Lisa Michaux. Paris, Fall 2015.
Bonjour and welcome to my website! For way too long I have wanted to have a place to write about my adventures in Paris and post my pictures, and now I have finally taken the plunge! Yikes—it’s cold in here! However, according to my Lululemon bag, I’m supposed to do something everyday that scares me, well, this would be it for a while!
My name is Lisa Michaux, known by my neighbors in my Paris apartment as Madame Michaux. I had a particularly nasty neighbor downstairs, we will just call him Monsieur Quatrième Étage (Mr. 4th Floor to my 5th floor), who didn’t appreciate that I wanted to look good in Paris and would wear my heels in the apartment. When he saw me he would say my name and accent each and every syllable while shaking his finger at me—Ma ´Dame ´ Mi ´Chaux—did I say that he didn’t like me very much??—so, I decided to take his condescending treatment of my gorgeous married name and make it a beautiful thing 🙂 Merci Monsieur!
My husband, the ever patient Q, and I have had an apartment in the 7th arrondissement in Paris for several years and I try to visit as much as I can. I am an art historian and was a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for 20 years before leaving and having a typical crisis that involved becoming a yoga teacher and wanting so spend copious amounts of time in Paris. What can I say, I am a cliché—at least it is a French word!
The idea for this site developed out of emails I wrote to my friends during my visits to Paris to renovate the apartment that we bought in either a fit of complete confusion, or absolute clarity. We had only seen pictures from our agent, and to make it even more interesting, we had visited this particular neighborhood exactly twice, in a country where I could barely speak the language. Missed in translation, hilarity, and totally embarrassment ensued. But I have lived to tell the tale and will go back in time to bring some of the best parts alive again.
My perfectionist side wants this site to follow a specific timeline, but that just doesn’t work for those of us without assistants and private planes.