Monday noon

Another beautiful, probably very unseasonably warm day. Normally the heat comes on in Paris apartment buildings on October 1—and ours did, because it was cold for a couple of days. But then it warmed up again, so the radiators are turned off, the windows are wide open, and at night people are out late in the streets as if it were summer.

Yesterday—Sunday—afternoon after a bit of translating, I took a book to the Luxembourg Garden and looked for one of the lounge chairs. There are three types of chairs in the Garden (and in the old days, whenever that was, you had to pay to sit in one; someone would come by to collect your money, like the ladies at the entry to the public toilets, les ‘Dames pipi’): straight chairs and armchairs, one like a dining chair and one low slung like a transat. The low-slung lounge chairs fill up pretty quickly on a sunny day, so as I meandered up the west side of the garden, through the different lawn areas I kept my eyes peeled, and as soon as I spotted one I grabbed it, along with a straight chair for my feet (there are always lots of extra straight chairs). A troop of girl scouts were playing on the lawn—which is forbidden—until two guardians came around and shooed them off. After there were some teenagers with teenage music and I decided to try my luck higher up towards the orchard. By then it was late and somewhat overcast, and I had a choice of lounge chairs overlooking the lawn with Baudelaire on it.

The kids’ playground is being done over, so it’s closed, which means that on these beautiful weekends, pre-schoolers are on the loose, instead of being corralled. The guardians were kept busy telling them and their parents where there were some lawns they could play on.

Today they’ll be in nursery school, free from age two in France, nice for working mothers.

I’m reading Knaussgard’s new and final installment to My Struggle. It’s had several so-so reviews, but so far I really like it. I’m 100+ pages into the 1000-word total.