Inside a Pearl (5 page)

The French may make diagnostic pronouncements about their own culture, but they dislike it when foreigners do so. The English writer Theodore Zeldin won wide esteem in France when he published
France: 1848
–
1945
in five volumes, but he irritated the French reading public in 1982 when he brought out his book
The French,
about
contemporary French society. Suddenly Zeldin went from being the unquestioned expert in French history to being one more unreliable British pundit. And as I write it, I'm wondering if this book of mine will ever be published in France.

Before moving to France I'd always assumed that the sort of educated people I would meet there would be progressive, even leftist, and always critical of their own government and even the whole nation. Back in New York, everyone I met socially was a Democrat, possibly a socialist, very occasionally a communist. They all loved making wry or stinging comments about the “military-industrial complex” ruling the United States. Our humorists were Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl, Jules Feiffer, Lenny Bruce—people who satirized themselves and their kind as slightly absurd, pretentious New York Jews and intellectuals, and who ridiculed America as an ignorant, destructive, war-mongering behemoth. I suppose I thought French writers and teachers and thinkers would be just as self-critical. I was shocked to discover they were patriotic. Maybe French leftists loved France because Mitterrand was a Socialist president, the first in half a century. The Left had elected him. The Left enjoyed some real influence, unlike radicals in the States who'd never governed and never would.

I quickly learned I could make a good impression by praising France to the French unqualifiedly as the center of world culture, the beacon of freedom, the epitome of fashion. My new friends loved their country—nor were they all leftists. I interviewed one aristocrat who'd known Genet and kept a photo of the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen on his grand piano. People I knew in Normandy hung out a black flag on the anniversary of the day Louis XVI was beheaded, and our summer-rental landlady in Provence routinely called Marie Antoinette “Sa Majesté la Reine.” Some were right, far right, even tending toward monarchism or fascism. I heard people murmuring anti-Semitic things—not so you could make an issue out of it: “But we're joking! You don't understand our humor.” For the first time I was meeting charming, educated people who were frankly elitist, who believed in France for the French only and who assumed the French
were superior to Arabs and black Africans and gypsies and Eastern Europeans. And Americans. Oh, there were good, i.e. Europeanized, Americans. But most of them were oafs who spoke loudly or put their feet up on the opposite seat of the train or chewed gum or didn't know how to wield their knives and forks or split the bill in a stingy way and were far from being generous hosts. Table manners seemed to enjoy a childish importance in France. How you held yourself at table (no slumping, naturally) and grasped your silverware (the fork always in the left hand, no switching back and forth to the right; soup spoon pointing away then turned 180 degrees to deliver the liquid to your mouth, and no sideways entry as required in America)—all proved or disproved your “upbringing”: a word that in French was simply “
éducation
.” And never take twice from the cheese plate, though it is the one course you may refuse altogether. Marie-Laure de Noailles's mother, the comtesse de Chévigné, told her that only plebeians ate cheese, anyway. The more snobbish the family, the more their cheese plate was only six kinds of goat cheese, the least stinky of all varieties.

Although Americans were far more religious than people in France, no one faith back home had the universal prestige of French Catholicism. I remember a French lover of mine telling me about his aunt and grandmother in Nantes standing for half an hour in the front hall every Sunday morning before going out to mass. They were both dressed in navy blue suits and they were both picking tiny, nearly invisible bits of lint off of each other. That image of their anxious weekly preparation for their ritual crept into my imagination. It became an emblem of the French bourgeoisie—not chic, certainly not glamorous, but
correct
. That was the word they used for everything they approved of. A restaurant was “correct.” A hotel was “correct.” An office party was “correct.” Nor was the word ever accompanied by an ironic smile. It was a grim badge of acceptance, not enthusiastic approval. Just a weary way of saying nothing had been disturbing or disorderly or shocking. A negative form of tolerance, the ground zero of disapproval.

Some American friends of mine owned a farm two hours south of Paris and an hour north of Tours. They were seldom in France and
gave me the keys for four months at a time. I bought an old Renault Cinq and drove down there and stayed sometimes to do a week's worth of work. In the village there was only one decent restaurant, which was in the sole hotel. There for twenty dollars one might have a fish soup sprinkled with cheese and croutons slathered in the reddish mayonnaise called “rust” (
rouille
). Followed by half of a roast chicken or three lamb chops. Then cheese and dessert and coffee. Delicious food. More than “correct.”

The customers whispered. Even families with children. To speak in a normal voice would have been proof of vulgarity, a sign that one was badly brought up (
mal élevé
). The restaurant was owned and managed by a placid, watchful, evil woman who resembled the queen of England. She never enthused over her customers, not even regulars like me and my guests. Her shoulders sloped, she held one hand dangling bone-lessly in front of her; she was
molle
(flabby, flaccid, soft). She'd nod coolly, condescendingly, at a slight angle. Her face relaxed into an unchanging expression of sleepy contempt. If she was nearly indifferent to us, the sole waitress, Marie-Louise, was always animated and attentive. Over the course of many evenings at the hotel, we learned that Marie-Louise had been in service all her life since she was fifteen, half a century before then, when she'd begun working at La Mère Poularde on Mont Saint-Michel. Briefly she'd worked in Germany “in order to learn the wines”—a biographeme that startled us since as good French chauvinists we just assumed French wines were superior to those of any other country. It was a bit like a Renaissance Florentine traveling to Zagreb to study art.

The hotel dining room had clean, gleaming tile floors and simple wood tables, crowned with pure white napery. The many windows were tall and let in the soft sunlight by day; at night the curtains, ugly orange and brown hunting scenes, were drawn against the perpetual winter fog. When my writing or my life was going badly I dreamed of living at the hotel upstairs in a room I somehow imagined was austerely platonic.

One day an aristocratic party of twelve came in for lunch after the stag hunt, but even they whispered—a decline from the days when duchesses
barked at the servants and dukes audibly sneered at the bill after the tradesman or waiter presented it. Now the local nobility had taken up the same infernal mincing as their
roturier
(“commoner”) neighbors. Eleven of the group ordered the same dessert, but a twelfth woman chose the
feuilletines au chocolat
, justifying her supposed eccentricity by saying “I'm plunging into an adventure!” (
“Je me lance dans l'aventure!”
).

One day we'd eaten so heartily that I told Marie-Louise I thought I would skip the dessert. We were the only customers. The queen of England was nowhere in sight. Marie-Louise leaned slightly in my direction and whispered, “Then would you possibly be willing to order the dessert with the chocolate leaves?”

“Sure. Of course. But why?”

“You could leave it for me. I've never tasted it.”

“You've worked here how many years?”

“Twenty-five. Madame never lets the servants taste the desserts.”

Another day Marie-Louise had obviously been weeping. She wasn't her usual brisk, tidy self wearing her fake pearl necklace and with her hair up. Her eyes were smaller and her voice subdued, and I said, “Is anything wrong, Marie-Louise?”

“My brother died yesterday and he's to be buried tomorrow in Brittany. I asked Madame for the day off. I could make it there and back in a day by train but she said no.
‘Mademoiselle, je ne peux pas vous épargner.'
[I can't spare you.] It was the first time in twenty-five years I'd asked for a day off. I'd even found a young man in the village to fill in for me.”

This sounded to us like something out of Mauriac's
A Nest of Vipers.
Marie-Louise had only two consolations. One was that she was about to retire. The other was that Madame let her choose the busboy every summer when things got busy, and Marie-Louise always chose the most handsome. This year it was a tall blond who had bad teeth and never smiled but who blushed easily and sometimes, very rarely and improbably, laughed at Marie-Louise's wisecracks and instantly covered his ruined mouth with his hand. He surely lived at home with his parents where he had rural chores to do, for the layer of urbanism in the village was literally only one street deep and the burghers'
houses—even those built around the town square with its band kiosk and town hall—opened up in the rear to fields and barns. One night my lover Hubert, who was very ill, couldn't finish his meal. Marie-Louise sniffed,
“Une petite nature.”

We invited the “peasants” who lived next door (I could never get used to calling them
paysans
) to visit the house sometime, and Hubert bought a bottle of aperitif, Suze, popular in the French countryside. I don't drink, but I admiringly smelled the bitter medicinal yellow fluid (a cordial made from boiled yellow gentian roots) in its tall, narrow bottle. The invitation we'd extended was understood to be flexible and open-ended and we didn't know when to expect the neighbors, yet two Sundays later all of them showed up, parents and grandparents, the two little girls and their handsome, effeminate teenage older brother who was being sent off to hospitality school to become a waiter. He'd straightened his blond hair and his clothes had sophisticated, stylishly useless buckles and straps.

The conversation was ponderous, the dialect (reputed to be the best, purest French) nearly incomprehensible to me—and I fled into an adjoining room and waited for it to end. From what I could understand, they were telling dull local stories involving the weather, much as my Texas farming relatives might do, except that my relatives would also include the mileage they'd gotten and the route they'd taken and the dust storm they'd seen. When my born-again cousin Dorothy Jean came to Paris, I took her to a museum entirely devoted to the work of Gustave Moreau and pointed out a painting of Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes. “It's a biblical scene,” I said optimistically.

“That's not in my Bible,” she scoffed.

One night Hubert and I, as we drove home from the hotel, saw a car that had gone off the road into the ditch. We hopped out and peered into the driver's side, where a young woman was slumped over the wheel, her ear running with blood. The headlights blazed into the tall, uneven grass. A little dog was yapping soundlessly in the backseat behind a closed window. The only noise was the creaking and ticking of the still-warm automobile. Since we didn't have a phone in our house, we rushed up the nearest drive to the peasant's house and
knocked. The farmer answered the door, blotchy-faced and reeking of cheap brandy, his trousers unbuttoned.

“Who is it?” he said, referring to the victim.

“What difference does it make?” cried Hubert. “She's hurt! Call an ambulance!”

“But who is it?”

“We can figure that out later. Whoever it is, we need to get her to the hospital.”

The entire family, even the grandmother, wanted to know who it was before they would bother to call the ambulance. It was raining slightly as we all trudged down to the still-illuminated car in the ditch. If I'd been able to communicate with them more readily, I might have reminded them their hesitation could very well end up being partly responsible for the woman's death.

“Oh, it's Hélène!” said the farmer. “She and her mother are both big drunks. This is the second accident she's had in a month.” And he went on and on filling us in on the sad case of Hélène as the dog barked silently and climbed up on the backseat to look at us through the window and left a breathy ghost of his nose on the glass.

I couldn't quite see how French city dwellers could idealize the
paysan
unless it was just one more strategy for despising the bourgeoisie. I can still picture Hubert and me walking down a country lane with tilled fields on either side discussing the word “peasant.” The fields were full of sunflowers taller than us that had been starved of irrigation and allowed to brown, wither, and die so that their seeds could more easily be harvested, and I felt that
paysan
must be a derogatory word for anyone except a royalist like Hubert. Finally, a little to my relief, we decided that their word
paysan
didn't quite carry the same meaning as our “peasant,” and that no French Hamlet would exclaim bitterly in an excess of self-hatred, “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”

Of course, I'd lied to the editors of
Vogue
and told them I spoke perfect French.

My first assignment was to interview Éric Rohmer, the most intellectual of all French film directors, an elderly genius obsessed by
midinettes
(shopgirls). And yet in 1984 he was only sixty-four, which naturally seemed ancient to me then. Someone had said that seeing his movies was “kind of like watching paint dry.” I preferred what my friend Jacques Fieschi had said, that Rohmer was “this sensual intellectual.”

Rohmer had been born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. I'd admired his talky films
Claire's Knee
and
My Night at Maud's.
I'd rehearsed my questions carefully with Gilles Barbedette, who'd translated my novel
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
. I had to tape Rohmer's answers, since I had no idea what he was saying—which of course meant that I couldn't pose any follow-up questions to the provocative and original things it turned out that he was saying. In Hollywood movies the star absorbs and perfects the foreign language seamlessly, and in a matter of days, since language plays no part in the plot. But my fear of daunting linguistic encounters only added to my mounting agoraphobia: I seldom left the apartment. I'd sit in a chair and rehearse what I might say, what Rohmer might say, and how I'd answer, and hours of invented conversations would play out in my head. I'd think something in English and immediately try to translate it into French. I'd practice translation so much that I could say many things, at least the sort of things that typically I'd say in my own language. Comprehension, however, was another thing altogether. After I'd present my own
carefully displayed sentence like a diamond necklace on black velvet, the other speaker, the French person, would throw his sentence at me like a handful of wet sand. It would sting so badly that I'd wince, and an instant later I would wonder what had just happened to me. Perhaps worst of all, I'd failed to grasp little nice things shopkeepers or neighbors were saying about the weather or the wild strawberries, pleasant comments I was unable to acknowledge or engage with. John Purcell couldn't speak but could understand, and together we made up an inept sort of team. What I could do was read French books and look up the words. Sometimes now when I glance over the novels and nonfiction works I was patiently annotating in those days, it astonishes me that there was ever a time when I didn't know those words.