Paris: A Love Story (5 page)

“One of my professors invited me for a drink at his home this week. It was one of my best evenings. We had champagne, delicious cake, and what
ambiance!
He and his wife have an old townhouse in Tours full of old books, paintings, and carpets. And one motorcycle the whole family shares! They’d rather spend their money on champagne than cars! What wisdom. They showed me their old family albums and told their tales of the Occupation, the Bombing and how they met each other through the American troops. It’s amazing,” I wrote my parents, “how much the War is still present in people’s lives and memories here. After so many years, they still talk about it, even at the Clouets.”

For all my pretense of being a woman of the world, the scribbled lines at the end of my extravagantly enthusiastic account of life in
la
douce France
are revealing. “I suddenly had such a pang to have you here with me!” I wrote my mother. “Deep down, I’m still the little girl who needs a hug from Mama twice a day. I miss you so much sometimes. Nobody has a Mother like you. I’m crying now so I’d better stop.”

“I can’t tell you how excited I am about Paris!” I wrote in my final letter from Tours. “We leave on Saturday morning and will stop on the way at Chartres and arrive in Paris in the afternoon. I am particularly pleased with my housing: I shall
be living in the heart of the Latin Quarter, two steps from the Sorbonne, across the street from the Luxembourg Gardens, off the Boulevard Saint Michel: 2 Place Edmond Rostand (how perfect, Papa, since I know Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is your favorite).”

I can still recite the poem I memorized that fall, “Ma Bohème,” by Arthur Rimbaud, mumbling it like a prayer during solitary rambles along the Loire, and soon the Seine. It was my personal anthem.

Je m’en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées;

Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal;

J’allais sous le ciel, Muse! Et j’étais ton féal;

Oh! là là! que d’amours splendides j’ai rêvées!

I went off, my fists in my torn pockets

My overcoat too became ideal

I walked beneath the sky, Muse! And I was your liege;

Oh what splendid love affairs I dreamed of.

I never returned to visit the Clouet family in their ancient
maison particulière
by the cathedral. I picture their son, Benoit, just a few years older than me, wearing his father’s well-worn corduroy jacket, with the patched elbows, now summoning his own children on Saturday morning, “Allez, mes enfants!” Let’s go kids! he calls out, as his father had. “À la chasse!” To the hunt! I do not need to return. That world is forever preserved for me in amber.

“Alive and exciting at all hours of the day,” I wrote in my first letter home from Paris, on October 25, 1967. “I live in a lovely, typical 19th Century Paris Haussmann building, with the usual high ceiling, moldings, marble fireplace, and an unbelievable view of the Luxembourg Gardens. At sunset or in the morning with all the little boys in their silly short pants sailing their boats in the fountain and their mamas shouting, ‘Jean-Paul tu vas tomber!’” Fallen chestnuts filled the park’s gravel walks. I polished them on my sleeve before pocketing them, as I had as a child in Budapest parks.

In Paris, I felt connected to history in a way I did not in America. Elderly men I passed in the Latin Quarter, with empty sleeves pinned to the shoulder of their jackets, reminded me of the not-so-distant war. Some of them wore their medals pinned to their frayed lapels.

I fell asleep to the roar of motorcycles under my window on place Edmond Rostand and the two-note (high/low) sirens in the distance. I would open my windows the minute I awoke and inhale the blend of diesel from the traffic and coffee from the café Le Rostand below. “Paris s’éveille” (Paris Awakes) was
the hit song in those days, and it always seemed to be playing on some distant radio. Even now, listening to that song on my iPod brings back those first Parisian mornings. “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille . . .” “It’s five a.m. and Paris awakes . . .”

Late at night, famished, I tiptoed across the creaky parquet toward the kitchen. The minute I crossed the threshold, my landlady, Madame Koumarianos, magically appeared. “Vous n’avez pas dîné, Kati?” she asked, her eyebrows terrifyingly arched. You haven’t had dinner, Kati? She was not responsible for my
dîner
and was not about to let me tear off the corner of a stale baguette. But not even this brittle Greek widow could dampen my excitement. “J’ai toujours faim, Madame!” I replied with what I hoped was my most irresistible smile. I am always hungry! It was true. In Paris I was always hungry. All my senses were heightened.

I was living in an enchanted world, which I tried to capture in my weekly letters to my parents. “The Seine: different at all hours. In the morning I watch the old guys setting up their little stalls of old prints, rare books and even rarer junk. The artists all look their parts, as accurately reproduced by Hollywood. To sit in Notre-Dame after sunset, quiet as a tomb with only candlelight, the stained glass beautiful even in the dark, is eerie and soothing—and overpowering.”

•   •   •

In those days, moving to Paris was a real displacement: no phone calls, email, Skype, or any of those other twenty-first-century tools. My letters home were my only means of communication.

By November, I was in love with a fellow student at “Sciences Po,” Paris’s prestigious Institute of Political Science. Among George’s many virtues was that, in addition to his perfect French, this French-Canadian spoke Hungarian. Our parents had been friends in Budapest. “George and I,” I wrote home, “are so much alike. We laugh over the same ridiculous things. He is the older brother I always wanted—
et plus encore.
” I added that in case they missed the point that I had my first serious boyfriend.

Our twosome was rounded out by another Sciences Po classmate, a violinist studying under the legendary Nadia Boulanger. Bruno Monsaingeon was Parisian to his fingertips and his family more or less adopted me. “I spent all day Sunday with the Monsaingeon family,” I gushed to my parents. “They have an amazing apartment, full of books, paintings and such warmth. After lunch, Bruno played the violin and his father—a surgeon—the piano.”

Even bad weather was cause for celebration in Paris. “Yesterday it poured rain,” I wrote on November 1, “and I went out very early and stood on the Pont Alexandre III and the city was quiet for once, and I could take in the river with Notre-Dame astride it, and the Invalides behind me. I admit to you that this pearly grey landscape so moved me that I cried.”

I was discovering art. “It is so much easier to appreciate Utrillo if you have just walked the same streets in Montmartre that he painted . . . I have been camping out at the Louvre as we are having our first big art exam next week. I have to be familiar with everything from Giotto to Corot for this one. I
feel almost at home now in that immense palace, I spend so much time there.”

Afternoons, I sometimes ducked into one of the Latin Quarter’s small movie theaters, where a churchlike hush reigned. The classics of French cinema, from
Hôtel du Nord
to
Jeux Interdits
as well as the films of Jean Renoir and Jean-Luc Godard, entered my life that year. My favorite by far was the haunting
Les Enfants du Paradis,
which I saw a half-dozen times.

And music! “The Orchestre de Paris concert was one of the most movingly beautiful things I have ever heard. I have never heard Beethoven’s 5th so powerfully played. And Mozart’s concerto for flute played by Jean-Pierre Rampal—magnificent! Music has become so important for me.” As usual for me, my sudden passion for music had a romantic source: Bruno, my classmate and companion, transformed from amusing pal to elusive artist and fantasy object when he picked up his violin and began to play. Listening enraptured to his rendition of the
Dumky Trio
by Dvořák, I dreamed about a future of nothing but music and long evenings of clever conversation and laughter. “On Tuesday,” I wrote home on March 7, “Bruno gave his annual spring recital—Dvořák, Mozart and Brahms, beautifully and movingly executed. This boy has real genius.” I wrote with new authority. “I’ve learned so much from him about how to listen and love music. I love him too. He has a heart of gold. After his concert we went to his place with several friends—mostly musicians. We made hot wine and talked until morning.”

Bruno introduced me to his favorite corner of Paris—now
mine. One winter afternoon as we were both leaving Sciences Po, he grabbed my arm and told me to hop on his motorbike—he had a treat for me. I hung on to Bruno as we careened in and out of dark, winding, cobblestoned streets in a neighborhood I did not recognize, and arrived at our destination. We faced a quiet square framed by pink brick pavilions and slate roofs and interconnected with arcades. I was instantly spellbound by the place des Vosges. The harmony of the square, the contrast of the lush green center where children played and lovers sat in the winter half light, framed by the breathtaking architecture, was startling in the dark and dingy Marais. The pavilions’ façades were still covered in soot then, before Paris started its great cleanup. Bruno and George and I returned often that year with wine and baguettes, which we consumed on the grass—something you cannot do in most Parisian parks.

Michel de Montaigne was another revelation. In the Sorbonne’s Grand Amphithéâtre, a coliseum-size hall, I listened enraptured to a professor I could barely see. Montaigne, he explained, was the first modern man, a real humanist who could teach us a thing or two about how to live our lives. As I was searching for just such a role model, I dove into the
Essays
and began a lifelong relationship with the man and his words. Montaigne called his literary project “essays,” meaning “trials,” and the word entered the lexicon. I appreciated his absence of certitude and his tolerance of all human foibles—as if they were good things. I was a bookish girl and thus I admired his decision at age thirty-eight to retire from public life to spend more time in his library and writing. Thirty-eight seemed the
right age to retire from the world. The fact that the Vatican called Montaigne shameless for embracing his “vices” (meaning his self-absorption) added to his appeal. Let us be kind to
ourselves,
my sixteenth-century hero preached. No one had ever given me that advice. Excel and you will be respected and even loved, was what my parents preached. “We are great fools,” Montaigne wrote. “‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? Have you not
lived?
That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations . . . to compose our character is our duty, not to compose books and to win battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live!”

I was not yet interested in Montaigne’s views of love and loss as part of the human condition. That would come much later. But I do remember leaning back in a wrought-iron chair, my feet propped up on the stone balustrade overlooking the fountain of the Luxembourg Gardens, a well-thumbed paperback of his
Essays
in my lap. The late-afternoon sun cast a glow on the yellow and orange flower beds, and the leaves of the chestnut trees shimmered gold. I had found the key to happiness.

So besotted was I with my Parisian life that I did not even mind the lack of individual attention from professors. For me it was part of learning to be self-reliant. Of course, I knew I would go home to America in a year or two (I couldn’t think of returning after only one year) to a different education system. But for now, on my own for the first time, I was learning who I was, and how I wanted to live.

I had always been a dreamy child. I was astonished at my energy.

“If you are perhaps wondering when I manage to squeeze in any studying,” I wrote home, obviously in answer to my parents’ query, “well, I’ve accustomed myself to going with little sleep—and I still wake up fresh in the morning . . . At 8:15 I set off for either the Louvre (25 mins) or to the Sorbonne (5 mins) or to Sciences Po (15 mins) each morning. My day is filled with classes, studying, walking, going out in the evening (my evening meal is between 9 and 10). I just live on the streets here,” I wrote.

One reason I was never “home” was my annoying landlady. I recall that once when I was under the weather, George came over with cold medicine and flowers and was sprawled at the foot of my bed while I was under the covers. Madame Koumarianos burst in and, with a triumphant look of “Aha, I knew it!” exclaimed, “Mais, Kati, je vous croyais une fille bien!” I thought you were a nice girl, Kati.

Since he had a tiny kitchen and was a good cook, most evenings I spent at George’s place. I remember every step of my solitary walk home each night around midnight from the rue de Grenelle, crossing the rue de Rennes, to the rue de Vaugirard, up to the Odéon Theater, to the rue de Médicis. Alone, late at night I punched in the code that swung open my building’s massive front door, and felt bold and grown-up.

Gradually, I was making discoveries that cast the French in a slightly less flattering light. “In Paris, especially,” I wrote home, “they are suspicious of
les étrangers,
very willing to exploit you,
and often resentful of Americans—convinced that we are all wealthy. The French lack the spontaneity and the warmth of many Americans. They are often too concerned with ‘
le comme il faut
’—appearances. The ones that are
sympa,
however, are witty, cultured and charming. It isn’t enough to be friendly here to be accepted. You have to contribute something as far as intellect and humor go. It’s an entirely different world than the one I left behind, but I feel very much at ease in this one.”

The letters, for all their determined sophistication, at times reveal a little girl feeling far from home. “Next year,” I wrote my papa, who was planning a skiing trip without me, “you and I can take to the hills together. Oh I can’t wait. I miss you so much. It’s been so long already.”