Author Archives: Dorothea Brooke

On a trip to France, when I was 14, I remember the sink of estrangement when, in an extended gathering of my host-family, I was meant to greet each of the members of the party––a group of some forty or so. Now as we know, personal greetings in France take the form of a two-time [...]

Greetings in Paris follow an inexorable plan, albeit with contextual variation. In small shops, for example, there is always the same pattern, though it is uttered with seeming sincerity to each on every occasion. Sincerity is sounded at once in the tenor of ‘Madame’ or ‘Monsieur,’ a different intonation for everyone standing in line––seeming acknowledgement [...]

At the train station, on a first foray into town, there are elderly women around corners with flowers for people to buy. The flowers are terse and papery yet they wilt in the sun; the women stand alone, or occasionally, in twos. Have the women come from the same fields? The flowers suggest as much. [...]