C'est la St Valentin!

by Kate Spade, New York.

À quoi ça sert l'amour ?

Pour y répondre, voici une chanson d'Edith Piaf *, sur une merveilleuse animation de Louis de Clichy.

 

* une chanson de Michel Emer (paroles et musique), interprétée par Édith Piaf et Théo Sarapo pour la première fois en 1962.

Paroles:

À quoi ça sert l'amour ?
On raconte toujours
Des histoires insensées.
À quoi ça sert d'aimer ?

L'amour ne s'explique pas !
C'est une chose comme ça,
Qui vient on ne sait d'où
Et vous prend tout à coup.

Moi, j'ai entendu dire
Que l'amour fait souffrir,
Que l'amour fait pleurer.
À quoi ça sert d'aimer ?

L'amour ça sert à quoi ?
À nous donner d' la joie
Avec des larmes aux yeux...
C'est triste et merveilleux !

Pourtant on dit souvent
Que l'amour est décevant,
Qu'il y en a un sur deux
Qui n'est jamais heureux...

Même quand on l'a perdu,
L'amour qu'on a connu
Vous laisse un goùt de miel.
L'amour c'est éternel !

Tout ça, c'est très joli,
Mais quand tout est fini,
Il ne vous reste rien
Qu'un immense chagrin...

Tout ce qui maintenant
Te semble déchirant,
Demain, sera pour toi
Un souvenir de joie !

En somme, si j'ai compris,
Sans amour dans la vie,
Sans ses joies, ses chagrins,
On a vécu pour rien ?

Mais oui ! Regarde-moi !
A chaque fois j'y crois
Et j'y croirai toujours...
Ça sert à ça, l'amour !
Mais toi, t'es le dernier,
Mais toi, t'es le premier !
Avant toi, 'y avait rien,
Avec toi je suis bien !
C'est toi que je voulais,
C'est toi qu'il me fallait !
Toi qui j'aimerai toujours...
Ça sert à ça, l'amour !...

The haze of time

Photo de Miguel Jacob.

Reflections on/of the past.  
Happy recollection.
Photo d'archives retrouvée ce matin...
Tiens! J'étais drôlement amusée, le regard un peu espiègle.
Marco, adossé contre un miroir, après avoir essayé son smoking de futur marié....juin 2009.

Déjà! 2 years already!

Last night, Marco and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary. Already!
He invited me to join him in a cafe with our baby Lola well tucked in the stroller, and there... SURPRISE! He offered me 2 big bouquets of flowers. I love being offered flowers in a public space, it is so beautiful to be spoilt in front of total strangers who for a second share an ounce of your joy!

Once back home, there was another surprise; a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Champagne cooling down in the fridge waiting for us to pop the cork, which we did! Our gift to each other was to spend some quality time and cook a meal together. We had watched a Jamie Oliver show that had inspired us and had decided on the menu for the night: a tray of fish with a spinach salad, salsa verde and the best potato salad in the world! We prepared the whole menu by the book, except for the Banofee pie that will have to be experimented and savoured for another special occasion. For dessert, I had already made some lemon and poppy seeds madeleines to match our vanilla ice cream.
To see the video of the Meals in Minutes show in question, go to this link.

Jamie Oliver making a salsa with extra virgin olive oil - gorgeous!

Marco and I cannot get enough of Jamie Oliver's culinary verve, he is so colourful and genuinely enthusiastic about food that you feel like cooking as soon as the show is over. And oh boy, does he love his extra virgin olive oil, Marco and I have this private joke about him, we call him Jamie Olive Oil- we love him soooo much!

Well, needless to say that we had a glorious night, cooking, eating, drinking, and celebrating our newly born trio with Lola. Yes, we sure paid a fair tribute to the Veuve's golden bubbles and finished the whole bottle that very night...

France-Italy, Summer 2010: through the arcades of my memories!

Last summer, my husband and I travelled in France (Lyon-Paris) and Italy (Torino, Milano, Verona, Venezia) to celebrate our 1st wedding anniversary.
For your viewing pleasure, here are a few vistas that we contemplated.
Do you recognize any of them?

L'été dernier, mon mari et moi avons voyagé en France ( Lyon-Paris) et en Italie (Turin, Milan, Vérone, Venise) pour y célébrer notre première anniversaire de mariage.
Voici un petit pêle-mêle de souvenirs en images.

Dream Nuptials a Labour of Love

Photo Giancarlo Jacob

On Valentine's Day, my husband and I just took a very pleasant stroll around St Lawrence Market in the downtown area. Nothing extraordinaire... Love, as always, was in the air!

Oh, but we did find it amusing that this year's Valentine's blessed us with an article in the Toronto Star, exactly one year after we got engaged in Paris, France. This was an unexpected gift.

* Read the article.
**For more details concerning the wedding step-by-step preparations, go through the posts in this blog's Wedlock topic, or go directly to the final blog post showing the photos of the wedding!

Rebirth in Venice!

To conclude on our pre-wedding trip, I'd like to share the last drops of my Venetian impressions with you. Here is a link that will take you to an article: "Renaissance à Venise" (pardon my French!) that got published in this week's L'Express de Toronto, the French-speaking newspaper.
Have a good trip! I'll see you there ;0)

Wedding Season - Part 2 : Christine & Marco, BOOM!

A cloche-pied en jouant à la marelle! / Playing hopscotch !
Photo: Cédric Roulliat

That's it, we did it! It was an easy step, and a long-expected one! Our wedding was celebrated at my childhood village's town hall, in France, on Saturday, September 19th, 2009. After the civil wedding, we invited all our guests to join us for a reception at the Château de Césarges. It was wonderful to be able to gather all the people that really matter to us in one place and on such a pleasant occasion. We celebrated all afternoon long in the park, enjoying the sun, and even a few raindrops that made us hurry the last photo shoot! A double rainbow then spread its fire across the sky, was it a sign of double chances of ever-lasting love and happiness or a sort of mirror effect of my marrying a twin? I don't know-but the thing I am sure of is the love that we share, both obvious and complex. Let me immerse you a bit more in the atmosphere of our big day.

At 7 PM, our guests were led to the Chapel where an impromptu concert took place. Some friends or family members performed and shared their talent gracefully, and therefore made it our solemn and religious moment, all shared with our friends and families; emotional.

The bride and groom feeling the impact of the wedding's BOOMING effect!
Photo: Cédric Roulliat

At 8.30PM, dinner was being served in the reception rooms of the castle and Le Grand Bal could start at 9.30PM. Every guest beamed with joy, either enjoying the extravagant quantities of food and wine (catered by my extremely generous elder brother, Philippe Rochet and his business!), or dancing their heads off on Max Fueris & Jean-Yves Serve's music; or doing both at the same time...

The groom wears a Ralph Lauren striped suit, a Brooks Brothers tie and shoes by Grenson; the bride wears a Nina Ricci silk suit, Pink shoes, and her something old: jewels from her mother.

In the castle, we stayed in a bedroom, called the Comtesse de Meffray suite, after the 18th century elegant châtelaine whose oval portrait was on the wall. She turned out to be of pleasant company! Well, just for your to know, she supposedly had an affair with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the great philosopher of the Enlightenment in France) when he stayed at Césarges to rest and work on the second part of his Confessions in 1769. Ah, if the walls of the castle could talk...

But no, this is not the spooky ghost of the Countess (who incidentally was poisoned by her husband, hum hum...). Just Marco and I, the newly-weds, taking the pause in the hallway.

Soneto XVII

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

(Cien sonetos de amor, de Pablo Neruda)

Groom: vintage Pierre Cardin tuxedo, Holt Renfrew bowtie, Polo Ralph Lauren dress shirt, and Ralph Lauren Purple Label pump shoes. Bride: vintage 1950s silk chiffon evening gown, found in the incredible Ian Drummond's Collection, and altered by Toronto-based seamstress, Loreen Lighfoot. The feathers were designed by my fashion designer friend, Julien Leydis, and made by Maison Février, Paris. As Tess, a good friend of ours, here in Toronto, who could not attend the wedding, said: "I think that what made it so special is that many of your friends and family members did their part (singing, catering, photographing, designing...) to make this day unforgettable...", and she is absolutely right, I could not agree with her more!

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love, a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, or you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

(100 Love Sonnets, by Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Tapscott)

All photos by Cédric Roulliat

Since we came back home to Toronto, we have been over-the-moon, finally wearing our wedding bands, calling each other husband and wife (at long last, I am now officially Christine Rochet-Jacob), and nurturing family projects. In a nutshell, we are loving every minute of it! Currently reveling in the delights of our honeymoon, you know this lunar month of fruitful bliss, friends invite us to raise glasses of that bubbly beverage to our health and prosperity; and it is divine ! Oops, sorry, no honey and propolis for us, as the Pharaohs and their tradition would have it - this is the slight little change that we dared to introduce...

To conclude, I will leave you with another happy-ever-after version of pastoral love. A castle, two lovebirds frolicking in the fields (watch it at 2'37''), an open-air banquet, all the staple ingredients are there. In unison, Marco and I could sing the song with Catherine Deneuve and Jacques Perrin: 'Nous vivrons ensemble un conte de fées charmant'/'We will live a charming fairy tale together'...To be continued.

P.S: Our Lyon-based photographer friend, Cédric Roulliat, gracefully accepted to cover the event... Thank you, Cédric !

To see the online PHOTO ALBUM of our wedding, click HERE.

Of pre-wedding honeymoons: Viva Venezia!

Last September 5th, we took the night train from Lyon to Venice. We stayed in La Serenissima for 5 days, five unforgettable days of baroque beauty and splashing delights. Our tactique was to go on a pre-wedding honeymoon so as to unwind and let go before the big day. Yes, we thought it could help us look at our best on our wedding photos! And it did help. Here is why...

Sunday, September 6th: 9.30 a.m. Arrival at Santa Lucia, Venice. OhhHH! But who is that at the end of the platform? Isn't it Stuart A. Staples from The Tindertsicks? YES, it's him!!!In Venice for the Mostra and Claire Denis's film (White Material), we shook hands with him and Marco posed next to him in the sun. What a plunge! Our pre-wedding honeymoon starts under very good auspices.

Sunday, 10.30am : Private view from the terrace of our hotel on the local canal. Hotel dalla Mora, Santa Croce ; far from the madding crowd, and yet, very central. A wonderful place to stay that was recommended to us by an Italian friend of ours. Don't waste the tip - pass it on!

Sunday 11 am: Ciao Piazza San Marco! Bello Marco @ The Caffè Florian. A classic!

Two espressos + two croissants = 30 euros (the biggest part of the bill is the band playing live on the piazza for you, they charge 6 euros per person!). An expensive treat...but a real treat so, no regrets.

Palazzo Ducale. Think Pink! Well, let's say we were in the right mood, the honeymoon type of mood- how can you go pinker than that??

Sunday afternoon: Passegiata in the Gardens of Palazzo Querini-Stampalia , designed by Carlo Scarpa. This fountain piece reminded me of the snail shape of the city itself...

Monday, September 7th : On the Canal Grande, aboard the vaporetto that was taking us to the Biennale of Contemporary Art at l'Arsenale. Palazzo Ducale partly covered and disfigured by gigantic billboards promoting Chopard or Guess-Marciano...Signs of the times. I heard the Bridge of Sighs silently crying out behind the cover of this ugly curtain of compulsive consumption. Jarring sobs...

Installation at the Biennale.

Marco experimenting the box of colours - a stunning installation.

Playing hide-and-seek, like a chameleon!

Ok, time to leave the box of colours. We tried them all...

After the Arsenale and the Lido beach, where we took a nice swim into the Adriatic, we went back to central Venice.

Monday evening: Mostra film festival. Before the open-air screening of Claire Denis's White Material on Campo San Polo, we stop by our favourite cornucopia-land of pastries - La Premiata Pasticceria Rizzardini. A must, if you go to Venice! We literally succumbed for the Mandorle (sort of almond tart) and the Moro (chocolate, almonds and orange zest).

Tuesday, Sept 8th : Shopping in the districts of San Zulian, Chiesa della Fava and San Moisé - above, the shop window of Ermenegildo Zegna. For ladies, I recommend a beautiful but super tiny place: Ninfea, a jewellery shop (5228 Calle Lunga, Santa Maria Formosa), an incredible bric-à-brac, where, among other treasures, you can find stunning brooches, necklaces, earrings and bracelets made of 1930s bakelite.

For our second visit to the fabulous Osteria- Enoiteca, Alla Mascareta (Castello, 5183 Calle Lunga, Santa Maria Formosa), we got totally out of control, you know the pre-wedding excitement thing.... After 3 or 4 hours of excessively good food and wine, Mauro Lorenzon, the exuberant owner, shows how touched he is by placing his hand on his heart to say goodbye. I am totally PAF! (in a nutshell: quite drunk!). Hum, so much so that when we left the Enoiteca, it took us an hour or so to find our way back to the hotel...

The map became all blurry, the Twilight Zone was happening...the calles were dancing in front of my eyes. Where are we?? Pffew!

Wednesday, Sept. 9th: Ca' Rezzonico (here above, covered by a beautiful screen during the renovation works on the facade)+ the palazzo Venier dei Leoni, or the Peggy Guggenheim foundation; for my third visit to the place...I was a bit disappointed, but well- it remains an incredible collection of modern art!

Cannaregio: one of our best memories, Trattoria Alla Palazzina; GREAT food, impeccable service and great view on the canal! If you go visit this typical district of Cannaregio (my favourite), try also the Osteria Ai 40 Ladroni and the Osteria Anice Stellato, both on Fondamenta della Sensa.

The amazing Paolo Olbi book-binder shop: hand-made articles, covered with marbled paper. We found our wedding photo album in this shop; one of the blue and white photo albums that you can see in the window display. A lot of joy!

Thursday, Sept. 10th: Last day in Venice, we travelled from one bank to the next using the traghetto (0,50 euros) - an experience brief in time but lasting in memory. Loved it!

And off we went for our next stop! After 5 days revelling in Venetian arty lifestyle, and bacchanals, there we were. All relaxed, fresh, and softened by the chiaroscuro quality of natural daylight in Venice. Our pre-wedding honeymoon had done marvels! The strategy had worked very well so far. We were all set to embark on the ferry boat to attend Mirela & Tom's wedding in Rovinj, Croatia. A week prior to our wedding, we were looking forward to sharing nuptial wishes...without having to commit yet.

Wedding season - Part 1: Mirela & Tom's wedding in Rovinj, Croatia

Thursday, September 10th. After Venice, we moored in Rovinj, Croatia. A picturesque port on the Adriatic, if there are any! Charming, and authentic. But wait a minute, we were not there to do sightseeing, we had to attend a wedding: Mirela and Tom's wedding -remember, he is German, she is Croat, they met in India and live in Beijing...Ok, let's get going!

Friday, 1 PM: Miguel (left) and Marco (right), on their way to the town hall. Believe me, they didn't go unnoticed by the locals, who rubbed their eyes - were they seeing double?...

Friday, September 11th, 2PM: That's it - Mirela and Tom are married, gorgeous couple!

Friday, lunch at a restaurant, a beautiful place that took us quite a while to reach as it was lost, or well-hidden, in the middle of Rovinj countryside. The scenery on our way was stunning, very similar to the landscapes of Provence (cypresses, olive trees, vineyards and arid soil) but with oak trees everywhere, for a change! Both Strangely familiar and truly exotic. Let's raise our glass: Vive les Mariés!!!
After the civil wedding, we enjoyed an afternoon of total rest at the Villa Meneghetti, paradise on Earth. Our pre-wedding therapy was therefore working... Don't we look happy and rested?

The same for the newly weds, who seem to savour that moment of comfort and let-go with a good glass of the Villa's Bordeaux Coupage red wine. Prost and Bravo to Tom & Mirela! Just for you to know, they were truly incredibly chilled out, although they had organized their wedding in Croatia from Beijing...A wedding planner was fortunately hired to help them finalize the last preparations and details on the spot, at the gorgeous Villa Meneghetti. What a wonderful job they did together!

Saturday, September 12th: One hour before the religious service. An armada of Reservoir Dogs presents for general review: 5 on the dandy Richter scale, as our excellent friend Rob Sidhu would say...These men in black are ready to charge the final assault and wedge a war of seduction on you ladies, beware!
Outside the Cathedral of Rovinj. Before Tom makes his big statement...

After Tom and Mirela said YES. Well said!

Then, everyone was invited to go back to the Villa Meneghetti to revel in and celebrate in the traditional Croatian fashion -this local folklore band was incredible! Very festive music- it made me feel like in a Kusturica film with Goran Bregovic's music. Not to mention, the various sorts of Schnapps that we gulped down in between the Sirtaki-like steps...

The newly weds, experiencing the Jacob sandwich! From left to right: Miguel, Tom, Mirela, & Marco

Croatian delights, miam-miam! Raw fish and prosciutto, I loved you so much.

The oil pit! The Villa's olive oil won the award of best olive oil in the world in 2006. Delicioso! We bought 2 bottles...

Dinner at night by candlelight, under the oak trees in the park of the Villa Meneghetti. Magical!
Marco and I, dancing in the dark; totally in love!

Oh man, what's going on here? Getting loose on Tina Turner...

Hrvala (thank you, in Croatian), Mirela and Tom, for such a beautiful celebration of your love! You helped us complete our 'Tactique de l'Adriatique' with high flying colours, mission accomplished. Our stay in Rovinj triumphantly ended our pre-wedding honeymoon trip on a higher note, the very one that creates the contrapuntal harmony in the wedding march; the very same one that, soon, was going to play for Marco and I too...