Paris Was Ours (27 page)

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

Perhaps not surprisingly, over the years Blake’s words have been reappropriated for their patriotic and nationalistic symbolism. “Jerusalem” has been used as the official anthem for English sports teams, boarding schools, political campaigns—wherever there is a need to stir up a sense of right or righteousness. Hearing the surge of voices in the chapel, I was struck by the gust of pride and sentimentality and I considered that Paris and the French would never dare to indulge in this level of delusion.

The English want to know that what they are doing is right; the French cannot permit themselves this lofty moral high ground. The English want their leaders and heroes faultless, morally impeccable, and those who are not must fall. Paris does not require the unimpeachable. President Mitterrand had a secret family, an illegitimate daughter, and a post in the Vichy local administration. President Sarkozy is twice divorced. His second wife left him after he had been in power for three months; four months later he married a woman he had known for three months. Carla Bruni, his new wife, has a habit of crashing in on marriages and a past of rock-star lovers. Paris does not even require consistency. Napoleon’s empress,
Joséphine de Beauharnais, was the daughter of a nobleman, married a nobleman, and used to hunt with the king’s brother. During the Revolution she was imprisoned, but she escaped the guillotine, although her first husband did not. She survived the carnage, whereupon she reinvented herself as a society hostess under the Directoire before marrying Napoleon. The French are endlessly subtle in their embrace of humanity and the mutations of a life. They accept human fault. They expect it.

Recognition of human frailty brings with it an inevitable sadness; there is no joy to Paris, no helium of optimism. I am not sure Barack Obama could exist in France, because I am not sure the French would ever let themselves believe in the ideal, the virtue and hope, that people have instilled in him. I remember a lunch with several women; the husband of one of them had left her six months before. She was in her late fifties and had been married for over thirty years. Her silver blond hair curled over the collar of her suede and fur
gilet
, her wrists were slim, her sorrow sheer. At the lunch it was obvious that her Parisian friends had decided the time of grieving was over. “You’ve got two children, a granddaughter, a lovely apartment. You’re invited out to dinner parties,” they said, as if this was enough to salvage from a lifetime of marriage and trust. “It’s true,” she said. “I go out a lot. I’ve never had as many
Brushings
as since my husband left me.” Paris is no place for idealization; sorrow and depression are accepted parts of life.

I live in the south of the sixth arrondissement, a quartier populated by schoolchildren, students, and the bourgeoisie. On a Wednesday in Paris, children do not go to school, and I spend much time crossing the streets and squares and the jardins du Luxembourg on foot with a stroller or a child’s hand
in mine. At around three in the afternoon I stop beneath the windows of an apartment building on the rue Joseph Bara to listen to a person who is practicing the piano. I can’t work out which floor the sound comes from; I’m not even certain which side of the road the piano is on, only that it is high above and I stand beneath. The music is soulful, classical. I cannot tell you which piece of music it is, only that the person is always there at this time playing. The sound of Paris is this melancholy, exquisite gift, this person playing, alone. Doubt is everywhere. “You always want to master it,” my piano teacher said to me, “but you have to feel it first.” Paris has taught me my will alone cannot get me there.

I pass by the sculpture of le capitaine Dreyfus, who stands on the boulevard Raspail. A young French officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, he was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having passed French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. Dreyfus suffered falsification of documents, wrongful imprisonment, a military cover-up, and rampant anti-Semitism. In 1898, after Dreyfus had spent four years locked up on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, Émile Zola exploded the military cover-up and forgery with his famous open letter to the president of the republic, Félix Faure, in the newspaper
L’Aurore
, which began “J’accuse.” The statue of Dreyfus shows him standing in all his humility and humiliation, at the moment when he was publicly stripped of office on the parade ground of the École Militaire. His sword is broken, but he still holds it to his face in salute, and the gesture is one of pathos and dignity. It is a remarkable sculpture in that it expresses
both the offense against the person and the admission of fault within the French establishment.

I walk across the boulevard Montparnasse, where my child has a rendezvous for a vaccination with a pediatrician, Dr. Jean-Claude Moscovici. I have been bringing my children here for five years but have only recently read Moscovici’s memoir of his childhood,
Voyage à Pitchipoï
, which was published in 1995. Dr. Moscovici’s father was the doctor in a village in the French countryside. His father and uncle were arrested by the Gestapo and French gendarmes in 1942, having been denounced by villagers. They were deported. Two months later the Gestapo returned to the house and took his grandparents. As soon as his sister reached the age of two, his mother was arrested. She escaped at the moment of arrest and remained on the run for the next year. Jean-Claude Moscovici, aged six, and his two-year-old sister were then imprisoned and taken to Drancy, a French concentration camp to the northeast of Paris, directed by SS officers and administered by French gendarmes, from which prisoners were deported to concentration camps, principally Auschwitz. Miraculously, Moscovici and his sister were released. We talk of the Occupation of France on a Wednesday afternoon as his hot waiting room fills with children and sighing mothers and my son deconstructs the playhouse. Moscovici, his mother, and his sister returned to the family house after the war, finding it shut up, emptied. His father and grandparents never returned. He still owns this house; it is where he spends his holidays, the last place he saw his father.

Still, the instinct to judge surges up in me—the Englishness, the need to know who was right and who was wrong.
And how could you carry on living there, go back among that village, those people? I ask. He shrugs and tells me his mother used to say that every time she was on the run during those years, one door would close in her face and another would be opened.

I walk home through the jardins du Luxembourg; it is brown and humid. They have placed warning posters at the gates, signaling strong winds and the possibility of falling branches. Beneath the warning text is a line drawing in black ink of a Parisian dressed in a winter coat with an umbrella turned inside out; she walks bent beneath a swooping tree, shards of branch flying. She walks through the
jardins
knowing that a branch can strike, asking if she will be strong enough to resist. Always this doubt. Paris knows that human failing is part of human endeavor.

In Franklin’s Footsteps

T
HE OBSESSION TOOK
hold in New York, which posed a problem: what I wanted to write about next was Ben Franklin’s eighteenth-century adventure in France. On some level, I knew from the start that the only way to research that book was to move our family, for some period of time, to Paris. And from the start—even as friends enviously asked if we would do so—I dreaded the prospect. Generally Paris is not considered a hardship posting, save to someone who values efficiency, candor, and Szechuan takeout. Nor was this to be a larky, lighthearted school year abroad. Paris means Angélina’s
chocolat chaud
and the Tuileries at dusk and the Rodin Museum and Pierre Hermé, but it is also a city, I had come to learn, of phone repairmen, plumbers, and dentists, the vast majority of them French. With age, the dislocations tend to announce themselves less as bracing, extracarbonated mental states than as crippling tornadoes of small details.

In part I suppose I dreaded what can only be termed my own devolution. Whereas at home I am organized, competent, and semiarticulate, I am in France awkward and incapable. I can be deaf to nuance. Some frequencies elude me entirely. Franklin was very clear about the fact that a man sacrifices
half his intelligence in a foreign language, but he had plenty of intelligence to spare. (He bemoaned especially that his humor fell flat on the page, as indeed it did.) Even without a language barrier, I knew myself to be handicapped. At any moment I am likely to revert to my Anglo-Saxon habits, to forget not to lay a finger on the greengrocer’s tomatoes, not to reach for my
boulangerie
change before it is counted, not to order my sandwich before my
café crème
. (My husband falls in a different category. A Frenchman raised on foreign soil, he passes for a native until confronted with a cheese tray, at which juncture his passport is nearly revoked. He once left a Normandy innkeeper dumbstruck by asking, in unaccented and syntactically impeccable French, what precisely
un potage jardinier
consisted of. Imagine a native New Englander inquiring after a definition of clam chowder.) There was one other deterrent, too, one that the biographer Richard Holmes has identified: “Writers of course are always slightly ashamed at not being at their desks, especially in Paris, where they might be out—having a good time,
mon dieu
.”

We figured that the one-year-old wouldn’t object to the plan but assumed that some finessing might be in order for the eight-and ten-year-olds. Which may explain why we broke the news at the Café de Flore a semester beforehand, over
cafés liégeois
and
éclairs au chocolat
, the blackmailing parent’s best friends. The eight-year-old was an immediate convert. The ten-year-old succumbed neither to the sugar rush nor to the pandering. He made it clear that he would not be decamping to Paris until France fielded a major-league baseball team. And it was he who—on the August day we headed off to JFK with our 15 suitcases—planted himself on the steaming sidewalk
and refused to budge. It was also he who planted himself on the sidewalk and refused to budge a year later, when we headed to Charles de Gaulle with more bags than any of us bothered to count. They were at least fewer than the 126 with which Franklin headed home in 1785, baggage that included three Angora cats, a printing press, a sampling of mineral waters, and a variety of saplings.

By a happy quirk, we found an apartment in Franklin’s old neighborhood, less hilly today than it was in the 1770s. There were other modern-day advantages as well. No fewer than six
boulangeries
stand along the mile that separated Franklin’s home from that of John Adams. Franklin had to make that walk on an empty stomach, something I never did. There was, after all, pressing
pain au chocolat
research to be done. We lived fifteen minutes from Versailles, an expedition that took Franklin two dusty hours by carriage. When we bicycled in the Bois de Boulogne, we crossed the lawn where Franklin followed the first manned balloon as it rose into the sky in 1783, something he did with considerable anxiety. We were two very different Americans in Paris, but I delighted in the overlay of our lives. It did what a foreign adventure is supposed to do—it made the mundane thrilling. Along the route Franklin traveled twice every week, to the home of the woman he hoped to seduce (as opposed to the one he wanted to marry), was the lovely Congolese tailor who lengthened our son’s pants before the start of the school year. Picking up the dry cleaning qualifies as less of a chore when you are doing so on ground you know Ben Franklin and John Adams have trodden before you. And I could always justify shopping at the pricey ice cream shop on the rue Bois-le-vent. It seemed nearly obligatory to do so, given that the
shop stands where the back door to Franklin’s home once had. Moreover, it seemed dangerous not to, as the shop hours were erratic, a universal signal of artistic integrity but a guarantee of greatness in France.

To France America sent as its first emissary a man who confessed he was wholly indifferent to food. (And one who was ignorant about it in the extreme: it was his conviction that there was no butter in French sauces.) Franklin ate well but pined for a good Indian pudding, a piece of salt pork, Newtown Pippin apples, and walnuts. We had an easier time fending off homesickness. Never has our family eaten as many H & H bagels as we did in Paris; they can be had, frozen, at a little store on the rue de Grenelle, conveniently on my way home from the diplomatic archives. And so breakfast became an odd binational affair—bagels with Kiri, the French spreadable that most closely resembles Philadelphia cream cheese. One thing that immediately fell off our radar was Chinese food, much though the cravings for sesame noodles and pork dumplings continued. Just as the word
teamwork
is missing from the French language, so are the concepts “family style” and “for the table.” To attempt a Szechuan or Hunan meal without sharing is to defeat the purpose of the exercise. Inevitably one is left to covet one’s neighbor’s plate.