Beyond the Chicken Coop I - Four Weekends
An afternoon spent perusing the Gustave Caillebotte exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay (Photo: Luca Howes)
In Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (2021), the “chicken coop”, in reality a prison cell, comes to symbolise the isolation and foreignness of being an émigré in Paris. Inspired by the expatriate journalists at the centre of the film, Luca Howes’s aims to overcome this loneliness, bringing warmth and familiarity to his descriptions of the city where he is spending his year abroad.
Friday 11 October, 21:59
The Vélib’ beeps, confirming my departure. I mount the bike and pedal slowly down Avenue René-Coty. I want to savour this moment: the slight chill of the breeze and my relative anonymity compared to the couples chatting in the bars along my route; a quiet period of self-reflection before the night begins. In 20 minutes, I’ll be standing in a busy street in the Marais, pint glass in hand, talking to people I met five weeks ago about what it’s like to live in Paris as a student, as a foreign student, to be here for a semester or a year. We’ll talk about things to do, exhibitions to see, restaurants to eat in and clubs to dance at. But for the moment, I am cycling, navigating Place Denfert-Rochereau as the city puts on its best clothes and gets ready for Friday night.
Saturday 19 October, 15:51
Impressionism is currently my favourite style of painting. Artists like Monet and van Gogh’s vivid colours and easy brush strokes are always the first things I look for in a busy gallery. Impressionist painting extends well beyond these two artistic giants. Today, for instance, I am queuing with a friend for the Musée d’Orsay. We enter the grand former train station and head straight for the Gustave Caillebotte exhibition.
Caillebotte’s work is more realistic and less dreamlike than other impressionists. We meander through the bustling exhibition, stopping to see his most notable work, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (Paris Street; Rainy Day). The painting depicts a 19th-century couple ambling through Place de Dublin. In the background, various others stroll, umbrellas to the sky; large Haussmann buildings line the boulevards. The painting perfectly captures the soft grey that taints the air when it rains.
This exhibition focuses specifically on Caillebotte’s paintings of men. He places men in various situations: the young Parisian bachelor, male nudes in domestic settings and sporting men in outdoor environments. The latter category is my favourite. La Partie de bateau (Oarsman in a Top Hat) and Périssoires sur l’Yerres (Boating on the Yerres) present male figures in action, engaging in leisure on the Yerres river, not far from where Caillebotte spent his summers. Despite these distinctively real subjects, the paintings preserve the warmth and nostalgia of Impressionism.
The figures have a clear sense of movement and Caillebotte doesn’t shy away from highlighting their physical forms. The body is illustrated as a mover, a propeller, a driver of action. It’s not glamorised – you can see the grimace on the rower’s face in La Partie de bateau. Rather, the man’s physical effort is celebrated in harmony with nature, as part of the course of the river.
Sunday 27 October, 09:36
Finishers pour over the line at Stade de France marking the end of the Saint Denis 10km and Half Marathon. I’m in the stands, sign in hand. My friend scours the track for a runner, the friend we’re here to support. We see her and erupt into cries of encouragement: “Come on! You’ve got this! Keep going!” She crosses the finish line in 1 hour 29 minutes, earning the title of eleventh fastest woman in the half marathon.
Just watching the athletes in the Saint Denis 10km and Half Marathon was enough to produce a runner’s high (Photo: Luca Howes)
She joins us to debrief. We talk about how fast the course was, the other friend who paced her middle 10km, the slightly wet weather conditions. She’s happy with her time, content to have completed the race. I smile too; being in such a massive stadium, cheering on the runners alongside so many others, is a unifying experience. It’s a shared moment of connection. The woman beside us greets her partner with a kiss and a bouquet of flowers. She takes a photo of him and his friends. They grin like schoolboys, flushed with pride, holding their race numbers like trophies.
My friends and I head into town for breakfast. The metro is full of sweaty runners and their supporters. The atmosphere is positive but a little tired. Sports drinks and energy bars are passed around as runners discuss cadence, future races and afternoon naps.
The café we choose is quiet and the staff are typically French, inflexible and slightly slow on service. Between bites of sausage and egg, I pause to listen to my group’s conversations. There are nine of us: on my left, I hear a stream of German; on my right, a “Franglais” discussion about running glasses. After the meal, we say goodbye and most head to a museum. I go home for a nap. On the metro, I get a warm feeling – a sort of runner’s high for those who didn’t run.
Sunday 3 November, 21:24
WhatsApp Desktop finally stutters into life. Two windows pop up on the video call. One is a friend in Berlin on her year abroad; the other is five of my friends in Cambridge. I marvel at their ingenuity in using a phone as the microphone for a laptop’s video stream. I’ve called this group several times in Paris. They’re the ones who keep me tethered to life back at university. They tell me about the monotony of Michaelmas in final year: library routines, gym sessions, eating at Sidge Buttery. I’m grateful to hear not much has changed. It’s still just as windy cycling down Huntingdon Road and the college bar is still a bit crap.
WhatsApp calls provide a tether to life in Cambridge (Photo: Luca Howes, Alex Brian)
Seeing them there is bittersweet. I love my life in Paris and wouldn’t change it for anything. Nevertheless, there’s a certain familiarity to Cambridge life that I’ve hardly known here. I miss the organisation of tightly clipped timetables, the smallness of the city, nights spent chatting in the kitchen. I know I can’t recreate second year on my year abroad but sometimes I wonder if that was it: my “university experience”. Will this year match it? Will fourth year live up to it?
It's better not to compare. I live in Paris, after all. Paris! There’s nowhere like it, I think to myself. My friend in Berlin shares stories about the German capital’s weather. I’m more of a summer person but I’m curious about what it would be like to live somewhere so bitingly cold and soviet grey. Another environment, another change from Cambridge.
I laugh a lot this evening. I leave the call and get into bed. I miss my friends and would love to be with them. I fall asleep thinking about life in the UK and wake up to attend a lecture. The metro is packed and I exit onto a roaring boulevard. A bike whizzes past as I cross the road. The soft mist is reminiscent of Caillebotte’s painting and I see a runner snake through the crowd of students at the building entrance.
The air feels fresh on my face. After this lecture, I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ll go and explore a new arrondissement… Or sit in a new café and read… or simply walk around the city and soak up the world housed between the boulevards.