symonne torpy

Two friends, on reputation.

Cecily: I looked for you today at your Couleur Café.

Arnaud: Couleur Café isn’t my café anymore. Some rumours about me were born in that hellish place.

Cecily: I have had many rumours spread about me throughout Paris. Lights, camera, scandal! In fact, the staff at Le Meurice told a man I was courting that I was a high class escort.

Arnaud: People!

Cecily: Well, it’s expected in Paris. I kill them with my kindness and my charm.

Arnaud: You should consider swords.

Cecily: Sometimes my kindness comes off too flirtatious though…

Arnaud: Oh, I see. “I am not a hooker. I would like you to invite me to Arpège for dinner to explain it all”.

Alexander, reading The Economist.

The Economist: When France imposed a state of emergency in November, following the terror attacks in Paris, it implied some constraints on liberty. But the freedom to smoke was probably not one many observers had in mind. Fully 32% of French 17-year-olds admit that they smoke daily, and by law pupils can do so only outside school premises. Yet head teachers now fret that, by letting them out of the school gates during the day to light up, they face a greater threat: terrorism. Improbable as it seems, the country’s biggest head-teachers’ union, SNPDEN-Unsa, wrote last month to the Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, demanding clarification. Did the ban still apply under the state of emergency, as the health ministry insisted? Or, given the security risk of gathering on the pavement, could head teachers make an exception, as the education ministry seemed to suggest, and allow smoking on school grounds? This, argued some, was the lesser danger. “Between a cigarette and a Kalashnikov, the risk is not the same,” said Michel Richard, a head teacher at the union.

Alexander: Under threat of being denied cigarettes, I’m afraid I’d have to take my chances with the Kalashnikov.

Two friends, on parents.

Cecily: At least your parents know who you are.

Alexander: They’re from Texas. They have no clue how to handle the malaise-riddled, bilingual, gender non-binary gay man that shares their genetics. They’d die of aneurysms if they met the people with whom I keep company: charlatans, musicians, career hedonists, trust fund druggies, and the older men with whom I seek to fill my paternal void (usually via sex and misplaced feelings).