The Original Madame

This week Grégoire's mother came in to town. Her much anticipate trip to Paris was an overall success. While she lives a mere four hours away from the capital this was the first time she's been to Paris in 18 years.

I have been enjoying a break between tours and thus have been home all day...all week... with Madame. Mrs B is the queen of domesticity. She includes cleaning as one of her hobbies in life. While I posses many interests, cleaning is not one of them. Despite this, in fear of being judged a poor choice of wife for her only son, I spent the entire day before her arrival scrubbing the apartment. It was a long day's work but I was pleased with the results and felt sure my mother in law would agree. These dreams, however, never came true. Shortly after her arrival I found her cleaning the grime stuck in the rubber seal of my fridge. I caught her red handed and she smiled apologetically saying, I just couldn't resist. 

Later that day she and I went grocery shopping for dinner. As we hopped from cheese shop to wine store, Madame gently suggested that I not waste my money on designer food and organic vegetables. Rather I should learn to bargain hunt and shop at large scale grocery stores. We did just that the following day and admittedly she made a mean dessert out of discount raspberries.

In addition to been a very good cook, Madame also cuts her son's hair, paints her living room walls according to the season, coifs her west highland terrier herself and sews like a professional seamstress. During the week she tried to pass some of these money saving household skills on to me. This week we made white linen curtains for our living room and bedroom and three cushions for our couch! While I did play a big role in selecting the fabric, for the most part I was not allowed to touch sewing machine. 

I am looking forward to Christmas this year. I can see Madame made a long mental list of things that I simply must have, ranging from microfiber dusting towels to scissors that actually cut.