More than any other season, autumn has inspired French poets and songwriters with nostalgia, regret and longing for lost love. In an 1820 ode, Alphonse de Lamartine sensed in this mourning of nature "the farewell of a friend, the last smile". The romantic poet said he wanted to drink the chalice to the dregs, for "perhaps there remained a drop of honey . . . perhaps, in the crowd a soul I have not met would have understood my soul and responded to me!" With that bittersweet regret, his soul expired "like a sad, melodious sound".
Paul Verlaine's Chanson D'Automne is another poem learned by all French schoolchildren. "I remember past days and I weep," Verlaine wrote. The ill wind tossed him about "like a dead leaf". Long after his miserable end in 1896, Verlaine's "long sobs of the violins of autumn" would acquire historical significance. In June 1944, a few days before the D-Day landings, a BBC newsreader recited the poem as a coded signal that France was about to be liberated.
Les Feuilles Mortes sounds infinitely more poetic than "The Dead Leaves", and perhaps it needs a French soul to understand why the Prevert and Kosma melody has been called the most popular French song of all time. Juliette Greco and Yves Montand made it famous, but the most memorable rendition I've heard was in a television documentary about the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, broadcast when he took office in June 1997. Dressed casually and surrounded by friends and family, Mr Jospin momentarily lost his severe, doctrinaire manner as he burst forth in a clear tenor: "The dead leaves are scooped up with shovels, you see, I have not forgotten . . . "
Earlier this month, on morning jogs through the Luxembourg gardens, I watched uniformed caretakers with flat-bedded trucks cram palm trees into the winter green house for safe-keeping. Pink and purple summer flowers were banished and replaced with orange and yellow chrysanthemums. Forests of chestnut and plane trees began shedding, and out came the French contraptions. A man with a motorised backpack looked like he was about to ascend into space, but the hose he held blew carpets of leaves from the lawns.
After the storms of last weekend, it looked as if nature had defeated the Luxembourg's pains taking gardeners. Multitudes of chestnut leaves shaped like giant hands and plane tree leaves - bigger and less red than their Canadian maple cousins - had been violently shaken from branches.
A few nights ago, my husband and I walked across the Seine, past the Louvre, to a bistro in the rue St Roch. The chill air made the little restaurant feel cosy, and - I know it's irrational - the duck and the Burgundy wine seemed especially savoury. When I smell chestnuts roasting on an open brazier outside the Metro station, I recall the first time I tasted roast chestnuts, on a cold night in 1976 when my next door neighbours in a Paris garret, a Spanish cleaning lady and her West Indian boyfriend, knocked on the door with the autumnal offering.
At the end of the summer, stones began falling from the north tower of Saint-Sulpice Church, which we see from our apartment. The metal framework used to build the tower in 1777 had rusted away, the mountain climbers sent to investigate it concluded. In September, the entire tower was shrouded in gauzy green netting, to protect passing pedestrians and cars. Now the tower looks like a dowager empress, with the autumn wind billowing through her long veil.
Falling stones are a recurring theme this season. The 150 year-old white stone balustrades and benches of the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change were eroded by pollution, and experts feared they would drop onto the tourist Bateaux-Mouches in the Seine. After the architectural pieces were replaced with exact replicas in Burgundian stone, the Paris town hall - which owns the bridges - discovered the originals had been sold by the companies that removed them and were in danger - heaven forbid - of being auctioned to Americans. Perhaps not such a terrible fate, because the contract said they should be ground into gravel. City authorities nonetheless obtained a court order to stop the auction.
The French have discovered Hallowe'en with enthusiasm this year, and Jack O'Lanterns, witches and skeletons decorate Paris shop windows. The telephone company is sponsoring "Ola ween" pumpkin harvests in seven cities, and French newspapers report the Hallowe'en market for children's costumes, sweets and decorations has multiplied tenfold since last year.
