The Day I Almost Met a Famous Person

As I mentioned in the last post, we've been having problems with the door at La Corneuve. For a while, it had been broken, because someone had locked a Sri Lanken church inside (we'd initally thought someone had broken in--as I wrote in the last post--, but turns out, it was really the church trying to break out). Then, when I went to La Corneuve last week, we were able to have classes, but a very drunken man (literally, a bottle of beer in each hand) was putting a new, electronic door on the building while we were there. Not surprisingly, the door doesn't work well. In fact, it no longer opens. The door is electic, so it needs electricity to work, and all the electricity has been turned off, and therefore, the door doesn't open. This sounds like a logic problem, no? (Ahh, if this were happening on TV, this comedy of errors would make me laugh. Since it's happening to me, I think I'll just have to find it funny later...). Anyway, all this to say, we went to La Corneuve today, but were unable to have our classes.
Since the classes were cancelled, I decided to get some errands done. I've got several completely banal things on my To Do List--grocery shopping, books and papers I'm supposed to read in order to be more informed on the women I'm working with, emails to write, etc. But I also had one thing I needed to do that I didn't particularly want to do. I have to have my birth certificate translated by an official translator in order to apply for my carte de sejour that will enable me to live in France more than 3 months. I was given the name of a woman--Mme Sylvaine Collet--who lives a ways away in Paris. I was told that she would translate my birth certificate, officially stamp it for me, and I could collect it again in 3 days. I really am not good with meeting people for the first time. I'm pretty awkward with small talk in English, but I'm completely incapable of making small talk in French. My roommate, Margret, is one of those really likeable people who can talk about anything all the time. If I'm silent for more than a minute, she says, "Are you okay?" I told her today, "I don't really like saying something if I have nothing to say." This is incomprehensible to her. Anyway, because of this super power of hers, I bribed Margret to come along with me to see Sylvaine. (Margret's a Starbucks junkie, so I told her that if she went with me to see Sylvaine, we'd get Starbucks afterwards).
We didn't have specific directions to Sylvaine's apartment--we just knew what metro line we needed to take and what street she lived on. So, we took the metro until our stop, came up the stairs, and started looking around. It was such a beautiful neighborhood. I really do love our house, but Margret and I live in the suburbs of Paris, where things are a little less manicured. However, where this woman lives in Paris, everything is so typically "Welcome to France", with the cute little creperies and boulangeries and people on the sidewalk playing accordians for money.
We finally found Sylvaine's apartment building. We walked in, and the interior was just so ornate. Everything was marble, there were real flowers on every mantle, two of the walls were lined with these floor to ceiling mirrors. We looked at the mailboxes, and noted that the majority of the people living in the building had the same last name: Collet. I rang up to Sylvaine's apartment, and in this really professional voice she said, "Hello? Who is it?" So, I explained who I was and that I'd come to have a document translated. She buzzed us in, and we took the smallest elevator ever up to her apartment (and just as a side note: there were only two apartments per floor.) She'd left her door open, and when we got off the elevator, she shouted, "Come in." So, we walked in, and this tiny dog was sitting by the door, eyeing us. The book shelves were full of books, but more notably, pictures of the dog who was still on the door step. There were also several black and white pictures of some old man.
Sylvaine was sitting in what I'd call the parlor, with a stack of papers on this tiny table in front of her. She had crazy curly black hair and little glasses that were sliding off the end of her nose. Of course, being French, she was wearing all black. I handed her my birth certificiate and she looked over it, and assured me that the translation would be very easy. She and Margret chatted a little about the weather and how beautiful Paris is and how spring will come soon. The whole time, I kept staring at Sylvaine thinking, "I bet she's famous." Of course, there was the obvious question: why would a famous person translate random documents for random people and sit with her dog at a desk in the parlor wearing black? Still, I felt that she acted elitist and frosty enough to be famous.
We left, and I said to Margret, "Do you think she's famous."
Margret shrugged.
I said, "I bet this didn't used to be an apartment building. I bet it used to be one huge house and all these Collets lived together."
"Doubtful," Margret said.
But I insisted that there was something "too good to be true" about this all.
As we were leaving, I decided to look for proof of famousness. I looked at the floor, the ceiling, and lastly, I looked at the walls on the outside of the house. Guess what I saw?
A plaque hung by the door, and it said "Henri Collet, writer, musician, and critic, lived in this house."
So, moral of the story: Sylvaine was not necessarily famous, but I wasn't completely off-base with my guess. She's got a famous heritage. That's something cool, isn't it?
And just to prove (to whom? I don't know....myself?) that the plaque and the man listed on the plaque were real, I got home, and googled Henri Collet. Sure enough, he was real, and most likely, he was the old man in the black and white pictures.
So, just to say it one more time--today, I was at the home of Henri Collet, someone who might possibly have been mildly famous.
The end.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Collet