Maybe the Dry Cleaners Are Just Sans-culottes

The travails of being a member of the Legion of Honour.

For everyday use, chevaliers and officiers wear a special hue of deep red thread sewn in a thin stripe from the buttonhole to the outer edge of the lapel, while commandeurs wear a silver thread. The thread and other legionnaire pins are sold at a store near the Palais Royal in Paris.

These threads might get some attention in France, but are harder to decode in New York. “Every time I take a suit to the dry cleaners they try to snip them off,” said Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library and a chevalier. “It’s very expensive thread if you have to go all the way to Paris” to get it.

Felix Rohatyn, the financier and former ambassador to France, said his silver commandeur lapel thread also posed problems. “Sometimes if I leave it on and send it to the cleaners, it comes back with the thing off because they thought it was a laundry mark,” he said.

Only France's orders of chivalry could get such sympathetic coverage in the New York Times.

The Sunday Serial

I've been a big fan of the New York Times' Sunday Serial since Scott Turow started writing for it in April 2006.

The latest is by Colin Harrison, a writer with whom I was not previously familiar. And from the second paragraph he's showing a virtue of the serial as a form: its ability to be absolutely topical, because of the shorter lead time compared to a book.

While they'd attempted this a bit in the past, I don't believe they've done it to this level of immediacy.

It all began the second Friday in April, a sloppy, cold day. People had finally stopped discussing Eliot Spitzer’s many complex urges. Oil had just hit $112 a barrel, but no one was shocked. People were getting worked up about the Olympics in China. The stock market, so recently up after being so recently down, was down again, and everyone I knew was hoping that the Fed’s quasi-legal voodoo might actually work, so that we wouldn’t all be sucked into a giant, cheap-dollared vortex of recession, inflation and coast-to-coast foreclosures. Then again, many of the folks in my firm had been slyly loading up on gold for months and no doubt counted themselves smart for betting against the American economy. Me, I’d done nothing to prepare for the fiscal apocalypse. All I wanted was to go home and have dinner with Susan.

I haven't liked (and therefore haven't read) the last two Sunday Serials. This one has grabbed me from the beginning.