My shadow journey has continued along two main axes.

The first is music. The chansons of Edith Piaf, to be precise, since we were very much in her stamping-ground last year.

I'm really enjoying Carolyn Burke's No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf. She's a sympathetic chronicler, who doesn't seek to sensationalize, and her evocation of the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s (drugs, crime, vice, excess...) is reminiscent of the Maigret story I finished at the weekend.

And I've been supplementing this account with various other sources.

The between-the-wars period was the golden age of "chanson realiste", and Piaf was perhaps its last great exponent. With its roots in the 19th century, it celebrates "the people": on the one hand, presenting very starkly their poverty, depression, and marginalization; but on the other, expressing a nostalgia for the world of the bals musettes, the rowdy places where ordinary people had fun.

Recurring themes are streets, fights, bitter cold, abandonment, survival, illness, violence, and the sex trade.

Frehel, another notable singer of the era, says in her memoirs: "Why do I sing? Do we know why and how we eat, or move, or love? I sing... I've sung the great distress of poverty and abandonment. It comes out of me like the cry you utter when you're struck by pain."

Piaf, asked in 1960 about the meaning of "happiness", says: "We're never happy. People are happy, perhaps, for about 10 minutes in the day. I'm happy when I sing. And then during the day for about 10 minutes. That's not bad!"

Charles Aznavour testifies: "Frehel, Damia, Piaf... Other singers offered pleasure, but these singers, they got into people's hearts. My mother used to cry. She didn't understand French well at the time, but she cried."

This amalgam of emotion and grit sounds to me very like the mood that animates fado, the music I fell in love with in Lisbon earlier this year. I'm sure the two must be related. But I haven't yet found any authority that says they are...

Be that as it may, I've been enjoying listening to Piaf's early songs, and hunting up the lyrics. They are not light-hearted, for sure -- so many women abandoned, so many sex workers threatened by tragic futures, so much bad stuff happening -- but it is fascinating to spend time with these ghosts of the past.

I particularly liked I Don't Know the End, perhaps because it resonates with our own Great Uncertainty at the moment... The singer doesn't want to know the end of the song, because she fears it will be tragic -- that the woman would suffer because her lover has done her wrong. So, to make sure that the song stays beautiful, she contents herself with the chorus, which is full of love and optimism.

The second axis of this week's French experience has been food.

At the top of the post is my attempt at Audrey Le Goff's chou-fleur mimosa -- whole poached cauliflower, with vinaigrette and crumbled egg. This dish is both easy and delicious. I loved it.

Then there have been a couple of attempts to make low-carb petits pains au chocolat.

Now these were never destined to be like the meltingly flaky real thing, so I guess any self-respecting French person might well be appalled by the whole idea. But hear me out...

First time round, I got the wrong type of mozzarella:


I also tried to make half the quantity, while still using the one egg that was required for the entire quantity. Result: a fairly sloppy mixture, and a product that was more cookie-like than pastry-like.



Still, it was pretty damn tasty... Warm and chocolaty -- what's not to like?

So I decided I would have another go. I procured some of the hard mozzarella that you buy ready-grated from the supermarket. And I made the full quantity (storing half the dough in the fridge, which I'll use to make something different tomorrow).

These little chaps turned out much more robust and pastry-like. I personally didn't detect any cheese flavour -- and, in any case, I've lived long enough in Indonesia to not see that as a problem...



So... France-inspired, rather than actually French. But I would definitely be up for an encore here.