Paris Without Her

by Gregory Curtis

  Tracy stayed behind during the first hunt, on Wednesday. Late in the afternoon, I got tangled in the branch of a tree, came off my horse, and fell hard against its rising left front knee. Although occasionally a trickle of blood ran out of the corner of my mouth, I managed to finish the hunt. Then two hunters loaded me into a car, and in a few moments we were racing through villages and down back roads between rolling fields. In a quarter-hour, we stopped in front of an ugly stucco building on a side street in a charmless village. A receptionist showed us into a large room. There was a wooden desk in one corner, a wooden examining table covered with white paper in another corner, a sink, and a few cabinets. Almost immediately the doctor burst into the room and shooed my two companions out. He was a large man, about fifty years old, with huge, thick shoulders, an ample belly, and a round, fleshy face sporting a bushy mustache. He motioned for me to lie down on the examining table.

  In French, he asked if my teeth were all right. They were. Had I had a tetanus shot recently? I thought so but wasn’t sure. Was I hurt anywhere else? No. He nodded, and then, beginning at my neck, he moved his hands slowly down my body, pressing here and there, particularly around my stomach. He repeatedly asked if I felt any pain. I didn’t.

  Abruptly, he took my lip between his thumb and forefinger, pulled it out, and peered inside. Then he swabbed out the wound and put a roll of gauze between my lip and teeth. He motioned for me to get up and went to the door to call my companions back in. He said I needed stitches all right, but he didn’t have the right apparatus to do the procedure. We would need to go to a hospital in Joigny, a larger town nearby. His charge would be 140 francs, about twenty-five dollars at that time. Fortunately, I had a two-hundred-franc note in my coat. I gave it to the doctor. He sat down behind his desk and pulled out the middle drawer. Papers, pencils, and little tin boxes slid back and forth. He threw my two hundred francs in and rummaged around in the drawer, looking under papers and flipping through the pages of pamphlets, until he found three twenty-franc notes, which he handed to me. Then he shook hands all around and we went our way.

  Joigny is a thriving town on the Yonne River. We found the hospital without difficulty and went in the emergency entrance. There was a square room, enclosed in glass, where six young women dressed in white were sitting or standing in relaxed attitudes and joking among themselves, as emergency-room staffs do everywhere. One woman asked if we played in a band. This confused me until I remembered we were still wearing our riding habits. Since I had the wad of gauze in my mouth, one of the other hunters explained what had happened. This produced more jokes and laughter. One of the women handed me a short form to complete. I wrote down my name and the address of the hotel in Barbizon, and, with a shrug of my shoulders, checked that, yes, I had had a recent tetanus shot. In two medical visits to people who had never seen me before, that was all the paperwork I had to do.

  Two of the women showed me into an adjoining treatment area, where I took off my riding jacket and lay back on a table. Supremely confident and reassuring, they took the gauze out of my mouth and swabbed my wounds with antiseptic and spread a local anesthetic on my lip. It took effect quickly, and they began sewing me up. I could feel a slight tug on my lips with each stitch, but nothing more. In five days, I could have the stitches removed. And payment? Oh, it would take them a day or so to get the bill out. They would send it to my hotel. Their casualness about everything, especially money, was astonishing to me. I left the hospital with a row of four stitches on my lower lip and another four stitches between my lip and my chin, where my teeth had cut completely through. The bill did arrive two days later. It was about fifty dollars.

  Someone had phoned the hotel about my accident, and Tracy was waiting for me in our room when I got back to the Bas-Bréau. She was full of sympathy and had already prepared an icepack for my mouth. She started a warm bath, then helped me pull off my boots and get out of my riding clothes. She washed off my back and sat on the edge of the tub while I soaked. Any injury or illness opened Tracy’s huge reservoir of compassion. We went to dinner, but I couldn’t eat anything except for some vanilla ice cream. When I tried a sip of wine, it felt as if I’d put a burning coal on my stitches.

  We spent Thursday in the gardens of the hotel and exploring Barbizon. On Friday, we walked farther and found the field just on the edge of town where Millet had painted both The Gleaners and The Angelus. The field, although apparently featureless, was nevertheless recognizable from the paintings. I think it was because of the way the field met the horizon in the distance.

  Along the way, we passed a small house with a brass plaque by the door that indicated a doctor’s office. I thought that maybe he could remove my stitches, so we wouldn’t have to go all the way back to Joigny. We entered the office. As is often the case in France, especially in the small towns, his waiting room was also his family’s living room. There was a couch, several stuffed chairs, and a television, although it wasn’t on. An elderly woman in a gray shawl was sitting in one of the chairs and greeted us pleasantly. Tracy and I sat on the couch. A few moments later, a bald man with shiny pink cheeks came in, clutching a cap in his hands. He greeted the old woman and us and sat down himself. It was easy to see what they both were thinking: Who could we be? Why were we there?

  After another five minutes or so, a stout woman in jeans came in. She almost tripped over a chair because she couldn’t stop staring at us. Then the office door opened, and a woman with a cane came out, followed by the doctor, a slight, fair-skinned man with close-cropped dark hair. He, too, stared at us as the woman in the gray shawl went into his office. We waited in absolute silence without moving. All of us in the waiting room looked like wax figures in a museum.

  Fifteen minutes later, the elderly woman left the doctor’s office, and it was our turn. We made our introductions and shook hands. He seated us in two chairs in front of his desk and then sat down facing us. I told him what had happened and asked about the stitches. I thought he would come take a look, but he didn’t. Oh, he said, it was much too early to take them out. I should leave them for at least ten days. We could return then and he would take them out. I told him we were leaving for home next Sunday. He shrugged, smiled, and pleasantly said, “Then I guess I won’t take them out.” He stood up and said there would be no charge; seeing us had been his pleasure. Good day, madame, monsieur. Good day, doctor.

  As Tracy and I left, we saw that several more people had arrived in the office. We felt their stares as we walked through the door and closed it behind us. Out on the street, we both felt oddly exhilarated. We laughed like delinquents who had pulled off an inspired prank. I bent to kiss her, but she put up her hand. “Careful,” she said. “Your stitches.”

  “I think it’s all right,” I said, and very gently touched my lips to hers.

  (Five days later, back in Austin, I made an appointment with a doctor who is a friend of long standing but whom I’d never seen as a patient. At his office, I had to complete endless forms about my health, medical history, and insurance coverage. Payment, I couldn’t help noticing, was due at the end of the visit. His office overflowed with patients, but eventually I got in. He had the stitches out in a minute or two. He said he wanted to hear about our trip, but just then he was pressed for time and had to move on. Still, I couldn’t resist asking him just one question: had they done a good job sewing up my mouth? “Oh, hell, yes,” he said. “A real good job.”)

  * * *

  . . .

  The hunt on Saturday, in the Forest of Fontainebleau, was a much grander affair than the first one. There were more riders, more horses, and more packs of hounds. And this time Tracy could come, too, in a car. At nine o’clock, Madame and Monsieur, who owned the hotel, drove us to a nearby town, where about thirty hunters and hunt followers were already eating massive breakfasts of scrambled eggs, ham, potatoes, fruit, pastries, coffee, and wine. Monsieur advised Tracy and me to do the same: we wouldn’t ea
t again until dinner that evening. The hunters all wore black velvet coats with blue-and-white collars and hems, the insignia of their club. Then we drove to a clearing in the forest where several long horse trailers were parked. Many of the hunters were already there. A few of the men had brass horns slung over one shoulder. Others wore long, straight swords such as we had seen in the store. Many people who weren’t hunters stood around the periphery of the clearing. Some had bicycles or small motor scooters; others had come in cars. These were “les suiveurs”—people from the farms and villages nearby who thought following the hunt was great sport.

  Scouts had been in the forest early in the morning to catch sight of the stag, follow his movements, and find a place where the hounds could pick up his scent. As the hunters waited in a semicircle, the scouts reported to Monsieur le Président of the hunt, an older gentleman with an almost fierce demeanor. He didn’t ride anymore himself—too many falls over the years—but his skill at hunting was still respected. There was much conversation between him and the scouts. Then Monsieur le Président gave instructions. I didn’t understand a word of all this. Tracy, meanwhile, was busy taking photographs. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Except for the suiveurs, who were in modern dress, everyone else looked as if they had just come from an audience with Louis XIV. Madame from the hotel took me to my mount, a huge animal, the biggest horse by far that I’d ever ridden. He had once been a trotter at the track. Tracy was going to ride in a car with Monsieur le Président and two of his cronies.

  She told me later that they were very gallant toward her and spoke to her in fractured English but with great respect. The mood in the car eased a bit when the three men realized that she couldn’t understand their French. They talked freely among themselves after that and often shook with laughter. Tracy was sure their talk was full of ribaldry. The car bounced and swerved as the president guided it down lanes through the forest.

  Meanwhile, I was holding my own, keeping up with the hunters. Once, I saw the stag, about a hundred yards away. He had come into a clearing, paused to look at us, then bounded back into the forest and disappeared. We trailed after him for several hours, mostly at a trot, then ending with a mad gallop as we tried to head him off, but he escaped into another part of the forest, where the club didn’t have the right to hunt.

  After the stag escaped, we all gathered around some folding tables that had been set out next to a farmhouse. Wine appeared. My mouth had healed enough that I could drink again, and both Tracy and I were ready for some wine after the long chase. Monsieur le Président sat at one of the tables, across from a man with snow-white hair. We were told that he was a count and that he was crazy. Tracy and I cringed and sank into the background as Monsieur le Président and the crazy count had a screaming argument over what mistakes had been made during the hunt and why the stag had escaped. Often other hunters joined in, but then faded back as the two men continued to fume at each other. Madame from the hotel saw Tracy and me raising eyebrows at each other, but she said, “Don’t worry. They are always arguing about something.”

  And, in fact, when we all met later for dinner at a country inn and sat together at one very long table that had been set up for us, the two men seemed happy and in good humor. The crazy count sat at the head of the table and proceeded to tell jokes—very, very dirty jokes, Madame told us as she laughed along with everyone else at the table. More wine appeared, then the food, then pear eau-de-vie. The crazy count had run out of jokes for the moment and was smiling contentedly, his hands clasped across his stomach. Monsieur le Président stopped by as he was leaving, to pay his respects to Tracy. He was joined by the two other gentlemen who had been in the car. They all made elaborate bows. Tracy was both serene and gracious in the face of all this gallantry in her honor.

  That night, in the comfort of our room at the Bas-Bréau, as she lay amid soft pillows on the bed, I made an elaborate bow myself and uttered various polite but long and ornate compliments. Tracy looked puzzled at first, but then smiled indulgently when she realized what I was doing. “Oh, mon cher chéri,” she said with her mouth pulled down in a pout, “you have no reason to be jealous of Monsieur le Président.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Storm During Dinner

  Tracy and I went to Paris one more time. We arranged to arrive on May 11, 2005, Tracy’s sixty-second birthday. I had just finished writing a book called The Cave Painters, which would be published the following year. I never had more fun researching or more difficulty writing than I did while working on that book. The caves I visited were in beautiful areas in rural France, especially around Les Eyzies, in the Périgord, where Vivian and I had seen the statue of the naked caveman. Tracy couldn’t come with me during my research, but now I was going to be able to show her some of the things I’d seen. And we would have the means to splurge during the trip. Gourmet magazine had commissioned me to write an article on traveling to see the painted caves. The publisher Condé Nast owned Gourmet, and, in 2005, expense accounts from Condé Nast were still obscenely lavish.

  But we found that extravagance didn’t come naturally for us, and we didn’t push boundaries by our spending. In Paris, we stayed in a modest but comfortable hotel in the Latin Quarter. After we were settled there, the first thing we did was walk to Georges Thuillier on the Place Saint-Sulpice so Tracy could buy some santons for her birthday. These are small, painted terra-cotta figures that come from various workshops in Provence. The word meant “little saint” in an eighteenth-century Provençal dialect. Santons first appeared during the suppression of the Church and religious services during the French Revolution. Formerly, in the weeks before Christmas in Provence, there were crèches and nativity scenes with living people in costumes playing the traditional roles. They were large public displays. When such religious displays were forbidden, people in Provence began to create small nativity scenes in their homes. But, so as not to upset the authorities, the characters were not the Biblical wise men, shepherds, and Mary and Joseph, but familiar local figures of village life, such as a woodcutter, a fisherman, a fishwife, a butcher, a gardener, a priest, and so on. There were enough different characters so that a whole village could be set up beneath the Christmas tree.

  Tracy had discovered santons in a guidebook she read about Provence before a trip we took together to Arles and Aix-en-Provence in 1998. She was enchanted by the story of their origin, and then, when she finally saw them, by the figures themselves. One bright day in Aix, we followed a map on foot down pretty but ghostly quiet streets to the studio and boutique of Santons Fouque, a much-honored workshop for santons that has been run by the same family for four generations. Tracy bought a handful of figures as well as a cliff, a bridge, a stable, and a couple of houses. One of the figures, perhaps her favorite, was a burly painter, who looked somewhat like Cézanne, sitting outdoors before his easel. In time, her collection grew to become a small village.

  Each year, not long after Thanksgiving, together with our children and then with our grandchildren, Tracy would spend an afternoon taking the santons out of the boxes where they were carefully stored the rest of the year, wrapped in tissue. Then she would begin to create her village, placing the houses here and there on the small cliff. She made a stream of aluminum foil run down the cliff, and she put a bridge over the stream. Then she placed the figures in groups around the village in a way that suggested that the whole scene had been frozen in one single moment. She also learned how to secrete small lightbulbs throughout the tableau. Children and grandchildren were allowed to look, and perhaps permitted to put one figure carefully where Tracy indicated, but they were sternly warned not ever to touch it at any other time. And then, one night after dinner, with the family around, we turned out all the lights. Tracy lit the hidden bulbs, and the santon village suddenly came alive with a soft glow and mysterious shadows.

  No one in Austin had heard of santons, at least no one we knew, so santons became Tracy’s special
area of expertise, her unique discovery. She even became rather scholarly about them. She belonged to a high-minded town-and-gown organization for women called the Open Forum. Each member in turn had to prepare and present a paper to the club during its monthly meeting. Tracy chose to make a presentation about santons. She gave their history, explained how they were made and painted, and discussed the different qualities of the acknowledged masters of the craft. She described our visit to Santons Fouque and spoke also of Marcel Carbonel of Marseille, who died in 2003 at ninety-one, after decades of dominating both the aesthetics and the marketing of santons. Tracy’s paper was a great success with the Open Forum—not a small matter, since they could be a demanding audience. Given confidence, she repeated her talk for our family, for her parents, for my mother, and for anyone else whose interest was piqued by seeing her village in our home during Christmas.

  What was it about these figures that so enchanted her? They were French. That was important. Also, certainly, she liked the colors and the forms, as well as the aesthetic pleasure of arranging all the figures in a dramatic and appealing display. And, more than that, I now believe that the santon village was not so removed from Tracy’s life before we met as it had always seemed to me before.

  When Tracy was growing up in the 1950s, Amarillo was only about seventy years old. It was not a city or even much of a town in those days, but more or less a rural village. It had its stock characters whom everyone knew, such as the grocer, the barber, the haberdasher, the accountant. Of course, there were also other figures—the rancher, the mechanic, the wildcatter. One could almost imagine a crèche surrounded by such small painted terra-cotta figures from life in Amarillo, although that display, with contemporary Texas figures, could only have seemed like a parody. But if, instead, the figures were from two centuries in the past and placed in a rural setting far away from Texas, then sincerity would replace what might have been satire. I believe that with her santons Tracy was creating an imaginary world that was based on her memories of her own life as she was growing up. With them, she could re-create that life as an ideal world of small painted figures around a crèche.