But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  —Forbes FYI, September 2005

  PARIS TO DIE FOR

  People going to Paris for the first time will ask you what they should see. I always tell them, “Père-Lachaise.” And always their eyebrows furrow when I explain that it is not a hot new restaurant but a cemetery. “Cemetery?” they say. “We’re not going all the way to Paris to see a cemetery.”

  “Too bad,” I reply, “because then you’ll miss Oscar Wilde, Héloïse and Abélard, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Chopin, Balzac, Rossini, Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Richard Wright, Modigliani, Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Molière, and Proust.” The ultimate Who Was Who.

  I’ve been there a half dozen times. A few hours in this vast, leafy necropolis and you’ll emerge back into the hum and thrum of Paris feeling serene and refreshed. I first heard about Père-Lachaise a quarter century ago from Alistair Horne. He’s Sir Alistair now, in recognition of his achievements as a historian. He was knighted the same day as Mick Jagger, who showed up at Buckingham Palace twenty minutes late wearing jogging shoes. The palace chamberlain looked down his long nose and said, “Ah, Sir Michael, how very good of you to join us.” My favorite of Alistair’s nineteen books is Seven Ages of Paris, brilliant in every respect, including his description of Père-Lachaise, which, as he writes, “contains probably more of France’s past than any other 44 hectares of her soil.”

  Père Lachaise was Father François d’Aix de la Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV. Being the priest who heard the Sun King’s confessions was, to judge from the acreage and the view from here, a very good gig to have. Cheated on the queen, again, eh? Well, no one’s perfect. How about one Hail Mary and half an Our Father? After the Revolution, the land was sold to the city. A city in which 1,343 people got their heads chopped off in two years was bound to run out of burial space sooner rather than later.

  In 1817 city administrators had a brainstorm about how to attract customers: reunite the remains of the doomed twelfth-century lovers Héloïse and Abélard and showcase them under a grand gothic marble canopy. Before long, Père-Lachaise was the chic place to be shoved six feet—rather, two meters—under. The remains beneath the ornate marble canopy are in all likelihood not those of the doomed twelfth-century lovers, but now there are so many famous people here that it no longer matters.

  Mark Twain visited in the 1860s and reported that there were people “snuffling” over Héloïse and Abélard’s tomb. Today the snuffling takes place up the hill, at Jim Morrison’s grave. The first time I visited, there were a dozen young snufflers sitting around Jim’s grave, channeling their grief with fragrant hand-rolled cigarettes, multiple body piercings, and graffiti. These vigils became such a nuisance that the authorities put up a chain-link fence and posted a notice warning that grave defacement is frowned on almost as much as cooperating with U.S. foreign policy. But the liminal—from the Latin limen, threshold—urge to leave mementos on tombs runs deep. Tombs, particularly mausoleums, are vestibules to the underworld. On a previous visit, I found Oscar Wilde’s tomb covered with hundreds of lipstick kisses.

  One of the pleasures of prowling about Père-Lachaise is stumbling upon the unexpected. You never know who you’re going to stumble on. While looking for the grave of Nadar, the nineteenth-century photographer who took history’s first aerial photographs, from hot air balloons over Paris, I came upon the inscription:

  PIERRE DE CHABOULON

  SECRÉTAIRE DE L’EMPEREUR

  “IL ETAIT

  PLEIN DE FEU

  ET DE MÉRITE”

  —NAPOLEON À ST-HÉLÈNE

  A few feet away, my companion Peaches and I found the tomb of Dupuytren, the surgeon who performed the first successful cataract operation. He’s just up the avenue from Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro and financier of the American Revolution. A distance from him we found Edith Piaf’s simple black granite tomb piled high—as it always is—with flowers. She died in 1963. If they’re still laying flowers on your grave forty years later, that’s immortality.

  As you approach the eastern wall of Père-Lachaise, a kind of silence descends that’s even more still than the silence elsewhere here. This section evokes the greatest grief. It was here in the final days of May 1871, against the bullet-pocked wall, that 147 members of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot. It’s become a rallying point for France’s left wing.

  It is also here that Père-Lachaise’s most wrenching memorials are to be found: those to the dead of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the other hecatombs of the Third Reich. Soil from those places was brought here and mixed with the earth beneath the sculptures.

  It was November. We walked down the avenue lined by sculptures of emaciated, tortured humans. The late afternoon sun, slanting through the yellow acacia leaves, failed to warm. Here the chill goes through you. We did not speak. I looked and saw that Peaches’s cheeks were streaked with tears.

  We climbed from there and soon we came upon Gertrude Stein (of Allegheny, Pennsylvania) and Alice B. Toklas (of San Francisco) and our mood lightened. We turned onto the Avenue Carrette, and there waiting for us, as he has been since he was reburied here in 1909 after nine years elsewhere in a pauper’s grave, was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. Today we had a connection, since we were staying in the hotel room where he died a sad and painful death in broken exile on November 30, 1900.

  The lipstick kisses were gone, but there were lots of flowers, including one bunch with a handwritten note in Italian pinned to it. I read a few lines. It was a love note. I felt as though I were prying, and stopped reading.

  The tomb is striking, an Art Deco–Assyrian sphinx, executed by Jacob Epstein and paid for, anonymously, by a Mrs. Carew. Striking, but I still can’t decide even after a half dozen visits whether I actually like it. According to one account, the sphinx’s naked genitals offended a pair of old ladies, who knocked them off with a hammer. Poor Oscar, assaulted in death as in life. They were restored in 1992.I

  On the back is a lengthy description of Wilde’s accomplishments, oddly focusing on his academic career at Oxford. Beneath are two inscriptions, the first from his The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

  AND ALIEN TEARS WILL FILL FOR HIM

  PITY’S LONG BROKEN URN,

  FOR HIS MOURNERS WILL BE OUTCAST MEN,

  AND OUTCASTS ALWAYS MOURN.

  The second is from the book of Job:

  VERBIS MEIS ADDERE NIHIL

  AUDEBANT ET SUPER ILLOS

  STILLEBAT ELOQUIUM MEUM.

  JOB CAPUT XXIX.22

  My schoolboy Latin wasn’t quite up to the translation, and the Oscar Wilde suite at L’Hôtel on the rue des Beaux-Arts provided no Gideon Bible, so it wasn’t until I got home that I was able to look it up: “After my words they spake not again; and my speech dropped upon them.” Wilde could easily have provided a translation. When he took his oral examination in Greek at Oxford, he was given a passage from the Passion of Christ to translate. He did it so fluently that the dons interrupted him and said they were satisfied. He replied, “But I want to see how it ends.”

  His own ending, in Paris, was as wretched as his life had been radiant when, five years earlier in London, he had two hit plays running in St. James’s. Few have fallen so far so fast. He went from riches, honor, and a front table at the Café Royal to ignominy, trial, jail, exile, penury, and death in a seedy pension. He’s celebrated for his deathbed witticisms: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death—one or the other of us has to go”; “I am dying as I have lived, beyond my means.” But it was no way to go, dying slowly and agonizingly of a misdiagnosed ear infection possibly resulting from tertiary syphilis. Peaches and I paid our respects and left.

  Down the cobblestone avenues past Balzac and Nerval and Géricault and Colette. We looked for Doctor Gachet, who had tended to another tragic artist of the time, Van Gogh, but couldn’t find him.

  We walked all the way back to the hotel that afternoon and early evening, stopping to refresh ours
elves in the crowded Marais. As we crossed the Pont Neuf, built in 1607, you could see the whole city at once: at one end, the Eiffel Tower sparkling from twenty thousand computerized strobe lights, at the other, the softer, ancient panorama of Notre-Dame.

  Somehow we ended up at a restaurant on the rue des Grands-Augustins, wearing silly feather hats given us by the waiter, drinking champagne and eating escargots and cuisses de grenouilles and listening to “If I Had a Hammer” sung in French to the accompaniment of accordion music. From the sacred to the profane, in one afternoon.

  L’Hôtel, formerly L’Hôtel d’Alsace on the narrow rue des Beaux-Arts, would be barely recognizable to its former tenant. It is now tout luxe and ornate. There’s a small bar adorned with black-and-white photographs of a few of its better-known visitors: Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Moreau.

  The Oscar Wilde suite is number 16 on the first floor, up the narrow winding staircase. His biographer Richard Ellman recounts how one day, unable to pay for his drinks at an outdoor café in Saint-Germain, Wilde remained at the table even as the waiters, trying to drive him away, rolled back the awning, leaving him to be drenched in the rain.

  Judging from the deathbed photograph taken by Maurice Gilbert, the wallpaper that annoyed him has been changed. The room is dominated now by a fantastical green-and-gold mural of peacocks. It looks similar to others done by his old friend and verbal sparring partner James McNeill Whistler. The mahogany bed looks as though it had been designed by Aubrey Beardsley, with its headboard carved with swans. A haunting period crystal chandelier hangs in the alcove that gives out onto a small balcony overlooking what used to be the courtyard. The walls are adorned with letters that he wrote in this room to his last publisher, Leonard Smithers; also, with the final bill from his kindly hotelkeeper, Dupoirier; and with caricatures by Spy and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as a yellowing news clipping from May 19, 1897:

  FREE ONCE AGAIN

  OSCAR WILDE WILL RESUME

  HIS CAREER AS A PLAYWRIGHT

  He never did. I once owned a first edition of his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, published by Smithers in 1899. When it was published, the name Oscar Wilde was still so radioactive that his name did not appear. It says only “By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan.” In the play, Jack tells the Reverend Chasuble that his invented brother has died. “He seems to have expressed a desire to be buried in Paris.”

  “In Paris!” says the Reverend, shaking his head. “I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.”

  —Forbes FYI, December 2005

  * * *

  I. On my most recent visit, I found the tomb encased in plexiglass, to protect it from the smooches. The plexiglass was entirely covered in lipstick kisses, with the result that the tomb now looks like a heavily graffitied construction site.

  HOW FOIE GRAS WAS MY VALLEY

  I try to avoid the sweeping statement, but I assert that there is surely no sight more preposterous than a busload of German tourists pulled over to the side of a road in France to take pictures of the daily 10:00 a.m. force-feeding of geese. But you have to credit their Teutonic pluck. It takes guts to go play tourist in a country you’ve been invading since the 1870s. We bicycled a total of 245 kilometers, and it seemed that every time you looked, there was a marker saying that here some poor twenty-four-year-old garage worker named Philippe or Marc had been lâchement assassiné by soldats Allemands. I had to look up lâchement. It means “cowardly.” What do they think, these busloads of people from Stuttgart and Munich, when they see that through the bus windows on their way to the next gavage of hysterical geese?

  But the Dordogne has been a misery magnet since 1337, when the Hundred Years’ War began. That funfest was followed by the more grim wars between Catholics and Huguenots, when it was okay—a moral duty, even—to burn people alive for their views on the Real Presence. Then, just as the place was getting back on its feet after the Revolution and two Napoleons, phylloxera wiped out the vineyards. And then the Nazis arrived—and not for the geese. But a history of ruination and tragedy does bestow on Eden a certain depth. Henry Miller, who appreciated earthly beauty almost as much as he did women, declared this part of France “the nearest thing to Paradise this side of Greece.” It did not feel remotely like paradise as I pedaled up the seven-kilometer-long hill to Rocamadour, trying vainly to keep up with my nine-year-old son. But for most of the week I agreed with Miller. The Dordogne is quite something.

  I’d been hearing about “the Dordo” for years, and finally took the family there on a bike trip. It’s a landscape built for kids: dramatic castles once lived in by Richard the Lionheart; caves where man created the first art; rivers for fishing and paddling; town markets redolent with lavender and statice and cheeses; starred restaurants in Relais & Châteaux hotels; hot fields of blazing sunflowers; cool forests aromatic from moss and truffles; picnics on bluffs looking down on trout-dimpled water; biking through a thunderstorm to a cozy inn offering a lunch of fresh mushroom omelets and glasses of Bergerac wine. It’s not a hard sell, really.

  We had our first semiserious hill the morning of Day Two. Perhaps for the best, since dinner the night before consisted of foie gras and a dessert called a chocolate volcano, which left Conor (my heir) looking like a Jackson Pollock painting. At the top of the hill, we stopped at a farmhouse for refreshments, which consisted of foie gras and white wine. I was hesitant at first, but I here declare that foie gras and wine is an excellent midmorning restorative.

  The Lascaux Cave was found, as many caves are, by children and a dog. In this case, the pooch—named Robot—did not make it back out. But what an amazing feat of “Fetch!” he performed. Here in this cave seventeen thousand years ago, men and women created the first art gallery.

  They closed the original Lascaux Cave in 1963 because the carbon dioxide emitted by thousands of daily visitors was causing “green and white disease”—a limestone version of gingivitis—to form on the paintings. Lascaux II is an exact copy, painstakingly re-created using the same painting techniques as in the originals: pigments mixed in the mouth and blown through marrow bones onto the walls.

  A few days later, we visited a real cave, the Font-de-Gaume near Les Eyzies. As we went in, a woman was coming out holding her head, blood spurting from a gash. “Pas sérieux!” she cheerily exclaimed.

  Our guide was a scholarly Englishwoman who stated in a fashion not inviting argument that Cro-Magnon was—I wrote it down—“more advanced than us.” Surely a sweeping statement, but I could not argue with her assertion that the first evidence of “organized fire” was found in Nice, and dates back some 450,000 years.

  We regained the light and pushed on to La Bugue and heavenly omelets; then pedaled back to Les Eyzies in a drenching rain, but it felt fine and carefree, as if it were a scene in a French B movie accompanied by accordion music. Later, my thirteen-year-old daughter, Caitlin, and I took a stroll over a bridge and looked down and there saw a dozen antique cars parked cheek-by-jowl next to a small by a stream. We wandered down. It was a club of English Alvis owners, on a ramble through the countryside. They were having their pints, pink-faced, jolly as could be, delighted to explain all about their marvelous cars. They were happy to be away from their damp sceptered isle, tootling and honking through paradise in their gleaming, buffed autos.

  Cat and I walked back to the hotel for a dinner of foie gras on white asparagus, sole, and chocolate soufflés. The chef was in an especially fine mood, since that very afternoon he had received the Légion d’Honneur for his contributions to French cuisine.

  Three days into the trip I had eaten so much foie gras that I was wondering if I ought to go on intravenous Lipitor. I decided to cut back. But every day at lunch arrived heaping bowls of warm potatoes. Boy, were they good. The bad news was that they were cooked in goose fat. Well, I thought, maybe it will be a massive heart attack and over quickly.

  Beynac Castle looms 150 meter
s above the Dordogne River. They shoot a lot of movies there. It was owned by the same family from 1115 to 1961, except for a brief spell in the late twelfth century when Richard the Lionheart occupied it. I was taken by the baronial hall from which the barons of Beynac issued their decrees from a portal 30 meters above the courtyard below. And picked up a useful tip: clockwise ascending spiral stairways favor right-handed defenders descending with drawn swords. Be sure to mention this to your architect when planning the beach house.

  We peeked into Richard the Lionheart’s apartment (or so at least they claim it to be). He was killed not far from here, during the siege of Chalus. I have never been a special fan of Richard’s ever since I learned about his slaughtering 2,700 Muslim captives at Acre during his crusade. It took three days to behead them all. Reading about the Crusades provides insight into our complex relationship today with the Muslim world. But my feelings about Richard were tempered when I came across James Reston, Jr.’s excellent book Warriors of God, which is largely about Richard and his fierce opponent Saladin.

  At Chalus, Reston relates, Richard was strutting about in plain view of the defenders, and not wearing armor. A young crossbowman, one Peter Basil, let fly a bolt. It struck Richard in the arm and lodged deeply.

  A butcher botched the extraction. Richard’s arm turned black with gangrene; the death watch began. His forces meanwhile took Chalus. He ordered all the defenders hanged, with the exception of Peter Basil, whom he had brought before him.

  “What harm have I done to you that you have killed me?” Richard demanded.

  Peter replied, “With your own hand you killed my father and my two brothers, and you intended to kill me. Therefore take any revenge on me that you want, for I will endure the greatest torments you can devise, as long as you have met with your end. For you have inflicted many and great evils on the world.”

  Lionheart’s attendant urged an especially painful and slow death for the cheeky young regicide, and God knows the medieval mind was good at coming up with horrible torture. But Richard said, “I forgive you my death” and ordered Peter released and given one hundred English shillings. “Live on,” he told the surely stunned Peter. “By my bounty behold the light of day. Let the vanquished learn by my example.”