When we arrived on rue Beaurepaire twenty years ago, at number twenty, where we still are today, the neighborhood looked completely different.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret: last year, I went through a period of emptiness, something that really put me on edge. Between a mid-life crisis and the need to hold on to something concrete and give meaning to my life, I really wondered whether I was on the right track. But I had to move on, so I decided to postpone my questioning.
Very few people know this, but the song Gigi sung by Dalida was inspired by a story about my mother who, in the seventies, when she had separated from my father, lived from odd jobs in the south of France, in Cannes, the city of poodles and scrunchies.
It was a Monday in February. I remember because it was cold. A cold that no longer exists, a polar cold. It was snowing heavily. Paris was paralysed. At the time, I was working for a major shoe brand created by a man who has now disappeared. Not in a magic trick, no. He was well and truly dead, well buried, well decomposed. Far, far away.
Somewhere after graduation and between a few extinguished university studies (which is the opposite of brilliant), I looked in the mirror and said to myself (apart from the fact that I thought I looked pretty good):
"Well then, girl, don't you think you'd be better off somewhere else than here? Tell the truth, and don't hide from it".
I'm sure you're dreaming of me telling you the story of the Higgins.
Last September, I woke up in the middle of the night, flooded, as if the giant aquarium in my bedroom, home to a family of piranhas, had broken and spilled onto my bed. However, I soon realized that I was in the middle of a wet dream.
When we opened our shop on rue Beaurepaire nearly seven years ago, we didn't have a penny to our name, and in fact it was I who finished the renovations./p>
Alone in the middle of the parking lot, in my future husband's white corvette with red leather interior, I called out for some kind soul to come and administer first aid. I could still hear a vague rattle emanating from his mouth. Seeing that no one was coming, I began to give him improvised mouth-to-mouth on his chapped lips.
When we receive our beautiful little shoes, they arrive in boxes, very large boxes which, once emptied, are of little use to us and even become cumbersome.
A shoe is always a story connected to a feeling, a moment in my life, a work, a song, a film, a person. I have to connect all the dots in a drawing in order to make progress and let a figure appear, and that's absolutely essential because that's how I weave my life together.
It's back-to-school, damn it. Damn, because when you have to get ready to put your hands, feet, neck and whole body into a new year, you have to be prepared or, on the contrary, completely relaxed to stand up and face an opponent that may seem out of proportion.