the exhibit to the club’s dedicated followers of fashion. Illustrated with enticing images of the show’s vintage clothing, her presentation traced women’s emergence from suffocating layers of lacy feminine pretense to the satiny-sleek deconstructed look of the flapper.

The next Sunday, on one of those rare autumn weekends when New Yorker’s set aside their cell phones to commune with nature, I engaged in some Central Park reconnaissance on my way to the Bard Gallery for a walk through wartime France.

Colette was there to greet me. “War?” the exhibit quoted her as saying in August, 1914. “Until the end of last month it was just a word, impossibly grandiose.” Added to the shock, the opening salvo of World War One fell in the middle of the Paris fashion shows. War is hell.

Poiret at war. Photo from the Bard exhibit.

Over three floors, the exhibit demonstrates how the French fashion industry fought to maintain its premiere position throughout the war. Movie theatres were closed but fashion houses remained open. Couturiers like Paul Poiret were mobilized but he continued to take care of business from the front.

The prewar “lampshade” look was replaced with a less restricting crinolline de guerre. And because a woman of means was no longer expected to change five times a day to accommodate wardrobe-prescribed activities, the tailored suit was born.

As the war slogged on, the slaughter climbed to horrific numbers, morale hit bottom, and the economy took a dive, the fashion and textile industry prevailed, employing one-third of the working population. When the Germans tried to appropriate France’s fashion sovereignty with counterfeit magazines featuring looks stolen from Parisian fashion designers, the attempt was met with caricature and derision.

Mademoiselle Coco in wool jersey, the beach at Etretat, ca. 1913. Bard exhibit.

The war also launched the couture career of a little-known hat designer whose millinery store on the rue Cambon had begun to attract attention. When her loyal clientele encouraged her to design clothing for them, Coco Chanel’s smart, practical wool jersey creations made a splash in her first boutiques at Deauville and Biarritz.

But the real impact of the war on French women began when the war ended. “In one week Paris was a changed city,” the exhibit quotes British socialite Lady Duff Cooper. “The streets were full of women dressed in black.”

The war had left 600,000 French women widowed but it had also claimed 1.3 million soldiers. While the traditional mourning period had lasted up to two years – the widow shrouded in black until a three-month “half-mourning” period allowed for some white clothing and jewelry – it was time to repopulate.

Poster, National Day for Mothers of Large Families. Bard exhibit.

No longer needed in munitions factories, it was now a woman’s patriotic duty to be a baby factory. “France needs children,” reads a poster in the exhibit for National Day for Mothers of Large Families. Get back on the market asap was the message, but not too enthusiastically. If a woman appeared too available she was known as a “bad widow” or worse, a “merry widow.”

But not all French women were ready to report to the baby production line after a whiff of freedom. And this might be when women and fashion became most complicit. The Roaring Twenties, known in France as the Années Folles (Crazy Years) was as much female statement as fashion statement.

WWI bullet casing with fashion motif etching. Bard exhibit.

“Fashion now favored androgyny,” the exhibit notes, “and encouraged women to deemphasize their hips and breasts. The image of the ‘garconne’ became the template for the modern woman, who was to be both sexually and economically independent.” Suffrage was yet to come but women were voting for their freedom – from acres of lace and multiple daily costumes changes to a look that fit new life choices.

It took a war to change women’s fashions and attitudes. And now we can change our morals, our partners, and our sexuality. It doesn’t take the latest Chanel for that. It takes courage to be who you are. To ignore the voices that still inveigle and coddle us to comply. So what are you wearing to the rest of your life? C’est la guerre. Are you dressed for it?

“French Fashion, Women & The First World War” runs from September 5, 2019 to January 5, 2020 at The Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86^th Street, New York City.

08/22/19

Hidden Venice: A Love Story In Black And White

“The black knot of gondolas in the canal of Mestre is more beautiful to me than a sunrise full of clouds all scarlet and gold.” John Ruskin, 1841

Just when you thought it was impossible to see Venice in a new light, La Serenissima sheds her color to reveal her bare essence, as expressed nearly two centuries ago by the Victorian art critic, John Ruskin.

Dream of Venice in Black and White, the third installment in the award-winning Dream of Venice series, continues its intimate portrait of the Adriatic Queen, this time as an homage to the city’s most precious and threatened commodity – her private worlds.

Cristina Marson, 2017, La Pescatrice de sogni

You float through Dream of Venice in Black and White as you would weave among the canals in a gondola. And as you are drawn into the real-life Venice behind the legend, you realize it is the city’s covert existence, not its iconic branding, that gives Venice its magic.

Caught in the glow of lamplight, a gentleman in a fedora, straight out of a Simenon detective novel, glances furtively over his pipe (in fear or anticipation?). Lovers kiss along a mist-shrouded back canal (will he cross the bridge as she continues home?). A woman in a skimpy black dress hurries along the colonnade bordering the Piazza (to meet her lover or to flee from him?) unseen by tourists sipping Campari.

Goran Pavletic, 2016, Gentleman in Venice

It is the unseen Venice, that concerns this collection of stunning photography. And a question: “What are tourists?” The word has become hackneyed, Tiziano Scarpa suggests in the book’s introduction. Its meaning is “from another age.” With increasing numbers of visitors inundating historic cities on bargain travel incentives, he says, the “tourists” of today have become “the new residents of the world.”

When Ruskin visited nineteenth century Venice there was only one class of travel – privileged. Yet journeys were embarked upon for exploration, reflection, and self-discovery. As John Julius Norwich tells it in Paradise of Cities (titled after Ruskin’s moniker), Venice would become the subject of Ruskin’s “endless philosophizings” inspiring his three-volume tome on art and architecture, The Stones of Venice.

The trip that inspired his 1841 quote above was made at the urging of his new wife, Effie, an “outstandingly pretty Scottish girl” according to Norwich. Alas, Effie’s charms were not enough to distract Ruskin from his love affair with La Serenissima. “Nothing interrupts him,” Effie wrote to her mother from the Hotel Danieli, “and whether the Square is crowded or empty he is either seen with a black cloth over his head taking Daguerreotypes or climbing about the capitals covered with dust.”

Paul Bucknall, 2014, Venetian Canal Reflections

Beneath his black cloth, Ruskin was getting intimate with la laguna. “Daguerreotypes taken by this vivid sunlight are glorious things,“ he recorded in his journal. “It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself.” His description of the palaces that “lift their shafts out of the hollow sea, their mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues of more eager fire,” is positively pornographic.

“It is as if the Ruskins’ marriage was being consummated through Venice’s female symbolism which it was denied in their conjugal bed,” observed cultural geographer, Dr. Denis Cosgrove. But any Sultanette could have deduced that.

Luckily, Venice dangled alternative distractions for Effie and her traveling companion, Charlotte, by way of the hale and horny Austrian officers stationed there. “Many are the cigars that are taken out of their mouths as we pass,” she wrote her mother.

Angelo Rigoni, 2015, Walking by artificial starlight

But beyond the gaze of randy boys-in-uniform was “the most exquisite place I have ever seen,” Effie writes, describing the Piazza as “a vast drawing room lighted enough by the gas from the arcades all round the square … with a dense crowd in the centre of men, women, children, soldiers, Turks, magnificent Greek costumes and sky above studded with innumerable twinkling stars.”

Above all, the floating city presented a separate world from the norm and the known. “It is so delicious to think that you can never be run over,” Effie rhapsodizes. “No carriages, carts, horses, barrows or anything but people and gondolas.” What would she have thought to see dozens flee in panic when a cruise ship rammed into the city center, as it did on June 22, 2019.

Ruskin sensed the impending doom. Even as Venice was unable to save his marriage, he predicted that the city would be unable to save itself. “The crowds of travellers of different nations, who have lately inundated Italy,” he lamented, “have not yet deprived the city of Venice of much of its original character, although … the shade of melancholy upon its beauty [which] is rapidly increasing, and will increase, until the waves which have been the ministers of majesty become her sepulchre.”

Scarpa sites a past study calculating that Venice could sustain twelve million visitors annually. The yearly number of visitors now tips thirty million. “So what can you do about it?” he asks.

And this is where Dream of Venice in Black and White departs from the guidebook map. Where it invites you to explore the Venice behind the horde of tourists and wall of cruise ships. To have a love affair with the real Venice, the concealed Venice, that beckons between dark and light.

Countless images of Venice are recorded now, not from under a black cloth but at the end of selfie sticks. Instead of looking beyond, these tentacles look back at the photographer. The explorer, not the explored, is the star now. Venice is in the background.

It is the world behind the tourist scene – that different way of seeing – that Dream of Venice in Black and White brings out of hiding. The sensuality of Ruskin’s palaces and the stars twinkling over Effie’s theatrical Piazza. The Venice beyond the known, that invites self-discovery instead of more selfies.

“Perhaps a paradoxical way of helping this city,” Scarpa suggests, “would be not to come at all. Instead, stay home and leaf through books of photos like this one, which inhabits the city delicately.” To that, The Sultanette offers an additional enticement.

Paging through “How To Spend It” in the Financial Times a few weeks ago, I came upon a profile of perfumer Christine Nagel. She recently created a fragrance for Hermes, inspired by a visit to the Garden of Eden on the Venetian island of Giudecca. “It’s a secret garden,” she tells Christina Ohly Evans in the FT profile, “planted by an Englishman in the late 1800s, and its full of jasmine, orange blossom and magnolia and rose – all mixed with the salty Venetian air.”

The next time Venice calls, why not first splash yourself with Un jardin sur la Lagune. Then, unthreatened by looming selfie-sticks, careening cruise ships, and over-crowded cafés, drift through Dream of Venice In Black and White, and get intimate with your own private Venice. Isn’t that what traveling used to be about?

All photographs from Dream of Venice in Black and White.

07/31/19

Some Look For Love In Paris. Others Settle For Desire.

Paris! City of Love or Capital of Desire? Choose your poison.

Love has occupational hazards (Think: Romeo and Juliet) and encourages odious feelings like guilt, jealousy, giddiness. Happily ever after requires contracts, vows, and facing a human at breakfast every morning.

Desire, on the other hand, is all feel-good in the moment. A tingling in the libido that makes the body smile. A stranger’s glance returned. A passing conversation ripe with innuendo. Desire requires no conquest, just the taste of possibility. It’s pure pleasure without the mess of plunder.

The eighteenth century philosophe Diderot – Encyclopedia author and favorite of Catherine the Great (we all know about her libido) – wrote that when rising from his bed in the morning, he would let his hair fall from his nightcap in fetching curls. “My neighbor, who got up early and left her husband’s side, would open her curtains and feast her eyes on the sight, something of which I was well aware.”

Admit it, dedicated monogamettes! You may not be kinky enough for philosophers in nightcaps, but surely your thoughts have strayed to the pool boy’s buns on those horny nights when hubby is sawing logs beside you.

As international burgs go, The Sultanette can think of no city that celebrates desire better than Paris. Haute mannequins in boutique windows lure you to hand over your inheritance for the couture du jour. Patisserie windows have your mouth watering for an orgy with a Tarte Tatin.

In an age of swiping for sex or a relationship fix, have we lost our appetite for cultivating desire? Have we become so obsessed with the endgame – the perfect match, the ultimate orgasm, the phantasmagorical unconditional love – we can’t enjoy the unconditional encounter along the way? Or is desire just a tawdry stand-in for the real thing? The Sultanette tested this proposition one chilly March evening in Paris.

It was my first night back from a long weekend on the sun-drenched Cote d’Azur. Four days in Antibes, learning how to turn out the delectable cuisine of Master Chef-ette, Elisabeth. (The Male Harem has hungry mouths to feed.) The secret behind La Cuisine d’Elisabeth is effortless dishes masquerading as haute gastronomy. Beef tenderloins bathed in a satiny sauce of crème fraiche, buttery veal smothered in mushrooms, a lemon custard so light, so decadent.

Classes were augmented with daytrips to Monaco and Nice, sunset hikes along the Cap d’Antibes, and a lunch at the edge of paradise on the terrace of the Hotel Belles Rives, where F. Scott and Zelda quaffed a martini or ten.

But that was then and this was cold and hungry. I was ready to settle for a decent poulet served up by any white-aproned waiter (the more insolent the better) who could unscrew a cork faster than I could say, “S’il vous plait.” But as the French say, “Chechez seulement du poulet roti et vous allez manquer les petits fours.” (If you’re only looking for roast chicken you miss out on the cupcakes.) Actually The Sultanette says that but it sounds better in French.

And there it was – a candle-lit boite offering “sheep cheese from the Pyrenees with black cherry jam and chili.” Hugo&Co was perfection at poulet roti prices! I was surveying the available tables when a cute maître d’ approached. “Avez-vous une réservation, Madame?”

Reservation? I had no reservation! How had I not prepared for the most important activity in Paris next to sex? Dinner! I left the restaurant and its flickering candles to face bleak Avenue Monge. The thin sweater I’d grabbed running out the door was no match for the evening’s chill. I felt a sudden pang of loneliness.

And then I spotted a shaft of light spilling below a blue awning at the end of a dark, deserted side street. I headed towards the source, a sliver of a restaurant called La Pie Noir. Three beefy men filled the entrance, hovering over a zinc bar, their backs to the street. Upon my arrival, the guy in the middle broke from their boisterous conversation and turned around, towering above me.

“Une personne pour diner, s’il vous plait?” I heard my voice squeak.

He measured me up. The restaurant was packed.

“Une petite personne?” I tried.

At that, the friendly giant exploded into a burst of laughter, put his arm around me, and shouted, “Claude!”

A slim man with a greying beard appeared with a menu under his arm and a twinkle in his eye. He lead me to the remaining table in the window, handed me the menu with a conspiratorial grin as if it contained the Kama Sutra, and disappeared down a narrow corridor of tables lined up along a stone wall that was the entire restaurant. As I perused the menu, Otis Redding’s Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay came up on a blues mix track.

Claude reappeared. Now he plunked down beside me, looked into my eyes, and inquired in his best Jean-Paul Belmondo, “And you are from where, Madame?”

“New York City,” I replied, waiting for him to be impressed.

“New York City?” He looked confused.

“Oui, Monsieur?”

“But I am sorry! I do not know of this Big Apple!”

With that he sprang out of the chair and was off again, stopping at each table to refill a wine glass, refold a napkin, share an inside joke with regulars, and help the waitress – a cheery girl in jeans, pullover, and ponytail – distribute the stream of plates emanating from a tiny kitchen in the rear.

When she brought the Beaujolais I’d ordered, it looked awfully generous. “Excusez-moi, is this a full carafe?” I asked her. “You will manage it,” she replied and dashed back to the kitchen. “What you want, baby I got,“ Aretha belted out from the mix track. On cue, Claude appeared with Coquille St. Jacques in saffron rice.

No matter those needy diners, Claude was to become my personal waiter-slave. Was Madame happy with her Coquilles? May I pour Madame more wine? As the crowd began to thin out, he pulled up a chair and we flirted in French/English. What was I doing in Paris? Had he ever been to New York? When I asked what was for desert, he lit up and pointed to himself.

None of it, of course, was to be taken seriously. We both understood that it was all foreplay with no after. That for a couple of hours on a chilly night in Paris, two souls would revel in each other’s attention. When I’d licked the last spoonful of my crème brulée, we bid each other bonsoir.

But as I reached Avenue Monge, I heard a voice calling, “Madame!” I turned to see Claude running towards me, waving something in his hand. “Vous avez oublié le pull!” he said, handing me the sweater I’d left on my chair, no longer in need of it.

If you come to Paris looking for love, don’t forget to sample the petits fours along the way. Happily ever after can wait.

The Male Harem

You've entered The Male Harem. So where are you?

Author: The Sultanette

Who’s Your Daddy? There’s An App For That!

Solo Travel Is Trending. Follow The Crowd!

When French Fashion Went To War: Vive La Fashionista!

Hidden Venice: A Love Story In Black And White

Some Look For Love In Paris. Others Settle For Desire.

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