‘Yes, it’s here!’ says the sign above the English épicerie in Paris. ‘Yes, at last,’ thinks the starved expat wandering in a desert of croissants, magret de canard and monts blancs. Now for some real food: Fray Bentos pies, Quaker Oats, Fentimans lemonade, HP Sauce, Marmite, Tetley’s, Twinings, Dorset cereals, Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, Altoids mints and Macsween haggis. As a sop to Americans: Pop-Tarts, Lucky Charms, Aunt Jemima’s pancakes and marshmallow fluff in a jar. I know an Englishman who walks the length of the Canal Saint-Martin for proper Yorkshire Tea.
There is a Pont cartoon ‘The British Character: Importance of Tea’ which shows four doughty picnickers getting an oil-stove and kettle going in a gale. Never formerly a tea fusspot, in Paris I have become a Pont throwback. I face a rictus of agony when the water comes tepid, the teabag in its wrapper and the milk UHT. One cannot stay cheerful on plongeur’s dishwater. Carette on the Place des Vosges and Le Fumoir opposite the Louvre do loose leaves and cold milk.
The Louvre’s gallery of British art is the furthest feather of the Denon wing. Miles of enfilading Spaniards and Italians, then in the last room: a holy trinity of Constable, Gainsborough, Turner (the only Turner in a French public collection) lumped in with the Yanks. The frame of Gainsborough’s Lady Alston was meant for a portrait of Madame de Pompadour: she wears it well. Thomas Lawrence’s ‘The Children of John Julius Angerstein’ hangs next to Richard Dadd’s ‘Titania Sleeping’. Is Mad Dadd the best we can do?
If you’re pining for the Wallace Collection, the Musée Jacquemart-André is small and sumptuous. Here, for the patriotic, is Paolo Uccello’s Saint George ‘Slaying the Dragon’.
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