As I am a lover of post offices, especially ones overseas, I mailed myself a postcard home from France. It arrived yesterday, 15 days after I mailed it from the post office at 30 Rue de Reuilly in Paris.
I spent 15 minutes in the post office, as it took the clerks some time to find the appropriate stamp to mail a postcard to Canada; I was eventually given a €1.80 stamp featuring Marcel Marceau.
The postcard itself was one I bought at the Rougier & Plé shop near Notre Dame, a small biography of Oscar Wilde (13 Rue des Beaux Arts, Wilde’s last home in Paris, was a 10 minute walk away).
Thus Wilde was visited upon Charlottetown for the second time in 141 years.
Comments
The choice of that particular pose of Marceau may have been inevitable, but I still think it’s genius, because the effect is man (trapped) in a stamp and so seems current. You know, I think he’s been featured in either a US or a Canadian stamp before. I think it was a full-body shot.
OK maybe I made that up about the earlier stamp, because I can’t find any evidence and it seems plausible that my brain somehow scrambled him with my memory of an Edith Piaf stamp and maybe one other in the same mental neighborhood