by John Baxter
He didn’t apologize for working both sides of the intellectual street. “At my age,” he told me, expertly shelling a shrimp, “a scholar has two alternatives—to write a novel, or to run off to the French Riviera with a showgirl. I decided to write the novel . . .” He paused to suck the juice from a shrimp head; I tried not to flinch. “. . . but that’s not to say I may not, one day, exercise the second option.”
Meeting Eco, Rouch, von Sternberg, and others like them raised the corner of a curtain on a very different Europe from the one I had imagined. A fellow science–fiction writer once said of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, that “his preferred future was extremely [H. G.] Wellsian, full of brainy people sitting about in togas swapping theorems.” This was my vision of Europe. Maybe not togas exactly, but definitely a high seriousness. So when European intellectuals behaved like ordinary men and women, I suspected them of acting the fool for our benefit, celebrating the trivial to prove they were Just Regular Guys.
It took a while to realize that Rouch’s surfing, von Sternberg’s artifacts, and Eco’s novels represented a different way of looking at the world. Eco didn’t eat our seafood out of politeness; he genuinely liked it. Nor did he turn up his nose at our writers and thinkers, many of whom he found bracing and original. Just because our way of life was different didn’t necessarily mean it was inferior. Until I met these men, my aim in life had been to, one day, live in Los Angeles. Now I had doubts. Might Europe, despite its daunting traditions, be the better option? Did London, Rome, even Paris offer more than madrigals, dreaming spires, old masters, and the rustle of ancient pages reverently turned?
8
Getting to Know the French
Place de la Concorde, Paris 8me. May 2017. 6 a.m. 10°C. As fountains splash and wet cobbles gleam in the slanting morning sun, tankers painted the somber green of all Paris sanitation vehicles trundle around its largest square, flushing its gutters as if in hopes of sluicing away the blood of those thousands of victims of La Terreur, a king and queen included, who died here. For a year after, not even dogs would cross it, so overpowering was the stench.
THAT MARIE–DOMINIQUE SHOULD, IN HER THIRTIES, HAVE DECIDED to marry and, in doing so, chosen a foreigner surprised and, in some cases, alarmed the people around her.
After a number of near misses over the years, her family and friends had decided that buzzing around the world as she did on assignment as a journalist, she was far too busy to settle down. They had her categorized as the glamorous aunt or niece, always good for a generous gift at a wedding or christening and free at a moment’s notice to join a Tuscan house party or help crew a yacht sailing to the Bahamas.
Who was I, an unknown, to have caught this highflier and coaxed her back to earth? Invitations to their home aren’t something the French make lightly, but during my first few months in Paris we were guests at several dinners where eating and drinking took second place to sizing me up.
Christmas with my new family had alerted me of what to expect. Fortunately, that went off well because I told a story about the misadventures of an Australian friend, the writer George Johnston, in the vineyards of Bordeaux just after World War II. Watching them smile at his floundering—and my own, in trying to tell the story in my fumbling French—taught me that the rules governing social life in Los Angeles would not do for France.
The passport to social acceptance in most societies is novelty. In California I played the slightly disoriented Englishman, increasing the broadness of my vowels and saying, when offered coffee, “I don’t suppose you have any tea?”
That would never do in France, where all things and people are judged according to the degree with which they share French values and ideals. Fortunately I had learned enough about both to, if not contribute, then at least nod in the right places.
At one such dinner party, the conversation turned to honeymoons and the fact that Marie–Dominique and I were too busy to have one.
“There’s a good story,” I said, “in the memoirs of Giscard d’Estaing . . .”
The autobiography of the former French president had just been translated into English, and my knowledge of it extended only as far as an extract published by one of the British papers. In it, he described his first meeting with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. It took place in Paris, at the Hôtel de Crillon, which looks out on Place de la Concorde.
Not sure with what kind of woman he was dealing, the urbane Giscard let her lecture him about Franco–British relations. As she did so, his mind wandered. Looking out on the sunlit fountains of Concorde, he wondered how many young couples had enjoyed this view on the first morning of their marriage. Why, he himself—
Seized by surprise, he interrupted Thatcher in mid–discourse.
“Forgive me, Madame Prime Minister,” he said. “I was just thinking how many young couples spent the first night of their honeymoon at the Crillon. I did so myself, but it’s only in this instant that I realized it was in this very suite!”
If he expected an answering smile, some sentimental response, he was disappointed. Raising one eyebrow in irritation, Mrs. Thatcher continued her recital. Clearly, the nickname “the Iron Lady” was well earned, an insight that affected all Giscard’s subsequent negotiations with her.
“Well, here is a surprise,” said our host when I finished the story. “A visitor who knows something of our country that, in my case at least, is quite new.”
Said over a dinner in Australia, a society preoccupied with equality, this would almost certainly have been sarcastic, and intended as an insult. In that egalitarian society, nobody was less appreciated than the know–it–all who soiled the garden of ignorance with an unwelcome factoid. In France, however, it was said with sincerity, even respect.
After that, I felt a lot easier about playing the heritage card, which is how I found myself on a balcony one night overlooking the Canal Saint–Martin, chatting about calendars with a man I’d only just met.
Inside, the party was getting noisy, but out here the air was heavy with odors of vegetal decay from the sluggish water of the canal—what the British poet Rupert Brooke called “the thrilling, sweet and rotten, / Unforgettable, unforgotten / River–smell.” They blended seamlessly with the cigar being smoked by someone a few meters along the balcony.
“It is too early for heat like this,” the smoker said from the darkness. “Every year, the summer comes earlier and stays longer.”
Groping for something more than bland agreement, I remembered a conversation with Céline years before, about how during the French Revolution, someone had the idea of renaming the months of the year. Thermidor was one; Brumaire was another, and what was the Month of Fruit . . . ?
“I know what you mean,” I said. “This is Fructidor, but it’s more like Vendémiaire.”
The red coal of the burning cigar moved closer, faintly illuminating the face of the smoker. Glasses, a beard . . . and, unexpectedly, a clerical collar.
“I knew you were a cinéaste, m’sieur. Are you also an historian?”
“No. Just interested.”
“In the Calendrier républicain?” He chuckled. “Believe me, my friend, you are in the minority. Hardly any of my own countrymen have ever heard of it. Or of Fabre d’Églantine.”
The name was new to me too, but I risked a bluff. “Not exactly a name one forgets.”
“So he thought,” said the man. He shifted his cigar and held out his hand. “Adrian de Grandpré. Of course, you know he faked it.”
Backpedaling, I said hurriedly, “I’m really no expert . . .” But it was too late.
Some time later, as I stepped back into the room, Marie–Dominique joined me. “What were you talking about on the terrace? You were out there for an hour.”
“The weather, as a matter of fact.”
I transferred to the pocket of my jacket the two pages of scribbled notes dictated by my new acquaintance and his list of books for further reading,
“What’s
all that?” she asked.
“Would you believe . . . homework?”
9
As If It Were Yesterday
A truck stop outside Poitiers. August 2010. 11 a.m. 22°C. Heat sucks moisture from the skin and desiccates the mouth. Kids, fully clothed, run squealing through the mist of a brumisateur. Feeling faintly foolish, I follow at a sober adult pace into a delicious rush of wet and cold. (Is this what a skydiver feels as he plummets through a cloud?) As I unlock the car a few minutes later, my clothes are just–ironed dry.
MODESTO, CALIFORNIA, HOMETOWN OF STAR WARS CREATOR George Lucas, could have been Junee in New South Wales, where I grew up. The table–flat landscape; the ubiquitous pickups; the locals lounging on benches, time on their hands and nothing on their minds; the railway line cutting the town in two; the freight trains that clanked through the level crossing, damming back traffic on each side—I knew them all. Lucas’s alter ego, Luke Skywalker, spoke for us both when he said of his home planet, Tatooine: “If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”
For proof that weather and landscape influence behavior, look no further than the similarities between countries with similar ecologies. Anyone who has lived in a community like Modesto, never mind its nationality, will tell you that the perception of days and weeks stretches or shrinks with the season, time flowing faster or slower in accordance with the degree of heat or cold.
Our brains know that time is elastic. A mild electrical current applied to the right inferior frontal cortex changes our sense of duration. A sustained lack of sunlight can induce depression. Why should stifling humidity or Arctic cold not have a similar effect?
Older societies adjusted their system of measurement to physical circumstances. The Persians measured distances not in kilometers but in parasangs, an elastic term representing how far one could walk in an hour in the local terrain. The rougher the country, the shorter the parasang. A “New York minute” is the parasang writ small. It recognizes that in a busy city, time speeds up—something even Einstein understood: a light–year, after all, is a parasang at the opposite end of the scale.
In a lifetime spent in Anglo–Saxon countries, I’d experienced a succession of seismic social and artistic changes: the Beat Generation, 1968 and the student revolution, flower power, Woodstock. After each, we brushed ourselves off, burned our banners, gave our outdated T–shirts to Goodwill, and moved on.
An acceptance of this fluid lifestyle had governed my life in California, where each day one woke alert for the Next Big Thing. But I felt no such urgency in France. Within its cultural microclimate, time moved at a different speed, sometimes even running in reverse or circling back on itself. I began to doubt my former commitment to the future. California found no merit in dwelling on the past, whereas France seemed to do little else.
In 1988, the French government commissioned a statue to mark the centenary of the wrongful conviction for treason of army officer Alfred Dreyfus, framed in a shameful example of an endemic anti–Semitism. Almost four meters tall, the statue depicted an officer saluting with a broken sword. The surface of the figure was bubbled, as if it had been dipped in pitch, then set on fire.
Minister of Culture Jack Lang wanted it erected on the parade ground of the École Militaire, the military college where Dreyfus was ritually disgraced before being deported to Devil’s Island. The army blocked its placement in so sensitive a location. (“My dear sir, are you aware that even Napoléon graduated from here?”) Banished to the Tuileries Garden, it stood for years in an obscure corner, facing a blank wall. Rehabilitated in 1994, it found a permanent home in a tiny park on boulevard Raspail, on the edge of Montparnasse.
When Louise was little I would walk her to school, past the park. We watched workmen construct a base and maneuver the heavy bronze figure into place. That was on a Friday. When we returned on Monday, somebody had spray–painted a word on the stone plinth.
Louise stopped and spelled it out. “What does this mean, Papa?”
“I’m not sure. Come on, chérie. We’ll be late.”
The word was traître. “Traitor.”
In France, the past, like the weather, was ever with us—for good or ill.
Statue of Alfred Dreyfus by Louis Mittelberg.
Learning to be papa. With Louise, age five.
Montel, Marie–Dominique. Author with Daughter.
10
Stormy Monday
Versailles. February 1990. 10 a.m. Wind drones in the trees. A white–haired guardian hides in a Perspex box the size of a telephone booth. From the woods on either side of the road come rushing cracks. “The trees are falling!” he yells over the noise, in a sort of glee. “Marie Antoinette couldn’t do it. Louis Quatorze couldn’t do it. But they are coming down now!”
ONE FEBRUARY MORNING IN MY FIRST YEAR IN PARIS, I WOKE IN our tiny apartment on the Île de la Cité to the rattling of windows. Icy air billowed white net curtains into the room. Shivering, I pushed the French windows closed and, through the glass, looked out onto Place Dauphine two floors below.
For days a gray fog had shrouded the city, composed, I decided, of one part water vapor, one part automobile exhaust, and the rest smoke from unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes.
Overnight, however, the fog had disappeared, driven off by a wind straight from the steppes of Russia. Across the square, our neighbor, Monsieur Gruyere, had brought his dog, Snowy, down for the customary canine reasons. Both now huddled in the doorway, Gruyere with hands shoved deep in the pockets of the coral–and–lime tracksuit he’d pulled on over his pajamas.
For Snowy, peering out from between his ankles, desperate need battled dislike of the wind. Finally he darted out, performed a sketchy pee next to a tree, gave a perfunctory flick with one rear paw, and fled back to shelter.
“There’s a storm,” I said, crawling back into bed.
“It’ll go away,” Marie–Dominique mumbled.
But it didn’t. When we got up at nine a.m., the wind was a steady drone overhead. It lashed the leafless chestnut trees below our windows and propelled the few pedestrians across the square like scraps of newspaper. According to the news, the wind had blown all night across most of central and northern France. Trees were down, houses had lost their roofs, and on TV the speakerines were using words like ouragan.
Mention of damage to houses had Marie–Dominique on the phone to her mother.
I understood almost none of their conversation, but her repeated troubled looks at the sky were graphic enough.
“Maman is worried about the house in Richebourg,” she said. “If one of those big trees fell on the roof, it would be a disaster. She wants us to go there and check.”
“How would we get there?” Richebourg had no railway connection. The nearest station was twenty kilometers away.
“By car, évidemment.”
On the TV, I watched as a caravan was crumpled against a tree like a sodden shoebox. The image shifted to a six–story apartment building under construction. As its scaffolding collapsed in the storm, sheets of metal went spinning like playing cards and industrial–strength PVC ripped like toilet paper.
“You’re sure it’s safe?” I asked.
Marie–Dominique spared the screen a glance. “This is all from farther south. It’s nowhere near that bad in the west.”
I was to get to know this tone of voice well, and learn not to argue with it. When it comes to family, world war alone takes precedence, and then only if the enemy is actually at the gates.
“Well, let’s go, if we’re going,” I said. “If it gets any worse, I’d prefer to be under cover.”
I had, I must admit, a hidden agenda. The road to Richebourg passed Versailles. So far I’d been put off visiting the palace and its gardens by the tourists that crowded both, but weather like this might keep them in their hotels.
Even as we reached the Seine, the force of the wind was alarming. It jammed houseboats against the stone abutments,
and down by the Pont d’Iéna, where the bateaux mouches excursion boats docked, men struggled to slide shut their big windows before the storm blew them out.
Taking the Périphérique, the ring road enclosing Paris, we crossed the Seine at Saint–Cloud and climbed into Ville–d’Avray, the beginnings of the countryside. Torn twigs littered the road. Trees thrashed in the gale. A few had been levered out of the ground like rotten teeth.
Medieval engraving of a hurricane.
Groenia, Johannes. L’Orage. Author’s collection.
Veill, C. (engraver). En Temps d’orage. Author’s collection.
The few drivers who passed us clutched their steering wheels and stared ahead with a concentration uncharacteristic of French motorists, who can, while at the wheel, speak on a mobile phone, eat a baguette jambon–fromage, and make love, sometimes all three at once.
Nobody else turned off to Versailles. We drove through the town almost alone and skirted the vast park. High spiked railings barred the common people from this synthetic world of lawns, forests, and boating lakes, private theaters, fountains, and pavilions. Within this bubble of privilege, a succession of French kings and their wives and mistresses had lived in a style that might have been copied from a canvas by Poussin or Claude Lorrain.
But today the gardens were deserted. It was as if the same gale that swept us here had blown away the five thousand people who’d lived in and around the palace at the time of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
We drove through the unmanned main gate and down a wide avenue toward the park entrance. At the foot of the drive, the road ended in a lake. The wind shredded the flow of the fountains and bent almost horizontal the plumes of water that once played above the gardens of André Le Nôtre. Under the scudding clouds, we were alone but exhilarated, infected by the same madness.
Obviously this was no day for sightseeing. Thirty minutes later, we were back on the road. A giant beech, in falling, had hammered a car flat. A gendarme directed us around the wreck. At Richebourg the wind had uprooted one of the giant poplars, but though branches and leaves littered the garden, the house itself was safe. Next door a redwood had snapped in half, exposing dense wood, blood red.