Mada Masr

A Macron tale: The story of a perfect Champs-Elywood recipe
▻http://orientxxi.info/dossiers/mada-masr/a-macron-tale-the-story-of-a-perfect-champs-elywood-recipe,1913

This article was originally published on Mada Masr, a digital media outlet based in Egypt, and has been republished here with permission. As part of the Egyptian government’s on-going campaign of press censorship, Mada Masr has been blocked inside Egypt. In line with our commitment to press freedom and independent journalism, Orient XXI will be republishing content from Mada Masr, to help circumvent the Egyptian state’s actions and assist Mada Masr in reaching people inside Egypt. Read more about the Egyptian state’s suppression of the media and attacks against Mada Masr here.

Let me start with a vain introduction.

I am French.

Worse, I belong to the Parisian middle-class.

After needing 10 years to realize human life is theoretically possible outside of Paris and 10 more to realize it actually exists, I left Paris, and have lived outside France for most of the past 10 years.

Throughout this period, I actively worked on unparisianing myself. This probably seems absurd, but, for me, being Parisian is associated with gray. Gray is more Parisian than Paris itself.

Gray is a color. Paris is visually quite gray, from its sidewalks to its buildings, from its roofs to its eternally clouded sky. Gray can be beautiful. Paris is beautiful.