Paris Was Ours (23 page)

I used to go to the Louvre to escape from the cold of my room. This was a reversal of what had happened in the previous four years when, starting at the age of fourteen, I’d lived in Washington, D.C., for one full year and three summers as a page in the U.S. Senate. There, because it’s so hot, I’d flee to museums to go to the coldness. In Paris, where there was no heat at all in my room for part of each day, this was how I would stay warm.

I became a deep museumgoer. For me it was a refuge, an escape, and on the way to warming up, I saw several other universes. The Louvre was a typical destination. It was delicious and huge. I loved the classical part—the Poussins seemed wonderful to me, and the Watteaus. Then it all came into full blossom for me with the nineteenth century. I’d also go to the old Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and, frequently, the Rodin Museum. Rodin, for me, conformed to my most romantic expectations.

Of the French artists, I liked Poussin in particular. I have a bad contrarian streak in me, so I really appreciated his sense of order. The eye-openers for me were the more florid works, starting with Rubens—this isn’t a style that most Protestants are accustomed to! That carried over to Delacroix. Looking at his work, I felt that I’d never seen excess before, that I was seeing it for the first time. That, in turn, led me to Courbet, where I saw frankness. Each one of these artists made a different kind of impression. And, of course, Courbet led to Cézanne.

When I’d go into the old Musée d’Art moderne, it seemed as if there was a chorus of people there who were willing to reinvent the wheel. Braque, Picasso, Picabia—I felt intrigued by all of them. That urge to be modern and to reinvent—it so impressed me. At a certain point it stops being about just one work of art or artist; rather it becomes about how an aesthetic vision is the universe. Artists believe in the completeness of their world and they want you to enter it. It’s an exciting invitation.

I did a lot of hitchhiking in and out of Paris, so I saw the city from the front and back of
camions
and other unlikely vehicles. I hardly ever took the train. I just didn’t have the cash. I sometimes had good-looking girlfriends around and they acted as bait. We’d get a ride that much faster.

I had a taste for the French countryside. I’d spent months in Burgundy and thought I was in the Garden of Eden. It was so beautiful. We were studying Romanesque architecture in a very desultory way; we’d go from one great site to the next. When you see towns like Autun and Auxerre—they’re captivating. They really arrest you. They stay in your imagination for your whole life. Even if it wasn’t misty or if the sycamores didn’t quite line up perfectly, you’d imagine that they did. It’s so synesthetic, that part of the world. That wet air carries everything with it. Those places are so humid and damp and all the antiquity lingers in the air.

One night, many years after I lived in Paris, when I finally had some cash, I was a little bit loaded and riding through the city in a friend’s convertible when I realized that Paris was meant to be viewed from a carriage. When you’re moving above the crowd, seeing the buildings from a few feet up, you
really appreciate how distinguished the tops of the buildings in Paris are. Driving around that night in an open convertible and stopping at traffic lights gave me a view of the city that approximated how Haussmann meant it to be seen. It was a dream night, recognizing that this was the other 85 percent of what you’re supposed to be experiencing as you go through the city.

One of the things I admire most about Paris is that the task in front of you is the central task. There’s no displacement. Even when people are sweeping the stairs, the task at hand has to be accomplished with a high level of perfection. A mere errand has to be accomplished with great élan. There’s all the dressing up. You can’t just slouch around—everything has a certain correctness to it. You feel like you’re in the present and therefore you’re living.

I miss the rigor of it all, the way that when you go into a shop there’s the standard greeting and the impossibility of leaving the shop without saying, “Au revoir, monsieur,” or whatever. All that handshaking! They greet and say good-bye to everyone.

It really doesn’t hurt if you don’t know anything about Paris when you arrive, because it’s all visibly legible. The French mark their houses in a uniform way; they even pile fruit up in a way that makes it legible. They have outfits for each task. Anyone with any sense can see the logic of the street. Their phenomenal ability to organize things and make them legible makes the whole thing somewhat theatrical—and quite memorable.

I’d imagined myself being a politician, but then that morphed into my thinking I’d be a journalist. Then, in Paris, I started looking at pictures. It was a whole period of sorting out where I wanted to put my energy. I didn’t even make a choice. It was all
done accidentally. I went to the Sorbonne, I got the diploma. But I never really took studying very seriously from then on. I felt that life was meant to be empirical. I still wanted to be a writer, but in the end I wound up writing about pictures.

As told to Penelope Rowlands

Guillaume à Paris

M
Y SON, WILLIAM
, celebrated his second birthday on the evening that we arrived in Paris, with twenty pieces of luggage, for a year’s stay. The first Gulf War had just begun, and the dollar was worth four francs. I had come to do archival research for a biography of Colette at the Bibliothèque nationale, which was still in its grand nineteenth-century palace on the rue de Richelieu. The librarians had only just begun to computerize the catalog, which, I discovered, was arranged not by author, title, or subject but by the date a book or a manuscript in the collection had been acquired. Why come to Paris, though, if not to lose oneself in its labyrinths?

I had sublet a furnished apartment on the rue de Rennes, almost directly across the Seine from the library. Its creaky parquets gave off a scent of beeswax, and the Haussmannian plasterwork was a bit too grand for the rooms. There were two
chambres
, each with a marble fireplace and a lumpy mattress. The French doors in the small oval salon opened to a narrow balcony. A two-year-old could easily have scaled the railing, although I told myself that the awning of the café below might, with luck, break his fall. In the building next door, Simone de Beauvoir had spent her unhappy adolescence. Around the
corner, on the rue Cassette, was the barracks of a firehouse, and Will loved the handsome young
pompiers
, who sometimes let him try on their casques. Saint-Sulpice was around the corner, and it was a pleasant walk to the Luxembourg Gardens.

My maiden aunt Charlotte, who was known as Arkie, an intrepid world traveler of eighty-one, had come to France with us, mostly, as she put it, “to be useful, which is much more satisfying to an old woman than being happy.” When she tried to speak French, no one—not even those rare, gallant Parisians who tried to respond, and who tended to be North African—understood a word. “Djuh vux doo reez,” she would say to the Algerian grocer on the corner, meaning, “Je veux du riz,” “I would like some rice.” Then she reverted to her pidgin/pantomime routine: “Reez: petite, blank, boilay danz oon pot. Manjay avec burr. Mercy bowcoo.” But when she pushed Will down the boulevard in his stroller, she cut the figure of such a proper old
grandmère
—in a neat plaid skirt, lisle stockings, sturdy brogues, and a twin set—that they always received polite nods of approval. One of her particular “friends” in the neighborhood was the pastry chef at the cafeteria of Le Bon Marché, the department store on the rue de Sèvres, convenient to the carousel of miniature racing cars in the square Boucicaut. She and Will lunched at the buffet three times a week, and the chef doffed his toque to them. My son’s French was quickly much better than his great-aunt’s. “Mousse au chocolat!” he could say, with the proper inflection of culinary admiration, and then he would add, to anyone, for whatever reason: “En garde!”

As the child of a taxpayer in the sixth arrondissement (the taxes on my electric bill apparently entitled me to more social
benefits than I had ever received as an American citizen), Will was welcome to attend the local
halte-garderie
, on the rue Chomel, a state nursery school for children. The teachers were gracious young women with advanced degrees in education; there were two of them for every small class, and one for every three of the infants who spent the hours of their parents’ workday in the crèche. The
garderie
was housed on the ground floor of a forbidding fortress with a wrought-iron porte cochere, but its big windows overlooked a sunny courtyard where the children spent their recess. It was Will’s first experience of school, and we had a long conversation about a subject I would never have had to address in New York. Every other two-year-old in the class had, according to the custom of the country, long since outgrown his
couches
. Will, to my surprise, used the lavatory with his classmates (visits were, like all the activities, strictly scheduled), and he never had an accident. But as soon as he got home, he asked for his diaper, and he told me that he wasn’t ready, yet, to be
propre
out of school. Since
propre
was the word he chose, I supposed that one of his teachers had tactfully introduced the subject. I didn’t want him to feel unclean because he wasn’t
propre
, but he seemed amused by my reassurances—a faintly Gallic smile played on his lips—and he gave me to understand that
propre
was just a silly French notion one pretended to accept.

There are, in fact, no precise translations, because there are no pure human prisms who refract a text or a speech without distortion. Rendering a word into another language is a mysterious process, and just as the noun
mystery
is religious in origin, so is the verb
to translate
. Its first meaning is “to remove the body or relics of a saint or hero from one place of interment or
repose to another.” Its second meaning is “to carry or convey to heaven without death.” That, of course, is what one aspires to do when one translates a work of literature: to convey a vital essence that has been buried in the crypt (encrypted) of an alien lexicon, to a place in the light where it can endure.

It is enthralling—especially, perhaps, to a writer—to watch a child acquire two languages at the same time, his supple mind (the capacity of the human brain, and the speed of its synapses, apparently peak at about thirty months) parsing the world as he discovers it, according to separate protocols, and keeping them straight. I had learned French as a teenager, and while my French is fluent, no one French mistakes me for a native speaker. After a few weeks in Paris, I can pass as one for about five minutes, until I misuse the subjunctive, or attribute a noun to the wrong gender. Even after forty years, I can still stupidly say “le fin” — the end (it is, after all,
le pin
—the pine tree—and
le lin
—flax or linen). “On n’est pas née femme,” de Beauvoir wrote, “on le devient.” (One is not born, rather one becomes, woman.)
Mais
, “on le devient”? French is not as rational as the French like to believe, and where caprice or intuition trumps reason, their myths about sex are often the culprit.

In researching the life of Colette I was, of course, translating her, literally and metaphorically, eight hours a day, and in my social life in Paris, I was translating myself, literally and metaphorically, to whomever I met. Biography and translation are related enterprises. In neither case does a word-for-word transcription produce the most desirable result: it refuses the challenges and the risks—the deep adventure—of the poetry. The transcription school of biography sticks timidly to the shore of fact, accounting for every petty quarrel, doctor’s
appointment, cup of coffee, thank-you note, orgasm, and pair of gloves. Such biographies may be useful to the scholar, but they cheat a lay reader of something more vibrant and sensuous, which only comes through an imaginative connection. When one translates the story of another life—an epic with many ellipses, lost passages, and obscure references—it is always into one’s own sentences, and if the essential question of biography is “Who are you?” the only way to hold a steady course toward the answer is to keep asking, at frequent intervals, “Who am I?”

THE FRENCH ARE
, as one knows, appalling snobs about foreigners, especially Anglo-Saxons, who mangle their language, but one also discovers that they mistrust anyone whose polish, in French, has no little cracks that flatter their sense of superiority. One summer after college, I took a job at the State Department as an escort-interpreter, and I was one of two guides attached to a group of French journalists, guests of the government, on an official tour of America. My senior colleague was an obese Hungarian polymath who traveled everywhere with two heavy leather suitcases, which he said were filled with the manuscript of a thousand-page novel that was better than
À la recherche du temps perdu
. I discovered, however, that the suitcases contained two portable fans.