Alibis

by André Aciman

  It is hard to think of anyone who lived on or around the Place des Vosges during the first half of the seventeenth century who didn’t treasure this one passion above all others. Even in their loves—hapless and tumultuous and so profoundly tragic as they almost always turned out to be—the French displayed intense levelheadedness when they came to write about them. They had to dissect what they felt, or what they remembered feeling, or what they feared others thought about their feelings. They were intellectuals in the purest—and perhaps coarsest—sense of the word. It was not what they saw that was clear; human passions seldom are. It was how they expressed what they saw that was so fiercely lucid. In the end, they preferred dissecting human foibles to doing anything about them. They chatted their way from one salon to the next, and on the Place des Vosges this was not difficult to do. Almost every pavilion on the square had a précieuse eager to host her little salon, or ruelle, in her bedroom. It is difficult to know whether there was more action than talk in these intimate ruelles. What is known is that everyone excelled at turning everything into talk. They intellectualized everything.

  As Descartes had done in The Passions of the Soul, they charted the progress of love on a geometrical plane that is so frightfully balanced that one suspects they needed these models the better to dispel the chaos within them. Love maps such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s carte de Tendre are still found in many poster shops in Paris. Ironic and obscene versions of Scudéry’s somewhat righteous map were not slow to crop up. One of them makes Place Royale the very capital of coquettish love. Yet another was penned by Bussy-Rabutin, Madame de Sévigné’s cousin. Nothing could better spell the difference between the French and the British than the fact that while the French were busily charting out their version of Vanity Fair, across the channel a puritan by the name of John Bunyan was busily mapping out a journey of an entirely different order. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in the same year as did Madame de La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves. One saw the world as good and evil; the other saw it as a series of psychological twists and turns that brings to mind the analytical mania that became fashionable in the many, many salons on the Place des Vosges.

  The French had a name for this. They called it préciosité. It was their way of giving their best quality a bad name. Eventually, they thought better of themselves and called it Classicism. Either way, they had caught the bug, and never again would the French resist digging out doubts and calling each one by its full name: je ne sais quoi—literally: I-don’t-know-what. Nothing delighted them more than smoking out truth with a je ne sais quoi. The mixing of Descartes and Mannerism yielded sumptuous results.

  Charles Le Brun, an ardent disciple of Descartes, remains one of the principal decorators of the Place des Vosges. His style is frequently considered Baroque; yet few would argue that if anything was alien to the Baroque sensibility it was Cartesian thinking. On the Place des Vosges, the dominance of intellect over excess is never hard to detect. Yet there are still telltale signs of sublimated trouble. The street level and first and second floors of every pavilion may have been the picture of architectural harmony and built according to very strict specification—there were to be no deviations from the model supplied by King Henry IV’s designers (often thought to be Androuet du Cerceau and Claude Chastillion)—but the dormer windows on the top floors do not always match: they are each builder’s tiny insurrection against the master plan.

  Henry IV, who favored the building of the Place, remains the most beloved French king: le bon roi or le vert galant (the ladies’ man), as he is traditionally called, famous for his wit, good cheer, sound judgment, and all-around hearty appetite. Every French peasant, he said, would have a chicken in his pot each Sunday. When told that he could become a French king provided he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism he did not bat an eyelash. Paris, he declared, was well worth a Mass. Like the Place Dauphine, the square’s cousin on the Île de la Cité, the Place des Vosges is built in a style that is recognizably Henry IV: all brick-and-stone facings, brick being, like the personality of Henry IV, down-to-earth, practical, basic, made for all times and all seasons. Though the Place des Vosges is elegant and posh, and is hardly spare, there is nothing palatial here. It also reflects the spirit of the high-ranking officials, entrepreneurs, and financiers to whom the king and his finance minister, Sully, had parceled out the land in 1605 on condition that each build a home at his own expense, according to a predetermined design. Some of them were born rich; others had made vast fortunes and, no doubt, intended both to keep them and to flaunt them. But like their king, they were neither garish nor gaudy: wealth hadn’t gone to their heads, just as power hadn’t gone to their king’s. Both forms of intoxication were due to happen, of course, but in another generation and under a very different monarch: Henry’s grandson Louis XIV.

  The grounds on which Henry IV decided to build the new square had once been the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, famous for its turrets, and where King Henry II had died in l559 as a result of a wound inflicted during a friendly joust with a man bearing the rather foreign-sounding name of Gabriel de Montgomery. Following Henry II’s death, his wife, Catherine de Médicis, had the Hôtel des Tournelles razed. To this day, Catherine is regarded as a mean, cunning, and vindictive queen, whose ugliest deed was the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, during which hundreds of French Protestants were put to the sword. It is another one of those ironies of history that the Protestant Henry IV, who had hoped to placate French Catholics by marrying Catherine and Henry II’s daughter Queen Margot, was not only unable to forestall the massacre, which erupted immediately after his wedding, but would himself be felled by a religious fanatic forty years later a few blocks from where Henry II had died. He thus did not live to see his square completed.

  Henry IV and Sully were far too practical to be called visionaries, but surely there must have been something of the visionary in each. They had originally intended the arcades to house common tradesmen, cloth manufacturers, and skilled foreign workers, most likely subsidized by the government. The idea was a good one, since Sully, like France’s other finance ministers, had had the wisdom to attract foreign workers to help France produce domestically and ultimately export what it would otherwise have had to purchase abroad. But in this case it proved too impractical. This, after all, was prime real estate. It was so exclusive an area that, rather than design a square whose buildings would boast façades looking out on the rest of Paris, the planners turned these elegant storefronts in on themselves—as though the enjoyment of façades were reserved not for the passerby, who might never even suspect the existence of this secluded Place, but strictly for the happy few.

  The Place des Vosges has all the makings of a luxurious courtyard turned outside in, which is exactly what Corneille saw in his comedy La Place royale. Everyone lives close together, everyone moves in the same circles, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Look out your window and you’ll spy everyone’s dirty laundry. And yet don’t be so sure, either: as Madame de Lafayette said of life at court, here nothing is ever as it seems. The Place des Vosges was, as Corneille had instantly guessed, not just the ideal gold coast but also the ideal stage.

  None of the residents, however, had any doubt that they belonged at the center of the universe. They were prickly, caustic, arrogant, querulous, spiteful, frivolous, urbane, and, above all things, as self-centered as they ultimately turned out to be self-hating. Like the square itself, this world was so turned in on itself that if it was consumed by artifice, it was just as driven by the most corrosive and disquieting forms of introspection. No society, not even the ancient Greeks, had ever sliced itself open so neatly, so squarely, to peek into the mouth of the volcano, and then stood there frozen, gaping at its worst chimeras. They may have frolicked in public, but most were pessimists through and through. The irony that they shot at the world was nothing compared with that which they saved for themselves.

  La Rochefoucauld, who wrote in the mo
st chiseled sentences known to history, expressed this better than any of his contemporaries. His maxims are short, penetrating, and damning. “Our virtues are most frequently nothing but vices disguised.” “We always like those who admire us: we do not always like those whom we admire.” “If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others.” “We confess our little faults only to conceal our larger ones.” “In the misfortune of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.”

  * * *

  It is hard to hear the echo of so much pessimism or intrigue on the square today. Art galleries, shops, restaurants, and even a tiny synagogue and a nursery school line the arcades. Access to the Place des Vosges is no longer restricted to those who possess a key—which used to be the case. Now, on a warm summer afternoon, one of the four manicured lawns—French gardens are always divided into four parts—is made available to the public, and here, lovers and parents with strollers can lounge about on the green in a manner that is still not quite characteristically Parisian. The Place lies at the heart of cultural activity in the Marais. Two blocks away is the Bastille Opera House; a few blocks west is the Musée Carnavalet; to the north, the Jewish Museum and the Picasso Museum. The rue Vieille-du-Temple, one of the most picturesque streets in the Marais, crosses what is still a Jewish neighborhood.

  In the evening, the square teems with people who remind me that the SoHo look is either originally French or the latest export from New York. In either case, it suggests that everything is instantly globalized in today’s world. And yet, scratch the surface … and it’s still all there.

  Which is why I wait until night. For then, sitting at one of the tables at the restaurant Coconnas, under the quiet arcades of the Pavillon du Roi, one can watch the whole square slip back a few centuries. Everyone comes alive—all the great men and women who walked the same pavement: Marion Delorme, Cardinal de Retz, the Duchesse de Longueville, and especially La Rochefoucauld, who would arrive at the Place des Vosges in the evening, his gouty body trundling ever so cautiously under the arcades as he headed toward no. 5 to visit Madame de Sablé. No doubt, his gaze wandered to no. 18, where more than a decade earlier his former mistress, the Duchesse de Longueville, had watched from her window as Coligny had championed her cause and then died for it. He and the Cardinal de Retz and the Duchesse had joined the Fronde in their younger days, only to end up writing lacerating character assassinations of one another. Now the most defeated and disenchanted man in the world—putting up a front, calling his mask a mask, which is how he hid his sorrows in love, in politics, and in everything else—La Rochefoucauld would arrive here to try to put a less sinister spin on his tragic view of life by chiseling maxim after maxim in the company of friends. “True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.” “If we judge love by the majority of its consequences, it is more like hatred than like friendship.” “No disguise can forever hide love when it exists, or simulate it when it doesn’t.”

  I think I hear the clatter of horses’ hooves bringing salon guests in their carriage, the brawling and catcalling of hooligans wandering into the square, the yelp of stray dogs, the squeak of doors opened halfway and then just as swiftly shut. I can see lights behind the French windows. Then I must imagine these lights going out, one by one, followed by the sound of doors and of footsteps and carriage wheels on the cobblestones again, not everyone eager to run into anyone else, yet everyone forced to exchange perfunctory pleasantries under the arcades, as some head home two or three doors away or pretend to head home but head elsewhere instead.

  An hour later the square is quiet.

  On my last evening in Paris, I drop by L’Ambroisie. It’s almost closing time. I have come to inquire about the name of the dessert whiskey they had offered us at the end of our previous evening’s meal. The waiter does not recall.

  He summons the sommelier, who appears, like an actor, from behind a thick curtain. The man seems pleased by the question. The whiskey’s name is Poit Dhubh, aged twenty-one years. Before I know it he brings out two bottles, pours a generous amount from one, and then asks me to sample the other. These, it occurs to me, are the best things I’ve drunk during a week in France. I find it strange, I say, that I should end my visit by discovering something Scottish and not French. One of the waiters standing nearby comes forward and says it is not entirely surprising. “Why so?” I ask. “Had it not been for the Scotsman Montgomery, who by accident killed Henry II during a joust, the Hôtel des Tournelles would never have been leveled and therefore the Place des Vosges would never have been built!”

  I leave the restaurant. There are people awaiting taxis outside. Everyone is speaking English. Suddenly, from nowhere, four youths appear on skateboards, speeding along the gallery, yelling at one another amid the deafening rattle of their wheels, mindless of everyone and everything in their path as they course through the arcades. As though on cue, all bend their knees at the same time and, with their palms outstretched like surfers about to take a dangerously high wave, they tip their skateboards, jumping over the curb and onto the street, riding all the way past the cruel Rouillac’s house, past the bend around Victor Hugo’s, finally disappearing into the night.

  Only then can I imagine the sound of another group of young men. They are shouting—some cursing, some urging one another on, still others hastily ganging up for the kill. I can hear the ring of rapiers being drawn, the yells of the frightened, everyone on the Place suddenly alert, peering out their windows, petrified. I look out and try to imagine how the torches of the four swordsmen must have swung in pitch darkness on that cold night in January 1614. How very, very long ago it all seems, and yet—as I look at the lights across the park—it feels like yesterday. And like all visitors to the Place des Vosges, I wonder whether this is an instance of the present intruding on the past or of the past forever repeated in the present. But then, it occurs to me, this is also why one comes to stay here for a week: not to forget the present, or to restore the past, but to forget that they are so profoundly different.

  In Tuscany

  I count the days. I know that I shouldn’t. And I try not to. But I do it all the same, because I’m superstitious and need to dampen the magic each time I’m ready to let go and embrace this dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it’s yours forever. That you’re here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime. Like a lover who knows he’s in way over his head, I niggle and fuss and am all too hasty to find fault with the small things, because the large ones can, with just a few colors and a few tones and the toll of bells all over the valley, easily shame my puny attempts to rehearse the wake-up call that is to take everything away.

  So I count the days. Two down, five to go. By this time tomorrow, it’ll be three down and four to go. Mustn’t forget to plan for the day when I’ll have spent more days here than I’ll have days left to stay. On that morning, I’ll brace myself and remember standing outside this very gatehouse with the gardener while stealing a few seconds from our improvised chat to think of the end. From every hour that goes by, I waste a few seconds to invoke my last day here, the way the ancients tipped their goblets and spilled some of their wine when the harvest was plentiful—to keep the envious gods quiet. Thus, I shoo the unavoidable by staring at it all the time. It is also my way of picking up the pieces I’ll be putting together in the weeks ahead. This view of the valley outside Lucca. These candlelit dinners in the garden. And the litany of names that never seems to end: Monticchiello, Montepulciano, Montalcino, Montefioralle—Monte-this and Monte-that, a lifetime of Montes.

  It seems ages ago that we sat in our living room one Sunday evening in New York and leafed through endless catalogs of farmhouses, which for weeks kept streaming into our mailbox. Houses with
or without swimming pool, with or without cook, with or without vineyard and/or olive grove, with or without vista panoramica—we wanted vista panoramica. And we wanted the cypresses and the ocher-tiled roofs and the faded brown doors and rusted hinges, and we wanted a brook—must have a brook—and all around we wanted pomodori (tomatoes) and girasoli (sunflowers) and fattened zucche (squash), the whole thing bathed in steaming parched fields of rosemary and oregano. We wanted a swimming pool that looks out straight into infinity. And we wanted to see the adjoining hills and fields through half-opened windows whose frames themselves are part of the picture.

  The villas came in lavish centerfolds, with informal, whimsical names, each promising bliss by stoking timeless dreamscapes of an inner Tuscany that all of us, especially those who have read the Romantics and post-Romantics, secretly cradle in ourselves. A reader’s Tuscany. Eternal.

  And then I saw it. The house was called Il Leccio. That one! I said. That one could—if I let it, if I didn’t stand in the way and if I let my guard down for once—that one could change my life, become my life, turn my life into what I’ve always, always wanted and known that life could be, even if for only a week: a life where everything is life-size, where timeless and time-bound are one and the same.

  A house in Tuscany can help us turn over a new leaf, give us a new life, and stir another us—the us that’s crying to step out every morning into a sun-washed, ancient land, an us we always keep on the sidelines, under wraps, forever bottled up like a sluggish genie we don’t quite trust or know what to do with or how to please—the basic us that needs basic things but likes them with gusto, the way it likes wines and cheeses, aged and not too pasteurized, but things not too wild either, authentic but refurbished, old but not dated. In Tuscany, the world as we know it turns into a world we all imagine must have been once. Agriturismo, this Italian invention that converts farmhouses and barns into expensive rental homes, is the ultimate in fantatourism. It allows us to live as country people—or, more accurately, as rustic, frugal feudal landowners did here in bygone days.