A Year in Paris

by John Baxter

  In its embrace of the modern over the antique and its sense of a rational new society, the calendar embodied the purest spirit of the revolution. A kind of poem, it reflected this divine beauty and echoed the music of the spheres. It mirrored the universe as it would one day be metered by Foucault’s pendulum: inexorable, essential, eternal.

  How could it fail? But as the old—and, in terms of the Republican calendar, politically unacceptable—joke goes, “If you want to see God laugh, show him your plans.”

  22

  April in Paris

  Malibu, California. August 1988. 2 a.m. 14°C. A chattering crowd fringes the beach as waves of the silver fish called grunion slither ashore, carpeting the zone where water meets sand. As females lay their eggs in the tidal flow, males ejaculate spasmodically into the soup of saltwater, sand, and milt before the ebb carries them, spent, back out to sea. Gleefully, watchers scoop them up in buckets, ingredients for a late supper.

  PEOPLE OFTEN ASK, “WHAT’S THE BEST TIME TO COME TO PARIS?”

  Before I moved here, I would have said, “Well, I suppose April,” not from conviction but simply because the song “April in Paris” is so ubiquitous that it could be the city’s theme. From Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to the entire Count Basie band—discovered, in Mel Brooks’s comedy western Blazing Saddles, blasting it out in the midst of the Arizona desert—it has more than earned its status as a standard. Composer Alec Wilder insists, “This is a perfect theater song. If that sounds too reverent, then I’ll reduce the praise to ‘perfectly wonderful,’ or else say that if it’s not perfect, show me why it isn’t.”

  A jazz listener since adolescence, I’d grown up with “April in Paris,” but like most things encountered early in life, since taken it for granted.

  It comes from an obscure 1932 Broadway show, Walk a Little Faster. The composer was Vladimir Dukelsky, who chose to work as Vernon Duke.

  The lyrics were by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, who wrote “Over the Rainbow” but also “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” with its catalog of body art made memorable by Groucho Marx: “Here’s Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon / Here’s Godiva but with her pajamas on,” not to mention “Here’s Nijinsky, doing the rumba. / Here’s her social security numba.”

  “April in Paris” didn’t aspire to that degree of invention. Its first few lines—“April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom / Holiday tables under the trees”—produced no frisson of recognition. They didn’t even rival another Duke/Harburg collaboration, “Autumn in New York,” with its sly couplet “Lovers that bless the dark / On benches in Central Park.”

  To my surprise, “April in Paris” has an introductory verse, but it’s seldom performed. Reading the lyrics, claiming that April brought a “tang of wine in the air,” I wasn’t surprised.

  Wondering if I was missing some nuance, I ran the lyrics past my gastronome friend Boris. Able to spot the bogus at a hundred meters, he didn’t disappoint.

  “‘The tang of wine’? Who wrote this? Had he ever even been to Paris?”

  A melancholy vision of April in Paris.

  Gorguet, Auguste François. A Melancholy Vision of April. April 1892. Wikimedia Commons.

  “In fact, Duke lived here for years,” I said. “He wrote a ballet for Diaghilev, was a friend of Prokofiev. But Harburg . . . I doubt it.”

  I didn’t mention Lydia and her tattoos. Why call down more scorn on my head?

  “And ‘chestnuts in blossom, holiday tables under the trees’? Those are hardly unique to April.”

  He was right. The marron (chestnut), Paris’s most common tree, flowered throughout the spring. And as for “holiday tables under the trees,” April has no monopoly on those. A blizzard needs to be blowing before café owners take in the highly profitable tables and chairs ranged along the sidewalk. Some hand out blankets for clients to wrap around their legs and keep right on serving even when the unprotected parts of their patrons begin to turn blue.

  By 1952, the fantasy of April in Paris was comprehensively blown. The writers of April in Paris, a film released that year starring Doris Day, seemed actually to know the city, since they poked fun at the whole idea. Day, a new arrival in France and eager to experience its widely advertised warmth, gaiety, and romance, convinces her leading man to sit outside at a café, even when a waiter, teeth chattering, urges them to move inside. When Day refuses, he takes cover himself, telling them he’ll be back in July.

  A journalist friend had other reasons for disliking “April in Paris.”

  “I can’t tell you how tired I am of that song,” he said. “Every year, they dust it off on the first day of April. On TV they play it over a montage of cafés and flowers, all from last summer, of course. It’s a marron, a chestnut.” He had a sudden thought. “You know, don’t you, that’s why anything boring—an old joke, or this TV thing—is called a ‘chestnut’? There used to be an old marron tree in the Tuileries that was the first to flower every spring. In England you have the first call of the cuckoo bird, and in America that rat thing—”

  “A groundhog, actually,” I said. “Name’s Punxsutawney Phil.”

  “C’est vrai? Merde alors!” He raised his eyebrows, partly at the name but mostly at the fact that I should know about it.

  “Well, in Paris,” he went on, “the first sign of spring was this marron flowering. So some reporter was sent to write a piece about it. Usually it was the stagiaire.” Obviously he had once been such a trainee himself. “A horrible job. What can one say that hasn’t been said a thousand times before? C’est ennuyeux. So that’s why we say that anything like that is a marron, a chestnut.”

  Worse and worse. The credibility of April in Paris as the inspiration for a song was evaporating before my eyes. So why would Duke write something that so poorly described a city he must have known intimately? Could it be no more than the fact that “April in Paris” fell more agreeably on the ear than “March,” “May,” “June,” or “July in Paris”?

  As I discovered after more research, it may all have been the fault of writer Dorothy Parker, a friend of lyricist Harburg. A cynic’s cynic and a mistress of acid wordplay—“If all the women [at this party] were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised”—Parker was a poet of the glass–half–empty persuasion. Life to her was one long disappointment, its pain assuaged by liberal applications of gin and sex.

  According to one account, Parker was within earshot when Vernon Duke referred to Robert Browning’s poem “Home–Thoughts, from Abroad” as a possible theme for a song. Was there a tune to be had from this dithyramb to the English spring, with its famous first lines “Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s there”?

  Through her tenth martini, darkly, Parker saw nothing appealing about England in April. The fogs, the rain, and, my dear, the people!

  But France . . . Now that was something else.

  “Oh, to be in Paris,” she murmured, “now that April’s there.”

  And from this bitter soil a song germinated? Isn’t it pretty to think so.

  23

  A Boy Named Wheelbarrow

  Matsue, western Japan. September 1982. 2 p.m. 10°C. Carp, dead white skin patched with orange and black, peer up, mouths pouting, from their shallow pond. Beyond, the ancient castle’s moat, now carpeted with green lawn, is filled with white tents, in and out of which slip exquisite women in kimonos of white silk also patterned with black and orange.

  FOR ALL ITS FAULTS, THE GREGORIAN CALENDAR HAD DONE GOOD work.

  Partly an almanac, a guide to the seasons, it reminded the rural population of their duties to both nature and the church. Even peasants who couldn’t write their names could count on their fingers and so knew it was a sin to eat meat on the fifth day of the week and that you must attend mass on the seventh day, eat less for a precise period preceding Easter, and post the banns in the church for a certain number of weeks before you married.

  Others had already worked on developing another almanac for the illiterate. In 158
8, Jehan Tabourot, a scholar who wrote as Thoinot Arbeau, published The Compot or Manual Calendar, by Which All Persons Can Easily Learn and Forecast the Passage of the Sun, and the Moon, and Similarly the Fixed and Moveable Feasts Which We Have to Celebrate in the Church, Following the Correction Ordered by Our Holy Pope Gregoire XIII.

  It showed how since, conveniently, we have the same number of joints in our fingers as there are months, the simplest peasant could use his hands to keep track of the ecclesiastical year.

  Late in the eighteenth century, someone suggested that a pack of playing cards could serve the same purpose. The idea survived into the twentieth century, to be taken up in the 1940s in an improbable quarter.

  In 1948, an obscure country singer named T. Texas Tyler recorded a recitation called “The Deck of Cards.” To the quasidevotional noodling of an electric organ, Tyler described a soldier who took out a deck of cards at a religious service.

  Disciplined by an officer, the soldier explained that he used the cards as a prayer book and almanac. The ace reminded him of the one true God, the two of the Old and New Testaments, the three of the trinity, and so on. As for the almanac function, the fifty–two cards equaled the number of weeks in a year, the twelve cards of a suit the number of months, and the four suits the number of weeks in a month.

  Critics were quick to spot inconsistencies. If an ace signifies the one true God, how does one account for the existence of three others? Such questions, not to mention the holier–than–thou tone—Tyler ends by declaring, “I was that soldier”—didn’t inhibit sales of the record, which rose to No. 2 on the hit parade and was widely imitated. The church didn’t object. Like Tabourot’s finger calendar, “The Deck of Cards” implied that the divine was present even in the simplest elements of nature, a belief the church was keen to encourage.

  Fabre also understood the importance of the calendar as an almanac, and promised to incorporate this function in the new version. “As the calendar is something that we use so often,” he somewhat patronizingly assured the Convention, “we must take advantage of this frequency of use to put elementary notions of agriculture before the people—to show the richness of nature, to make them love the fields, and to methodically show them the order of the influences of the heavens and of the products of the earth.”

  One important function of the Gregorian calendar was in the naming of children. By law, parents could choose only from names that appeared in the official calendar. This meant that children were automatically recruited by the church from the moment they were baptized. A few parents in the Caribbean, from either ignorance or defiance, christened their sons “Toussaint,” which signified the feast of tous saints (All Saints’ Day). Others injected individuality by doubling up, calling their children Jean–Luc or Marie–Claire, or exploited a technicality by choosing Jean–Baptiste, i.e., John the Baptist. But most toed the ecclesiastical line.

  Fabre’s solution was characteristically extreme: “We thought that the nation, after having kicked out this canonized mob from its calendar, must replace it with the objects that make up the true riches of the nation, worthy objects not from a cult but from agriculture–useful products of the soil, the tools that we use to cultivate it, and the domestic animals, our faithful servants in these works.”

  Accordingly, every day in the Republican calendar was renamed for a flower or plant, each décade (week) for a tool or object one might see around the farm, and each demi–décade (the former fortnight) for a domestic animal: “more precious, without doubt,” suggested Fabre, “to the eye of reason than the beatified skeletons pulled from the catacombs of Rome.”

  This proposal confronted the calendar’s framers with their biggest challenge. Despite his pose as Old Farmer Philippe, Fabre probably couldn’t identify more than a few common plants or flowers and wouldn’t have known a shovel from a spade. He hurriedly recruited an expert.

  André Thouin (pronounced Twain) supervised the Jardin du Roi, the Royal Garden, the finest botanical museum in the world. Sprawling across the left bank of the Seine, its walls enclosed hothouses, orangeries, groves of trees, and plantations of fruits and flowers brought back from the far corners of the world.

  Thouin learned botany from his father, head gardener before him, and from Georges–Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who pioneered the systematic identification and cataloging of animals and plants. Recognizing his talent, Buffon recommended him to take over after the death of Thouin Senior in 1764.

  Botanist André Thouin.

  Anonymous. Portrait of Botanist André Thouin. Author’s collection.

  Thouin made the Royal Garden famous across Europe. He introduced numerous new plant varieties to France, sometimes at personal risk. The spices and exotic plants imported by the first European travelers in India and beyond had alerted Europe’s governments to the commercial value of botany. In 1794 and 1806, when France invaded the low countries, Thouin led raiding parties in the wake of the army, “rescuing” (i.e., looting) the specimens collected by Dutch botanists in Asia and the Pacific.

  Thouin corresponded with gardeners everywhere, and with such thinkers as Jean–Jacques Rousseau, whose philosophy of simplicity and harmony with nature he followed. He also became friendly with future US president Thomas Jefferson, who praised his research as “well worthy of one whose time and great talents for that science have been so much devoted to its improvement.” They regularly exchanged parcels of seeds for trees, grasses, and exotic fruits and vegetables. Among these were tomatoes, familiar for centuries as a decorative plant but believed to be poisonous until soldiers from Mediterranean Marseilles brought the fruit to Paris in 1789.

  Almost excessively modest, Thouin refused to wear anything but the simple smock recommended by Rousseau. Even when awarded the Légion d’Honneur, he declined to display its red ribbon in his buttonhole, saying it was “not appropriate to my gardener’s shirt.” Appointed a professor, he agreed, reluctantly, to give morning lectures, expecting only a handful amateurs. Instead, he found himself addressing the assembled gardeners of stately homes and horticulturists from all over Europe.

  It’s likely that Thouin had reservations about the Republican calendar and the man behind it from the start. But Voltaire’s injunction in Candide to “cultivate our own gardens” before giving advice to others had served him well, and he was not about to change. He supplied the hundreds of plant and animal names demanded by Fabre, and left it to him how they were used.

  If Fabre used a system to match plants and flowers to specific days, nobody has ever unraveled it. The demi–décades of Floréal, for example, the former mid–April to mid–May, were puzzlingly represented among domestic animals by the nightingale and the silkworm The agricultural implements of its three décades were the rake, the garden hoe, and the shepherd’s crook, on none of which, it’s reasonable to assume, Fabre had ever laid a hand.

  Individual days were named chêne (oak), fougère (fern), aubépine (hawthorn), ancolie (columbine), and muguet (lily of the valley). When the compilers ran short, Thouin rummaged up another obscure plant or object, though he was often on shaky ground, as with armoise (mugwort) and topinambour (Jerusalem artichoke).

  Although every day in the warm months of the year had its own signifying flower or plant, the coldest month, Nivôse, stumped Thouin, since barely anything green stuck its head above ground then. Instead, in a final complication, Fabre assigned each of its days not a plant or flower but a mineral or animal product. These included granit (granite), lave (lava), and fumier (dung).

  The concept of naming children for plants, flowers and domestic objects, attractive in principle, proved impossible in practice. Among other difficulties, such names were seen as suiting women far more than men. Girls could choose from a cornucopia of fruits and flowers—Violette, Poire, Garance, Amaryllis—but unless you wanted to call your son Wheelbarrow, saints’ names remained the preferred choice for boys.

  In 1803 Napoléon, as part of his new agreement with the church, r
estored the law requiring parents to choose from the names of the saints alone. By and large, it still applies. Regional names are more common today, particularly Celtic adoptions such as Gaëlle and Yannick, but fruit and flower names turn up rarely. An attempt to christen a girl Fraise (strawberry) was overturned in the courts by a compassionate judge who pointed out that “ramener ta fraise” (literally “pull in your strawberry”—the equivalent of “mind your own business,”) would doom a girl called Fraise to a miserable childhood. The parents compromised on Fraisier—“strawberry shortcake.”

  Within a few weeks of the calendar becoming official, people in all walks of life were complaining. In practice, the revised system was absurdly cumbersome. June 19, 1794, old style, became Messidor 1 of Year III, or, for those who could neither read nor count, Day Seigle (rye) of Week Mule in fortnight Shawm (a woodwind musical instrument).

  Had Fabre been aware of the calendar’s unpopularity among ordinary people, he might have delayed its general introduction, particularly since the project had already served his purpose of making him famous. At the time, however, he had other things on his mind. His life—lived increasingly, like those of all public men, in the shadow of the guillotine—was slipping out of control.

  24

  Hot Hot Hot

  Fouras, Charente, Atlantic coast of southwestern France. February 2010. 8°C. Dazed from a night of wind, locals straggle down to the concrete esplanade and stare, disbelieving, at the void once occupied by their beach, carried away by the storm surge of Hurricane Xynthia. Concrete stairways that once touched the sand now hang in emptiness two meters above black river mud.