by John Baxter
Once Fiona and her two-man crew were inside, I looked after them down the stairs.
“No production assistant?”
“I was the production assistant,” Fiona said. “An hour after we arrived, the director had a call from her boyfriend saying he was leaving her. And she’s just found out she’s pregnant.” She checked her watch. “About now, her train’s pulling into Waterloo Station.”
“They couldn’t discuss it on the phone?”
“Oh, I don’t think he comes into her calculations. If I know her, she’ll go straight to her shrink or her mother. Can we do this now, while we’ve got the light?”
Battling heavy traffic, the cameraman navigated us across the Pont Royal and past I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid above the entrance to the Louvre.
Already, shoppers filled the streets. The French might claim to detest the commercialisation of Christmas, but this was the season when department stores and boutiques did their best business. Even crèches were put on a paying basis. In front of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s town hall, circus tents sheltered a block-long Bethlehem diorama, which people were already lining up in the cold to visit. Going one better, an entrepreneur was also offering, under the questionable title La Crèche du Vieux Paris—The Crèche of Old Paris—a Disneyesque reconstruction of Paris in 1491, with four hundred live and “animatronic” actors and a recorded narration by a mid-level movie star. Its relevance to Christmas was obscure, but it was surely only a matter of time before Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and Quasimodo turned up in this version of Bethlehem.
While we waited on the steps of Garnier’s gingerbread building, the cameraman set up on a traffic island in the middle of place de l’Opéra, the better to capture its façade, festooned with statuary of showgirl-like nudes. I’d be lucky if audiences even noticed me.
It was an odd setting for a melodrama, but Gaston Leroux, who wrote the original novel, knew how to play on the sensibilities of his readers. Paris—as befits a place where much of what is agreeable, either sexual or digestive, takes place below the belt—is a city of cellars, catacombs, and sewers, sewn together by the sinuous tunnels of its underground railway, le Métro. How inventive of Leroux to locate his mutilated hero/villain not in the opera house but beneath it, on a black lake across which his phantom boat glided, carrying the insensible heroine to his stony lair.
Fiona said, “I tried to get permission to film the lake itself, but they wouldn’t let us.”
“Fiona, sweetheart,” I said. “There is no lake.”
She stared at me. “Tell me you’re kidding!”
“Leroux invented it. Before the novel, nobody ever mentioned a lake. The sewers are what he was really thinking of—but who wants to read about some hermit poling himself around on an ocean of merde?”
“But the movie. All the movies!”
“It’s an urban myth. I can tell you exactly how it started. The ground here is swampy. When they sank the foundations in the 1870s, water flooded in. Pumps had to be kept going twenty-four hours a day. Once the building was opened, they shut them off.”
She grasped at this straw. “So there could be a lake there.”
“More likely a couple of damp cellars. I have never seen such a lake. I don’t know anyone who has. There are no drawings or photographs and no reliable descriptions, just some very old and very dubious anecdotes.”
Seeing that she was unconvinced, I went on, “The opera management runs tours to almost every corner of the building, but none of them include a visit to a lake. If it really existed, don’t you think somebody would have got in by now?”
“Well, if you say so …”
I felt like someone who’d just told his child there was no Santa Claus. She wouldn’t take my word for it, of course. She’d return to London that night and spend Christmas Eve persuading some film buff or horror writer to swear there really was a lake. And she’d find someone, no doubt about that. Rule 1: get the gig.
On the Métro back home—Fiona stayed on with the crew to shoot background—I thought about the urge to believe. The tenacity of the need for something—anything—in which to repose one’s faith is overwhelming. Even the French Revolution hadn’t been able to neutralise that. This helped explain the French attitude toward Christmas, at the same time sacred and profane. Losing your religious faith is like losing a limb. It continues to itch. So, if people chose to believe that a black lake stretched from place de l’Opéra to rue Scribe, that blind fish swam in it, and a malevolent masked figure rowed its waters, plying between his luxurious subterranean apartments and a secret entrance to the stage … well, let them.
I had a more pressing appointment—with Pascal.
21
Green Christmas
Angels we have heard on high
Telling us, “Go out and buy.”
—TOM LEHRER
It took a while for the French Christmas to win me over.
The hardest changes to accept are those where the familiar coexists with the new: the favourite song with different lyrics, the one-time libidinous lover turned respectable. The French custom of mailing greeting cards after Christmas threw me for a while. Cards seldom arrive before December 25—one friend actually apologised for sending his so early but explained he’d be out of town over the holidays—and the last trickle doesn’t subside until mid-January.
I was less perturbed to lose Santa Claus. In France, it’s not Santa but Père Noël—Father Christmas—who distributes gifts, and his presence is far less evident. Good riddance to the old coot, his elves, his reindeer, his North Pole toy factory, and, by extension, all those department-store “Daddy Christmases” of my childhood, sweating in their cotton-wool beards and reeking of BO and furtive beer.
The hand of commerce lies less heavily on a French Christmas than in Anglo-Saxon countries. For this, one can credit the Catholic Church, which allows no festival to stray far from religion. French Easter eggs, for instance, are not brought by a bunny but by the church bells, which, during the period of Lent, when bells are traditionally stilled, fly to Rome, presumably to attend a clangorous convention at which rules for the length of clappers are promulgated, methods of eradicating bats in belfries discussed, and new restrictions voted on the use of recorded chimes. They return for Easter Sunday and, in flagrant defiance of EU directives on food safety and nutrition, scatter chocolates as they pass.
The Church almost managed to keep Père Noël out of Christmas entirely. When my French mother-in-law was a child in the 1920s, she was taught that gifts were provided by someone very different. Every church had its crèche. On Christmas morning, the manger, empty the previous night, was found to have acquired an occupant, proof that it wasn’t Santa Claus who’d come to town but Baby Jesus—and while he’d brought everyone a present, he was still, in a well-established Church tradition, making a list, checking it twice; gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.
Christmas in France is less a single event than an extended celebration that begins around December 22 and, if you play your cards right, can continue until about mid-January. Schools go on holiday until the first week of January, and just as one is thinking of returning to work, the Réveillon, or New Year, celebration arrives, offering another two or three days off. It’s tacitly understood that family men in particular can use accumulated holidays to bridge the gaps, giving plenty of time for that trip to the Maldives or Disney World. If Paris is empty on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day is even more desolate. When the hardier Parisians gather on the Champs-Elysées at midnight to shout their welcome to the New Year, restaurants and shops remain stubbornly shut. The real fun is taking place somewhere else.
Around January 5, France returns slowly to life, but not before the Church gives one last twitch to the festive leash with the celebration of Twelfth Night, January 6. La fête des rois—“the feast of the kings”—commemorates the moment when, traditionally, the three wise men, Gaspard, Melchior, and Balthazar, arrived in Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense, and
myrrh.
Just after New Year, French cake shops and supermarkets fill with galettes des Rois. Resembling flat, round versions of the croissant, and filled with crème pâtissière, usually in the almond flavour called frangipane, they come in all sizes, but always accompanied by a golden cardboard crown.
I knew of this custom before I came to France—predictably, through a movie. In Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, the depressed and pregnant Catherine Deneuve has the golden crown placed on her head by the diamond merchant she’s ready to marry to Give Her Child a Name.
Marie-Dominique explained how the ceremony worked. On the Night of the Kings, the family gathered to share a galette and drink champagne. A wedge would be cut for each person and one for the “poor man”—the stranger and wayfarer who would have been a common figure in the medieval world.
Baked within the galette is a fève—literally “lima bean”—usually a small porcelain figurine. Like the sixpence my mother put in her Christmas pudding. Or the coin the Greeks place in the cake they serve each New Year’s Eve.
Whoever gets the fève presents it to a woman at the table, who becomes the queen. He places the cardboard crown on her head, and she returns the compliment by dropping the fève into his glass. Wine is poured over it, and he drinks, to cries of “Le roi boit!”
At my first fête des roi, I won the fève, a tiny Virgin Mary—ensured by a little kindly probing with the knife on the part of my mother-in-law—and placed the gold crown on Marie-Dominique’s head. She really did look radiant—in part because we privately knew that, like Catherine Deneuve in Parapluies, she was already pregnant.
The fève had clinked into my glass. Champagne was poured over it. People looked at me expectantly.
I hestitated.
There was so much in this quasi-religious ritual of which I disapproved. I could feel resting coldly on my shoulder the dead hand of the Church that I’d rejected in adolescence.
What nonsense it all was! One only had to read a little cultural anthropology to see that every tradition of Christmas and the New Year began with the orgies of the Roman feast of Saturnalia, the human sacrifices of neolithic Scandinavia, the rituals of primitive and superstitious cultures to guarantee the return of warmth and the spring.
Was this the time to make a stand? Should I begin as I meant to go on in my new home, as a model of that rationality and clear thought that the French had done so much to pioneer?
I thought not.
I raised my glass to my new family.
“Salut.”
They toasted me back.
I sipped.
“Le roi boit!” they shouted. The king drinks!
Damn right!
22
A Sense of Place
The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
—MARCEL PROUST
We got away from Paris late on Christmas Eve, driving toward a western horizon below which the sun had descended half an hour before. Few people were on the road. The main exodus had already taken place, and in a different direction. At this time of year, France’s compass pointed south.
The smell of spices from the back seat permeated the car, so that we seemed to trail an alien scent. The simplicity of the countryside underscored the risk I was taking with my menu. The French detested anything spicy and exotic. To serve both was flying in the face of centuries of custom. Who in this countryside we were crossing had ever tasted chilli, even seen a cardamom?
Richebourg for me had become the safest of havens, the scene of our marriage and of numerous fêtes thereafter, including more than a dozen Christmas dinners I’d cooked. As we drove through the big gates, I remembered my first Christmas here: the sounds of cars and bikes arriving, the greetings of each new arrival, the exclamations at their contribution to the dinner, and my sense of alienation and exclusion. Now it was my turn to be greeted, Pascal exclaimed over, his colour and scent commented on, the oysters taken outside to spend their last night in the cold. The refrigerator suddenly overflowed with fruit, cheese, vegetables.
Mentally, I checked off the ingredients I’d need for tomorrow’s dinner—and stopped at one of the simplest.
“Where’s your flour?” I asked my mother-in-law.
“Oh!” She patted both cheeks with her hands, a familiar gesture of panic. “I forgot. I used the last of it yesterday.”
“No harm,” I said. Plenty of supermarkets stayed open on Christmas Eve. The village was too small to have one, but there were large ones in Houdan, Maulette, and other neighbouring towns.
“But they’ll be jammed,” Marie-Do said as we got into the car. “Let’s go to Septeuil.”
Septeuil was tiny, a cluster of houses hidden in a fold of the hills. We mostly visited it for flea markets, held in the square in front of the engagingly ugly late-nineteenth-century town hall. Its sole hypermarché was too small for serious shopping, but even the smallest market had flour.
The square was almost empty of cars when we arrived, but fortunately the front windows of the market were lit. We crossed the little bridge over the stream that continued on down the valley and stepped into the warmth and light. A single checkout was manned, the lone girl, probably the only unmarried member of staff, sour-faced at having drawn the short straw.
While I looked for flour, Marie-Do wandered off. A minute later, she appeared around the corner of an aisle and grabbed my arm.
“You won’t believe this!”
She led me to the wine shelves. The market might not have much in the way of sophisticated ingredients, but they knew what their clients wanted, so these racks were filled.
Bending to the bottom shelf, she held up a bottle with a label I knew well.
Château les Eyquem Margaux 1998.
This was one of the most respected Bordeaux of the Médoc, matured in oak casks, bottled at the château. The last thing one expected to find in this backwater.
“Look at the price!”
The tiny label couldn’t really say 10.25 euros, surely? In a branch of Nicolas, you would easily pay 50 euros, and half as much again in a restaurant.
“Is there just one bottle?”
“No. Three!”
As we extracted them, the young manager came out through the wide doors that led to the storage area behind the market. Like the server at the counter, he would obviously rather have been somewhere else. But he brightened as he saw us piling wine into our plastic basket.
“Let me help you.” He returned with a rolling chariot.
“This is a discovery,” I said. “We never expected to find a Margaux of this quality in, well …”
“No, you’re quite right. People here won’t pay that for their wine. They prefer this.” He waved a hand at the shelves of cheap reds and the two-litre cardboard boxes, which increasingly dominated the market. “I don’t suppose I’ve sold a bottle of this since I put it out more than a year ago. I’ll never get rid of the rest.”
“The rest?”
“There’s the best part of a case out back,” he said. “Maybe two, even.” He looked at us calculatingly. “If you’re interested, I could give you a discount.”
We drove back to Richebourg in a daze, giggling occasionally at the unexpectedness of acquiring two cases of château-bottled Margaux for less than we’d pay in a restaurant for three bottles. The joke would be on us if the wine has somehow spoiled in storage, but I knew it had not. Wine of this quality was made to last.
It seemed, despite what the French thought, there was really a Santa Claus.
The western sky wasn’t yet entirely dark, and the giant trees in the garden held their silhouettes against the sky. Their bare limbs were hung with spherical bunches of
mistletoe, like tree-caught versions of the tumbleweeds that I’d seen bowl across the road of the high desert between California and Nevada. With its ability to live apparently on air, making no contact with the ground, and to bear, in the heart of winter, tiny fruit that, crushed, exuded a liquid that looked like semen, mistletoe seemed the very paragon of fertility. Women hoping for children surrounded themselves with it in orgiastic rites, the only survival of which is our chaste tradition of “a kiss under the mistletoe”.
When one of these trees fell, Ulisse the gardener let it lie until the wood dried out, then cut it up with a chainsaw and piled it in heaps around the garden. Before the light disappeared entirely, I walked down to the nearest of his piles and dragged out some logs for the night, tearing off the vines that had grown over and among them. They’d been cut in the summer, but the tree itself fell many years earlier—eighteen years before, to be exact. I had been here, with Marie-Dominique, in the big bed, listening to the hurricane roar. That night, in this house, Louise had been conceived; Louise whom, looking back through the window into the salon, I could see, now a slim eighteen-year-old with long blond hair, draping tinsel on the Christmas tree.
Proust was right. Any house or garden or town existed only as the sum of the feelings experienced there. It was remembering history and maintaining tradition that kept the material world alive.
23
Project Piglet
The pig an unclean animal? Why, the pig is the cleanest animal there is. Except for my father, of course.
—GROUCHO MARX
“He’s too long!”
“I told you,” Marie-Do said.
Pascal lay across the largest baking dish in the house. Even placed diagonally, his snout overhung one corner and his tail the other.