Write to Me by Post

No forms, no inbox, no scripts — a real letterbox in the eighteenth arrondissement.

I do not keep an email address for this site and I have no intention of starting. If you would like to write — a question, a correction, a memory of your own evening on Boulevard de Clichy — the post reaches me reliably and I answer, usually within the month. The slowness is deliberate; letters are better letters.

A few honest notes on the arrangement, so nobody's letter is wasted. Please write in either French or English — my English is serviceable and I enjoy the practice. There is no need for a reply coupon, though a return address on the envelope helps more than you would think. I do not answer questions about anything commercial, and I cannot help with reservations, prices or arrangements — those belong to the establishment itself, and this page is only a retired woman's letterbox.

Corrections are the letters I treasure most. If I have described the balcony rail wrongly, or misdated a season, or given the wrong exit from Blanche, do tell me — the notebook is only as honest as its errors are small. Former colleagues have already set me straight twice, and both times the page was better for it.

And if your letter is simply to say that you went, and sat at a small round table, and watched the feathers go up — those letters are the whole point of this little site. They go in a box under my desk with the old seating plans, which is the right company for them.

If you are wondering whether the address is real: it is. I sit near the window most mornings with coffee and the square below, and the postman knows my name after a decade of orchid catalogues. Letters in any hand are welcome — no need for formality, and certainly no need for apology about your French or your English; I read both with the patience of someone who seated tourists for a living. What I ask is only this: be patient in return. I answer in order received, and in months with many letters, order is a slow queue — the only queue on Boulevard de Clichy I still keep.

One last practical matter, since a few letters have asked: I am afraid I cannot advise on planning an evening — dates, prices, availability, what is currently playing. I have been retired for some years now, and the house changes its arrangements as it pleases; anything I told you from memory might well be wrong by the time you read it. For those questions the establishment itself is the only reliable voice, and it answers them daily. What this letterbox is good for is everything on these pages — the room, the streets, the work, the life — and for the kind of question that begins with the words I was there in 1998, and I have always wondered… Those letters, I confess, are the ones I answer first.