A Letter from Paris

by Louisa Deasey

  The WhatsApp group buzzed with messages from the Australian-French family over who could come and what to bring — and there: it was arranged.

  Marie and her partner, Anne, were coming; Laurence and Arnaud, too. Margaux and Maxime — Edouard’s children, who’d been the first to transcribe Michelle’s letters — would also be there.

  Cheese. Saucisson. Edouard’s place. Friday night. Another ‘early’ night, I was to turn up at nine.

  By morning, Clém had sent an enormously relieving piece of news: Sandrine said she would take responsibility for the mysterious ‘piece of paper’, so Gisèle could return to the Residence.

  With the number of pills Gisèle had to take every day since her stroke a year earlier, she needed careful monitoring. The reason she’d been sent to hospital was because she couldn’t remember if she’d taken her heart medication. She would now have a daily visit from a nurse as part of her care. In France, the cost of this extra care was a fraction of what it would cost in a nursing home in Australia.

  Clémentine replied to Sandrine before I’d even typed merci, and as I pressed refresh I saw emails from Ayala and Dec. The two had been worried in Melbourne.

  Gisèle is family, Lou. What can we get to thank Clém … ?

  A little more at peace with the idea of Gisèle, I opened myself up to Paris. The next week passed in a beautiful blur of sightseeing and deliciously unique experiences. I went to poetry in a cave, and read dad’s memoir at Café De Flore, underlining pages before walking off to find the locations like he’d left me a Parisian treasure hunt. I caught the train to Montmartre and retraced the steps I’d taken ten years before, finding a church dad had described and feeling so moved from my time inside that it felt akin to a séance. I drank wine in little bistros at happy hour in Saint Germain and walked myself to the Dali museum. I visited the Bibliothèque Nationale, the most beautiful library on the planet, which reminded me of a sculpture gallery where the books lined gold-flecked shelves. I bought candles and gifts from Diptyque and Buly, and browsed clothing stores that explained exactly why Gisèle had always been so impeccably dressed. The level of detail on the French designs was exquisite.

  And every night, Clém and I would catch up on the phone, sharing the latest on Gisèle and my treasure hunt of dad, as well as the details and dramas of Clém’s life, which had me feeling like I’d known her for years.

  Laurence took me on a tour of the ancient ateliers of Montparnasse, and we lunched in the Luxembourg Gardens. Circular paths, it all felt, me and Michelle’s daughters and grandchildren, dad and Gisèle, I wondered so many times if he’d seen Michelle again in Paris. It was a dream holiday, a new life, an experience of family and history and returning to myself I hadn’t expected.

  I discovered, to my delight, that the first writer I’d met on my 2007 trip to New York — Karen — was now living in Trocadéro, just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. We rendezvoused at Café Carette, where we shared tales of the madness of freelance journalism, and she told me about her new life and medical career in Paris, thankful not to be pitching for work in that exhausting roundabout that is living freelance.

  Coralie had Clém and me over for pizza and wine in her apartment, and I went to the national museum of modern art at Centre Pompidou, visited the contemporary photography gallery Jeu de Paume, and promenaded the Jardin des Plantes, the largest botanical garden in France. I got lost searching for the Henri Cartier-Bresson museum, but it didn’t matter, I was in Paris and every other corner held a doorway to wonder and beauty.

  Early evening, when the Paris light would start to fade from 5.00 p.m., I’d find myself a spot on Boulevard Saint Germain or Rue Vieille du Temple for a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.

  Over a glass of Châteauneuf du Pape sitting at the bookshop bar La Belle Hortense in Le Marais, a French couple told me of their holiday house in Le Lavandou. By the time the conversation was over, they’d offered me their phone number in case I needed a translator when I got to the town.

  The French were serious, yes, but also warm and intelligent and interesting and concerned with aesthetics and contradictory about politics, and happy to discuss the various shades.

  I saw the lights of the Eiffel Tower glitter at sunset, and swam at Piscine Pontoise, walking home in the rain across the Île de la Cité.

  I wrote my first poem in years and queued to present it, adding my name to the list of performers at Au Chat Noir. I went for drinks with an Australian writer friend who’d moved to Paris, and took notes on how she’d done it because I wanted to return for longer.

  My visit to Saint Clair was inching nearer, but those three weeks in Paris felt like the preparation for a whole new life ahead of me. Old friends and new family overlapped and intertwined, and I had the feeling, finally, that I’d found not just my family of origin, but a place I fit in. Like a book on a shelf I’d waited years to open, Paris had always been waiting for me.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Fête de fromage

  It was Friday night, time for fromage. I’d been careful to eat nothing but soup for lunch, because I knew how proud the French are of their unique rules about pasteurisation.

  I hailed a taxi in Montparnasse after catching the Métro and getting lost, and gave the driver Edouard’s address.

  Safely inside a stately entrance, past three separate sets of door codes and up in another teeny tiny lift, Michelle’s three children were all waiting with smiles and wine. Leonard Cohen crooned on the stereo, the aroma of baked apples and cheese and bread mixed in the living room, and there were cries of ‘Bonsoir!’ and ‘Welcome!’

  Maxime took my coat and lay it in the ‘cloak room’ (his bedroom), and Edouard steered me towards the numerous platters at the back of the living room. He proudly explained each of the dozens of delicious French cheeses. Ooh la la. Soft goats, stinky bries, mouldy blues, this was my idea of a last supper.

  Arnaud held out a plate and challenged me to try them all. I shook my head — there was a lot of cheese.

  ‘But Louisa, you must.’ He was emphatic. ‘This night is held in your honour.’

  I was in a French film, chatter and cheeses moving in circles around me, Michelle’s children taking turns to ply me with questions. Every once in a while, if my plate became empty, Arnaud’s knife would appear, Daliesque, with a large sliver of cheese, which was then moved to my plate with a quiet description of its origin.

  There was an air of competition around who spoke the best English in the family, which was a relief for me, because it meant that when anyone asked me a question there would be an argument over the best way to phrase it. I didn’t need to translate. Yet I loved hearing the French spoken.

  I wasn’t sure I understood properly, but Edouard seemed to be saying his parents sent him to a Montessori school, but took him out because he was too creative. There was no sense of shame in us all sharing our family stories, just an intelligent, passionate, high, low, open, and curious discourse.

  ‘Louisa, what is your favourite of the cheeses?’ Arnaud prodded in between an exchange I was having with Marie on psychotherapy, because cheese is just as important as the deeper discussions in life.

  Then suddenly the discussion turned to me getting some good cheese back to Australia. ‘It’s your right!’ shouted Arnaud, explaining how to get a vacuum-sealed bag of their finest fromage through customs in London and back to Australia.

  At midnight, when I was settled on the couch in between Laurence and Marie, talking about dad, Edouard disappeared to his study. He returned, proudly brandishing a copy of my travel memoir, Love & Other U-Turns, calling everyone’s attention to the pink-covered paperback. The book was passed around the group, thumbed and discussed, and eventually he handed me a pen for my signature while the family reverentially went quiet as I thought of what to write.

  ‘It’s a very modern cover,’ Marie said, and Clém explained that i
n France, books are usually released with only the title of the book on the cover. No pictures. And the hardbacks in France were usually a cheaper edition printed on lower-quality paper with rough binding. My published paperback was a treasure!

  Catherine waited until I’d finished signing, and handed me a slice of her apple tart.

  Who were this family, where had they come from?

  Laurence pulled out a slip of paper, handing it to Arnaud. It held a transcription of a piece of graffiti we’d seen written on a wall outside La Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse when we’d taken our atelier tour; it had been written after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. Laurence and I had discussed what it represented about the French attitude to life. France is the personification of what all the religious fanatics hate, it began.

  Arnaud read the translated version aloud, persevering despite numerous interruptions to discuss which English word would have been a better translation. Exhausted after the performance and all the interruptions, he retreated to the corner with a whisky.

  Clém kept looking over to me and smiling. Someone took some photos and a video.

  ‘You’re doing me a huge favour,’ I said to Edouard.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he replied, perhaps thinking I meant the cheese, which I did, too.

  ‘By competing over your English. It’s quite relaxing for me to not have to translate.’

  He peered down from his glasses like I’d set him a new challenge.

  ‘Do you like movies?’

  ‘I love movies.’

  ‘We will take you to the movies on Sunday. I’ll find one with the subtitles in French for me and Catherine. Clém will give you directions to find the cinema from Le Marais.’

  And that was that. A new appointment had been arranged.

  ‘Thank you for bringing everyone together like this, Edouard!’ I said later, but Laurence looked concerned about something and I heard her refer to a ‘Benjamin’. It seemed Coralie and Clém’s brother never received an invite to Cheese Night. Clém had accidentally put the wrong number in our Australian-French WhatsApp group.

  After 1.00 a.m., when everyone started to leave, Edouard booked me an Uber ride to get home. We all walked down the stairs, and when it arrived Edouard leaned in and spoke in French to the driver before opening the passenger door for me to get in.

  ‘I told him I’m your cousin so he keeps you safe,’ he said.

  I sailed back across the Seine in the rain, full of fromage.

  On Sunday, I met Edouard and Catherine at the cinemas in the huge Beaugrenelle shopping centre. We enjoyed two hours of spoken English with French subtitles, a little breather from the constant mathematics of translation.

  ‘Do you go to the movies very often?’ I asked Catherine on the way out.

  ‘Every weekend, sometimes twice or more.’

  No embarrassed laughter, no faux guilt. That’s just what they like to do — no apologies. God, I loved them.

  As we walked outside, Edouard spotted someone in the crowd.

  ‘Pierre!’ It was his oldest friend, who apparently already knew who I was, because he’d heard the story of dad and Michelle many times over the last year.

  We all went over the road to a bar for a glass of champagne.

  As we walked inside, Edouard looked like something had struck him.

  Hasard. Hasard. I kept hearing that word. And then Edouard said in English, ‘This is as if from God!’

  It was Clém and Coralie’s brother, Benjamin, and his girlfriend. They lived elsewhere in Paris, but their nearest cinema had been sold out, so they’d made the unusual decision to come all the way to Beaugrenelle.

  We kissed and talked. I’d finally met the whole family. All Michelle’s children and grandchildren.

  ‘That is bizarre,’ said Edouard, shaking his head with a smile after they left, and I couldn’t quite believe it either.

  After our perfect glass of champagne, Edouard insisted on taking me home on his motorbike. Catherine gave me her pink helmet and left to go home by the Métro.

  ‘So. Louisa. I will ride along the Seine and you will see Paris by night.’

  With the Eiffel Tower flickering as we left Beaugrenelle, we passed the Musée D’Orsay, the Louvre, and finally crossed the Seine. When we’d crossed the river and I saw the familiar Métro station signs, I was hit by a sweep of sadness that it would all be ending soon.

  ‘Thank you so much, Edouard. You’ve all been so generous.’

  ‘Of course, Louisa.’ It was, apparently, an obvious conclusion. ‘We have been waiting for you to arrive since Coralie’s email.’

  Hasard. What did that word mean?

  Like dad’s life — full of so many coincidences. Perhaps he didn’t suffer from bad timing, perhaps it was all as it should be? Perhaps his life, actually, was very beautiful?

  Perhaps those moments of hazard, like they had for me, meant that everything happened at just the right time — meeting Michelle’s last grandchild, quite by accident, then celebrating with une coupe de champagne and being driven across glittering Paris on the back of a motorbike. Perhaps the return to Australia in 1954 hadn’t been a failure, but, as Gisèle seemed to remember it, just a continuation of the French story, with a different landscape and more wild birds?

  Maybe dad’s story was more joy than sadness? More luck than loss?

  He’d once joked to a cousin that being the ‘seventh son’, according to Celtic myth, gave him extra powers. And maybe it did. Like Gisèle, he’d lived through a lot — war and malaria, starvation and tuberculosis. Even when mistaken for a Cold War spy, he hadn’t been shot, but instead was handed a cup of champagne.

  After fifty years on earth, when he’d assumed he was unable, he’d even had children.

  And now here I was, seeing Paris as he did, almost like he and Michelle were directing the scene from the skies.

  As Saint Clair drew nearer, I began to feel harrowed by the clattering Métro, the wailing beggars, the sleepless song of the city. I wasn’t ready to leave France, but I needed a break from Paris. Like I’d needed that first sleep after catching my flight, I wished for space to knit something up in my psyche. To make sense of the patterns, to see the story from afar.

  A message from Raphaël arrived in my inbox. In one line, like a telegram, it said simply:

  See you tomorrow.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Émue

  On the spring equinox in Australia, and autumn equinox in France, I made my way to Saint Clair. The date seemed significant: a day of equal light and dark. The turning of the wheel.

  A montage of French countryside passed my train window, and by lunchtime we’d reached Saint Rémy de Provence, the azure blue of the Mediterranean spinning past peach-coloured rooftops. Soon, we were in Toulon.

  The South of France. Saint Tropez. Cannes. Nice.

  Who did I think I was? This was a place for royalty, for artistes of the first order, not someone like me.

  Yet here I was. The place dad had fallen in love with France, at first sight. The blue coffee cup on my perfect little train-tray held the words coupe de foudre in cursive script across the outside, like an inside joke.

  As I left Gare de Toulon in search of the nearby bus to Saint Clair, I heaved dad’s heavy French travel memoir into my handbag, rolling my suitcase behind me.

  Once I’d found the stop and got on board, the bus hurtled towards Saint Tropez, and I started to let myself believe I’d see it. Saint Clair, Le Lavandou. An actual place, as real and tactile as the pages weighing my bag down. My secret entrance token, the key to the palace. I breathed and sighed, feeling heavy with the new pilgrimage.

  The accents around me had a peculiar sing-song, and, as both Sylvain and the members of the French family had warned in friendly WhatsApp messages the night before, it would be hard to find anyone who spoke En
glish. The bus driver had taken my euro fare while speaking unintelligible French about what time we arrived, muttering cheerily as he loaded my suitcase into his cabin.

  For two hours we twisted and churned around Toulon, through to Hyères, then finally, an hour later than I’d told Raphaël I would be arriving, we ground to a halt next to a footpath on a small street of closed shops that looked down to the ocean after the main town of Le Lavandou.

  I got off the packed bus.

  A Citroën circled the roundabout, the driver honking when he saw me.

  Saint Clair was a dream of the South. A small bay between two rocky points, a scatter of small houses, mimosas and eucalypts, vines and olive trees half circled by low hills. There was a daily bus service along the narrow road but no traffic of any importance.

  As the bus disappeared and Raphaël galloped over the road to shake my hands and snatch my suitcase, just as dad’s heavy bags had been nabbed by generous Frenchman decades before, I felt a sweep of emotion.

  ‘How was your travel?’ Raphaël asked politely, and I mumbled something like ‘très bon’ despite a headache that had taken over since Toulon with the fear I was on the wrong bus until I saw the sign to Saint Clair.

  Saint Clair, Le Lavandou. So many things could have gone wrong on the way. To go from hundreds of pages full of dad’s love and sighs, to finally be standing in the physical space, seemed too unreal a thing. Those papers, filling hundreds of boxes in both Melbourne and Canberra’s chief libraries, all the way back in Australia, held the imprint of dad. But this is where he’d been as he wrote them. The actual place.

  The papers looped and crossed time, his whole life, really, but they always came back to Saint Clair.

  The poet’s villa. The lost love.

  Literature and war and sun and champagne and music and writing and romance and superstition and the sense that he’d found the place that he fit.

  Hope, relief, kindness, and food. Rediscovery of the peace they’d lost from war’s destruction …