Clarence R. Currie
S/Sgt. USAF
Manston, England, March 2, 1955
For a girl who started this adventure from 40 degrees below zero both Centigrade and Fahrenheit, I have a very hot temper. In a flash, after reading Sergeant Currie’s comments, I was at the boiling point: 100 degrees Centigrade, 212 Fahrenheit. Consequently, I sat down and shot off a tart reply to the sergeant via the Mailbag. It was printed thus:
International Fever
To the New York Herald Tribune:
If I were Staff Sergeant Currie I think I would take my temperature!
Yours for more available pharmaceutical books, and French doctors who know what you mean when you say your child has a temperature of 102.8!
Olivia de Havilland
Paris, March 5, 1955
Although Sergeant Currie was apparently never heard from again, a great many other people were. A flood of missives engulfed the letters column and among them were the following:
Kilos to Pounds
To the New York Herald Tribune:
The things that go on in this world! The last time I was in Hollywood, Olivia de Havilland was a glamour girl and the only figures (ahem) she was interested in had to do with, well, you know. Now she’s “an American mother” and worried about translating Centigrade into Fahrenheit and the multiplication table. With fractions yet. Wow! Does the Hays office know about this, ’Livvy? Do they approve? Isn’t this the sort of activity likely to lower the stock of the American glamour biz?
Ah, well, since we’re on the subject—and since I’m not an American mother but a mere American male—something else lies closer to my selfish heart. How in the name of all that is hectic do you translate kilos into pounds? I would like to find out whether all this good French cooking is adding to my poundage. Or is it better not to know?
Wolfe Kaufman
Paris, March 2, 1955
That Clear Now?
To the New York Herald Tribune:
What’s all this hullabaloo about Fahrenheit and Centigrade? Any schoolchild knows that 32 Fahrenheit is equal to zero Centigrade, so if you add 18 to 32, which makes 50, and put it above 32 Fahrenheit and add 10 to zero Centigrade and put it above zero Centigrade you have 50 Fahrenheit is equal to ten Centigrade and so on up, and you subtract under 32 Fahrenheit and zero Centigrade.
An American in Cannes
Cannes, March 5, 1955
Knew It Already
To the New York Herald Tribune:
Sorry, Miss de Havilland did not devise any formula at all; the formula for transposing Centigrade temperature readings into Fahrenheit as quoted by Miss de Havilland has been used by the undersigned for at least twenty-five years!…
S. H. Newman
Paris, March 2, 1955
By this time, of course, I was living exclusively for the letters column of the New York Herald Tribune. A state of affairs which could not be permitted to continue, in case Benjamin should get the sniffles again and need me to take his temperature and to figure the whole thing out by you-know-what. Therefore, to tie the matter off, I wrote a third letter to the Tribune, which promptly appeared in the usual place, with a heading which gratified me deeply. I do think it was nice of them to refer to you-know-what as “The.”
The Formula
To the New York Herald Tribune:
Well, if my letter did nothing else, it certainly inspired others to come forward and contribute to the peace of mind of this American mother!
Mathematics not being my strong point, when I devised (I beg your pardon, stumbled upon) the formula about which I wrote you, I always had the uneasy feeling that there must be a flaw in it somewhere. However, we now have the assurance (and from all sides, too) that it is a classic formula and can be used with perfect confidence.
With my thanks to your contributors,
Yours for the tried and true,
Olivia de Havilland
On the same day that this article of correspondence made its appearance in the Mailbag, I went to lunch at Mrs. Biddle’s house on the Left Bank. A lot of guests were standing about and chatting in the background as I entered the drawing room and found my hostess posted just within the doorway. She greeted me, and then said, indicating the gentleman to whom she’d just been talking. “I’d like you to meet Eric Hawkins—the editor of the Herald Tribune.”
As he leaned forward over the small table which stood between us, I detected not only a twinkle in Mr. Hawkins’ eye, but also a flash of reflected light just below my direct line of vision. Just under our clasping hands, I then saw, on the table, a very essential article indeed. It was a small column of glass mounted on a frame; up the column ran the red line of a magic fluid, and on each side of the column were printed small numerical figures, one side headed by the initial C, and the other side headed by the initial F. Of course, none of us contributors had thought of that solution. But just to be sure that the Centigrade-Fahrenheit thermometer-in-one was doing its job, I gave it a thorough check. It was accurate. By the Formula, it proved out.
All this time that you’ve been having your housing problems back in the United States, I’ve been having mine, here in France.
When I planted that pennant on the Left Bank in October of 1953, I did so behind the Palais Bourbon, the classical eighteenth-century building which was once the abode of a Royal Duchess and is now the arena of the Republic’s National Assembly—that is to say, the French House of Representatives.
Just off the Palais’ Place, some friends of Pierre’s had found Ben and me a little apartment, and when I first saw its small, intimate, low-ceilinged rooms, I was utterly enchanted with them. They had recently been freshened with paint and paper and provided with more than one piece of furniture in what was to me then the graceful but still foreign and unfamiliar style of Louis the Fifteenth.
Of course, the entry did serve as sitting room and dining room as well as coat, boot, and umbrella catcher, but beyond it was a charming, single-purpose bedroom for me, and adjoining mine, a bedroom for Ben, hung most attractively, though not exactly boyishly, in opulent red damask. As we installed ourselves, I heard the great clock of the Palais sounding out sonorously and musically, and to my Western, American ears it seemed to be the very voice of Old Europe.
That great, tolling tone also brought me upright in my bed all through the night, every hour on the hour and at every quarter hour too.
There was a further clanging note: the bathtub was in the kitchen. A very big bathtub in a very, very small kitchen.
I told myself, good sport that I am, that to bathe among the cooking pots was a gay, gypsy thing to do, and so it was. But when the evening chill of the sharpening weather drove me to tubbing at 6 P.M., the atmosphere rapidly thickened to dark-brown Bohemian. Six o’clock, you see, was also the hour when Benjamin’s nurse prepared his supper. That kitchen was crowded and cozy, I can tell you, with the nurse frying the chops, Ben playing on the floor, and me bathing in the bathtub, all at the same time.
It was during this period that a most extraordinary phenomenon began to occur—the landlady seemed to materialize in the middle of the sitting room, or even my bedroom, and wordlessly float out the entry door. At first I thought that I’d imagined this specter, but no, Pierre once saw her too. We never spoke, we just followed her with our eyes as she passed silently through the rooms and out.
When we finally learned that our eerie visitor was terrified of small American boys and was sure that Ben would reduce the apartment to a shambles, we realized that what she was doing was patrolling. Then we discovered the outline of a small door which we’d not noticed before, as it was secreted in the damask of Benjamin’s room. No knob, no lock, of course, but clearly, at last, this was the passage through which she entered at any odd hour to make her ghostly rounds.
Eventually all that ectoplasmic anxiety and the amount of bath water that was getting into Benjamin’s chops and the amount of chop fat that was getting into my bath water brought about the
mutually relieving decision that we ought to live elsewhere.
This time I found quite another sort of apartment, on the Right Bank, near the Étoile. It had a long, rather spacious entrance hall, the use of which was strictly limited to the purpose for which it was designed. It also had a sitting room paneled in light almond green, two bedrooms, a kitchen without a bathtub, and bathtub where you’d expect it.
When my new landlady departed on a three-month voyage she confirmed that I could have her apartment only during her absence. I accepted the condition cheerfully. After all, in three months I’d certainly be able to find another, more permanent, abode, and in the meantime, Ben and I would not only be bedding in the bedrooms and cooking in the kitchen, but also, for a change, we’d be sitting in a sitting room and bathing where we ought to.
All went well until the doorbell rang one day and who should be standing on the threshold but my current landlady. She looked shattered. I looked shattered too. I wasn’t nearly accustomed to these phantasmagoric appearances of my proprietresses, I can tell you. In this case, however, we did speak, and I learned that she’d just rushed back over the Atlantic (not by magic carpet, as I recall, but by plane) at the behest of her Paris lawyer. There’d been, she told me, a sudden tightening of restrictions on the subletting of Paris apartments, and she was limited to lending hers to friends. Therefore, she went on to say, to avoid being evicted from these rooms which had for so long been her home, she would have to be in a position, immediately, to prove that she was in occupancy and that a certain American woman and her little boy were merely guests. That night she moved into the sitting room.
Every night thereafter she came in around eleven and went to bed on the couch in that verdant, paneled room. Every morning afterward she and I would meet, in our dressing gowns, for a cup of coffee in the kitchen. It was all rather jolly, really, and pale-green Bohemian this time, instead of dark-brown.
As the third month came to a close, I was lucky enough to find still other quarters, again on the Right Bank, but nearer to the Bois. As in the previous place, we again had an entry just for entering, we had a kitchen without a bathtub, and a bathtub in the bathroom. We also had two bedrooms, a boudoir and, connected by an archway, two rooms which served as sitting room and dining room—but separately. They were ornamented with low-hanging, crystal-dripping chandeliers, tapestries, and dark mahogany Restoration furniture. “Restoration” means, I later learned, the period just after Napoleon the First, when the French made a try at a monarchy again. Somewhat uneasily, I noted that the walls were hung in rich red damask.
The silvery charm of my most recent landlady, however, put my uncertainties to rest, and I settled down to enjoy both the nineteenth-century elegance of my surroundings and, beyond our windows, the chestnut-bordered avenue with its bridle path, down which rode on Sundays the Garde Républicaine, magnificently uniformed in white breeches, dark-blue tunics faced in red, and shining helmets festooned with scarlet plumes. Then one day the landlady came to call.
She had come to tell me, she said, with anxious grace, that a very dear friend of hers, the lady in the apartment immediately below ours, had just died, and that she herself not only anticipated following her friend’s example in the very near future, but would like to do so in her own bed. I was stunned. However, I rose marvelously to the moment, I think, and calmed her at once with the clear assurance that I’d do everything possible to accommodate her.
Thereupon, though it was in the dead of winter, I began an intense, shivering and seemingly hopeless search for another roof. All the time, of course, I envisaged our being forced by the imminent demise of our proprietress—and by pure politesse—to pitch a tent in the snow-bound bridle path, with the certain result of our being crushed under the Sunday hoofs of the Garde Républicaine and of our thus beating our landlady to it.
Then one afternoon I came in, mauve of nose and frozen of foot, to find my landlady there before me. She wished me to know, she gently explained, that she had changed her mind and would not, after all, be joining her friend in another world. I must feel free, therefore, to live on in these Old World, evocative rooms, as she would no longer be needing my bed as a point of departure.
I don’t know why I never really felt secure after that, do you?
It wouldn’t occur to you, I know, but I’ve an awful lot in common with Napoleon Bonaparte: exactly the same problem with the French. They kept saying to him that everything he wanted to do was impossible, and they keep saying precisely that to me. With him it was the military, with me it’s saleswomen. That time, for example, when Napoleon wanted to get those cannon over the Alps and all his French engineers told him, “C’est impossible”—take me any time I want to buy anything, my salesladies say the same thing to me. The difference is, though, that that Little Corsican knew what to say right back, and this little American doesn’t. Napoleon knew that what those Frenchmen were looking for was a “bon mot,” “une bonne réponse,” and he gave it to them. He said, “Impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools.” The French thereupon not only got those cannon over the Alps, they made him Emperor. Of course, around him they stopped saying the word right then and there, but they didn’t stop saying it to other people, and since that day no one else has ever been able to come up with an outwitting witticism to check them. I’m working on it, though, and I’ve got my coronation robes all set in case I make it.
My saleswomen put me through a double frustration. They not only tell me that it’s impossible to buy whatever I’m shopping for, they also tell me that “ça n’existe pas en France.” My method of dealing with this statement is sheer, grim, dogged persistence. I once went to ten shops in the Avenue Victor Hugo hunting for some perfectly ordinary high rubber boots for Benjamin. Each time, of course, my inquiry was met by the same phrase, and each time the brilliant response which would have procured those boots for me failed to spring to my tongue. Nevertheless, reduced to a glowering “Merci” though I was, I marched, round-shouldered but determined, from shop to shop until, at last, I reached the eleventh. There I found the boots. The salesgirl was new at the job.
Yes, there’s nothing to do but persist. Not so long ago, having decided that a simple, straightforward, black necktie would look very smart with Benjamin’s dark-blue-and-black striped blazer and blue shirt, I charged off to Trois Quartiers to find one. There I was, right in front of the boys’ counter asking for a black tie, and as usual the saleswoman stared me right in the eye and told me my request was impossible because a black tie n’existe pas. I hoped that this time my coronation réponse would leap to my lips, but it didn’t. However, I had the advantage just the same, because the ties were above the counter instead of below it, where they usually keep up the game by keeping the merchandise concealed.
“If it doesn’t exist,” said I in my heavy way, “then what is that hanging behind your shoulder?” She turned, looked, and taking down the article in question, said, “You mean, Madame, a plain black tie.” She had the last word, but I had the tie.
Once, just once, I enjoyed a splendid vindication. It happened quite by accident. I was in the bedding department at Les Galeries Lafayette and had sat down on a mattress to check over the list of purchases which I had in my hand. I was garbed in my combat shopping uniform of funeral-gray cardigan and skirt and looked, I suppose, exactly like a saleswoman sitting down not only on her job but on her wares. At this moment an elegant, gloved, hatted and fur-coated Parisienne came surging up to me and asked if she could find such and such an article in my department. Quick as a fox, I replied, “Impossible, Madame, ça n’existe pas en France.” She gasped and heaved, as I usually do, but then made her way, baffled and broken, toward the escalator. No coronation for her.
I think we can conclude that Napoleon never had a concierge, because if he’d had one, his response to what I think of as The Concierge’s Complaint would have come down to us as recorded history. The concierge, as you know from all those French novels you’ve been
reading lately, is the elderly lady in faded black who lives on the ground floor of every French apartment house, and whose duty it is to dust the stairs, stoke the furnace, keep an eye on anyone who enters the building, and keep a rich odor of cooking circulating through the halls. To you, as the tenant, she has another obligation, the most sacred of all, and that is to deliver to you, every single day as you leave the building, her comment on the weather. The comment is always negative.
If it should be the first day of spring, a fresh fifty-five degrees in the shade, and a morning so glorious and luminous that you are wearing your new spring costume to celebrate it, the concierge will be waiting for you in the foyer to commiserate on the terrible, unbearable heat.
If, on the other hand, all of France has been suffering from the fiercest drought in five hundred years, if a disastrous water shortage threatens, and the churches are crowded with petitioners for rain, the moment you step upon the doorsill to unfurl your umbrella in joyful greeting of the first, timorous, long-awaited droplet, the concierge intercepts you to remark, “What a deluge, Madame, what a deluge.”
Naturally, this prelude to the day’s events colors everything that follows, and no matter what good fortune may befall you, enveloped as you are in the gray garment of the concierge’s gloom, you take a dismal view. You may try to circumvent her by escaping from the building without attracting her attention. Here, alas, the word impossible can be used with dreadful, hopeless justification, because even though you may live on the fourth floor, the concierge knows the very second you pass through your private portals, and she is waiting for you, already arranged in an attitude of sad lament, by the time you reach the rez de chaussée.
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