I was sitting in a small café in Paris last week and a song came on that stopped me mid-sip. It was dreamy, slightly off-kilter song that felt out of place in winter, that made me nostalgic for the warmth of the tropics. The track was “Paraiso” by Pearl & the Oystersfrom their April 2023 album Coast 2 Coast. Pearl & the Oysters originated in Paris by French-American indie pop duo Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack. They met in high school in Paris, before they moved to Gainesville, Florida, then Los Angeles, where they recorded Coast 2 Coast, their first album. They blend indie, dream pop, retro synths, soft rock, and tropical sounds, that combine like French pop filtered through Californian oceans and sunsets. Coast 2 Coast is an album about literal and metaphorical movement: travel, displacement, and the simultaneous joy and anxiety of seeking “paradise” in an unstable world. The song “Paraiso” (Paradise), sounded sensuously sunny when I listened to it for the first time, in that Parisian café. Coincidentally, at the time – January 2026 – I was reading a UK magazine dated July/August 2023, which listed its 60 favourite summer tracks by categories. Number 7 on the Maritime beats list was “Paraiso” – a “whimsical song about being stranded on a desert island.” With coffee just touching my lips, though the music felt strangely enticing, it was the lyrics that stopped me. “Paraiso” opens with that unforgettable line: “Another day in paradise…” As the verses unfold, paradise feels less like a perfect place and more like a contradiction, with the lyrics, “an advertised dream that doesn’t quite match reality.” The song hints at idyllic imagery of endless summers and tropical horizons while acknowledging that paradise can be lonely, unbalanced, and even unsettling when viewed through the pressures of modern life. The chorus circles back to a feeling of being stranded, adrift between beauty and boredom: “My brain’s stranded on an island / A tired sea song in my head…” It’s contemplative, but less than a vacation than a state of mind. The lyrics continue, “It’s lonely in the garden of Eden.” Feeling a bit stranded myself, in a Parisian paradise, the songcaptures the same mixture of feelings that I was experiencing: both yearning and reflection. Whether it’s nostalgic warmth with an undertow of anxiety, or a promise of paradise that’s not quite what it seems, the song feels like it could be the soundtrack to a Parisian movie. There’s something poetic about hearing a song like “Paraiso” in a café near the Seine, with a reminder that paradise isn’t always a far-off beach. Sometimes it’s the small moments of stillness in a bustling city, the warm place in winter, with the aroma of coffee and the murmuring sounds of morning visitors. The song concludes with the dreamy verse: Just look around and feel the hush I’m on the edge of my seat, a mouthful of coffee warm and euphoric, expecting my final season, or 2026 at the very least, to breeze in surprise.
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Tuesday, 20 January 2026
Another Winter Day in Paradise, in Paris
Monday, 19 January 2026
Feast of the Fools: irreverent carnival of sacred disorder
Feast of the Fools: irreverent carnival of sacred disorder… a festival where kings are fools and fools are kings …
France has an irreverent history of celebrating disorder and turning hierarchy upside down, when bells rang out of tune, choirboys became bishops, kings became fools, and fools became kings. This was the Feast of the Fools. For one day, sometimes up to a week, hierarchy dissolved. The world was turned upside down. The festival emerged in medieval France, around the 12th century, with strong roots in the south. It was not a single, centrally organized event, but a family of local customs that took place in and around churches, often organized by the lower clergy, choir members, or theology students. Junior clerics elected a mock pope or “bishop of fools.” Sacred vestments were worn backwards. Processions paraded donkeys through cathedrals. The smoke of burning shoes replaced incense. Latin hymns were twisted into comic songs. Dice were thrown on altars. Wine replaced solemnity. It was called, quite unapologetically, a disorderly revel. Its spirit was carnivalesque: parody, misrule, satire, and joyful chaos. The Feast of the Fools was primarily held in late December to early January, linked to December 28 (the Feast of the Holy Innocents), January 1 (the Feast of the Circumcision), or January 6 (Epiphany). It was when chaos entered the activities of the sacred. It was daring. Accounts from the period, many written by horrified church authorities, describe scenes that are almost unbelievable today. Clerics brayed like donkeys during Mass. Mock sermons praised drunkenness. Masks were worn inside cathedrals. Gambling took place on holy ground. The poor mocked the powerful. The solemn was made ridiculous. Beneath the scandal, historians saw something important. It was not simply a festival of misbehaviour. It was a ritualized release, like a social pressure valve. It was a brief, structured moment when those who lived under relentless hierarchy could invert it. The fool became king. The king became a joke. I’m reminded of this feast because I’m re-reading Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Hugo places one of the novel’s most famous scenes at the heart of this festival. The hunchback, Quasimodo, is elected Pope of Fools. Dragged before a crowd, his physical deformity makes him, in their eyes, the perfect embodiment of grotesque comedy. He is crowned, paraded, cheered, and finally tormented. The scene is comic. It is also cruel. It is unforgettable. Hugo understood that the Feast of the Fools was not only about laughter, but about power, exclusion, and the fragile line between celebration and violence. The crowd crowns Quasimodo not because they love him, but because he fits their idea of what a fool looks like. In doing so, Hugo exposes how easily societies turn someone “different” into a spectacle. Repeated attempts were made to suppress the Feast of the Fools. Catholic bishops issued condemnations. Councils banned the rituals. Humanist reformers and, later, Protestant movements, rejected what they saw as blasphemy and moral disorder. The Counter-Reformation brought a new emphasis on discipline, clarity, and reverence. By the late 15th and early 16th centuries, church authorities had had enough. Feast of the Fools ended in 1444 and it was officially forbidden by law to celebrate the event in France in 1552. That law remains today. We have equivalents of the feast today, though they wear different hats or crowns. April Fools’ Day offers a thin echo of the feast with harmless tricks, temporary gullibility, and licensed nonsense. Carnivals and Mardi Gras retain more of the old spirit, with their costumes, parades, and ritual excess before Lent. Political satire, meme culture, protest theatre, Burning Man, and even internet absurdism all bear fragments of the same ancient impulse: to mock power, to invert norms, to let the fool speak truths that no one else is permitted to voice. Why did Victor Hugo think it mattered to create a scene around the Feast of the Fools 300 years after it ended? Because Hugo was writing about fractures: beauty and cruelty, faith and fear, the individual and the crowd, love and spectacle. The Feast of the Fools allowed him to place all of these tensions into a single scene. A medieval ritual became a mirror of society, and the festival became a moral stage. And yet, the Feast of the Fools is also about societies that have always known they needed disorder. It was an event where even the most rigid worlds made room, once a year, for a week, for the fool. Perhaps Hugo saw in this vanished feast something profoundly human: our need to mock what frightens us, and to have the freedom of inversion. The Feast of the Fools may be gone, but its ghost still appears in our festivals and in our novels, protests, and screens. Ringing a crooked bell asks us to ponder whether order cannot exist without periods of misbehaviour, disorder, and chaos. A disorderly revel, the chaos of kings becoming fools, and fools becoming kings, may have been almost tolerable for a week in medieval times, but even then, a week was more than enough.
Can’t see the whole article? Want to view the original article? Want to view more articles? Go to Martina’s Substack: The Stories in You and Me More Paris articles are in my Paris website The Paris Residences of James Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to The Stories in You and Me . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Another Winter Day in Paradise, in Paris
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