Saturday, October 7: Tonight was the Nuit Blanche in Paris, and I was very excited about it. It’s a big arts festival with installations in major Parisian buildings. Laura and I were planning to meet up with K. from our seminar, and P., my fellow eighteenth-century French theatre specialist who I met at ATHE this summer. We started our Nuit Blanche with some wine and conviviality at P’s apartment, and then headed over to the installation at the Bibliothèque Nationale. That was pretty cool, with fog surrounding the “trees of knowledge” and ethereal music playing. Then we got on the Metro and headed to the Archives Nationales, where there were ostensibly theatre performances. The Marais was insanely crowded, and when we finally got in to the Archives Nationales complex, all we saw were shrubs wrapped in plastic, a band playing, and people waiting in a line. So we got in line behind them and ended up in a building with some guy doing calligraphy and an audience leaving a staged reading that had clearly just ended. Since we had no idea when the next reading might start, and we were kind of done with the Nuit Blanche, we decided to get on the Metro and go home. I was a little disappointed, but Katie pointed out that waiting in line for something unimpressive is part and parcel of the French cultural experience. Well, she didn’t say that. She said, “We had our Nuit Blanche. It was an experience.” And she invited us to a party at her apartment the following Saturday.