Fierce People

The dinner was served on Rothschild pattern porcelain, the cutlery was antique silver.  The wine glasses were crystal and the water was served in monogrammed Asprey silver beakers.  

The table was decorated with Herend bunnies.  Like five thousand dollars worth of them.

The whole set up was somewhat ridiculous.  Over the top.  Craziness.

I was eating sunday lunch - Easter lunch, in fact - at my friends' apartment in the centre of Paris.  The friends are the odd couple that I talked about a while back.  One is French, the other American.  

The French guy works 9-5 in a dull office job, the American has a trust fund.  Really.  A trust fund.  Admittedly, he had to take his father to court to get him to pay out, but hey, that's Americans for you (apologies to my American reader).

Anyway, the food was sublime and the conversation ranged from political debate (spare me) to hilarious tales of blowjobs in car parks (not me, oddly enough).  It was a good, if not very christian, way to spend Easter sunday.

After dinner, we headed out to a bar.  On the way out of the apartment, I stopped to look at some photos.  They looked like stills from a movie of any F Scott Fitzgerald novel.  Beautiful people, living a beautiful lifestyle.  With servants.

"Is this your Mom?" I asked.

"Yeah, that was the last photo of her before she died".

"She was beautiful"  I said.  The photo was of a handsome woman, admiring flowers in the grounds of what looked like a stately home, New England style.  "Where was the photo taken?"

"Oh, that's at my summer cottage.  In Maine."

I felt like Dorothy.  A long way from Kansas.  A long way from home.