We’d like to tell you about a project that we feel strongly about…

Corinne Moncelli, owner of the Hôtels Paris Rive Gauche, would this to say about a recent experience she had:

“Everything started with an unknown face that soon became familiar. Each day, on the way to and from work I walked past a woman living in the street, a femme de la rue, and suddenly the term seemed to resonate with meaning: she was grey, often sitting, staring into space or at the pavement, sometimes listening to the radio, never asking for anything, between one hot air vent and another. I knew I’d see her in front of the Institut Océanographique, or rue d’Ulm. She was almost invisible, except to me. I don’t how how to describe the uneasy feeling it gave me, not from a bad conscience but almost pain from seeing her there, so sweet and so abandoned. I tried to talk to her but the silent figure wouldn’t respond. One day I tried offering a cup of hot coffee, another some loose change, some kind words another. Some evenings when it turned really cold I called social services to come and get her. I tried various little gestures without much success. For example, she made it very clear she didn’t like coffee! But one day, I touched her heart; thanks to my 5 year old daughter Carla giving her a packet of biscuits, I finally saw the face of this mystery person on rue d’Ulm fill up with pent up emotion. After leaving her we turned round and waved, only to see her regard following us, as if dreaming… What was she thinking of? Her past? Her child?

Corinne Moncelli

The Hôtels Paris Rive Gauche group has decided to support one of the association’s new projects:

Firstly, with financial aid:
For each reservation made through our site, we will be donating two euros. You will also be able to support the project when reserving, by donating a discretional sum of between one and fifty euros.

The Maison Bellefontaine
The Paris city council has let the association use the Château de Bellefontaine, a beautiful 19th Century building which will be completely restored and turned into a centre for women that are extreme difficulty, or who have no real way of getting back into society. The centre will be able to house up to fifty women.

The project:
To create a place in which the inhabitants contribute to the daily running (cooking lessons for the midday meal, upkeep of a market garden for forgotten varieties of vegetables, and an orchard). The association’s brilliant idea is to create links with artistic craftsmen and teach the chateau’s inhabitants useful skills so that they can become “little helpers” and slowly have a certain financial independence. The Hôtels Paris Rive Gauche group is extremely eager to participate in a project that mixes the teaching of useful skills with the creation of beautiful objects, allowing people to find a place in society once again.

Updates:
Our blog with be one of the ways you can keep track of the project. We will try to do regular reports on how the works are going and – later on – what life in like at the centre.

Bees:
Finally, we would like to help the community at Bellefontaine to look after some beehives and produce their own honey… Obviously this will be after the centre is properly up and running smoothly.

We hope that you will also be interested by this cause, and want to support the Maison de Bellefontaine.

*Cœur de Femmes is part of the Cœur des Haltes association, which looks after several centres where people living in extreme conditions in the street can come and stay and be helped.

“I think of the men and women that I see in the street, sometimes drunk, sometimes mad, sometimes kind, sometimes violent, so close to us on the pavement, often tranquil, giving a kind hello, and it makes me think once again that if only more of us had a little of the humanity of those who work for the association and look after these people, then we could do something good for people, and help everyone to be a little happier.”