It’s the birthday of French novelist George Sand,
born Lucile Aurore Dupin in Paris (1804). She was raised by her
grandmother at the family’s estate in rural Berry in central France, and
was sent to an English convent in Paris to be educated. Although she
started out as a troublemaker, Aurore underwent a spiritual conversion
and decided to become a nun. She was an enthusiastic convert, and the
other girls called her “Saint Aurore.” When her grandmother discovered
her granddaughter’s intentions, she promptly removed her from the
convent and brought her home.
Back
in Berry, she abandoned her dreams of the convent and did whatever she
pleased. She loved to ride horseback, and her tutor at the time
encouraged her to wear men’s clothing since it was more comfortable, so
she rode all over the countryside in pants and a loose shirt. She smoked
tobacco, learned to shoot, and flirted outrageously with all the local
men. When her grandmother died, she inherited her money and estate.
She
briefly went to Paris to live with her mother, then got married and had
two children. But her marriage soon deteriorated — her husband drank
too much and was unfaithful. She fell in love with other men, including
the novelist Jules Sandeau. Her relationship with Sandeau was
short-lived, but while they were together, they co-wrote a novel, Rose et Blanche (1831).
It was published under Sandeau’s pseudonym, J. Sand. When the publisher
asked for another book, she had one written entirely by her, but
Sandeau did not want it under his pen name. As a compromise, she
published her new novel, Indiana (1832), under the name George Sand. It was a big success.
She was a prolific writer; she wrote more than 90 novels, 35 plays, and a multivolume autobiography.
Sand
was one of the most famous women of her time, not just for her writing
but for her scandalous behavior — everything from her men’s clothing and
cigars to her sexual exploits were in the public eye. She had a long
string of lovers, including Frédéric Chopin, and her many friends
included Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Eugène Delacroix, Ivan Turgenev,
and Gustave Flaubert. Sand and Flaubert were especially close, although
the two novelists disagreed on just about everything from politics to
the role of women to the purpose of art. They spent long hours together,
smoking and discussing literature and humanity; they exchanged frequent
letters, and read each other’s unpublished work. Sand was 17 years
older than Flaubert; he addressed his letters to her “dear master,”
while she addressed hers “friend of my heart.”
She
said: “The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day
does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way
for other women.”
Writing is hard work. It is gathering ten times as much material as can ever be used. This information has to be gleaned to get the best possible use from it. The reader has to be convinced that the writer knows what he is writing about.
JOHN STEINBECK
Between my junior and senior year in college, I
worked at No. 9 Park. I’d applied for a dishwasher prep-cook job, and
they were short-staffed in their pastry department, so I was the pastry
plater. People were passing me food to taste, the foie gras and the
prune gnocchi. That experience really caused me to think, “I could do
this.” Chef Marc Sheehan
I like eating at places that feel kind of
classic, that feel like home. I lived in Quincy for a long time, and I
loved going to Denly Gardens in Weymouth. It’s a pizza place that’s been
there since 1933. You order your pizza, you might wait 45 minutes to an
hour, and it’s cash-only. The bar doesn’t have any seats; it has a rail
that you lean on. It’s this thin, Roman-style pizza. They import all
their products from Italy. You can just order a plate of anchovies that
come with Scali bread and pats of butter that are still wrapped in
little gold foil.Chef Marc Sheehan
She moved from Paris to Vermont and found her ‘dream job’ opening a bakery
Shelley MacDonald opened Burlington’s Belleville Bakery, and it’s become one of the city’s gems.
The all-butter croissants at Belleville Bakery & Catering in Burlington, Vt.Sheryl Julian
BURLINGTON,
Vt. — Shelley MacDonald and her husband, both Canadian citizens, had
been living in Paris for over a decade when the pandemic hit. She’d been
selling baked goods and hosting a dinner club called Paris Bread in
their apartment. She wanted to open a business in the United States,
where she could operate in English. It was time to leave, except that,
at the moment, only American passport holders could fly into the United
States.
With
ingenuity and grit, the couple discovered a visa for foreign
entrepreneurs and secured one from the American Embassy the day it
reopened after lockdown. Once their passports were stamped, they had 30
days to fly out and move everything they owned to this picturesque
college town.
Since
2022, MacDonald has run Belleville Bakery & Catering near City Hall
in Burlington, Vt., down the street from the University of Vermont.
She’s training staff, including students, and offering confections you
might see in a Parisian patisserie, most not as fancy. She has different
varieties of all-butter croissants, cinnamon snails and feta-garlic
snails made with croissant trimmings, tempting lunch items such as bacon
cheddar quiche and tuna sandwiches with smoked Gouda on homemade onions
buns, and dinners such as lasagna, rigatoni, and chicken pot pie to
take home.
Shelley MacDonald, a Canadian citizen, lived in Paris before moving to Burlington.Sheryl Julian
“I
think the town is adorable with kind people who help you when you don’t
need to be helped,” says MacDonald, sitting in the bright bakery.
“There’s something very special about Vermont.”
She
and her husband — the hyperrealist painter André Beaulieu — picked
Burlington because they had visited often when they lived in his
hometown, Montreal. “The real reason is so that I could open a business
in English,” she told her 48,000 Instagram followers,
“so that I could function in my native language, for all of the reading
and writing and dealing with lawyers and accountants and plumbers that
you need to do when you own a business.”
MacDonald
describes their new situation as “the best of both possible worlds,
where I get to live in English in a really cute space, and he gets to
live with me in English in a really cute space and he’s really close to
home.” She describes her business as her “dream job.”
The
100-year-old building whose storefront she renovated is large and airy,
with bakers in the kitchen in full view making croissant and brioche
doughs, prepping cookie batters and galette pastry.
Quiches at Belleville Bakery.Sheryl Julian
MacDonald
moves quickly, laughs easily, and greets customers warmly. “People come
into a bakery looking for a treat and some kind of care,” she says.
When you’ve finished eating, you don’t have to take your plates and cups
to various bins for recycle and trash. That system horrifies her. “No
bussing,” she says. “We take care of you.”
Her
clientele skews older, she has noticed, and they’re looking for
somewhere to go. “The demand is enormous,” she says. She describes her
personality as “Shelley takes care of people.” Remembering her days
running an underground restaurant, MacDonald now offers twice-monthly
Sunday brunches and dinners, both served at a long table farmhouse-style
so everyone talks to their neighbors.
MacDonald,
who is willing to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,
also has a successful mail-order arm to send cookies across the country.
They’re thick and perfectly round in flavors such as orange gingersnap,
pistachio chocolate, and lemon pistachio shortbread.
She
also gives classes in the bakery and writes a weekly newsletter, which
she snail-mails for free. “People are lonely,” she says. They want to
receive real mail.
Feta-garlic snails at Belleville Bakery.Sheryl Julian
Born
and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, MacDonald, 59, also lived in
Vancouver. She met Beaulieu in Montreal. His large, striking artworks
hang in the bakery.
In
order to get a US E-2 Investor Visa, they had to invest $15,000 in a
new US company (some applicants invest considerably more) and have
secured premises in the destination city. Sight-unseen, they rented a
painting studio in The Soda Plant in Burlington for Beaulieu, which qualified them.
The
bakery’s name is the English version of Beaulieu’s surname. Beaulieu
means “beautiful place,” she says. Belleville, which means “beautiful
city,” is easier for Americans to spell.
Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak,
who happened to be there when I was — she said she stops by often since
her office is so close — describes the bakery as “loveliness in this
corner. [MacDonald] draws people into this community.”
Cinnamon snails at Belleville Bakery.Sheryl Julian
The
bakery has become known for its I am Proud of Me Banana Cake. It’s
really banana bread, but when MacDonald made it in France, customers
wondered why it was called bread.
When
you buy one, MacDonald asks you what you’re proud of. She’s heard many
comments, mostly emotional. One woman in her 20s was going to drive on
the highway for the first time, someone else was excited to have
completed exams. Then a man came in to say he was proud of his wife for
finishing chemo.
“She’d been planning this cake during her treatment,” MacDonald told a local TV reporter who did a segment
on her. Donations started coming in so other cancer patients at the
local hospital could get a banana cake; MacDonald also sends cakes to a
palliative care center and a teen drop-in center.
Those
efforts came to the attention of a program director at the University
of Vermont, who called MacDonald in the middle of Vermont’s dark, cold
February winter. The administrator was running a mental health day for
freshmen. She bought 100 banana cakes from MacDonald and asked her to
come and hand them out.
The
line was an hour long. Students waited patiently, not just to get an I
am Proud of Me Banana Cake, but also for a moment to tell MacDonald what
was on their mind.
Belleville Bakery & Catering, 217 College St., Burlington, Vt., www.bellevillevt.com
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